| Author | Message | | Cowboy | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:15 am Post subject: Re: Truthout - Another Eyewitness to Torture Comes Forward |
| | Alpha wrote: |
A Jordanian lawyer who claims that he is acting for Saddam says that the former Iraqi leader was also tortured during interrogation.
|
And OJ Simpson's lawyer said he was innocent. | |  | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:20 am Post subject: |
| | A jury of his peers found him innocent. It's called the US Constitution, go take it up with the Supreme Court.[/b] | | | | Cowboy | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:23 am Post subject: |
| | Jefferson Davis wrote: | | A jury of his peers found him innocent. It's called the US Constitution, go take it up with the Supreme Court.[/b] |
And another jury found him guilty.
Do try to keep up with the news. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:29 am Post subject: Accused Contractor at Abu Ghraib Told Guards What to Do |
| So at least two Jews (John B. Israel and Steven Stefanowicz) were telling the guards how to torture the Arabs of Abu Ghraib - man, is this one going to go down in the neocon propaganda of 'liberating' Iraq (for Israel, of course!):
http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0614prisonabuse-contractor14-ON.html
Accused contractor at Abu Ghraib says he told guards what to do
WASHINGTON - In testimony that conflicts with some generals' accounts, a private interrogator accused of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison told investigators that he and military intelligence operatives directed prison guards to keep Iraqi prisoners awake for as much as 20 hours a day.
Steven A. Stefanowicz also said he may have heard, but did not see, some military police physically abusing a prisoner. Otherwise, he said, he did not see any abuses inside Abu Ghraib like those documented in photos that became public this spring.
Stefanowicz, whose own veracity has been questioned in the official prison investigation, told Army investigators in a sworn statement that Col. Thomas Pappas, the military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, personally approved of the sleep deprivation tactics.
Prison guards were given copies of written interrogation plans for each inmate, which were prepared by three-person teams comprised of contractors or military intelligence soldiers, Stefanowicz said in the sworn statement obtained by The Associated Press.
Those plans specifically placed one detainee on a "sleep/meal management program" that involved letting the prisoner sleep only in small blocks of time totaling no more than four hours out of every 24, up to a total of three days. The prisoner then would be allowed 12 hours' sleep, Stefanowicz told investigators.
"The MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the allotted period of time as long as it adheres to approved rules of engagement and proper treatment of the detainee," Stefanowicz said, adding he never ordered MPs to assault a prisoner.
Stefanowicz' statement conflicts with congressional testimony by some top generals and statements by Stefanowicz' employer, CACI International Inc., that private contractors and military intelligence operatives never gave guards orders to take actions that would assist interrogations.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq, and former Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, have said their orders allowed military police to offer information to help interrogators, but they were forbidden to take active roles, such as denying sleep.
CACI president and CEO J.P. "Jack" London has said CACI's contract did not allow its workers to tell MPs or any other soldiers what to do. London has said Army officials have praised Stefanowicz' work and never complained about him.
"In connection with inquiries into our operations in Iraq, we have been assured that our employees had no involvement in any inappropriate activity," CACI said in a news release Sunday.
A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Monday night.
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the investigation that documented the abuses at Abu Ghraib, had access to Stefanowicz's statement before writing his report. Taguba agreed with the assertion that military intelligence officials directed the prison guards on activities but disputed Stefanowicz on the issue of whether he saw, engaged in or encouraged abuses. "He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba said of Stefanowicz.
Stefanowicz' lawyer, Henry Hockeimer Jr., said Monday that his client is innocent of wrongdoing and he has gotten no indication his client will face criminal charges.
Six enlisted military police soldiers are facing charges for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Another has pleaded guilty. Photos from the prison show prisoners being beaten, stripped naked, sexually humiliated and intimidated by dogs.
A 2002 Justice Department memo from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee told the White House that techniques such as sleep deprivation and isolation "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" but don't meet the legal definition of torture.
In his sworn statement to Army investigators, Stefanowicz described one possible instance of abuse on Dec. 20, after he, a military intelligence sergeant and private interpreter John B. Israel interrogated a prisoner in a stairwell. The Taguba report also names Israel, an Iraqi native and naturalized U.S. citizen who worked for a subcontractor to Titan Corp., as possibly being involved in abuses.
Stefanowicz said he walked ahead of two MPs as they took the prisoner back to his isolation cell. When the guards put the prisoner in the "segregation hole," Stefanowicz said, "the sound of the detainee falling or possibly being struck was heard."
