Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who’s since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture. Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to “break” detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. “True, but officially it is not happening,” she is quoted as having said.

A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.

“In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC,” Fredman said, according to the minutes.

The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.

It’s unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.

Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.

Beaver testified that she didn’t recall making the comment about avoiding “harsher operations” while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.

The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush’s “war on terrorism.”

The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. … Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.” The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.

But Dalton, who’s now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes “does not want this … to proceed.” Haynes testified that he didn’t recall the objections of the four uniformed services.

Officials in Rumsfeld’s office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they’re captured.

The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.

An official in Haynes’ office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, “The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.” The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday’s hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers “will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military intelligence communities,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..

Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.

Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, “We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue.” “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.”

US official on interrogation: ‘If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.’

Military officials tasked with training U.S. troops to evade enemy interrogations provided Pentagon lawyers a list of abusive tactics that could be used in prisons like Guantanamo Bay, a top Senate Democrat disclosed Tuesday.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said the harsh techniques were then pursued despite strong objections in November 2002 by the military’s uniformed lawyers.

“If we use those same techniques offensively against detainees, it says to the world that they have America’s stamp of approval,” said Levin, D-Mich., at the onset of a committee hearing.

“That puts our troops at greater risk of being abused if they’re captured. It also weakens our moral authority and harms our efforts to attract allies to our side in the fight against terrorism.”

The hearing is the committee’s first look at the origins of the harsher methods used in Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq and how policy decisions on interrogations were vetted across the Defense Department. Its review fits into a broader picture of the government’s handling of detainees, which includes FBI and CIA interrogations in secret prisons.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said the administration’s legal analysis on detainees and interrogations following the the Sept. 11 attacks will “go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military and intelligence communities.”

The Pentagon’s top civilian lawyer at the time, chief counsel William “Jim” Haynes, was expected to testify. Also present were Richard Shiffrin, Haynes’ former deputy on intelligence matters, as well as legal advisers at the time to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Guantanamo Bay prison.

According to the Senate committee’s findings, Haynes became interested in using harsher interrogation methods as early as July 2002 when his office inquired into a military program that trained Army soldiers on how to survive enemy interrogations and deny foes valuable intelligence.

Haynes and other officials wanted to know if the program — known as “Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape” training — could be used used to develop more effective interrogation methods.

Shiffrin said his interest was not so much in trying reverse engineer the tactics to be used against the enemy but rather tapping military expertise in interrogations.

In response, the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the SERE program, offered that resistance training included sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding and slapping.

Several of those techniques, including stress positions, were later approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a December 2002 memo.

Levin said these techniques were approved despite fierce objections a month earlier by the military services’ lawyers. In separate memos, the lawyers told the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the techniques warranted further study and could be illegal.

The committee also released previously secret and privately held memos dating from the 2002 inception of the harsh interrogation program at Guantanamo.

In one of them, the top military lawyer at Guantanamo, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, explains that the Defense Department had made a practice of hiding prisoners who were being treated harshly, even abusively, from the International Committee of the Red Cross, a non-governmental body empowered to monitor compliance with Geneva Convention rules for the treatment of military prisoners.

Beaver also confirmed that the military was secretly using previously forbidden techniques, such as sleep deprivation, but hiding them so as not to draw “negative attention,” according to minutes of the meeting.

“Officially it is not happening,” Beaver said, according to minutes from the meeting. “It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out, scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave. This would draw a lot of negative attention.”

Beaver said interrogators should “curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around.”

Beaver was speaking at an Oct. 2, 2002 meeting between CIA and military lawyers and military intelligence officials on how to counter the resistance of Guantanamo detainees to military interrogation.

Beaver’s comments suggest that the CIA’s practice of hiding unregistered “ghost detainees” from the ICRC at military jails may have been as much in service to the Pentagon’s interrogation program as it was to the CIA’s.

A senior CIA lawyer at the meeting, John Fredman, explained that whether harsh interrogation amount to torture “is a matter of perception.” The only sure test for torture is if the detainee died.

“If the detainees dies you’re doing it wrong,” Fredman said.

McCain And Graham Plan To Introduce Legislation Undermining Supreme Court Decision On Guantanamo

 

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wasted no time in publicly blasting the decision, saying they were “disappointed” in “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”

This ruling will inevitably lead to a “flood of new litigation” challenging the Bush administration’s right to hold these detainees, only one of whom has received a verdict. Detainees will then finally get a decision as to their status.

