Saturday’s Washington Post featured a story about three detainee suicides at Guantánamo on June 10, 2006. The information about the circumstances of the suicides came from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that yielded a report from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The article reports:
More than two years later, a[n NCIS] probe and other documents reveal that the men took advantage of lapses in guard protocol and of lenient policies toward compliant detainees…
…An internal investigation into the guards’ actions found six violations of Guantánamo’s standard operating procedures, procedures that have since been revamped.
The government can’t say it didn’t see the suicides coming. Detainees’ lawyers had warned that, as their clients’ detention dragged on with no end in sight, the men would likely kill themselves in despair. Department of Defense (DOD) officials admitted that by June 2006, there had been at least 41 suicide attempts at Gitmo. When three detainees actually committed suicide that month, government officials went on attack, calling the deaths an “act of asymmetrical warfare waged against [the U.S.]” and a “good PR move to draw attention.”
Read more…
In Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel, The Trial, a man awakens to be suddenly arrested and put on trial for an unspecified crime in a court where no evidence is presented. Hey, at least he got a trial! Most detainees at Guantánamo Bay are still waiting to defend themselves against their crimes — real or imaginary.
My latest Civil Discourse comic is about an imaginary series of secret detention camps hidden within other secret detention camps. The final camp in the series, ‘Uttermost Secret Camp Supreme 17," is a dimensional rift where not even the laws of physics apply.
I look forward to the day when we don’t have to use the words "Orwellian" and "Kafka-esque" to describe our treatment of detainees in the "War on Terror." Maybe the next President will try to live up to the writings Jefferson instead of Kafka.
On Monday, ACLU attorneys attended a meeting with the judge and opposing counsel on our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, ACLU v. Department of Defense.
Today the judge issued an order that demands Special Prosecutor John Durham submit one more declaration (by September 10) explaining how and why the production of a catalog of information about the destroyed interrogation videos interferes with the DOJ’s criminal investigation. This information includes:
- A list identifying and describing each of the destroyed records
- A list of any summaries, transcripts, or memoranda regarding the records, and of any reconstruction of the records’ contents; and
- Identification of any witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes or retained custody of the videotapes before their destruction.
At Monday’s meeting, the judge clearly stated that he did not believe this information would interfere.
For now, the judge deferred making a decision on the contempt issue, but appears to indicate that he wants to move forward. He has clearly expressed frustration with the government’s argument that his hands are tied because of the ongoing criminal investigation.
On Friday, attorney Amrit Singh will be a guest on Glenn Greenwald’s radio show discussing the ACLU’s contempt motion against the CIA. Check out Amrit’s interview and stay tuned as this case unfolds.
Back in December 2007, we learned that the CIA had destroyed videotapes depicting the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects. After learning of the tape destruction, the ACLU filed a motion asking the court to hold the CIA in contempt of the court’s orders requiring the agency to produce or identify records responsive to the ACLU’s FOIA request for information relating to the treatment of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas.
Yesterday, the judge ordered the CIA to prepare a catalog that identifies everything that it had destroyed, and also a list of all summaries, transcripts, information on witnesses and any relevant documents or memoranda relating to the tape destruction. The ACLU has submitted a proposed order requesting these items for the judge to sign. If the judge accepts our order, the CIA will have 30 days to turn that catalog over us.
Beyond indefinite detention, numerous allegations of torture, and a massively deficient court system created by the Military Commissions Act, the case of Sami al Hajj, an Al Jazeera reporter, adds the prospect of uncovering a new and equally disturbing side of Guantánamo: its use as a mechanism to further silence the the press.
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Sami al Hajj was arrested in December 2001 by Pakistani authorities as he tried to re-enter Afghanistan, the location of his news assignment. He was turned over to United States officials and arrived in Guantánamo in June 2002. Sami al Hajj was released six years later on May 1, 2008, without ever having been charged with a crime. Although the longterm detention and seemingly arbitrary release of so-called “enemy combatants” without charge is, quite disturbingly, not unique, what does make his case unique is the fact that he is a journalist, and the U.S. government has consistently failed to show that he was acting in any other manner when he was detained and sent to Guantánamo.
The extremely troubling nature of Sami al Hajj’s case was highlighted in a recent article by Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle. The article cites allegations made by Sami al Hajj and his attorney, Clive Stafford Smith of the Londonbased human rights organization Reprieve, that assert that Sami al Hajj’s detention may have been due to the fact that he worked for Al Jazeera, the largest broadcaster in the Arab world and nothing more. Al Jazeera has been consistently attacked by the U.S. government for its alleged inaccurate coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as U.S. policy more broadly. This criticism has been countered by people across the Arab world, as well as here at home who view Al Jazeera’s coverage of the U.S. led wars as a welcome reprieve from the censored imbedded journalism conducted by the mainstream U.S. media. Al Jazeera English was also recently nominated for two Emmy Awards in the news and current affairs categories.
Egelko’s article quotes Sami al Hajj’s human rights attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, stating that Sami al Hajj and he “calculated about 135 times [Sami had] been interrogated, and about the first 120 the only interest [his interrogators] had was Al-Jazeera.” Clive Stafford Smith was further quoted as stating that the interrogators of Sami al Hajj “told him that they thought Al-Jazeera was an al Qaeda front.” While we have no independent way of verifying the validity of this statement, the state of press freedom in the United States gives added weight to the seriousness of such allegations. As Reporters Without Borders’ most recent press freedom index shows, the United States’ rank is far from its rhetoric. The U.S. is ranked 48th in the world for press freedom, and 111th in the world for press freedom when viewing the U.S. extraterritorially.