Stefanowicz said he and the other interrogation team members confronted the MPs when they returned to an office. One of the MPs was unhappy and agitated when questioned if abuse had occurred, he said.
---
On the Net:
Text of the interview with Stefanowicz is available at:
http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/stefanowicz.pdf | | | | Jefferson Davis | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:30 am Post subject: |
| Law suits are different than criminal trials Cowboy. But you knew that.
He's a free man because he was found not guilty.
Screw the Supreme Court, send one of your Mossad assassins after him.
That's Cowboy law and order. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 7:56 am Post subject: Iraqi Street Speaks: New Government Made up of CIA Pawns |
| CounterPunch
June 10, 2004
The Iraqi Street Speaks
New Government Made Up of CIA Pawns
By PATRICK COCKBURN
Baghdad.
Iraqis are highly sceptical that the US occupation will, as promised, end on 30 June and predict worse fighting to come if real power is not handed over. "I don't believe there will be a transfer of power," said Ali Hashimi, a computer accessories salesman. "It is just a show for the international community."
There was no echo yesterday on the streets of Baghdad of the optimism on display in New York as the UN Security Council voted unanimously to endorse a sovereign Iraqi government. Few people expected a reduction in violence and many said they feared it would get worse.
"We Iraqis are rejecting this decision because it will turn Iraq back to the British occupation period," said Haidar Mahmoud, a shopkeeper. "At that time there was an Iraqi government but it was just a puppet."
Iraqis from both the Shia and Sunni communities repeatedly said that they longed for the violence to end but they not believe that the US would hand over real power. The US will keep 138,000 troops in Iraq after handover.
Many Iraqis said that the new interim government just appointed was not representative of them. Bassam Najam, a middle-aged driver, said: "In one sense the Americans are transferring power but only to their own agents. The new government are all pawns of the CIA."
Doubts about the return of sovereignty to Iraq in three weeks are expressed at every level. A security guard in a blue police uniform holding a sub- machine gun was standing outside the Palestine Hotel. Close by was a concrete barrier on which was pasted a poster, distributed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), showing a boy holding up a map of Iraq and saying: "On 30 June we are all winners."
I asked the guard if he believed the claim on the poster was true. He studied the words carefully and said, to loud laughter from other security men, "maybe they mean the 3,000th of June".
The cynicism among ordinary Iraqis about the Security Council resolution is rooted in a feeling that no promises made by the US since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein have been kept. An unmissable reminder of the slow rate of improvement of living conditions comes from the continuing electricity blackouts as Baghdad swelters under the summer sun.
Several Iraqis questioned yesterday said that they held the UN Security Council responsible for sanctions in the 1990s that impoverished Iraq but did nothing to bring down Saddam. They did not expect much good from it now.
Several said they did not think decisions reached in New York had much to do with them. Bassam Najam, a driver, said: "I switched off the radio when I heard about this decision. I don't believe they will give us anything."
In one sense power has already been divided in Iraq. The Iraqi resistance, which has been battling the US army all year, is now in full control of Fallujah, a city of more than 250,000 30 miles from <Baghdad.The> US army's confrontation in April with the Sunni resistance in Fallujah and the Shia resistance of Muqtada Sadr, the radical cleric, in Kufa, Najaf and Sadr City, showed the limits of American power.
There are, however, few signs in Baghdad that the US is going to scale back its influence. After 30 June there will still be 1,000 Americans in the massive US embassy in the heavily fortified Green Zone, the headquarters of the CPA. The embassy will be in a small building but the Republican Palace will be used for overflow. There will also be 200 US advisers attached to government ministries.
Yet the new interim government is more popular than the old Iraqi Governing Council. The appointment of Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar as President, although he has few powers, and Iyad Allawi as Prime Minister were generally welcomed. But the new government has several disadvantages in common with the old. Many ministers are former exiles, often from the US. Some in key positions such as the new Defence MinisterHazem Shaalan, a property dealer in Britain, have no experience in their jobs.
The new government will be wholly dependent on the US armed forces for its power, which means that the transfer of sovereignty on 30 June will have little real meaning. Iraqi armed forces are being built up and in theory already number 200,000. But during the fighting in April 40 per cent of these deserted and 10 per cent changed sides, as the US military has admitted.
Even before the interim government formally takes over sovereignty it is beset by a crisis. The Kurdish leaders Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani feel they have been short changed. They wanted to see the principle of federalism enshrined in the Security Council resolution as it had been in the interim constitution, known as the Transitional Administrative Law.
This was vetoed by the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shia religious leader. He wants elections before such important decisions are taken. The Kurds are threatening to leave the new government and boycott the elections if they do not get what they want.
