The Secret Iraq Files: The War

US turned blind eye to torture

Leaked documents on Iraq war contain thousands of allegations of abuse, but a Pentagon order told troops to ignore them.

A review of the leaked documents reveals more than 1,000 allegations of abuse committed by Iraqi security forces. Not all of them are credible, as some detainees showed no physical evidence of abuse, while others changed their stories during multiple interrogations.

Violating its obligations

International law did not require the US to investigate these allegations of Iraqi-on-Iraqi detainee abuse, because all of them were reported after June 30, 2004 – when Iraq once again became a “sovereign country”, according to the United Nations resolution 1546. The United States no longer directly controlled Iraq's security services, and thus, it was no longer legally obligated to police them.

One could argue, of course, that the decision to look the other way represents a clear moral failing – and a conscious decision to undermine US’ own stated goal of nation-building. The US has spent tens of millions of dollars to develop prisons, courts, and the “rule of law” in Iraq. But the leaked documents show that Iraq's security forces routinely violated the most basic rights of detainees in their custody, assaulting them, threatening their families, occasionally even raping or murdering them.

More importantly, many of the detainee abuse reports suggest that the US knowingly violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The convention – which the United States ratified in 1994 – forbids signatories from transferring a detainee to other countries "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture".

The thousand-plus allegations of torture in Iraqi jails, many of them substantiated by medical evidence, clearly seem to constitute "substantial grounds" to believe that prisoners transferred to Iraqi custody could be tortured. Yet the US has transferred thousands of prisoners to Iraqi custody in recent years, including nearly 2,000 who were handed over to the Iraqis in July, 2010.

"Evidence of unchecked torture"

The abuses reported by detainees were often nearly identical to those used by the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein. Some detainees were whipped across the feet with heavy cables, an excruciatingly painful form of torture but one that leaves few marks on its victims. Others reported being hung from hooks attached to the ceiling, or receiving electrical shocks across their bodies.

In order to read the complete article HERE.

Wikileaks Iraq war logs: Civilians have paid heaviest price

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p80YyLNEV5s

Five New Reasons (and One Old One) Why We Must Close Guantanamo Now

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet.

A surprising poll shows that by wide margins, Americans don't want to see Gitmo shut down -- here's why it should be closed forever.

Splashed on the front page of USA Today this week were the surprising results of a poll finding that a wide majority of Americans now oppose the closing of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. "By more than 2-1, those surveyed say Guantánamo shouldn't be closed. By more than 3-1, they oppose moving some of the accused terrorists housed there to prisons in their own states," USA Today reported.
USA Today's poll results present a major political challenge to President Barack Obama, who has repeatedly vowed to close the detention camp by early next year, and who already faces a battle over Gitmo with Congress.
How could it be that after such an endlessly devastating era of high-profile lawlessness, torture, rigged trials, and prisoner deaths -- and years after Bush officials themselves acknowledged the need to shutter the prison camp -- a majority of Americans want to keep it open?
It is a testament to the ageless power of political fearmongering. In the months since Obama vowed to close Guantánamo in an executive order that was met with relief and praise by human rights advocates worldwide, the debate over how and when to do so has been hijacked and utterly skewed.
Despite all we have learned about the prisoners held there -- the fact, for starters, that only a fraction of them are actually self-avowed terrorists who have plotted anti-American acts -- much of the political establishment has stuck with the argument that Guantánamo might just be the only place for these "terrorists," promising that under no circumstances will they allow them to be brought onto U.S. soil.
Apparently the fearmongering is working. "Coming up on eight years after Sept. 11, fear remains, and fear is politically potent," political scientist Paul Freedman of the University of Virginia, who studies public opinion, told USA Today. "When it comes to the issue of terrorism ... people are inclined to err on the side of that fear."
"I feel like all the ground we gained over the past five years has been lost in the last five weeks," says activist Matthew Daloisio, a member of Witness Against Torture, which has advocated relentlessly for the closure of the prison camp.
This cannot stand. There's too much at stake when it comes to human rights, American democracy and the perception of the United States abroad. It's time to cut through the noise of political rhetoric and cable news and set the record straight. Below are five new reasons -- and at least one old one -- why closing Guantánamo Bay cannot wait.
Reason #1: The Torture Continues
So Obama was inaugurated, and that means no more torture, right?
Not quite.
In an interview with former CBS news anchor Dan Rather revealed this week, former Guantánamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene -- the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court ruling grating habeas corpus rights to prisoners at Gitmo -- claimed that torture is still going on under Obama. “Nothing change in Guantánamo,” he said. “They torture me in the Obama time more than Bush.”
Boudemiene described being force-fed at Guantánamo using methods that were deliberately made "as painful and uncomfortable as possible." The claim echoes the treatment of prisoners described in an in-depth article published by AlterNet last month by investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, who documented the existence of brutal thug squads known as "Immediate Reaction Force" (IRF) teams that have routinely terrorized prisoners since day one.
The tactics used by these forces -- nicknamed the "Extreme Repression Force" by some -- include gang-beating prisoners, breaking their bones, gouging their eyes and dousing them with chemicals at the slightest sign of resistance or simple failure to follow protocol. It also includes force feeding prisoners who refuse to eat.
According to attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube inserted with "one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the tube in his nose and down his throat" and into his stomach. "No anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of the procedure." Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to vomit "substantial amounts of blood."
This was painful enough, but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as "unbearable," causing him to pass out from the pain.
The IRF teams are "the Black Shirts of Guantánamo," Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Scahill -- and they are illegal to boot.

