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New Morsels on the Destruction of the TapesOriginally posted on The Torture Report. New materials released last week in the ACLU’s ongoing FOIA proceedings seeking documents on the destruction of the torture videotapes add some details to the narrative in Chapter 3. The materials are Vaughn indexes containing brief descriptions of 165 internal CIA electronic communications relating to the reasons behind the destruction of the tapes. The CIA continues to withhold the documents themselves, but descriptions of several of the documents are illuminating. A few of the things we learn:
Interestingly, in a related affidavit summarizing the agency’s reasons for continuing to withhold these communications, the CIA says it was willing to release parts of thirteen of the documents. Prior to releasing the documents, however, the Agency was informed by the Department of Justice that Special Prosecutor John Durham was asserting Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Exemption (b)(7)(a) over the proposed-for-release portions of 10 of the 13 documents that the CIA was prepared to release in part. The other three documents the CIA proposed for partial release have Congressional equities that require consultation with Congress before a final determination can be made. Therefore, all of the documents are currently withheld in full. The 10 documents that Durham is apparently blocking from release, on the grounds that their release would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation, are:
We know from these most recent Vaughn indices, which follow similar indices of documents relating to the tapes’ destruction that the CIA has forwarded to the ACLU in recent months, that there is a substantial paper trail surrounding the destruction of the videotapes. We know Durham has been down that trail. Where is his investigation going?
Experimenting with TortureToday we post Chapter 2 of the report, “Experimenting with Torture." The chapter chronicles the development of the so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and their carefully-orchestrated application during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in a CIA black site in Thailand in the spring and summer of 2002. In it, Zubaydah himself speaks; his statement to the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), which was finally allowed to visit 14 “high value” detainees after they were transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, is one of the few first-hand accounts we have describing interrogations in the secret CIA prisons. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied,” Zubaydah tells the ICRC. “It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.” The more we learn about his interrogation, the more we see how right he was. Check out The Torture Report at www.thetorturereport.org Tags: The Torture Report
Piecing Together Bush's Torture ProgramToday we launch The Torture Report. On this site, over the next several months, we will construct a comprehensive account of the Bush administration’s torture program. The goal is simple: to tell the whole story and to get it right. How to do this — how to bring together everything we know from tens of thousands of formerly secret documents, from official and independent investigations, from press reports and the many good books that have recently appeared, and from the growing number of first-hand accounts of those who witnessed, participated in, or suffered mistreatment, how to register it all so we can come to some conclusions — is a daunting challenge. But it’s a challenge we all share. In a way, as the Report’s lead writer, I’m just trying to do what any one of us should be doing in the face of evidence that our elected officials presided over gross human rights violations: to piece together exactly what happened and who is responsible. I have help, fortunately. As sections are posted, a group of expert Contributors will offer comments; you’ll see their annotations, which will include corrections, elaborations, questions, and suggestions, in-line in the text. We invite your comments as well; these will appear at the end of the chapters. The Report will be constantly updated to incorporate the best of these suggestions and the very latest information. We begin at the beginning — the first days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This chapter, "Origins," looks at two of the earliest actions of the Bush administration, one that literally opened a space for torture to happen and one that revealed the administration’s approach to legal barriers and restrictions. Tags: The Torture Report
Why We're Challenging the FAA(Originally posted on Huffington Post.) On Wednesday, July 22, PEN American Center will join the American Civil Liberties Union in court to challenge the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which greatly expanded the ability of the U.S. government to spy on Americans without a warrant. PEN is an 87-year-old organization that defends writers and the freedom to write around the world. We are plaintiffs in this lawsuit first and foremost because we believe our own communications, which include sensitive phone calls and emails with writers facing persecution in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, are vulnerable under the program. Like our coplaintiffs in the case, which include human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations, we rely on confidential international communications to carry out our work. The trust we depend on is hard-won: those with whom we work abroad have often been monitored, imprisoned, or persecuted in their countries, and some of them are living and working in countries where a history of cooperation between their governments and U.S. intelligence agencies has left a legacy of fear and distrust of the United States. The fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) now has nearly limitless authority to monitor our international calls and emails severely compromises our ability to communicate freely with our endangered colleagues, undercutting our ability to ascertain and serve their needs. But surveillance powers like those the National Security Agency now possesses do more than damage our ability to do international human rights work. We know from the experiences of our colleagues in countries where governments had unchecked surveillance powers (including the United States as recently as the 1970s) that programs that allow governments to spy on their own citizens are often directed against writers and intellectuals, and that surveillance in general poses a serious threat to the intellectual and creative freedoms