^ I sure as hell hope not. To be clear if it isn't already, torture or inhumane treatment to prisoners are war crimes under the Third Geneva Convention. Torture would be a "grave breach":
"Nations who are party to these treaties must enact and enforce legislation penalizing any of these crimes.[28] Nations are also obligated to search for persons alleged to commit these crimes, or persons having ordered them to be committed, and to bring them to trial regardless of their nationality and regardless of the place where the crimes took place."
I would personally be ashamed as a Canadian to know that my government took part or had a hand in these despicable acts. The U.S. government reneges on a lot of things, a lot of promises, treaties, agreements. But if they're now engaging in torture of POW's...
It's tough to view the US government as anything but dangerous. Think about how many news items over the last few years have emerged regarding their actions. It really is starting to be concerning and a damning view on the erosion of rights based on the unilateral decisions of people in positions of power.
Torture is not just another news item that should go softly in the night. If any Canadians were engaging in the active breach of the Geneva Conventions, they are war criminals and should go to trial. End of story.
What good are treaties if nobody respects them? ESPECIALLY treaties of such human basic rights?
Absolutely disgusting.
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This torture thing isn't new information. It's been a public "secret" for years now. In general no one cares enough. They don't even care that their own government is spying on them, why would they care how they treat some "insurgents".
Al Qaeda achieved a victory so total with 9/11 that it's barely comprehensible.
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Johnny eats garbage and isn’t 100% committed.
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This torture thing isn't new information. It's been a public "secret" for years now. In general no one cares enough. They don't even care that their own government is spying on them, why would they care how they treat some "insurgents".
Al Qaeda achieved a victory so total with 9/11 that it's barely comprehensible.
I think it's just more official though. To the average guy like me, previous releases of acts of torture were more of a "he said she said" thing. This report sort of rolls it all up quite succinctly.
In a career-defining speech, Sen. Mark Udall took to the Senate floor Wednesday to discuss a largely classified internal CIA investigation into the agency's Bush-era "enhanced interrogation techniques," and to call for the current CIA director's resignation.
Udall, an outbound Democrat from Colorado, began highlighting key conclusions from the CIA's so-called Panetta Review, written in 2011 and named after then-agency Director Leon Panetta. Its critical findings, in addition to the agency's attempts to prevent the Senate from seeing it, Udall said, demonstrates that the CIA is still lying about the scope of enhanced-interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration.
That deceit is continuing today under current CIA Director John Brennan, Udall said.
"The refusal to provide the full Panetta Review and the refusal to acknowledge facts detailed in both the committee study and the Panetta Review lead to one disturbing finding: Director Brennan and the CIA today are continuing to willfully provide inaccurate information and misrepresent the efficacy of torture," Udall said. "In other words: The CIA is lying."
Obama, Udall said, "has expressed full confidence in Director Brennan and demonstrated that trust by making no effort at all to rein him in." Udall additionally referred to Brennan's "failed leadership" and suggested that he should resign.
Udall said that redactions in the Senate Intelligence Committee's landmark torture report obfuscated key details about the CIA's harsh interrogation methods. Among those, Udall said, the report is ambiguous about how many CIA officials participated in the brutal practices. In reality, it was only a handful, he said.
As he spoke, Udall continued to give a blistering and detailed account of what he portrayed as the CIA leadership's refusal to come clean with the American people about its now-defunct interrogation program. Udall accused the CIA of outright lying to the committee during its investigation.
"Torture just didn't happen, after all," Udall said. "Real, actual people engaged in torture. Some of these people are still employed by the CIA."
Udall said it was bad enough not to prosecute these officials, but to reward or promote them, he said, was incomprehensible. Udall called on Obama "to purge" his administration of anyone who was engaged in torturing prisoners.
"He needs to force a cultural change at the CIA," Udall said.
And, Udall said, the institutional problems are far from over. "CIA was knowingly providing inaccurate information to the committee in the present day," he said.
