Jun 15th, 2009
Posted by Ateqah Khaki, National Security Project at 6:19pm	Torture

Newly Released Detainee Statements Provide More Evidence of CIA Torture Program

Today, in response to an ACLU lawsuit, the CIA released documents in which Guantánamo Bay prisoners describe abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. In previously released versions of the documents, the CIA had removed virtually all references to the abuse of prisoners in their custody; the documents released today are still heavily redacted, but include some new information.

The documents were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking uncensored transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) that determine if prisoners held by the Defense Department at Guantánamo qualify as “enemy combatants.”

The newly unredacted information includes statements from the CSRTs of former CIA detainees, including Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Abd Al Rahim Hussein Mohammed Al Nashiri, Abu Zubaydah and Majid Khan, including descriptions of torture and coercion. These statements include:

• Abu Zubaydah: "After months of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries that they inflicted to my eye, to my stomach, to my bladder, and my left thigh and my reproductive organs. They didn't care that I almost died from these injuries. Doctors told me that I nearly died four times." "They say ‘this in your diary.' They say ‘see you want to make operation against America.' I say no, the idea is different. They say no, torturing, torturing. I say ‘okay, I do. I was decide to make operation.'"
• Al Nashiri: "[And, they used to] drown me in water."
• Muhammad: "This is what I understand he [CIA interrogator] told me: you are not American and you are not on American soil. So you cannot ask about the Constitution."
• Khan: "In the end, any classified information you have is through…agencies who physically and mentally tortured me."

You can check out the documents we received today here.

In response to the documents’ release today, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner and lead attorney on the case stated, “The documents released today provide further evidence of brutal torture and abuse in the CIA's interrogation program and demonstrate beyond doubt that this information has been suppressed solely to avoid embarrassment and growing demands for accountability. There is no legitimate basis for the Obama administration's continued refusal to disclose allegations of detainee abuse, and we will return to court to seek the full release of these documents.”

While the information released today shed some new light on the CIA’s torture program, there are still many unanswered questions. We hope the Obama administration will make good on its commitment to transparency by stopping the suppression of information about torture and abuse, and holding accountable the officials who put those policies in place.

Do your part in demanding accountability for torture crimes: head over to the ACLU’s new Accountability for Torture site to learn more and take action.

Permalink |	Torture

Tags: accountability, national security project

1. D. Winter Says:
   Jun 16th, 2009 at 7:01am

   I absolutely support accountability with regard to the use of torture as a matter of policy by the previous administration. Yet it seems inevitable to me that if we cannot simultaneously demand accountability around the use of neural linguistic reprogramming and the tools that make such activities possible then the use of torture as a matter of policy is one that must at some point in the future again arise.

   What I am saying is that the use of behavioral tools to humiliate, intimidate, and to kill remains a subject that is, it seems, taboo. As long as this remains so, it maintains a culture where other forms of human rights abuse may incubate and grow.

   We have the tools to identify and arrest Cuban spies in our midst, and yet, to date, I have not heard of a single individual arrested for creating an environmental construct incorporating behavioral tools that result in death. I assume it is in part, simply a lack of political will.

   It makes me wonder: If I set myself on fire down on Main Street, would that be construed as a rejection of behavioral conditioning? or as simply one more act of random madness - which it seems so often lately has resulted in the death of individuals with left leaning views.

   The United States signed the Convention Against Torture, but if we cannot hold ourselves accountable, and if there is no one else who will do so, then it seems that rather than protecting human rights, the United States will [or has] become a nation that engages in the proliferation of technology that subverts both international agreements and the protections they were designed to create.

   D. Winter
   http://zendogblog.net

2. D. Winter Says:
   Jun 16th, 2009 at 10:55am

   Information on torture that has come to light indicates a close connection between torture and behavioral experts. It has been acknowledged that the CIA hired a pair of behaviorists as private contractors to conduct some of their own 'proceedures'.

   Yet the process of accountability grinds slow and the demands of justice remain unmet.