In order to read the complete article HERE.

Prosecute This: Torture Was Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Obama's intent to immunize those who broke the law violates his constitutional duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet.

The Legal Case Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al., Is Murder One, Not Just War Crimes

When I testified last year before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties about Bush interrogation policies, Congressman Trent Franks (R-Ariz) stated that former CIA Director Michael Hayden had confirmed that the Bush administration only waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashirit for one minute each. I told Franks that I didn’t believe that. Sure enough, one of the newly released torture memos reveals that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. One of Stephen Bradbury’s 2005 memos asserted that “enhanced techniques” on Zubaydah yielded the identification of Mohammed and an alleged radioactive bomb plot by Jose Padilla. But FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan, who interrogated Zubaydah from March to June 2002, wrote in the New York Times that Zubaydah produced that information under traditional interrogation methods, before the harsh techniques were ever used.
Why, then, the relentless waterboarding of these two men? It turns out that high Bush officials put heavy pressure on Pentagon interrogators to get Mohammed and Zubaydah to reveal a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers, in order to justify Bush’s illegal and unnecessary invasion of Iraq in 2003 according to the newly released report of the Senate Armed Services Committee. That link was never established.
President Obama released the four memos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. They describe unimaginably brutal techniques and provide "legal" justification for clearly illegal acts of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the face of monumental pressure from the CIA to keep them secret, Obama demonstrated great courage in deciding to make the grotesque memos public. At the same time, however, in an attempt to pacify the intelligence establishment, Obama said, "it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.
"In startlingly clinical and dispassionate terms, the authors of the newly-released torture memos describe and then rationalize why the devastating techniques the CIA sought to employ on human beings do not violate the Torture Statute (18 U.S.C. sec. 2340).
The memos justify 10 techniques, including banging heads into walls 30 times in a row, prolonged nudity, repeated slapping, dietary manipulation, and dousing with cold water as low as 41 degrees. They allow shackling in a standing position for 180 hours, sleep deprivation for 11 days, confinement of people in small dark boxes with insects for hours, and waterboarding to create the perception they are drowning. Moreover, the memos permit many of these techniques to be used in combination for a 30-day period. They find that none of these techniques constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Waterboarding, admittedly the most serious of the methods, is designed, according to Jay Bybee, to induce the perception of "suffocation and incipient panic, i.e. the perception of drowning." But although Bybee finds that "the use of the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death," he accepts the CIA's claim that it does "not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard." One of Bradbury’s memos requires that a physician be on duty during waterboarding to perform a tracheotomy in case the victim doesn't recover after being returned to an upright position.
As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye points out, the CIA and the Justice Department "ignored a wealth of other published information" that indicates dissociative symptoms, changes greater than those in patients undergoing heart surgery, and drops in testosterone to castration levels after acute stress associated with techniques that the memos sanction.
The Torture Statute punishes conduct, or conspiracy to engage in conduct, specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering. "Severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from either the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering, or from the threat of imminent death.