Udall publicly disclosed the existence of the Panetta Review during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last December. It has been previously reported that it harshly criticized the utility of the CIA's brutal Bush-era interrogation techniques.
So, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the CIA is actively deceiving them to this day.
The Panetta Review found that the CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Congress, the president, and the public on the efficacy of its coercive techniques. The Brennan Response, in contrast, continues to insist that the CIA’s interrogations produced unique intelligence that saved lives. Yet the Panetta Review identifies dozens of documents that include inaccurate information used to justify the use of torture – and indicates that the inaccuracies it identifies do not represent an exhaustive list.
The Panetta Review further describes how detainees provided intelligence prior to the use of torture against them. It describes how the CIA – contrary to its own representations – often tortured detainees before trying any other approach. It describes how the CIA tortured detainees even when less coercive methods were yielding intelligence. The Panetta Review further identifies cases in which the CIA used coercive techniques when it had no basis for determining whether a detainee had critical intelligence at all. In other words, CIA personnel tortured detainees to confirm they didn’t have intelligence – not because they thought they did.
"MU" Is Mark Udall, Senator from Colorado who served on the intelligence committee that launched the investigation. He's the guy in the videos in my previous post. "SR" is Scott Raab, journalist for Esquire
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SR: So you don’t just have the report, you have an agency that hacked the committee’s computers.
MU: Right. Four times. Four times.
SR: You called for CIA director John Brennan’s resignation.
MU: There are some that would like this report never to see the light of day. There are some that are running out the clock. There are some that are raising the specter that the CIA employees involved would somehow be subject to not only threats but potential action that would affect their personal safety. Those personnel, if they have that worry, can be given some legitimate security. . . .
The people who conducted these activities in the name of the CIA, in the name of the American people, have a right to be processed. They don’t have a right to [pause] push under the rug what happened.
SR: Right.
MU: What happened broke faith in the Constitution. It’s made our challenge much greater when it comes to facing the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. And it is morally repugnant. When this report is declassified, people will abhor what they read. They’re gonna be disgusted. They’re gonna be appalled. They’re gonna be shocked at what we did. But it will lay a foundation whereby we don’t do this in the future. That’s been my goal. That’s been my mission.
On July 17, 2002, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who later became secretary of state, said the CIA could proceed with "alternative interrogation methods," including waterboarding, when questioning suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.
The decision was contingent on the Justice Department's determining the method's legality. A week later, Attorney General John Ashcroft had determined the "proposed interrogation techniques were lawful," the report said.
The same techniques also were used in the interrogations of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the first person charged in the United States in the 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Video Watch how Rice's role has emerged »
The release of the report, prepared by the attorney general's office at the request of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, details and declassifies the advice given to the CIA regarding its interrogation techniques.
The techniques again gained the endorsement of the Bush administration in spring 2003 when the CIA asked for a "reaffirmation of the policies and practices in the interrogation program."
In a meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet, Ashcroft, Rice and their legal counsels, "the principals reaffirmed that the CIA program was lawful and reflected administration policy," the report said.
President Obama has called waterboarding -- which simulates drowning -- torture and last week released a series of Bush-era memos on interrogation tactics.
One memo showed that CIA interrogators used waterboarding at least 266 times on Zubaydah and Mohammed.
In a 2008 interview with ABC, Cheney defended the practice of waterboarding, now banned by the Obama administration, particularly in the case of Mohammed.
"Did it produce the desired results? I think it did," Cheney said.
"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... provided us with a wealth of information. There was a period of time there, three or fours years ago, when about half of everything we knew about al Qaeda came from that one source.
"So it's been a remarkably successful effort," he said. "I think the results speak for themselves."
I won't comment on the American part of it, but if you actually read the artical, the CBC slanted this editorial based on speculation:
""Given their close working relationship, did Canadian intelligence agents witness any of the CIA's torture tactics?
"It would be speculation on my part," says Juneau-Katsuya, "but I think it's very likely.""
If your going to tarnish Canada in anyway on this matter, you may as well tarnish the Chretien liberals(who were in power at the time) and every other western state.
