CIA Releases Dozens of Torture Documents in Response to ACLU Lawsuit

[muriel_volestrangler]

Secret Documents Describe Graphic Abuse and Admit Mistakes

“Often, prisoners who possess significant or imminent threat information are stripped to their diapers during interrogation and placed back into their cells wearing only diapers. This is done solely to humiliate the prisoner for interrogation purposes. When the prisoner soils a diaper, they are changed by the guards. Sometimes the guards run out of diapers and the prisoners are placed back in their cells in a handcrafted diaper secured by duct tape. If the guards don't have any available diapers, the prisoners are rendered to their cell nude.”

Rahan froze to death in his cell, naked from the waist down. The ACLU represents Rahman’s family in a lawsuit against the two CIA-contracted psychologists who designed and implemented the torture program, James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen.

“In a visceral way, these raw documents drive home the inhumanity of the torture conceived and carried out by Mitchell and Jessen in collaboration with the CIA,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “The documents reveal that Rahman was brutalized in part because his torturers decided that complaining about his torture was a form of resistance and he needed to be ‘broken.’”

Also included is a draft letter from the CIA to the Justice Department — cc-ing Mitchell — concluding that the torture they intended to inflict on Abu Zubaydah “normally would appear to be prohibited under the provisions” of the Torture Act, a federal law against torturing people. The draft letter is a “request” that the attorney general “grant a formal declination of prosecution” for torture.

Other new disclosures reveal the CIA’s concerns that detainees who had been tortured should be kept hidden from representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross for the rest of their lives.

https://www.aclu.org/news/cia-releases-dozens-torture-documents-response-aclu-lawsuit

Via Charles Pierce, who is worth reading on this:

Sooner or later, we're going to have to talk seriously about the atrocities committed in our name by elements of the United States government, and about the subsequent cover-up of those atrocities by elements of said United States government, only some of which were the same elements of said United States government who committed those atrocities.
...
If you are one of those people energized by the feeling of being utterly ashamed and revolted, you can read all the documents on which the ACLU is reporting at the CIA website. And it is here that I point out that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president has been all over the map on this issue, but that she seems to have finally lighted on the fringes of the right place.

Meanwhile, the presumptive Republican nominee, a ridiculous man running a ridiculous campaign, has contented himself with being an uninformed maniac on the subject. Presidential campaigns are the machinery within which we litigate something like this in a self-governing republic. But I'll be surprised—stunned, really—if these revelations even come up, except perhaps in abstract form, or perhaps in rueful silence while discussing the "war" on terror. An age of complicity goes on, endlessly, up that endless dirt road.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a45845/cia-torture-documents/

[malaise]

1. Sooner or later, we're going to have to talk seriously about the atrocities committed in our name by

elements of the United States government, and about the subsequent cover-up of those atrocities by elements of said United States government, only some of which were the same elements of said United States government who committed those atrocities.

----------
It may help folks understand the origins of ISIS (which we called Resistance) during WW2

[gratuitous]

2. Well you would think so . . .

But whatever successes or failures the United States has accomplished over the couple of centuries, we've gotten pretty practiced at absolving ourselves of our own atrocities or glossing them over with barely an airy hand-wave. Once they've slid down the memory hole, we're good; it's just those malcontent surviving victims or their families who stubbornly cling to the past and make a big stink about (for example) torturing people to death. You don't see us even suspending the perpetrators, let alone trying them for their crimes against humanity, do you?

[OnyxCollie]

3. "We tortured some folks."

Despite this acknowledgement, the obligation to prosecute under the UN Convention Against Torture, and a 6,700 page Senate torture report, Eric Holder didn't prosecute anyone.

Holder Says He Will Not Permit the Criminalization of Policy Differences
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7410267&page=1

As lawmakers call for hearings and debate brews over forming commissions to examine the Bush administration's policies on harsh interrogation techniques, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed to a House panel that intelligence officials who relied on legal advice from the Bush-era Justice Department would not be prosecuted.

"Those intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and in good faith and in reliance on Department of Justice opinions are not going to be prosecuted," he told members of a House Appropriations Subcommittee, reaffirming the White House sentiment. "It would not be fair, in my view, to bring such prosecutions."

Holder: Won't criminalize terror policy disputes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8470942

Associated Press Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder left open the possibility Thursday to prosecuting former Bush administration officials but ruled out filing charges merely over disagreements about policy.

"I will not permit the criminalization of policy differences," Holder testified before a House Appropriations subcommittee.

"However, it is my responsibility as attorney general to enforce the law. It is my duty to enforce the law. If I see evidence of wrongdoing I will pursue it to the full extent of the law," he said.

~snip~

"It is certainly the intention of this administration not to play hide and seek, or not to release certain things," said Holder. "It is not our intention to try to advance a political agenda or to try to hide things from the American people."

CIA Exhales: 99 Out of 101 Torture Cases Dropped
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/cia-exhales-99-out-of-101-torture-cases-dropped/

This is how one of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism ends: with practically every instance of suspected CIA torture dodging criminal scrutiny. It’s one of the greatest gifts the Justice Department could have given the CIA as David Petraeus takes over the agency.

Over two years after Attorney General Eric Holder instructed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to “preliminar(ily) review” whether CIA interrogators unlawfully tortured detainees in their custody, Holder announced on Thursday afternoon that he’ll pursue criminal investigations in precisely two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees, Holder said.

But just because there’s a further criminal inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean there will be any charges brought against CIA officials involved in those deaths. If Holder’s decision on Thursday doesn’t actually end the Justice Department’s review of torture in CIA facilities, it brings it awfully close, as outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta noted.

“On this, my last day as Director, I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us,” Panetta wrote to the CIA staff on Thursday. “We are now finally about to close this chapter of our Agency’s history.”