{"id":244932,"date":"2023-10-02T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=244932"},"modified":"2023-09-26T05:31:02","modified_gmt":"2023-09-26T04:31:02","slug":"torture-at-guantanamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/10\/torture-at-guantanamo\/","title":{"rendered":"Torture at Guantanamo"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>

Picture from Abu Ghraib<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I Was the only U.S. Official Imprisoned over the Torture Program \u2014 because I Opposed and Blew the Whistle on It<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Listen to John Kiriakou expand further in last week\u2019s<\/a> episode<\/a> of Scheer Intelligence.<\/em><\/div>\n
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25 Sep 2023 – <\/em>Almost immediately, my team began capturing al-Qaeda fighters at safehouses all around Pakistan.\u00a0 In late March, 2002, we hit the jackpot with the capture of Abu Zubaydah and dozens of other fighters, including two who commanded al-Qaeda\u2019s training camps in southern Afghanistan.\u00a0 And by the end of the month, my Pakistani colleagues told me that the local jail, where we were temporarily holding the men we had captured, was full.\u00a0 They had to be moved somewhere.\u00a0 I called the CIA\u2019s Counterterrorism Center and said that the Pakistanis wanted our prisoners out of their jail.\u00a0 Where should I send them?<\/p>\n

The response was quick.\u00a0 Put them on a plane and send them to Guantanamo.\u00a0 \u201cGuantanamo, Cuba?\u201d I asked.\u00a0 \u201cWhy in the world would we send them to Cuba?\u201d\u00a0 My interlocutor explained what, at the time, sounded like it had been well thought out.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re going to hold them at the U.S. base in Guantanamo for two or three weeks until we can identify which federal district court they\u2019ll be tried in.\u00a0 It\u2019ll be Boston, New York, Washington, or the Eastern District of Virginia.\u201d<\/p>\n

That made perfect sense to me.\u00a0 We were a nation of laws.\u00a0 And we were going to show the world what the rule of law looked like.\u00a0 These men, who had murdered 3,000 people on that awful day, would go on trial for their crimes.\u00a0 I called my contact in the U.S.\u00a0 Air Force, made the arrangements for the flights, and loaded my handcuffed and shackled prisoners for the trip.\u00a0 I never saw any of them again.25 Sep 2023 <\/em> – When I joined the CIA in January 1990, I did it to serve my country and to see the world.\u00a0 I believed at the time that we were the \u201cgood guys.\u201d\u00a0 I believed that the United States was a force for good around the world.\u00a0 I wanted to put my degrees\u2014in Middle Eastern Studies\/Islamic Theology and Legislative Affairs\/Policy Analysis\u2014to good use.\u00a0 Seven years after joining the CIA, I made a move to counterterrorism operations to stave off boredom.\u00a0 I still believed we were the good guys, and I wanted to help keep Americans safe.\u00a0 My whole world, like the worlds of all Americans, changed dramatically and permanently on September 11, 2001.\u00a0 Within months of the attacks, I found myself heading to Pakistan as the chief of CIA counterterrorism operations in Pakistan.<\/p>\n

The problem is that our country\u2019s leaders, whether they were at the White House, the Justice Department, or the CIA, never really intended any of these men to face trial in a court of law, being judged by a jury of their peers.\u00a0 The fix was in from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Just a month after the September 11 attacks, the CIA leadership gathered its army of lawyers and black ops people and came up with a plan to legalize torture.\u00a0 This was despite the fact that torture has long been patently illegal in the United States.\u00a0 But it didn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 There was no thought to the long term.\u00a0 There was no worry about what would happen if prisoners were tortured and then actually did have to go on trial.\u00a0 Nothing they said would be admissible.\u00a0 But nobody cared.<\/p>\n

On August 2, 2002, CIA officers and contractors began torturing Abu Zubaydah at a secret prison.\u00a0 That torture was well-documented in the Senate Torture Report, or rather, in the heavily-redacted Executive Summary of the Senate Torture Report.\u00a0 The report itself will likely never be released.\u00a0 But even in its redacted version, and with comprehensive footnotes, it paints a horrifying picture of what the CIA did to its prisoners.\u00a0 That torture, that policy, has come back to haunt the CIA.<\/p>\n

Military trials have always moved at a glacial pace at the U.S.\u00a0 base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where the United States has kept a total of roughly 780 prisoners<\/a> from the so-called \u201cWar on Terror\u201d since early 2002.\u00a0 That number is down to a few dozen of what the government calls the \u201cworst of the worst.\u201d\u00a0 Only a small handful are cleared for eventual release, pending the identification of a country willing to take them.\u00a0 The rest will likely never be released.<\/p>\n

The problem with charging a defendant at Guantanamo has proven to be several-fold.\u00a0 First, much of the evidence that the Pentagon wants to use against the likes of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, accused al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaydah, accused September 11 facilitator Ramzi bin al-Shibh and others was collected by CIA officers and contractors through the use of torture.\u00a0 That in and of itself essentially doomed the cases from the start.<\/p>\n

None of that information, no matter how damning it may be, can be used against them.\u00a0 Even the purported \u201cworst of the worst\u201d have constitutional protections, whether we like it or not.\u00a0 Second, what information that remains against each defendant is generally classified\u2014usually at a very high level\u2014and the CIA is unwilling to declassify it, even for a trial.\u00a0 Consequently, no trials progress except at the slowest possible bureaucratic pace.\u00a0 And if you\u2019re the CIA, why would you care if trials proceed?\u00a0 Nobody\u2019s going anywhere, whether they do or not.<\/p>\n