Putting together what I know on the topic of torture, I would easily bet my life that the Canadian military tortures people too. (Or at the very least they hire private contractors to do the dirty work, or have some other intelligence operation do it for them).
And yeah, probably pretty much every western military does it, at least the ones that take part in operations abroad. I actually pretty recently heard from a relatively good source that even the Finns do it, even though most Finns would be shocked by this. (Although please don't quote me on that, it's hardly guaranteed info.)
It's sad, stupid and quite unnecessary, but "everybody" does it anyway.
But I think only good things can come out of this discussion I think. The dark side of intelligence communities is not talked about enough, but there's good reasons to believe the practice of torture is mostly just a stupid waste of lives and money.
To put it more bluntly, Cheney’s response is unhinged. It is suffused with indiscriminate rage which is indifferent to such standards as whether the prisoner is innocent or guilty, or even if he should be in a prison at all. He is acting out a revenge fantasy, no doubt fueled in part by the understanding that 3,000 Americans lost their lives because he failed to prevent it – when the facts were lying there in the existing surveillance and intelligence system and somehow never got put together.
What we have here is a staggering thing: the second highest official in a democracy, proud and unrepentant of war crimes targeted at hundreds of prisoners, equating every single one of the prisoners – including those who were victims of mistaken identity, including American citizens reading satirical websites, including countless who had nothing to do with any attacks on the US at all – with the nineteen plotters of one terror attack. We have a man who, upon being presented with a meticulous set of documents and facts, brags of not reading them and who continues to say things that are definitively disproved in the report by CIA documents themselves.
This is a man who not only broke the law and the basic norms of Western civilization, but who celebrates that. If this man is not brought to justice, the whole idea of justice in this country is a joke.
WASHINGTON – Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today plans to introduce into the Congressional Record important new information about how Bush administration officials misled the nation in advance of the Iraq War, and called on CIA Director John Brennan to fully declassify an important 2003 CIA cable.
Levin will introduce a letter he received from CIA Director John Brennan, declassifying for the first time some details of a March 2003 CIA cablewarning the Bush administration against references to the allegation that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, had met before the attacks in Prague, Czech Republic, with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He also introduced a translated excerpt from a book by the former head of Czech counterintelligence, describing U.S. pressure to confirm that the meeting took place. In fact, no such meeting occurred. And he called on Brennan to fully declassify the CIA cable.
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On March 6, 2003, just two weeks before U.S. troops would cross the Iraqi border, President Bush held a prime-time televised press conference. In that press conference he mentioned the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks eight times, often in the same breath as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. There was a concerted campaign on the part of the Bush administration to connect Iraq in the public mind with the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks. That campaign succeeded. According to public polls in the week before the Iraq war, half or more of Americans believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks. One poll taken in September 2003, six months after we invaded Iraq, found that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Americans who believed in a link between Iraq and 9/11 overwhelmingly supported the idea of invading Iraq. Of course, connections between Saddam and 9/11 or al Qaeda were fiction.
America’s intelligence community was pressed to participate in the administration’s media campaign. Just a week after the President’s prime-time press conference, on March 13, 2003, CIA field staff sent a cable to CIA headquarters, responding to a request for information about a report that Mohammad Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackings, had met in 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official in the Czech capital of Prague. In stark terms, this CIA cable from the field warned against U.S. government officials citing the report of the alleged Prague meeting.
Yet the notion of such a meeting was a centerpiece of the administration’s campaign to create an impression in the public mind that Saddam was in league with the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. On multiple occasions, including national television appearances, Vice President Dick Cheney cited reports of the meeting, at one point calling it “pretty well confirmed.” Officials from Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, who set up a sort of rogue intelligence analysis operation, briefed senior officials with a presentation citing the Prague meeting as a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
Now, why am I bringing up a CIA cable from more than a decade ago? Isn’t this old, well-covered terrain? No, it isn’t. This is about giving the American people a full account of the march to war as new information becomes available. It is about trying to hold leaders who misled the public accountable. It is about warning future leaders of this nation that they must not commit our sons and daughters to battle on the basis of false statements.