A year ago the new interim government might have had a chance of success. Now it may be too late. The guerrilla movement, though fragmented, has put down deep roots. It can cut, almost at will, the roads around Baghdad.
The one strong card of the US is its powerful and well-equipped army. But this alone has not been enough to offset US political weakness in Iraq. And if it tries to crush its enemies militarily it will shatter the fragile interim government it is trying to put in place. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 10:23 pm Post subject: Seymour Hersh is Frightened According to this Email |
| Subj: Seymour Hersh is Frightened According to this Email
Date: 6/15/04 2:31:20 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: shniad@sfu.ca
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 4:48 PM
Subject: Seymour Hersh's comments at the University of Chicago
From Shniad: Torture and rumors of torture. In my email inbox this morning...
If what it reports is true, then once again it looks like the Bush
administration is worse than I had imagined--even though I thought
I had taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is always
worse than one imagines. Either Seymour Hersh is insane, or we have
an administration that needs to be removed from office not later than
the close of business today. The scariest part: "[Hersh] said he had seen
all the Abu Ghraib pictures. He said, 'You haven't begun to see evil...'
then trailed off. He said, 'horrible things done to children of women
prisoners, as the cameras run.' He looked frightened.
From a student who attended:
Seymour Hersh spoke... at the University of Chicago.... I took some
scattered notes. The remarks will be disjointed--as will be the notes-
but chilling. He asserted several things that he says he didn't have
nailed down enough to write, but that he was confident of....
He then turned to the 40th president, referring obliquely to 138 names,
then began to list them, saying those with long memories will catch on:
they were the Reagan administration figures accused, indicted, or
convicted of wrongdoing....
He talked about Carl Levin (though he didn't use his name) telling him
about high officials lying to him in closed hearings, and how frustrating
to be lied to, in classified settings, when the liars know the senators know
they are lying. Levin said he'd never seen such brazenness in Washington....
He waits after the My Lai story broke mid November 1969, one week, two
weeks- then, by Thanksgiving 1969, other correspondents finally write about
the atrocities THEY had seen in Vietnam: an outpouring that made him feel
strange that it took little old him, the police reporter who had flunked out
of law school, 11 years after winning his B.A. in English, to unleash this
outpouring of truth....
From My Lai, the transition to the current scandals was seemless. He
connected the dots, and spoke of the CIA secret prisons we haven't heard
about yet: "We're basically in the disappearing business." He made the first
of several criticisms of our humble profession: "there's no learning curve
in America. There's no learning curve in the press corps."...
Unsurprisingly, he flagged the extraordinary importance of the WSJ memo
revealing the government's plans to torture, including its assertion that
it's not against the law if the president approves it, and mocked the New
York Times headline "9 Militias Are Said to Approve a Deal to Disband,"
suggesting in its stead, "Bush Administration Offers Hoax in Hopes of
Convincing U.S. There's Some Peace." His assessment of the postwar
settlement: "It's going to come down to who has the biggest militia will
win."...
Then a story from one of his intelligence sources, whom Hersh says
didn't find it an unflattering story: some time in 1986 or 1987, Reagan
was given a long chart presentation of what actually happened with Iran/
Contra and began sleeping five minutes in to it, then snoring on Nancy's
shoulder. After twenty minutes it was over, the helicopter was fired up for
the Friday trip to Camp David, Nancy aroused him, he awoke with a start,
glanced at the charts, and asked, "What's that." Sy said something like
"That's MY Ronald Reagan."...
"NATO's falling apart in Afghanistan now."
And this was one of the most stunning parts. He had just returned from
Europe, and he said high officials, even foreign ministers, who used to
only talk to him off the record or give him backchannel messages, were
speaking on the record that the next time the U.S. comes to them with
intelligence, they'll simply have no reason to believe it.... He lamented
of his journalistic colleagues, "I don't know whey they don't just tell it
like it is."...
He said the people most horrified by the way the war was planned were
The military commanders responsible for protecting their troops.... He
talked about the horror of the 1000 civilian deaths in Fallujah (but was
careful to note the Marines were doing their job, placing the blame with
their superiors)....
He talked about how hard it is to get the truth out in Republican
Washington: "If you agree with the neocons you're a genius. If you
disagree you're a traitor." Bush, he said, was closing ranks, purging
anyone who wasn't 100% with him. Said Tenet has a child in bad health,
has heart problems, and seemed to find him generally a decent guy under
unimaginable pressure, and that people told him that Tenet feared a heart
attack if he had to take one more grilling from Cheney. "When these guys
memoirs come out, it will shock all of us."...