With that said, the Pentagon is still willing to go through the motions.\u00a0 In 2006, the Pentagon initiated a program whereby law enforcement officers tried to get Guantanamo defendants to make voluntary confessions independent of what they had told their CIA torturers.\u00a0 That way, the torture couldn\u2019t be used as a defense.\u00a0 But that effort failed.<\/p>\n

In 2007, a military judge threw out a confession<\/a> that these officers obtained from Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi prisoner who has been accused of being the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing, in which 17 American sailors were killed.\u00a0 The Pentagon argued that the officers made clear to Nashiri that his statement was completely voluntary.\u00a0 But the judge held<\/a> that after four years in secret CIA prisons, where Nashiri was tortured mercilessly, \u201cany resistance the accused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the same reason that Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, and others have not been tried, despite having been in U.S.\u00a0 custody for more than 20 years.\u00a0 And to make matters worse, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, accused of being one of the most dangerous masterminds of the September 11 attacks, last week was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.\u00a0 Relentless CIA torture at black sites around the world and at Guantanamo, has caused \u201cpsychosis and post-traumatic stress disorder<\/a>\u201d so severe that he is not only unable to participate in his own defense, but he is so insane that he cannot even enter a plea and understand what he is doing.\u00a0 Defense attorneys said in court last week that the only hope of making bin al-Shibh sane enough to be tried would be to provide him with post-trauma psychological care and to release him from military confinement.\u00a0 That will never ever happen.<\/p>\n

Bin al-Shibh\u2019s attorneys say that in the four years between when he was captured by the CIA in 2002 and his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006, their client \u201cwent insane as a result of what the Agency called \u2018enhanced interrogation techniques,\u2019 that included sleep deprivation, waterboarding, and beatings.\u201d\u00a0 Bin al-Shibh ranted incoherently during a court hearing in 2008, and his mental state has been an issue ever since.<\/p>\n

Ammar al-Baluchi, a nephew of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, and another accused September 11 conspirator, has had a similar experience<\/a>.\u00a0 Like his co-defendants, Baluchi, who also goes by the name Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, is facing the death penalty, if he can ever get a trial.\u00a0 But he, too, was the victim of CIA torture.\u00a0 A 2008 report by the CIA Inspector General, declassified and released in early 2023, found that Baluchi had been used as a \u201cliving prop\u201d to teach CIA trainee interrogators, who lined up to take turns knocking his head against a wall, leaving him with permanent brain damage.\u00a0 The report also said that in 2018, Baluchi was given an MRI and examined by a neuropsychologist, who found \u201cbrain abnormalities consistent with traumatic brain injury, and moderate-to-severe brain damage.\u201d\u00a0 Like bin al-Shibh, Baluchi is unable to participate in his own defense.<\/p>\n

All Americans should know about these recent developments.\u00a0 All Americans should understand that the purpose of trials would be to expose the truth.\u00a0 We all have a right to know what happened to us on September 11.\u00a0 Without that information, conspiracies run wild.\u00a0 Without that information, there is no accountability.\u00a0 We have a right to know about the planning for the attacks and about what al-Qaeda did to us.\u00a0 But at the same time, we have a right to know what the official government response was.\u00a0 Why did torture suddenly become acceptable?\u00a0 Who was responsible for it?\u00a0 And why weren\u2019t they punished for obvious crimes against humanity?<\/p>\n

In the end, I was the only person associated with the CIA\u2019s torture program who was prosecuted and imprisoned.\u00a0 I never tortured anybody. But I was charged with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, for telling ABC News and the New York Times that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that torture was official U.S.\u00a0 government policy, and that the policy had been approved by the president himself.\u00a0 I served 23 months in a federal prison.\u00a0 It was worth every minute.<\/p>\n

There is certainly no easy fix to this situation.\u00a0 The New York Times reported in March 2022<\/a> that prosecutors had opened talks with attorneys representing Khalid Shaikh Muhammad and four co-defendants to negotiate a plea agreement that would drop the death penalty in exchange for sentences of life without parole and promises that the men would be allowed to remain in Guantanamo, rather than to be transferred to a Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where prisoners are held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.\u00a0 Defense attorneys also said the men vastly prefer the weather of eastern Cuba to the snows of Colorado.\u00a0 The Times notes that such a deal would infuriate death penalty advocates among the families of the victims of the September 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that\u2019s true, and I\u2019m sorry if their feelings would be hurt by such a decision.\u00a0 But as angry as they might be at the likes of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, and the others, they should be at least as angry with the likes of former CIA Director George Tenet, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jose Rodriguez, former CIA Executive Director John Brennan, and CIA contract psychologist and torture program creators James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, all of whom were the godfathers of the torture program.<\/p>\n

They should be just as angry with the Justice Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who did intellectual handstands to convince themselves that the torture program was somehow legal.\u00a0 And let\u2019s not forget that the buck has to stop somewhere.\u00a0 We also should blame George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.\u00a0 This cast of characters weakened our democracy by pretending that the Constitution and the rule of law didn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 Their irresponsibility, childish emotion, and willingness to commit crimes against humanity guaranteed that the men who likely committed the worst ever crime against Americans will never be fully and legally punished.\u00a0 It\u2019s up to us to make sure that future generations know that.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>John Kiriakou was a CIA analyst and case officer from 1990 to 2004. In December 2007, John was the first U.S. government official to confirm that waterboarding was used to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners, a practice he described as torture. While employed with the CIA, he refused to be trained in so-called \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d and never authorized or engaged in such crimes. Kiriakou is the sole CIA agent to go to jail in connection with the U.S. torture program, despite the fact that he never tortured anyone. Rather, he blew the whistle on this horrific wrongdoing. John can be reached at: <\/i>jkiriakou@mac.com<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 scheerpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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