In order to read the complete article HERE.

Some Accuse Mexican Army Of Abuse In Juarez

“Abu Ghraib would be a kindergarten compared to the military camp here in Ciudad Juarez.”

"Abu Ghraib sería un jardín de infancia en comparación con el campamento militar en Ciudad Juárez".

-Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, ombudsman for the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission-

Some Accuse Mexican Army Of Abuse In Juarez
by Jason Beaubien

Thousands of Mexican soldiers have been sent to Ciudad Juarez in an effort to stop drug-related violence in the city.

In the Mexican border city of Juarez, thousands of army troops have taken over control of the local police force in an effort to win back the city's streets from violent drug cartels.
Local officials say the surge over the last two weeks has dramatically reduced the number of drug-related executions. But human rights groups say the military has been abusing detainees suspected of having ties to organized crime.
The Scene On The Border
As you come over the Bridge of the Americas from El Paso, Texas, into Juarez, Mexican soldiers with automatic weapons man a security checkpoint. They flag down SUVs and rummage through the vehicles looking for drugs, guns and money.
The army is now in charge of security in Mexico's most violent city.
It patrols the streets, runs the police department and oversees the jails.
Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz says this is not martial law. He calls it a collaboration between the army and the city.
"We have to work to implement it, have to get many things straightened out," he says. "But at the end of the day, it's going to be a very helpful way to get crime down in our city,"
More than 2,000 people have died in Juarez since the beginning of 2008 as two of the nation's most powerful drug cartels battle for control of smuggling routes into El Paso. The gangs have gunned down their rivals, police officers and prosecutors in broad daylight.
While the thousands of additional troops haven't eliminated executions entirely, the murder tally has fallen from about 10 a day in February to only one or two a day since the extra soldiers arrived.
Allegations Of Torture, Beatings
But Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, the ombudsman for the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission, says the military shouldn't be in charge of security in Juarez. And he says the first wave of soldiers who arrived a year ago have tortured and even killed criminal suspects.
"We have registered 160 cases of abuse committed by the military here in Ciudad Juarez," Hickerson says. "And the majority of those cases were of torture."
Hickerson says that when the soldiers arrived more than a year ago, the new troops tried to quickly gather intelligence on the local cartels by beating information out of suspects.
"Abu Ghraib would be a kindergarten compared to the military camp here in Ciudad Juarez," he said, referring to the notorious U.S. military prison in Iraq.
One Man's Story
A used car dealer who doesn't want his name used out of fear for his safety says he was held naked, blindfolded and handcuffed at the base for four days late last year. He says he was beaten along with dozens of other people who were being detained in a building there. He says the soldiers demanded that they confess to working for the drug cartels.
He fled to El Paso as soon as they let him go.
He says at 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. on his first day of detention, someone named El Tigre, or the Tiger, took over the interrogation and pulled a plastic bag tight over his head.
"I tried to rip the bag with my mouth but I couldn't," he says. "And at that moment I couldn't breath. When he realized I couldn't keep going, he released me. El Tigre told me, 'Now you're going to talk because you're going to talk.'"
The car dealer says he was arrested after selling a car to two men from out of town who the army claimed were cartel hit men. When he insisted that he was just a businessman, he says, the soldiers threw him naked, handcuffed and soaked in water into a cold storage freezer. Other detainees, he says, were being shocked with electricity.
Hickerson at the Human Rights Commission says this man's account of the military interrogations matches the stories of other detainees.