He said that after he broke Abu Ghraib people are coming out of the
woodwork to tell him this stuff. He said he had seen all the Abu Ghraib
pictures. He said, "You haven't begun to see evil..." then trailed off. He said,
"horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run."
He looked frightened. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 11:23 pm Post subject: Ollie North Joins the War Party |
| Subj: article - Ollie North joins the Torture Party
Date: 6/14/04 6:17:43 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Torture Incorporated
Oliver North Joins the Party
By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen
The U.S. Army has employed as many as 27 contractors to run its interrogation operations, according to media reports. But while CACI and Titan are getting all the mainstream media play, it appears that far more than 27 contract employees were involved in recruiting and placing interrogators in various locations. Some of the firms involved in the Bush administration’s “TortureGate” include an odd assortment of telecommunications companies and executive placement firms that have jumped into the lucrative torture business in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and at secret locations throughout Central Asia and North Africa.
Interrogators can earn up to $120,000 per year plying their trade and most are former military and law enforcement personnel. More ominously, these so-called “private military contractors” are nothing of the sort. They are paramilitary organizations that are funded by the US Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State, and assorted other agencies through contract vehicles known as Basic Ordering Agreements or “BOAs” hidden throughout the vast US government bureaucracy. It now is well known that CACI got its money through a BOA with the Department of the Interior.
Ollie -- He’s Baaack!
On January 12, 2004, United Placements ran an advertisement for Army Interrogators.
“Job State: IRAQ, Job Number: 8. Interrogators: 30 Positions. Compensation to $120,000. Individuals must be trained Interrogators with at least five years of experience in interrogation. Individuals must be knowledgeable of Army/Joint interrogation procedures, data processing systems such as CHIMs and SIPRNET search engines. Knowledge of the Arabic language and culture a plus…Candidates must have documented in their resumes five years of Humint collection and/or interrogation experience. This is a requirement of the client. Some locations require individuals to work and live in a field environment with minimum medical facilities. Must possess the ability to work extended work hours in difficult surroundings for up to one year.”
United Placements’ lists none other than Oliver North--a member of Ronald Reagan’s NSC and focal point of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s—as one of its two “Industry Associates.” North is currently the host of Fox News Channel’s “War Stories.” United Placement’s second “Industry Associate” is Intelligencecareers.com run by former intelligence analyst Bill Goldman.
While TortureGate festers, it is noteworthy that as late as May 7, 2004 the same posting for interrogators was listed through Design Staffing LLC. Evidently, a new batch of interrogators is needed to replace those now under criminal investigation. “Job
Nr 85832--Conduct interrogations. Conduct pre-brief and debrief preparation which includes researching, compiling, and preparing supporting material; prepare all-source target overview/summaries to include cultural, religious, and sociological factors; and identify information required for immediate processing and dissemination including support to ongoing and planned operations and force protection. This listing opened 07-May-04 and is valid for 90 days.” The listing goes on to say that the openings will be available “until filled.” It was listed under the categories “Analyst (Intelligence) & Knowledge Specialists.
Another company, ZKD, Inc. ran advertisements for interrogators on February 4, 2004. “This listing opened 10-Feb-04 and is valid for 180 days. The company's closing date comments for this listing are: "Open Till Filled. Category: Military Arts, Operations and Science. Send resume to careers@zkdinc.com. It seems interrogators are not only knowledge specialists but artists too.
Who Are Those Guys?
Just who are these people? It shouldn’t be a surprise that Oliver North is back in the war crimes business, but some of the organizations getting into the act seemingly don’t belong in the murky field of recruitment for the US military’s shadow paramilitary force. But, then again, some of these groups have some of the trademarks of CIA or other intelligence agency cut-out operations. Flush with seed money from existing government contracts, small and medium-sized government contractors and recruiting firms were able to launch major drives to draft language-capable interrogators from the ranks of America’s ex-military, law enforcement, and intelligence cadres and the immigrant community.
ZKD, Inc., located in Fairfax, Virginia, bills itself as a veteran-owned, minority owned and women owned firm that provides “Staffing Solutions, Security and Language Services.” It’s President and CEO is Zachary K. Duck. The May 2004 issue of Black Enterprise states that ZKD, “as a staffing agency, analyzes current labor market trends and matches qualified applicants with employment opportunities. After 9-11, the company doubled its efforts to provide security services to meet increased demand. ZKD also offers a comprehensive communications service.” ZKD has seen a meteoric rise in profits thanks mostly to the Pentagon and Transportation Security Administration. Black Enterprise states that ZKD was founded in 2001 with only two employees but now has more than 250 people with revenues totaling more than $ 10 million in 2003.