Today on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol revealed that “very soon” — likely as early as next week — McCain and Graham will be introducing legislation to undermine the Supreme Court decision by setting up a “national security court”:

And I think you will see Senator Graham, accompanied by Senator McCain, come to the floor of the Senate very soon, like next week, and say, We cannot let chaos obtain here. We can’t let 200 different federal district judges on their own whim call this CIA agent here, say, ‘I don’t believe this soldier here who said this guy was doing this,’ you have to release someone,’ or, ‘Let’s build up — let’s compromise sources and methods with a bunch of trials. I mean, it’s ridiculous.

 

A national security court would envision a scenario “in which sitting federal judges would preside over proceedings in which prosecutors would make the case that a person should be detained.” But as Michael Hoffman and Ken Gude note in a paper for the Center for American Progress, this scenario is problematic and underestimates the U.S. criminal justice system:

Adopting a national security court system would send the United States down another unproven path prone to repeat the same mistakes. It would not further justice or American legitimacy. Rather, it would risk creating American courts that more resemble the tribunals of dictators than those of democracies. And that would be a strategic victory for Al Qaeda, not for Americans. […]

The criminal justice system, coupled with standard military trials when necessary, has and can further law enforcement, intelligence, and prevention efforts without undermining our fundamental liberties or our long-term efforts to combat terrorism. It is time to let it fully do that crucial work.

As ThinkProgress reported on Friday, at one time, McCain and Graham advocated a solution similar to the Supreme Court ruling. In 2003, they called on then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to “formally treat and process the detainees as war criminals or to return them to their countries for appropriate judicial action.” Clearly, things change when you’re running for a third Bush term.

US accused of holding terror suspects on prison ships

The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.

Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.

Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.

The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.

It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Reprieve will raise particular concerns over the activities of the USS Ashland and the time it spent off Somalia in early 2007 conducting maritime security operations in an effort to capture al-Qaida terrorists.

At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were “disappeared” to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantánamo Bay.

Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.

The Reprieve study includes the account of a prisoner released from Guantánamo Bay, who described a fellow inmate’s story of detention on an amphibious assault ship. “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo … he was in the cage next to me. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship. The prisoner commented to me that it was like something you see on TV. The people held on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, said: “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights.

“By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been ‘through the system’ since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them.”

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, called for the US and UK governments to come clean over the holding of detainees.

“Little by little, the truth is coming out on extraordinary rendition. The rest will come, in time. Better for governments to be candid now, rather than later. Greater transparency will provide increased confidence that President Bush’s departure from justice and the rule of law in the aftermath of September 11 is being reversed, and can help to win back the confidence of moderate Muslim communities, whose support is crucial in tackling dangerous extremism.”

The Liberal Democrat’s foreign affairs spokesman, Edward Davey, said: “If the Bush administration is using British territories to aid and abet illegal state abduction, it would amount to a huge breach of trust with the British government. Ministers must make absolutely clear that they would not support such illegal activity, either directly or indirectly.”

A US navy spokesman, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, told the Guardian: “There are no detention facilities on US navy ships.” However, he added that it was a matter of public record that some individuals had been put on ships “for a few days” during what he called the initial days of detention. He declined to comment on reports that US naval vessels stationed in or near Diego Garcia had been used as “prison ships”.

The Foreign Office referred to David Miliband’s statement last February admitting to MPs that, despite previous assurances to the contrary, US rendition flights had twice landed on Diego Garcia. He said he had asked his officials to compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

CIA “black sites” are also believed to have operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Poland and Romania.

In addition, numerous prisoners have been “extraordinarily rendered” to US allies and are alleged to have been tortured in secret prisons in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Morocco and Egypt.

Internal Justice Dept. Investigation Includes Yoo Torture Memo

Just how bad were John Yoo’s now-infamous torture memos?

After numerous calls from Congress for the DoJ to get digging, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility told Congress in February that it is busy investigating Yoo’s infamous August, 2002 torture memo. That one, signed by then Office of Legal Counsel chief Jay Bybee, limited the definition of torture to physical pain “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” It was the administration’s so-called “golden shield” which permitted the CIA to use its most aggressive interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.

