By Matthew Harwood, Media Relations Associate, ACLU at 5:41pm
When former White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan went before the Senate in early February for his confirmation hearing to lead the CIA, he made a startling admission. After reading the 300-page summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's (SSCI) mammoth 6,000-page report on the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, Brennan's belief in the life-saving value of the torture program was shaken.
By Noa Yachot, Communication Strategist, ACLU at 2:31pm
A detailed and harrowing first-person narrative of a prisoner's experiences in Guantánamo is available to the public for the first time: Slate today published a three-part series of excerpts from The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi. The excerpts were culled from a manuscript hundreds of pages in length, which Slahi provided his attorneys, a pro bono team of ACLU and other lawyers. After being classified for years, Slahi's memoirs – of arrest, rendition, torture, and imprisonment without charge or trial – are finally seeing the light of day, albeit with some redactions.
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 10:23am
Update (5/7/2013): CIA Director John Brennan has replaced the acting head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, who is also the subject of this blog post. This important news hopefully signals Brennan’s commitment to enforcing the letter and spirit of President Obama's executive order banning the use of torture, abuse, and secret prisons.
When the U.S. ratified the international treaty on the rights of children in armed conflict in 2002, it committed to protecting children under 18 from military recruitment and deployment to war and guaranteeing basic protections to former child soldiers, including those in U.S. military custody. Formally known as the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict (OPAC), the treaty requires ratifying nations to submit periodic reports on the progress they have made to implement their treaty obligations to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, a body of independent human rights experts charged with monitoring countries’ compliance with the treaty. The U.S. government’s latest report will be reviewed by the Committee in January 2013. The list of issues to be discussed during this review, which was adopted by the Committee on July 3, raises serious concerns regarding U.S. compliance with the Protocol and provides an opportunity for the United States to provide transparency and accountability for its treatment of juveniles in military custody.
Almost nine years ago, Khaled El-Masri was abducted, forcibly disappeared, and tortured by Macedonian authorities and the CIA. Until today, his well-documented claims of abuse had yet to be affirmed by any authorities responsible for his mistreatment or by a court of law. In a landmark ruling today, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) ruled that El-Masri’s treatment at the Macedonia airport by U.S. agents in cooperation with Macedonian officials “amounted to torture.” The court also found that while in CIA custody El-Masri was subjected to abuses including sodomy, forced nudity, total sensory deprivation, solitary confinement, force feeding, physical assault, sleep deprivation, inadequate food and water and denial of medical care in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, and that his entire period of captivity constituted a “forced disappearance” in violation of international law. According to ACLU Human Rights Program Director Jamil Dakwar, the ruling represents “a huge victory for justice and the rule of law.” He added:
By Alexander Abdo, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project & Mitra Ebadolahi, Legal Fellow, ACLU National Security Project at 1:45pm
On Friday, the ACLU appeared before the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to argue that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requires the CIA to release documents describing its use of waterboarding. The simple question at the heart of the hearing was this: is waterboarding an "intelligence method" that can be protected from disclosure under FOIA? We argued that the answer — of course not — is easy because even the president himself has declared that waterboarding is illegal. Exposing official misconduct to public scrutiny is the chief purpose of FOIA. But it cannot serve that purpose if even officially confirmed illegality is protectable.
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals just issued its opinion in the ACLU’s First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo. He was fired from his job at the Congressional Research Service (part of the Library of Congress) in 2009 because of op-ed pieces he wrote in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal criticizing the Obama administration’s decision to try some Gitmo detainees in federal courts and others in the military commissions system.
By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:05pm
The ongoing crisis in the prison at Guantánamo Bay is escalating, and new details are emerging as media have been allowed to visit this week. A few days ago, as part of an operation to shift hunger-striking prisoners from communal living to individual cells, Guantánamo guards shot at prisoners using what the military calls "less-than-lethal" ammunition, hitting at least one person. The AP reports that five prisoners were injured, as prisoners apparently resisted.
By Devon Chaffee, Legislative Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:31am
Today, the ACLU released a 2011 FBI “primer” on overseas interrogation that calls into question whether the FBI is adhering to its own policy prohibiting coercive techniques. The 2011 primer was obtained by the ACLU and colleague organizations through Freedom of Information Act litigation. It was written by an FBI Section Chief within the counterterrorism division, and is ironically titled “Cross Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation,” – ironic because it encourages FBI agents to request that detainees in foreign or military custody be put in isolation to prolong the detainee’s fear for interrogation purposes. Isolation was a key component to many of the abusive interrogations that took place in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and in secret CIA black sites after 9/11, in some cases causing extreme psychological trauma. This morning, we wrote to the FBI Director Robert Mueller expressing their concerns with the primer.