   And as for those 'other' victims, like:

   Robert 'Woody' Woodward - Sunday 12.2.2001 shot by police, Unitarian Church, Brattleboro, Vermont,

   Marty Hopkins, Tina Davis, Tuesday, November 25, 1997, who leapt from an Amtrak train, Nebraska,

   James Quarells, shot by a police officer in a mall in the fall of 1997,

   and many others like them, killed only because of fear that some unspecified "they" were out to get them;

   or the wieght of blood that furnished proof sufficient to induce these paranooid ravings that did result in death -

   there may be no justice at all.

   Doesn't this, by its very nature, bring into serious question our commitment to freedom and justice, and undermine our credibility as a nation, both to lead and to govern?

   D. Winter
   http://zendogblog.net

3. jr Says:
   Jun 16th, 2009 at 12:01pm

   So you naive people really believe these guys? The joke is on you.

4. Kristi Haynes Says:
   Jun 16th, 2009 at 1:43pm

   YOU ARE A PATHETIC ORGANIZATION. How dare you put our SOLDIERS IN DANGER. Every security agency says that is exactly what this will do. This is OUTRAGEOUS AND DISGUSTING. I will campaign against the donation and support of any affiliate you deal with. I will write every CONGRESSMAN AND REPRESENTATIVE. Do you even care about true Americans or do you have to be a minority to get your attention. You should be ashamed of yourselves, but shame would mean that you had an ounce of decency,or morality, and we know that you don't. PATHETIC

5. Vic Livingston Says:
   Jun 16th, 2009 at 8:59pm

   THIS GOES MUCH FARTHER THAN CO-OPTATION OF SHRINKS AND THERAPISTS.

   WE ARE TALKING ABOUT A GOVERNMENT-ENABLED AMERICAN GESTAPO.

   My personal experience tells me that psychologists have been recruited by a government-enabled "community stalking" extrajudicial apparatus that is persecuting unjustly "targeted" Americans and their families -- a social genocide/politicide that I believe be rightfully descried as an "American Gestapo."

   Co-opted psychologists, psychiatrists and family practitioners are pressured to labeled as mentally ill those who are labeled as such by ideologically-driven elements of federal and local law enforcement and military and intelligence agencies.

   The ideological, hate-fueled police state apparatus has been institutionalized, using federally-funded community policing and volunteer organizations as fronts for a neo-fascist vigilante army.

   And these citizen vigilantes cruise the streets, harassing and stalking, in EVERY county in the United States -- enabled by local law enforcement, some of whose members are part of what they call "the program."

   Meanwhile, the ACLU, I am disappointed to report, has declined to hear out the credible reports from the victims of this extrajudicial targeting and punishment network -- which has as its victims a disproportionate number of minority group members (such as blacks and Jews) as well as liberals, progressives, peace activists, and homosexuals.

   D. Winter, you are correct. But this goes much further than the co-optation of the professions of psychology and psychiatry. We are talking about a silent takeover of key agencies of government, the imposition of an extreme right police state that threatens the very foundation of democracy and daily makes a mockery of the rule of law.

   And one of the chief tools of this oppression is silent, body- and mind-degrading microwave radiation "directed energy weapons," which have been deployed to law enforcement agencies nationwide by the very government agencies that have enabled this American Gestapo.

   Please, ACLU, wake up and smell the police state. And please read this article, based on my first-person experiences as an unjustly targeted citizen:

   http://nowpublic.com/world/gestapo-usa-govt-funded-vig ilante-network-terrorizes-america

   http://NowPublic.com/scrivene r

6. Rob Says:
   Jun 17th, 2009 at 9:01am

   Maybe you people should check out how other countries torture there prisoners. You are right they probably dont water bore and they probabaly dont put bambo under there finger nails, ohh wait thats right they cut off there penis and choke them with it and then if they are lucky they cut there heads off and let the locals drag them around the city for a couple of days as they burn the American flag. The people that are complaining here are the ones responsable for the torture methods that are used against the troops. Good job idiots.

7. Paen Says:
   Jun 19th, 2009 at 1:09pm

   Contrary to what some of the more ignorant of the war mongers think the entire rest world does not spend their time cutting off heads and penises in their spare time and even if it were true it still would not justify torture by the U.S.Furthermore as I have said in the past if the war mongers gave a damn about the troops they would be marching for peace rather than acting like a mob of taliban fanatics at a stoning.