And then in March of 2003 came Yoo’s memo broadly authorizing the use of torture by military interrogators on unlawful combatants. Now OPR has told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that it will be investigating that memo, too.

It is far short of a criminal investigation. OPR’s job is to police whether the Department’s lawyers behave professionally, and so in this case, OPR’s chief Marshall Jarrett has informed Congress that the investigation will be covering “whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”

So the question for OPR will be whether Yoo came to his roundly-denounced conclusions in a professional, ethical manner. OPR’s investigations are usually not publicly released, but Jarrett wrote that “OPR will consider releasing to Congress and the public a non-classified summary of our final report.” There’s no telling when that would be.

There are plenty of grumbles that the limited scope and independence of OPR’s investigation (OPR reports to the attorney general) mean that it won’t tell us enough and won’t result in any changes. And Attorney General Michael Mukasey has already made it clear that no matter how deeply flawed an Office of Legal Counsel memo might have been (or be), anyone who relied on it “could not be the subject of a prosecution.”

‘Extraordinary-rendition’ procedure unreliable, says CIA vet who created it

DURHAM, N.C. — The creator of the CIA’s “extraordinary-rendition” program says he has always distrusted interrogation intelligence flowing from the controversial practice, given that the admissions it produced were usually “very tainted” by foreign agencies who jailed suspects at the behest of the United States.

Michael Scheuer, an outspoken anti-terrorism crusader, took part in a Duke University law-school panel on Friday. There, experts debated the future of the highly controversial snatch, jail and interrogate program that he created, and whether it should survive beyond the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which has often justified rendition as an intelligence gold mine.

In Canada, rendition has become synonymous with the process that resulted in Ottawa’s Maher Arar spending a year in a Syrian jail, where he was beaten with electric cables during the first phases of his captivity. Canadian officials have apologized to the telecommunications engineer and compensated him with $10-million (U.S.), upholding that he was wrongly smeared in intelligence exchanges emanating from Canada, prior to the U.S. decision to render him.

The Bush administration has proven far less contrite in the Arar affair and similar cases, blocking lawsuits on the grounds that probing rendition would illegally spill state secrets.

An estimated 100 to 150 people have been rendered to foreign prisons by the U.S. program, of which Mr. Scheuer remains a big booster. Now retired, he created the program when he was a Central Intelligence Agency analyst tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden. He said the program has been enormously valuable, at least in terms of taking high-level terrorists off the streets and seeing what documents they carried.

But he added that resulting interrogations proved dubious once suspects were sent to third-country prisons, such as Syria or Egypt. “You could bet on the testimony given to you, it was altered in a way that would serve the interests of the country that was giving it,” he said. “So, it was very tainted, in the sense that if Country X or Country Y interrogated these people, you would really have some information, but it would be far from coupled with what was actually being said.”

Mr. Scheuer didn’t dispute that torture has occurred in foreign jails where the United States sent suspects – “You’d have to assume that 80 per cent [of prisoners rendered to Egypt] are not going to have a good time,” he said – but said simply that he didn’t particularly care. “I’m perfectly happy to do anything to defend the United States, so long as the lawyers sign off on it,” he said.

After 9/11, the Bush administration decided to enhance Mr. Scheuer’s pre-existing rendition program with international “black-site” prisons where U.S. officials would lead interrogations in secret CIA jails. “I am much less experienced in the Bush administration,” Mr. Scheuer conceded. “I ran rendition operations from July ‘95 until June of ‘99.”

Speaking at Duke, Mr. Scheuer did put some distance between the program he hatched in 1995 and events that occurred after 2001. “The bar was lowered after 9/11,” he said.

In addition to Mr. Arar’s case in Canada, high-profile renditions controversies have arisen in Germany and Italy. Mr. Scheuer made a point of saying he would personally put the German suspect back on a rendition plane, but did not say the same that about the other two cases. The program he conceived was restricted to targeting only the highest level terrorism suspects, he said.

Questioned about the Arar affair, Mr. Scheuer asserted that that rendition was not technically a CIA job, but rather an FBI initiative, by agents working in cahoots with unspecified agencies north of the border.

That prompted a response from Canadian lawyer Ron Atkey, who was in attendance to give a speech about the years he spent inside the Arar Commission battling government secrecy to reveal what Canada knew about the CIA rendition program.