ZKD has a growing roster of clients, including the Transportation Security Administration and McNeil Technologies. In January of this year, ZKD was awarded a five-year, $ 53.7 million contract from the Department of Defense. The company now enjoys a solid
$34.5 million in contracts for 2004 with another $13 million in the contracting queue.
It is noteworthy that according to The Washington Post, CACI and McNeil Technologies are the recipients of Federal contracts to process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for Federal agencies, including the Pentagon and Homeland Security and Justice Departments. In what could be a major conflict of interest, any FOIA request from the public or the media for information on Pentagon or intelligence agency contracts with CACI or ZKD on their interrogation/translation work abroad could be handled by employees of CACI, an interrogation contractor, or McNeil, a client of ZKD, another interrogation contractor.
Design Staffing, LLC is located in Boyds, Maryland has all the trademarks of an operation run by an ex-military or intelligence agency veteran. The language is classic military gangland style “Beyond [the] core categories, we also assist companies with those hard-to-fill positions that do not fit in the traditional molds. Our method, which we call the Design Staffing Approach, DSA, is critical to the success of our business ‑- and yours. The DSA model is an innovative systematic, seven-tier approach…”
A search of the U.S. Business Directory reveals Design Staffing, LLC is an “employment agency & opportunities firm” and has one employee, an unknown credit status, and a business address at 14024 Clopper Road, Boyds, Maryland. Its principal--listed by email as mpoage@designstaffing.com --is very particular about what he/she is looking for in an interrogator.
“For interrogators I look for experience conducting interrogations, conduct of personnel screenings of local nationals and conduct of tactical debriefings.” He/she goes on to imply that embellishment of experience may not be a bad idea to make the resume look stronger to the customer.
If North is There, the Carlyle Group Can’t be Far Behind
Then there’s CalNet, a Vienna, Virginia-based company that says it provides “Agile Solutions for the New Customer Economy.” It is run by President and CEO Kaleem Shah. The U.S. Business Directory provides the following sketchy information on CalNet: its description is “Computer-Systems Designers and Consultants,” and it has four employees. A CalNet Ltd., also listed as a “computer related” company and located in West Yorkshire, England, was dissolved on March 20, 2001.
According to its website, “Since 1989, CalNet has used its business and technology consultancy to help many of the largest telecom, financial, public sector, high-tech and services organizations remain agile by obtaining explicit business results through the rapid application and delivery of advanced information and telecom solutions.” That may be so, but CalNet posted the same interrogators-wanted ad that United Placements ran in January of 2004. Interested parties are encouraged to apply for a position with the Iraq Survey Group. “…please send resume to bcoleman@CALNET.com. Reference job number DISG2.”
USIS, or U.S. Investigations Services, bills itself as “one of the largest Intelligence and Security Services companies in North America.” Hoover’s Company Capsules has a very unusual descriptive background for the firm. “Formally a US government agency, USIS was spun off as a private company in 1996.” A recent job fair it hosted in Falls Church, Virginia, sought “Interrogators, Strategic Debriefers and Protection
Specialists for Overseas Assignments.”
One of the USIS investors is the omnipresent Carlyle Group, a multibillion-dollar venture capital firm with close ties to George H. W. Bush, former British Prime Minister John Major, and former Secretary of State James Baker, and past ties to the Saudi Bin Laden Companies, which has its tentacles into many of the Bush administration’s major foreign adventures. USIS also owns a subsidiary, Total Information Services, Inc., of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which ironically is similar to the name of the defunct Pentagon program to glean personal information from databases on U.S. and foreign citizens. That program, called the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system was headed by Iran-contra felon retired Admiral John Poindexter before he resigned. TIA, according to media reports, is alive and well in the offices of DARPA in Northern Virginia.
Since the US Congress, the Pentagon, the White House and US Department of Justice seem determined to sweep the entire TortureGate disaster under the rug before the November 2004 elections, the only check on their power appears to be the financial markets. As was recently reported by the Washington Post, directors of one of CACI’s pension funds, the California Public Employees' Retirement System, or Calpers, planned to meet with CACI in early July “…to discuss concerns about [CACI] management controls, training and legal procedures at the Arlington-based government contractor… What the management of this company owes [shareholders] is a full explanation of exactly what has occurred, exactly who was responsible and a full accounting of what will be done to reform its practices."
Maybe if the money talks, Bush--and the Gordon Gecko’s of the defense contracting world--will walk.
