CIA Director Asked to Preserve Secret Prisons
By William Fisher / April 17, 2009
NEW YORK — Lawyers for a Guantanamo detainee who claims he was held and tortured in one of the “black site” secret prisons run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is demanding that the CIA preserve cells and interrogation paraphernalia there as evidence of mistreatment.
Military and civilian counsel to Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri sent a letter to CIA Director Leon Panetta requesting that the CIA “black site” buildings, interrogation cells, prisoner cells, shackles, waterboards and other equipment be preserved for inspection and documentation.
Disclosure of the letter came on the heels of Thursday’s release of four more top-secret “legal memoranda” prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the administration of former President George W. Bush. The memos approved “enhanced” interrogation techniques they claimed were not torture – a claim rejected by both the Barack Obama administration and human rights advocates. Nine other OLC memos were previously released by the Obama administration.
OLC is the DOJ office that provides authoritative legal advice to the president and all executive branch agencies. It drafts legal opinions of the attorney general and also provides its own written opinions and oral advice in response to requests from the executive branch.
Al-Nashiri, who is now detained at Guantánamo, was held in the secret CIA prison facilities from 2002 to 2006. While President Obama has ordered the closure of CIA black sites, al-Nashiri’s attorneys are concerned that the CIA intends to destroy the sites, including the buildings and the equipment used to interrogate and torture al-Nashiri and other detainees. They say that would amount to destroying evidence of his mistreatment.
Panetta told CIA personnel on April 9, 2009, that the CIA would be “decommissioning” the CIA secret facilities. The letter asks Panetta to “preserve all the secret sites.”
The CIA has admitted that al-Nashiri was subjected to waterboarding while in CIA custody. Videotapes depicting his abusive interrogations have already been destroyed by the agency and are the subject of ongoing litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Through its John Adams Project with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the ACLU worked with under-resourced military lawyers to provide legal counsel for several of the Guantánamo detainees including al-Nashiri during the military commissions process.
The lawyers’ letter put Panetta “on notice that we will be seeking discovery and inspection of this highly relevant evidence in whatever court Mr. Al-Nashiri finds himself.”
The lawyers added, “We have already lost the video tapes which would have allowed a jury to see what happened to Mr. Al-Nashiri in those secret prisons. We cannot lose the remaining tangible evidence of the actual prisons themselves and the instruments of torture within them.”
They note that Panetta’s predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, has admitted that Mr. Al-Nashiri was subjected to waterboarding, “which is a form of torture, while in the custody of the CIA.”
According to the recently released report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), ‘waterboarding was only one of the many forms of torture inflicted on Mr. Al-Nashiri while in the custody of the CIA,” the lawyers’ letter said.
They claim that, according to the ICRC report, “While in CIA custody, Mr. Al-Nashiri was also forced to stand with his wrists shackled to a bar in the ceiling for prolonged periods of time – extending to several days – and was threatened with sodomy and with the rape and arrest of his family members.”
Throughout that time, the letter says, Al-Nashiri “was not able to communicate with his family, a lawyer or anyone. Effectively the CIA ‘disappeared’ him for four years while it tortured him at will and beyond the eyes of the world.”
The CIA and other government agencies also admitted to the purposeful destruction of at least 92 videotapes of interrogations and observations of prisoners in its black sites, specifically including the destruction of videotapes of waterboarding and other observations of Mr. Al-Nashiri, the letter says.
It concludes, “Had Mr. Al-Nashiri known that the CIA possessed these video tapes and intended to destroy them, he would have demanded their preservation. However, neither he, his lawyers nor the courts learned of the CIA’s plan until after the tapes had been destroyed and now they are forever gone.”
“Although we welcome your decision to cease the secret detention and mistreatment of prisoners of the United States Government, we are concerned that the CIA intends to actually destroy the sites – including the buildings and the equipment used to interrogate and torture Mr. Al-Nashiri – before Mr. Al-Nashiri has had the opportunity to fully investigate his conditions of confinement. We write to avoid the destruction of more evidence – namely the actual secret facilities themselves,” the lawyers wrote.
Al-Nashiri was charged in the military commission with offences that carried the death penalty. His lawyers note that, “Although those charges have now been dismissed, we fully expect the government to prosecute Mr. Al-Nashiri and again charge him with offenses that could carry the death penalty. In fact the government is now actively working to determine in what forum he will be prosecuted.”
Evidence held by the CIA “is exculpatory evidence” and Al-Nashiri “will be entitled to it.”