Mr. Atkey pointed out Canadian agencies were found to have had no foreknowledge of the U.S. decision to put Mr. Arar on a Gulfstream jet and fly him to the Middle East, after his 2002 arrest in a New York airport.

“The biggest piece of baloney,” Mr. Scheuer said. “They [the Canadians] were totally surprised like Captain Renault in Casablanca,” he quipped.

The allusion referred to a scene in the 1942 film, where a duplicitous French gendarme shuts down an illegal casino operation in Morocco – saying “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here!” even as he is handed a big win from the roulette wheel.

Mr. Scheuer went on to describe certain U.S. newspaper reporters as “scurrilous” traitors for revealing details of the rendition program.

After the panel, however, he said he wasn’t necessarily familiar with the domestic investigations that led to the Arar affair.

Ecuador says CIA controls part of its intelligence

QUITO (Reuters) – Ecuador’s president accused the CIA on Saturday of controlling many of his country’s spy agencies, in comments that could fray ties with Washington and drag it into Ecuador’s feud with neighboring Colombia.

 President Rafael Correa has fired a top intelligence officer and plans to overhaul spy agencies for belatedly informing him about links between Colombian rebels and an Ecuadorian who died in Colombia’s raid inside Ecuador last month that sparked a regional crisis.

 ”Many of our intelligence agencies have been taken over by the CIA,” the leftist leader said during his weekly radio show. “Through the CIA, information found here was passed to Colombia to improve their position” in the dispute.

Correa also charged the United States with financing some officers in the Ecuadorian spy agencies.

U.S. Embassy spokesman in Quito Arnaldo Arbesu declined to comment on the charges but said, “We are always willing to work with the Ecuadorian government in any type of issue.”

 Correa, whose popularity has rebounded for his handling of the dispute and is an ally of U.S. foe Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, is a critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

 He has called President George W. Bush worse than Satan, and once vowed to cut off his own arm before renewing a lease that allows U.S. troops to use a key anti-drug air base.

 The March 1 raid, which killed a Colombian rebel leader and more than 20 other people, raised the threat of war after Ecuador and Venezuela briefly sent troops to their borders with Colombia. Nerves quickly calmed during a regional meeting a week later.

 Correa said he hoped the diplomatic spat would be over soon, but warned of legal actions against Colombia for the killing of the Ecuadorian citizen who was in the rebel camp.

 Correa added that Ecuador’s decision to sue Colombia in international court over Colombia’s anti-drug spraying along its border was in response to the raid.

 The suit filed on Monday has once again strained relations between the neighbors who share a 400-mile border often crossed by rebels fighting a four-decade war against the Colombian government.

Gitmo captive: I was threatened with rape

WASHINGTON — In a fresh document from the Guantánamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground already investigated, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.

But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.

Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, “I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon’s long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with in keeping with military standards.

“In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims,” he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques are published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaeda training manual “teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse.”

The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr’s upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.

Meantime, the Canadian’s Pentagon lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and later in Guantánamo.

The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.

Speer died of his wounds days later at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date.

In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ”Lt. Col. W” wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ”engaged,” leaving open the possibility that he had survived.

Khadr was the only survivor.

The documents are under seal at the Office of Military Commission along with the other defense motions from last week’s case.

Now, the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr’s most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment — an English document crafted with his lawyers, which does not name his guards and interrogators, at least in the portion not blacked out by military censors.

For example, after his capture and regaining consciousness, he said, he was guarded by “a young blond soldier who was about 25 and a Mexican or Puerto Rican soldier.”

The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.

”On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,” he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man, who ”told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.” In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian “to rape me.”

The document also revisits old allegations — such as his description on arriving in Guantánamo, at age 16, and hearing someone in the military say, “Welcome to Israel.”

Or his claim, investigated by the military, that in March 2003 guards splashed his prison camp uniform with Pine Sol and dragged him around an interrogation booth, like a human mop, because he had urinated on himself during a bout of shackled isolation.

Pentagon and Guantánamo spokesmen did not reply Tuesday to queries on what that investigation found or whether anyone was disciplined.

The current prison camps spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, in February declined to address allegations emerging at the military commissions, saying, “It is likely best for all of us to hear what the attorneys have to say during the hearings.”

Former SAS man condemns British role in torture tactics

Hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture, a former SAS soldier said yesterday. Ben Griffin said individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and in Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay.