John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security and political matters. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “A Power, But Not Super.” Reach John at cioran123@yahoo.com. Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. His forthcoming book is titled: "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates." Reach Wayne at wmadsen777@aol.com. Stanton and Madsen authored America’s Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II released in May 2003. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Jun 17, 2004 10:57 am Post subject: Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq |
| Another article on John B. Israel appears at the following URL:
http://www.scvhistory.com/scvhistory/signal/iraq/
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Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 16 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment, and to avoid disclosing their location to an enemy, officials said.Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army officer who in February investigated abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, criticized the practice of allowing ghost detainees there and at other detention centers as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first to have been kept off the books at the orders of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.Pentagon and intelligence officials said the decision to hold the detainee without registering him - at least initially - was in keeping with the administration's legal opinion about the status of those viewed as an active threat in wartime.Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse."Once he was placed in military custody, people lost track of him," a senior intelligence official conceded Wednesday night. "The normal review processes that would keep track of him didn't."The detainee was described by the official as someone "who was actively planning operations specifically targeting U.S. forces and interests both inside and outside of Iraq."But once he was placed into custody at Camp Cropper, where about 100 detainees deemed to have the highest intelligence value are held, he received only one cursory arrival interrogation from military officers and was never again questioned by any other military or intelligence officers, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials.The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Wednesday that officials at Camp Cropper questioned their superiors several times in recent months about what to do with the suspect.But only in the last two weeks has Mr. Rumsfeld's top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen A. Cambone, called C.I.A. senior officials to request that the agency deal with the suspect or else have him go into the prison's regular reporting system.Mr. Di Rita referred questions about the prisoner's fate to the C.I.A.A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that "the matter is currently under discussion."In July 2003, the man suspected of being an Ansar al-Islam official was captured in Iraq and turned over to C.I.A. officials, who took him to an undisclosed location outside of Iraq for interrogation. By that fall, however, a C.I.A. legal analysis determined that because the detainee was deemed to be an Iraqi unlawful combatant - outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions - he should be transferred back to Iraq.Mr. Tenet made his request to Mr. Rumsfeld - that the suspect be held but not listed - in October. The request was passed down the chain of command: to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then to Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, and finally to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. At each stage, lawyers reviewed the request and their bosses approved it.A senior intelligence official said late Wednesday that the C.I.A. inquired about the detainee's status in January, but was told that American jailers in Iraq could not find him, perhaps as a result of the chaos and confusion of the November and December spike in insurgent violence.The detention was first reported in this week's U.S. News & World Report. But the role played by senior officials in deciding the detainee's status was not known publicly before Wednesday. Pentagon and intelligence officials gave new details on Wednesday about the prisoner and the circumstances that brought him to Camp Cropper, including the fact that his status was decided by Mr. Tenet and Mr. Rumsfeld, and approved by senior officers.While acknowledging mistakes in the prisoner's detention, the senior intelligence official said the detainee posed a significant threat to American forces in Iraq and elsewhere. "He also possessed significant information about Ansar al Islam's leadership structure, training and locations," the official said.At Camp Cropper, some prisoners had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in small cells without sunlight, according to a report by the international Red Cross.The suspected Ansar official was segregated from the other detainees and was not listed on the rolls. Under the order that had filtered down to General Sanchez, military police were not to disclose the detainee's whereabouts to the Red Cross pending further directives.The prisoner fell into legal limbo as the military police pressed their superiors for guidance, which has still not formally come."Over the course of the next several weeks, the custodians at the prison asked for additional guidance, but there were no interrogations," Mr. Di Rita said.Before this case surfaced, the C.I.A. has said it had discontinued the ghost detainee practice, but said that the Geneva Conventions allowed a delay in the identification of prisoners to avoid disclosing their whereabouts to an enemy.In Washington, the Army announced that Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army Mat?el Command, would oversee an Army inquiry into the role military intelligence soldiers played in the abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Kern replaces General Sanchez as the senior officer reviewing the findings. General Sanchez removed himself from that role so he could be interviewed by investigators.Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company.
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Updated: 05:52 AM EDT
U.S. Admits Holding Prisoner in Secret
By MATT KELLEY, AP
WASHINGTON (June 17) - In a rare admission of violating the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war, the Pentagon has acknowledged it improperly held an Iraqi prisoner in secret for more than seven months.
The military has held the man in Iraq since October without assigning him a prisoner number or notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross that he is a prisoner, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Wednesday night.
Both assigning a prisoner number and notifying the Red Cross are required under the Geneva Conventions, which the Bush administration acknowledges apply to the conflict in Iraq.