The letter concludes: “The CIA’s secret prison facilities and the inquisition-like treatment meted out to its prisoners were a tragic, immoral and illegal period in our history that we all hope has come to an end. But its effects are enduring, especially on someone like Mr. Al-Nashiri who, according to the ICRC report, lived through the horror chambers of at least three different secret prisons.”
Following Thursday’s release of the four OLC memos, it is likely that the government’s treatment of detainees will attract increased public scrutiny – despite President Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo Bay and CIA black site prisons.
Continuing concern about U.S. credibility in war-on-terror detentions and prosecutions has been voiced by many U.S. legal scholars. David Cole, one of the country’s preeminent constitutional authorities, told IPS, “For better or worse, the U.S. is a world leader on matters of human rights. When the U.S. violates human rights in the fight against terrorism, it sends a message to autocrats and dictators worldwide that they, too, can deny human rights in the name of counterterrorism.”
Source / IPS News North America
Keith Olbermann Special Comment : ‘Mr. President, You are Wrong.’
Keith Olbermann, Special Comment, Countdown, April 16, 2009
U.S. future depends on torture accountability
By Keith Olbermann / April 16, 2009
[The following was delivered as a “Special Comment” by commentator Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown, April 16, 2009.]
As promised, a Special Comment now on the president’s revelation of the remainder of this nightmare of Bush Administration torture memos. This President has gone where few before him, dared. The dirty laundry — illegal, un-American, self-defeating, self-destroying — is out for all to see.
Mr. Obama deserves our praise and our thanks for that. And yet he has gone but half-way. And, in this case, in far too many respects, half the distance is worse than standing still. Today, Mr. President, in acknowledging these science-fiction-like documents, you said that:
“This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke.”
“We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history.
“But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.
Mr. President, you are wrong. What you describe would be not “spent energy” but catharsis.
Not “blame laid,” but responsibility ascribed. You continued:
“Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”
Indeed we must, Mr. President. And the forces of which you speak are the ones lingering — with pervasive stench — from the previous administration. Far more than a criminal stench, Sir. An immoral one. One we cannot let be re-created.
One, President Obama, it is your responsibility to make sure cannot be re-created. Forgive me for quoting from a Comment I offered the night before the inauguration. But this goes to the core of the President’s commendable, but wholly naive, intention. This country has never “moved forward with confidence”.without first cleansing itself of its mistaken past.
In point of fact, every effort to merely draw a line in the sand and declare the past dead has served only to keep the past alive and often to strengthen it. We “moved forward” with slavery in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And four score and nine years later, we had buried 600,000 of our sons and brothers, in a Civil War.
After that war’s ending, we “moved forward” without the social restructuring — and protection of the rights of minorities — in the south. And a century later, we had not only not resolved anything, but black leaders were still being assassinated in our southern cities.
We “moved forward” with Germany in the reconstruction of Europe after the First World War.
Nobody even arrested the German Kaiser, let alone conducted war crimes trials then. And 19 years later, there was an indescribably more evil Germany and a more heart-rending Second World War.
We “moved forward” with the trusts of the early 1900s. And today, we are at the mercy of corporations too big to fail. We “moved forward” with the Palmer Raids and got McCarthyism.
And we “moved forward” with McCarthyism and got Watergate. We “moved forward” with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk.
They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. But, Mr. President, when you say we must “come together on behalf of our common future” you are entirely correct. We must focus on getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.
That means prosecuting all those involved in the Bush administration’s torture of prisoners, even if the results are nominal punishments, or merely new laws. Your only other option is to let this set and fester indefinitely. Because, Sir, some day there will be another Republican president, or even a Democrat just as blind as Mr. Bush to ethics and this country’s moral force. And he will look back to what you did about Mr. Bush. Or what you did not do.
And he will see precedent. Or as Cheney saw, he will see how not to get caught next time. Prosecute, Mr. President. Even if you get not one conviction, you will still have accomplished good for generations unborn. Merely by acting, you will deny a further wrong — that this construction will enter the history books: Torture was legal. It worked. It saved the country.
The end. This must not be. “It is our intention,” you said today, “to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” Mr. President, you are making history’s easiest, most often made, most dangerous mistake — you are accepting the defense that somebody was “just following orders.” At the end of his first year in office, Mr. Lincoln tried to contextualize the Civil War for those who still wanted to compromise with evils of secession and slavery. “The struggle of today,” Lincoln wrote, “is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also.”
Mr. president, you have now been handed the beginning of that future. Use it to protect our children and our distant descendants from anything like this ever happening again — by showing them that those who did this, were neither unfairly scapegoated nor absolved. It is good to say “we won’t do it again.” It is not, however…enough.
Source / msnbc.com
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