Griffin, 29, left the British army last year after three months in Baghdad, saying he disagreed with the “illegal” tactics of US troops. While ministers had stated their wish that the Guantánamo Bay camp should be closed, they had been silent over prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. He added: “These secretive prisons are part of a global network in which individuals face torture and are held indefinitely without charge. All of this is in direct contravention of the Geneva conventions, international law and the UN convention against torture.”

Referring to the government’s admission last week that two US rendition flights containing terror suspects had landed at the British territory of Diego Garcia, Griffin said the use of British territory and airspace “pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of extraordinary rendition in the first place”.

He told a Stop the War Coalition press conference in London that since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, UK special forces had operated within a joint US-UK taskforce that had been responsible for the detention of “hundreds if not thousands of individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq”. The primary mission of the taskforce in Iraq was to kill or capture “high-value targets”. However, the taskforce often detained non-combatants.

He said he had not himself witnessed torture or mistreatment. But he added: “I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.”

He continued: “It is only since I have left the army [and] I have read the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention on Torture, that I realised that we have broken so many of these conventions and treaties in Iraq.”

He said three fellow soldiers had told him on separate occasions that they had witnessed the interrogation of two detainees in Iraq using “partial drowning and an electric cattle prod”. Ministers must have been briefed on the activities of the taskforce and should be charged with breach of conventions protecting individuals from torture, he added.

The Ministry of Defence said yesterday it did not comment on the activities of special forces. However, senior army officers and parliament’s security and intelligence committee have expressed concern about ignorance among British troops about both national and international law covering the treatment of prisoners.

Combatants may get phone link to home

IN THE PRISON CAMPS

 

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — ET, the extra terrestrial, tried to do it. Now the Pentagon has decided to let ECs, or enemy combatants, do it too — phone home.

Army Lt. Col. Edward M. Bush said Tuesday that the Department of Defense has approved a policy to let at least some of the 275 or so war-on-terror detainees here speak by telephone with family.

How? They’re working on it.

”I have no projected timeline for implementation but it is currently being developed,” said Bush, a detention center spokesman.

Approval of the idea comes two months after the International Committee of the Red Cross launched a pilot program in Kabul, Afghanistan, that lets Afghan families to speak by a teleconference video with select U.S.-held captives in the Bagram Air Base, a U.S.-run lockup.

No such single site could be set up to speak with detainees held as ”enemy combatants” here. Their families are spread across far-flung nations from Canada and China to Sudan and Yemen.

On paper, the policy would permit at least certain detainees twice-a-year phone calls.

”Obviously, anything that mitigates the crushing isolation these men have experienced for more than six years is welcome news,” said Illinois law school professor Marc Falkoff, who has for years handled unlawful detention suits on behalf of about a dozen Yemeni detainees.

But he was skeptical about the initial announcement. He suggested it might be a publicity stunt ahead of a coming U.S. Supreme Court decision on detainee rights meant to portray the prison camps in a better light.

”One phone call twice a year hardly makes Gitmo the model of a humane prison,” Falkoff said. “One of my clients has a 6-year-old daughter who he’s never seen or spoken to. She was born while he was in Guantánamo. To be honest, I don’t know whether speaking with her will lift him from his depression or simply shatter him.”

Red Cross delegates have for years had access to detainees at this remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba and acted as couriers for letters between the captives and their families. First, detainees must submit their letters to U.S. military censors, who have blackened out such details as allegations of their treatment and descriptions of the sprawling prison camp complex on the Caribbean.

Past prison camps commanders have said that both logistics and security concerns would complicate telephone calls; they would require foreign language interpreters listening in to make sure detainees don’t divulge sensitive information.

U.S. commanders here have already permitted a limited number of so-called “humanitarian phone calls.”

In one case, the U.S. military approved a Guantánamo-Algeria call for a detainee to speak with his mother after learning that his father, an Algiers attorney, had suddenly died of a heart attack.

Under that scheme, the mother was asked to go to the U.S. Embassy in Algiers for the call.

There was no immediate word on whether alleged 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed — on the short list for a death penalty prosecution — would qualify for a phone call.

He has yet to see a lawyer and is held among 15 so-called high-value detainees in segregation at a site called Camp 7, run by a special unit called Task Force Platinum