Algunos acusan a Ejército Mexicano de abusos en Juárez

by Jason Beaubien

En la ciudad fronteriza mexicana de Juárez, miles de tropas del ejército han tomado el control de la policía local en un esfuerzo por recuperar las calles de la ciudad de violentos carteles de la droga.Los funcionarios locales dicen que el aumento en las últimas dos semanas ha reducido drásticamente el número de ejecuciones relacionadas con las drogas. Pero los grupos de derechos humanos dicen que los militares han abusado de los detenidos sospechosos de tener vínculos con la delincuencia organizada.

La escena en la frontera

Como ustedes ven el Puente de las Américas de El Paso Texas, en Juárez México soldados con armas automáticas tienen un punto de control. Con una bandera señalan y buscan a través de los vehículos en busca de drogas, armas y dinero.El ejército está ahora a cargo de la seguridad en la ciudad mas violenta de MexicoQue patrulla las calles, recorre el departamento de policía y supervisa las cárceles.El Alcalde de Juárez José Reyes Ferriz dice que esta no es la ley marcial. Él lo llama la colaboración entre el ejército y la ciudad."Tenemos que trabajar para implementarlo, tenemos que conseguir enderezar muchas cosas", dice. "Pero al final del día, va a ser una manera muy provechosa de conseguir bajar el crimen en nuestra ciudad,"Más de 2000 personas han muerto en Ciudad Juárez desde principios de 2008 cuando dos de los más poderosos carteles de la droga pelean por el control de rutas de contrabando en El Paso. Las bandas han asesinado a sus rivales, los agentes de policía y fiscales a plena luz del día.Mientras que los miles de tropas adicionales no han eliminado totalmente las ejecuciones, el recuento de asesinatos se ha reducido de unos 10 por día en febrero a sólo uno o dos al día cuando llegaron los soldados.

Denuncias de tortura, palizas

Sin embargo, Gustavo de la Rosa Hickerson, el Defensor del Pueblo para el Estado de Chihuahua de la Comisión de Derechos Humanos, dice que los militares no deben estar a cargo de la seguridad en Juárez. Y dice la primera ola de soldados que llegaron hace un año han torturado y aun matado a los sospechosos."Hemos registrado 160 casos de abusos cometidos por los militares aquí en Ciudad Juárez", dice Hickerson. "Y la mayoría de los casos son de tortura."Hickerson dice que cuando los soldados llegaron hace más de un año, las tropas trataron rápidamente de reunir informacion de inteligencia sobre los cárteles por golpes a los sospechosos."Abu Ghraib sería un jardín de infancia en comparación con el campamento militar en Ciudad Juárez", dijo, refiriéndose a la tristemente célebre prisión militar de EE.UU. en Iraq.

La historia de un hombre

Un distribuidor de coches usados que no quiere que su nombre sea utilizado por temor por su seguridad dice que fue sujetado desnudo, con los ojos vendados y esposado en la base militar por cuatro días a finales del año pasado. Él dice que fue golpeado junto con docenas de otras personas que estaban detenidas en un edificio. Él dice que los soldados exigieron que confesara que trabajan para los cárteles de la droga.Huyó a El Paso, tan pronto como lo dejaron ir.Él dice que a las 4 am o 5 am del primer día de su detención, alguien llamado El Tigre, o el Tigre, se encargó del interrogatorio y jaló una bolsa de plástico fuerte sobre su cabeza."Traté de rasgar la bolsa con mi boca, pero no pude", dice. "Y en ese momento no podía respirar. Cuando se dio cuenta de que no podía seguir adelante, me soltó. El Tigre me dijo: 'Ahora vas a hablar, porque tú vas a hablar".El distribuidor de coche dice que fue detenido después de vender un coche a dos hombres de fuera de la ciudad que el ejército alegó fueron sicarios del cártel. Cuando insistió en que era un hombre de negocios, dice, los soldados lo arrojaron desnudo, esposado y empapado en agua en un congelador de almacenamiento en frío. Otros detenidos, dice, fueron asustados con la electricidad.Hickerson en la Comisión de Derechos Humanos dice que el relato de este hombre de los interrogatorios de los militares coincide con los relatos de otros detenidos.