North Carolina’s Governor Beverly Perdue agreed with us 100 percent, her Policy Director Al Delia told our delegation — “extraordinary rendition” and torture are wrong. However, the Governor would do nothing about rendition flights operated from just outside of Raleigh at Johnston County Airport in Smithfield. During the Bush administration, Aero Contractors, the CIA’s notorious “torture taxi” aviation service, had used its headquarters and hangars in Smithfield and Kinston, NC, to fly dozens of kidnapped men to secret detention and torture. Among those transported by Aero were Khaled el-Masri, Binyam Mohamed, and Abou el-Kassim Britel.
Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 pages of government documents relating to the abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the “war on terror,” brought to light by the ACLU.
Since 2004, the ACLU has requested and received thousands of documents on the Bush administration’s torture program. The task of extracting a narrative from this intimidating pile of documents was left to Larry Siems, Director of Freedom to Write at the PEN American Center.
Yesterday, the ACLU and over 30 other organizations sent a letter to the Senate asking them to oppose an effort in Congress that threatens to revive the use of torture and other inhumane interrogation techniques. If passed, an amendment introduced by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) to the Defense Authorization bill would roll back torture prevention measures that Congress overwhelmingly approved in the 2005 McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, as well as a 2009 Executive Order on ensuring lawful interrogations. It would also require the administration to create a secret list of approved interrogation techniques in a classified annex to the existing interrogation field manual.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project & at 12:23pm
Michele Bachmann announced on Saturday night that the ACLU is "running the CIA." Not true, of course, but it got us thinking: what if we did run the CIA?
By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 1:25pm
Yesterday, the man accused of planning the 2000 U.S.S. Cole bombing appeared before the world for the first time, nine years after his capture, at a military commission hearing at Guantánamo. I was there to observe the proceedings for the ACLU.
The arraignment of Abd al-Rahim Hussayn Muhammad al-Nashiri (pronounced al-NAH-shiri) was the beginning of what will likely be a years-long death penalty trial before a military commission. Mr. al-Nashiri wore a white smock and trousers (similar to a doctor's scrubs, just a bit thicker and baggier).
The ACLU was in court yesterday trying to hold officials accountable for the torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. In 2002 he was taken from a New York jail by the military, declared an "enemy combatant," and secretly transported to a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
He was imprisoned without charge for nearly four years, subjected to extreme abuse, and unable to communicate with his lawyers or family for two years. The illegal treatment included forcing Padilla into stress positions for hours on end, punching him, depriving him of sleep and threatening him with further torture and death.
Many people saw the torture and abuse of prisoners and indefinite detention at Guantánamo Bay in the wake of 9/11 as a fall from grace. Harvard Historian, Jonathan Hansen disagrees. “America,” he says, “scarcely has any grace to fall from.”
In this episode of ACLU Studio, ACLU National Security Project Litigation Director, Ben Wizner talks with Hansen about his new book, Guantánamo, An American History. Listen and learn how Guantánamo is a reflection of America; revealing the good, the bad and the ugly.
For nearly 10 years, Ali Soufan helped fight the United States’ secret war on terror, gathering intelligence and interrogating prisoners as an FBI Special Agent. Soufan claims that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence that waterboarding was effective is flat-out wrong.