Mr. President, there is no more grave decision for a nation to make than the decision to go to war. And there is no more important issue for every member of Congress than the decision to authorize the use of military force. A decision to authorize force is a decision to unleash the might of our armed forces – the strongest military on the planet. It commits the men and women of our armed forces to fight, and perhaps to die, on the battlefield. The decision to go to war must be careful, considered, and based on the facts.
Such careful consideration was tragically absent in the march to war in Iraq.
Here is what the Vice President said on December 9, 2001, in an interview on “Meet the Press:” “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.”
Far from “pretty well confirmed,” there was almost no evidence that such a meeting took place. Just a single unsubstantiated report, from a single source, and a mountain of information indicating there was no such meeting, including the fact that travel and other records indicated that Atta was almost certainly in the United States at the time of the purported meeting in Prague.
It was highly irresponsible for the Vice President to make that claim. Calling a single, unconfirmed report from a single source “pretty well confirmed,” as he did on Dec. 9, 2001, was a reckless statement to make on such a grave topic as war, in the face of overwhelming doubt that such a meeting occurred.
Yet Vice President Cheney’s reckless statements continued, even as evidence mounted that there was no Prague meeting. In September 2002, he said Atta “did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official.”
The Vice President made those statements in the face of a then-classified June 2002 CIA assessment that said the alleged meeting was “not verified,” called the information about it “contradictory,” and described assessments of Iraqi cooperation with al Qaida terror plots as “speculative.” The Vice President made those statements in the face of a July 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency analysis, which reported that there was no evidence that Atta was in the Czech Republic at the time. He made those statements despite a Defense Intelligence Agency memorandum in August 2002 rejecting the claims by a rogue intelligence analysis shop at the Pentagon that the meeting was an example of a “known contact” between Iraq and al Qaida.
That brings us to the March 13, 2003 cable. Mr. President, it is unfortunate that I cannot fully lay out the contents of that cable, because much of it remains classified. But as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2006 “Phase II” report indicates, it appears that the cable was sent in response to a request from headquarters at Langley for comment on the claim that Atta and al-Ani had met in Prague because the White House was considering a reference to a Prague meeting in a speech. At that time, according to then-CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, the CIA had been given a draft of a speech by Vice President Cheney containing assertions about connections between Iraq and al Qaida. Tenet writes in his memoir that he had to object to the President that the speech went “way beyond what the intelligence shows. We cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”
Sad. US Soldier, trained in psychology and interrogation techniques, kills herself with her service weapon after witnessing and refusing to torture Iraqi detainees.
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With each revelation, or court decision, on US torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gitmo—or the airing this month of The Tillman Story and Lawrence Wright's My Trip to Al-Qaeda—I am reminded of the chilling story of Alyssa Peterson, who died seven years ago this week. Appalled when ordered to take part in interrogations that, no doubt, involved what most would call torture, she refused, then killed herself a few days later, on September 15, 2003.
Of course, we now know from the torture memos and the US Senate committee probe and various press reports, that the "Gitmo-izing" of Iraq was happening just at the time Alyssa got swept up in it.
Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native, served with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. She was a valuable Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on September 15, 2003, from a "non-hostile weapons discharge."
A "non-hostile weapons discharge" leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials "said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson's own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian." And that might have ended it right there.
But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, not satisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, "just on a hunch," he told me in late 2006. He made "hundreds of phone calls" to the military and couldn't get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations.
Here's what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston worked, reported: "Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed."
The official probe of her death would later note that earlier she had been "reprimanded" for showing "empathy" for the prisoners. One of the most moving parts of the report, in fact, is this: "She said that she did not know how to be two people; she…could not be one person in the cage and another outside the wire."
She was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and sent to suicide prevention training. "But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle," the documents disclose.
The official report revealed that a notebook she had written in was found next to her body, but blacked out its contents.