of all citizens. While its full scope remains unknown, the surveillance program that the Bush administration first implemented late in 2001 clearly gave the National Security Agency unprecedented power to monitor telephone and internet communications, and concerns about its constitutionality have surfaced repeatedly. In 2004, the Department of Justice even refused to provide the legal certification necessary for reauthorization of the original program because top department officials — all Bush appointees — were not convinced of its legality. When elements of the program were finally exposed in 2005, however, Congress failed to hold accountable the officials who had authorized it or to put new legislative protections in place. Instead, in 2008 it passed a new law — the FISA Amendments Act — that not only granted immunity to telecommunications companies for their participation in the NSA program, but also provided the executive branch with even broader authority to monitor the communications of innocent people. Wednesday's hearing is the first in a lawsuit specifically targeting the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act. It comes amid new and disturbing revelations about the NSA's surveillance activities. Earlier this month, the Inspectors General of the NSA, CIA, Defense Department, Justice Department, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report describing a surveillance program that was far larger than previously acknowledged; that report, too, questioned the legal basis for the program the Bush administration launched in 2001 and revealed that most of the intelligence leads generated by the program had questionable relevance to terrorism investigations. Meanwhile, ongoing Congressional investigations have uncovered new information suggesting that the NSA continues to scrutinize emails on a scale that may even violate the terms of the FISA Amendments Act. First the Bush administration and now the Obama administration insist that these surveillance powers are necessary to protect the country from individuals and groups that threaten national security. In fact, the laws that the FISA Amendments Act eviscerated were specifically crafted to ensure the U.S. government could spy on suspected terrorists and other foreign threats. What those laws also guaranteed, however, was that the constitutional right of American citizens and residents to be secure against unreasonable searches was protected. History has repeatedly shown how, without such protections, surveillance in the name of national security often extends to spying on peaceful political activists, journalists and writers, and other ordinary, law-abiding citizens. So we are heading to court, asking a federal judge to strike down those provisions of the FISA Amendments Act that allow unchecked, warrantless surveillance of our telephone and email communications. And we will continue to press the Obama administration and Congress to rein in a range of post-9/11 surveillance powers that threaten the right of our members, and all American citizens and residents, to read, write, and communicate freely without fearing that our government is listening in or gathering private, First Amendment-protected information. Larry Siems, Director of the PEN American Center's Freedom to Write program, is one of the ACLU's clients in our lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act.
Encouraging for the World, Embarrassing for the U.S.
This week, 58 Catholic and Muslim scholars met at the Vatican for talks aimed at bridging divisions between the world’s two largest religions. The gathering, hosted by Pope Benedict XVI, ended with a joint declaration “renouncing any oppression, aggressive violence and terrorism, especially that committed in the name of religion, and upholding the principle of justice for all.”
The Pope’s guests included Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born, Oxford-based scholar who, while eminent enough to merit a place at the papal conference table, continues to be persona non grata in the United States.
In 2004, Ramadan was preparing to assume a teaching position at Notre Dame when he was told that his visa had been cancelled. At the time, a State Department spokesman said Ramadan was unwelcome in the U.S. under a Patriot Act provision barring those who use a ‘position of prominence’ to ‘endorse or espouse terrorism.’ It was an untenable explanation — Ramadan has consistently denounced terrorism throughout his career — but the U.S. has continued to exclude him from the U.S. through a series of strategic stalls and shifting explanations.
When PEN joined the ACLU in challenging his exclusion and the Patriot Act provision, the government retracted its claim that Ramadan endorsed terrorism, but said it needed more time to decide his fate. The judge disagreed, ordering the government either to grant him a visa or give a legitimate reason for excluding him. With the court’s deadline looming, the government then asserted Ramadan was inadmissible because he had provided ‘material support to terrorism.’ It cited donations Ramadan had made to a Palestinian charity in Switzerland in 1999 and 2000 totaling around $1,000, a charity which the U.S. added to its terror watch list in 2003 but which still operates legally in Europe.
We went back to court to challenge this new pretext. This time the judge said his hands were tied — that the government had given a reason for the exclusion, and that, even though in 2000 the U.S. itself hadn’t yet concluded that the charity was involved in anything other than relief work, Ramadan hadn’t proved he didn’t know his donation was supporting terrorism. How does a person prove he didn’t know something?
We’re now appealing that decision. If it stands, tens of thousands of foreigners could find themselves barred from the United States because they made donations in good faith to organizations the U.S. later alleged have connections to terrorists. Among them there are likely to be many Tariq Ramadans, international writers and scholars who are major participants in some of the most critical conversations of our time, men and women whose exclusion from the United States violates our rights as American citizens to hear these voices face-to-face and engage directly in these conversations.
These conversations are happening, whether we’re part of them or not, and this week’s gathering at the Vatican shows how valuable and hopeful they can be. The fact that one of the Pope’s guests cannot visit the U.S., meanwhile, just serves to underscore how out of step and embarrassing this administration’s practice of ideological exclusion has been.
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