The prisoner will be given a number and the Red Cross will be formally notified soon, Whitman said.
"The ICRC should have been notified about the detainee earlier," Whitman said. "We should have taken steps, and we have taken the necessary steps to rectify the situation."
The Iraqi prisoner is so far the only individual Defense Department officials have acknowledged shielding from the Red Cross. Before Wednesday's admission, Pentagon spokesmen would not confirm or deny if anyone was being held in secret.
"We've not talked about the location of specific detainees other than Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba simply because it gets into the classified realm," Air Force Maj. Michael Shavers said in an e-mail response to questions from The Associated Press on Wednesday, before the Iraq admission.
President Bush and members of his administration have said repeatedly that all detainees are treated humanely. Pentagon officials have argued that announcing the numbers or locations of all detainees would indicate the scope of U.S. anti-terrorism efforts to terrorist groups and give them ideas of sites to attack.
The military says detainees at the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not mistreated, despite the Bush administration's argument that Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war do not apply to them.
Maj. David Kolarik, a spokesman for the military's Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, said all prisoners are treated "in accordance with the principles" of the Geneva Conventions "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."
The secret prisoner in Iraq is believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, a radical group which had been based in northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion last year. U.S. officials believe the man was involved in attacks on coalition troops, Whitman said.
The CIA asked the military to take custody of the man in October and asked that he not be given a prisoner number or disclosed to the Red Cross while officials determined his status, Whitman said.
The Bush administration contends that terrorist suspects are "enemy combatants" who do not have any protection under the Geneva Conventions. Military officials questioned the arrangement but those objections did not reach the highest levels in the Pentagon until last month, Whitman said.
"Certainly the people that had responsibility for maintaining him in custody knew that they had him, knew their instructions, knew that a disposition hadn't been determined for him and raised concern about it on a couple of occasions," Whitman said.
06/17/04 02:49 EDT
Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. The
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040614-646366,00.html
Monday, Jun. 14, 2004
One Expert's Verdict: The CIA Caved Under Pressure
By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON
The CIA that George Tenet leaves behind next month is a shadow of its imaginary self, a butt of jokes rather than the envy of the world. It is an agency that has become self-protective and bureaucratic; it is too reliant on gadgets rather than spies to steal secrets. Sometimes the CIA has simply been too blind to see what is hiding in plain sight. Tenet restored the agency's morale, but he leaves behind a string of spectacular intelligence failures. And that may not be the worst of it. In his new book A Pretext for War, intelligence expert James Bamford alleges that the CIA not only failed to detect and deter the secret army of Muslim extremists gathering over the horizon in the late 1990s but also failed to take action when a group of Administration hard-liners, backed by the Pentagon chief and Vice President Dick Cheney, began to advance the case for war with Iraq in secret using data the CIA widely believed weren't supportable or were just plain false. Instead of fighting back, Bamford argues, the CIA for the most part rolled over and went along. The result was a war sold largely on a fiction, confected from unchecked rumor and biased informants.A Pretext for War is probably the best one-volume companion to the harrowing events in the war on terrorism since 1996, chiefly because it focuses on the most difficult to pierce subject: the hidden machinery of U.S. intelligence. Bamford is a veteran chronicler of the spy world whose The Puzzle Palace, published in 1982, is still considered the classic account of the mysterious National Security Agency (NSA), which electronically snoops on friends and enemies overseas. His account of 9/11 and its aftermath is studded with new details, including some about the undisclosed location known as Site R, an underground bunker on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border where the Vice President spent much of his time in 2001. Deep under Raven Rock Mountain, Site R "is a secret world of five buildings, each three stories tall, computer filled caverns and a subterranean water reservoir." It is just 7 miles from Camp David. Bamford maintains that before 9/11, the U.S.'s entire spook network was pretty much out to lunch. It was a community that had done its job well in the cold war and was looking for a reason to exist. By the late 1990s the NSA was becoming obsolete, unable to keep up with the pace of technological change. The NSA netted millions more conversations at its worldwide listening posts than it could translate or interpret. The agency spent billions to eavesdrop on chatter overseas that moved by satellite — only to see the world move to harder-to-steal digitized cellular, e-mail and instant-messaging communications. Meanwhile, at the NSA's sprawling Fort Meade, Md., campus, the agency's director could not send an email to all the NSA's 38,000 employees. Why? The NSA had 68 separate e-mail systems. Things were not much better at the CIA. In a devastating chronology, Bamford reports that even as late as 2000, the agency was stuck in an old cold war way of doing