The Army talked to some of Peterson's colleagues. Asked to summarize their comments, Elston told me: "The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties. That was the consistent point in the testimonies, that she objected to the interrogation techniques, without describing what those techniques were."
Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, which suggested that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note. It did not emerge.
Peterson, a devout Mormon—her mother, Bobbi, claims she always stuck up for "the underdog"—had graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship. She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003, reportedly going in place of another soldier who did not wish to go.
A report in The Arizona Daily Sun of Flagstaff—three years after Alyssa's death—revealed that Spc. Peterson's mother, reached at her home in northern Arizona, said that neither she nor her husband Richard had received any official documents that contained information outlined in Elston's report.
In other words: Like the press and the public, even the parents had been kept in the dark.
I know it's easy to just pretend like it doesn't matter, but these are real people's lives here. While allusions to nazi germany are far fetched, millions of people's lives have been negatively, often brutally, affected by the chilling lies and contempt of a select group of people. These people are still free, and in positions of authority.
These people should and need to be held accountable. This is the precedent of the Nuremburg trials.
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US Senator Carl Levin accuses CIA of 'Watergate' style evidence destruction
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The Senate report on CIA interrogations of terrorism suspects disclosed that the agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations after Sen. Carl Levin pushed for an independent investigation of the treatment of detainees.
"It reminds me of Watergate," the retiring Michigan Democrat, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Wednesday.
The report released Tuesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence includes a 2005 email from the CIA's acting general counsel expressing concern that Levin's push for an outside commission was gaining traction and, if created, would uncover the interrogation videos.
"I think I need to be the skunk at the party again and see if the director is willing to let us try one more time to get the right people downtown on board with the notion of our destroying the tapes," wrote John Rizzo.
The report says a senior CIA attorney who had viewed the videotapes agreed that "the sooner we resolve this the better." Another respondent who was not identified said the tapes "should have been destroyed in the normal course of business two years ago."
Levin's proposal for an independent investigation was voted down by the Senate on Nov. 8, 2005. The videotapes were destroyed the next day, according to the report.
Democrats don't like Wall Street bailouts. Republicans don't like Wall Street bailouts. The American people are disgusted by Wall Street bailouts
And yet here we are, five years after Dodd-Frank with Congress on the verge of ramming through a provision that would do nothing for the middle class, do nothing for community banks, do nothing but raise the risk that taxpayers will have to bail out the biggest banks once again...
She's way too left. I personally think she'd be a good president, but I can't see her even getting the nomination. The whole american political spectrum has just moved too far right for it to happen.
She's way too left. I personally think she'd be a good president, but I can't see her even getting the nomination. The whole american political spectrum has just moved too far right for it to happen.
Yeah but it would be real interesting to see her go up against some far right Republican. I prefer her over Clinton.
Oklahoma and Nebraska, better known as the guys you don't invite to the party
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Colorado’s neighbors are not happy about marijuana legalization.
The attorneys general of Oklahoma and Nebraska filed a lawsuit on Thursday with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that Colorado’s commercialized marijuana system violates the constitution.
“Oklahoma and states surrounding Colorado are being impacted by Colorado’s decision to legalize and promote the commercialization of marijuana which has injured Oklahoma’s ability to enforce our state’s policies against marijuana,” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a statement on Thursday, referring to Colorado’s Amendment 64, which legalized marijuana in that state.
In the lawsuit, the states argue that Colorado’s law violates the supremacy clause of the Constitution, which states that federal laws takes precedence over state law.
“In passing and enforcing Amendment 64, the State of Colorado has created a dangerous gap in the federal drug control system enacted by the United States Congress,” they write in the suit. “Marijuana flows from this gap into neighboring states, undermining Plaintiff States’ own marijuana bans, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”
The irony alert meter must have exploded. These two states are full of Teaparty republicans who routinely argue for more state powers and of course to shrink and make less the federal government.
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The irony alert meter must have exploded. These two states are full of Teaparty republicans who routinely argue for more state powers and of course to shrink and make less the federal government.
Being "against the constitution" just means "something I don't like" nowadays.
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