things — training its agents, recruiting spies overseas and keeping headquarters happy. One agent explains that CIA recruiting overseas was about as rigorous as going to an opening-night mixer at a Las Vegas convention: American agents overseas sometimes competed with one another to see who could collect the most business cards at official receptions in foreign capitals. Then they would return to their embassy to determine the night's winner. Each card, the agents told themselves, represented a potential spy for the U.S. In fact, the agent said, "none of these people had anything useful ... It was just numbers. It's all quantity."With tradecraft like that, it is little wonder the CIA "never once even tried to infiltrate" al-Qaeda, according to Bamford. He says agents working at the CIA's vaunted Alec station, the shop inside the agency responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden, seemed more interested in flying to Afghanistan and Paris to meet with various Afghan warlords who promised to provide details of bin Laden's whereabouts in exchange for bags full of cash. Bamford asserts that the CIA's Afghan assets never came through with very much on the Saudi terrorist, but the CIA kept them on the dole anyway. About the only thing going well was the 50-year war between the CIA and the FBI. Alec station's chiefs were so turf conscious about which agency had "the lead" in the hunt for bin Laden that they routinely left their FBI counterparts in the dark about what they were learning from overseas — a habit that turned out to be a fatal error. Sloppy surveillance permitted two of the hijackers to elude the CIA as early as January 2000, but then the agency repeatedly failed to inform the FBI or half a dozen other government officers who could have assisted in the hunt. Indeed, at the CIA, keister covering was in full swing long before the attacks of 9/11. In January 2000 the head of Alec station told his bosses he still had the two men under surveillance when in fact he had lost them in Bangkok. That bureaucratic chore completed, Alec station then dropped its chase altogether. It would be more than a year before a conscientious FBI agent assigned to the CIA re-examined the evidence and realized how badly the agency had blundered. The two names were finally given to the State Department on Aug. 23, 2001.But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted. The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle Eastand Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year. The result was a war built on sand — and a CIA that lacked the will to take on its masters. Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, set up several secret offices in the Pentagon that received data from Israel's own intelligence teams and coordinated its findings with them, partly as a way to get around CIA caution in the region. Bamford reveals that the original source of the spurious allegation that Saddam harbored "mobile biological-weapons labs" did not come from the brother of a top aide to Ahmad Chalabi whose code name was Curveball, but from an Israeli tip going back to 1994. Bamford quotes anonymous CIA agents who say that they suspected that much of the hard-liners' intelligence on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was bogus but there was pressure from within and without to shut up about it. Bamford implies that Tenet, the ultimate staff guy, is partly to blame for this failure of nerve. When Secretary of State Colin Powell was putting together his now discredited speech to the U.N. last year about Saddam's WMD program, he stood virtually alone against the hard-liners, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, all of whom seemed keen to pump up the Secretary's talking points. Cheney's staff handed Powell a 50-page draft of allegations; the Secretary rejected most of them as unsupportable, with the hard-liners, Rice and even Tenet fighting him every step of the way during run-through sessions at CIA headquarters. And as it turned out, Powell didn't fight hard enough. Could Tenet have stopped the rush to war? Bamford suggests he could have. "Off on the sidelines, George Tenet was one of the few who knew the truth," he writes, adding that Tenet preferred to work behind the scenes on minor disagreements about the data "instead of speaking out" against the grand scheme. That's a harsh indictment of the man who kept America's secrets under two Presidents. But one of Tenet's colleagues was even less generous, saying simply, "We caved."
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2004/06/14/iraq-war-for-israel-according-to-james-bamford-s-new-book.php
Abu Ghraib Prison Torture Scandal Goes to the Highest Level:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/06/13/interrogation-abuses-were-approved-at-highest-levels.php | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jun 18, 2004 7:37 am Post subject: Report: officer felt pressure at Abu Ghraib by Neocons/Bush |
| Report: officer felt pressure at Abu Ghraib
Washington-AP -- The top military intelligence officer at the Abu Ghraib prison says he was under intense pressure to get better information from detainees.
U-S-A Today obtained a sworn statement from Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, who says the pressure came from the White House, Pentagon and C-I-A.
Jordan says he was reminded of the need to improve intelligence "many, many, many times." An aide to White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice even visited the prison as a reminder.
Jordan also says he had worked out a procedure with C-I-A interrogators to hide five or six inmates from Red Cross inspectors last October.
Rice's aide told The Associated Press that she never discussed interrogation during her visit to the prison at the center of the prisoner abuse scandal She says she went to find out how the information was being used to improve effectiveness.
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