The freedom of the press is vital to the maintenance and security of our republic. Allegations such as Sami al Hajj’s, while unverifiable, should make us all more aware of both the importance of such a freedom and the ease with which the government can take it away.
(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)
Friday morning, a determined and defiant Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul (PDF) appeared before the military commission. Escorted by military police holding each of his wrists, al-Bahlul wore a tan prison uniform and flip-flops. He wasn’t carrying his “boycott” sign, which he created back in January 2006 and has held during subsequent hearings. We soon realized that this was the reason for a half-hour delay in the hearing’s start time.
Al-Bahlul then took center stage in a hearing that quickly became a circus. First, al-Bahlul requested the boycott sign, on which he had written a nine-point list enumerating the “political and legal reasons” why he opposes the military commission proceedings against him. The front of the sign had been entered into evidence, but apparently not the reverse side, on which al-Bahlul had written his nine-point manifesto, and no one could produce the original, which he said had been confiscated from him after his last hearing. Al-Bahlul refused to continue without the signed document, saying it would assist him in explaining his position to the judge. Al-Bahlul then rightly pointed out “There should be an administrative regime for the court to find the paper…If such a legal document is lost, what kind of court is this?”
Criticizing the proceedings as being inherently unfair, Al-Bahlul then announced that he refuses to attend any further hearings and will not accept military defense counsel. “I do not have any trust in this legal farce,” Al-Bahlul declared. “When it is the final proceeding, just let me know this is the proceeding when the verdict and sentence are announced, and I will show up. For the other sessions in between I will not be present,” he announced. He gestured to his stand-by defense counsel, Maj. David Frakt, and said, “Until I hear the final verdict I don’t consider him my attorney.” He stoutly added, “I am not going to talk to Major Frakt.”
Al-Bahlul also told the new military judge in this case, Col. Ronald Gregory, that because fellow Yemeni Salim Hamdan had recently been convicted and sentenced, he was ready to “do some settling” of the case today to “facilitate things.” It is unclear whether he meant he was prepared to plead guilty to the charges today. Al-Bahlul also asked to withdraw his habeas petition — filed on his behalf by his cousin — announcing, “The case which is put forth in the American courts in my name, I am not satisfied with it, and I don’t want it.”
Before exiting the courtroom midway through the pre-trial hearing, Al-Bahlul departed with a final salvo: “You can continue your legal play.”
After al-Bahlul left the courtroom, the judge appointed Maj. David Frakt defense counsel because al-Bahlul’s departure meant he had waived his right to represent himself. Maj. Frakt told the military judge that he would defend al-Bahlul “in the manner in which he desired to be defended.” Afterwards, Maj. Frakt stunned the judge and observers by waiving all future pre-trial motions, including motions related to discovery of evidence, and demanded the right to a speedy trial, announcing he was ready to go directly to trial. Under the military commission’s rules, Maj. David Frakt’s request for a speedy trial could push the trial to start in 90 days.
After the hearing, Maj. Frakt told me he will not mount any defense. Because his client “does not recognize the legality or validity of the proceedings,” and believes it is impossible for him to receive a fair trial in a Guantánamo military commission, Maj. Frakt explained, al-Bahlul does not want to have defense counsel do anything purporting to be on his behalf. “He thinks this circus has gone on long enough,” Maj. Frakt said.
Al-Bahlul’s decision to boycott is, perhaps, only a recognition of what the whole world knows — the military commissions system is designed to arrive at a guilty verdict, regardless of whether evidence was coerced or can be tested, because it lacks fundamental guarantees of fair trials and due process. The government has ensured that the regular rules don’t apply, so it can hardly be surprised when criminal defendants refuse to participate in a sham process.
It also comes as no surprise that al-Bahlul rejects the military commission system as unfair. Al-Bahlul’s statement Friday criticizing the legal process as a “farce” is just the latest in a series of accusations of unfairness that have marred the proceedings in the past week.
On Thursday Judge Stephen Henley disqualified Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the military commission’s Legal Advisor to the Convening Authority, from participation in Mohammed Jawad’s case, citing excessive interference in the prosecution of commission cases (for excellent coverage, see here, here, and here). Because Brig. Gen. Hartmann pushed for charges to be brought against Jawad, (bringing Jawad “from the freezer to the frying pan, thanks to Gen. Hartmann,” according to testimony by the former chief prosecutor on Wednesday), Judge Henley ordered an unprecedented top-level review of the charges against Jawad. This is the second time Brig. Gen. Hartmann has been removed from a military commission case for improper influence, as Judge Keith Allred disqualified him from further participation in Salim Hamdan’s case back in May.
Last week also brought additional testimony by Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for the military commissions, in Omar Khadr’s case. Col. Davis resigned in last October, citing political interference. He has testified in Hamdan, Jawad, and now Khadr’s hearings to criticize Brig. Gen. Hartmann’s interference with the prosecution of military commission cases, including pressuring the prosecution to get trials underway before the presidential election. On Wednesday Col. Davis repeated his famous testimony recalling his initial job interview, when the Defense Department’s chief counsel William J. Haynes II told him that the military commissions couldn’t result in acquittals because “We’ve been holding these guys for years.”
Also last week another senior military official (this time a general) came forward to critique Brig. Gen. Hartmann, adding to the taint on the military commissions. Brig. Gen. Gregory J. Zanetti, deputy commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo prison camps, accused Brig. Gen. Hartmann of bullying, characterizing his approach as “Spray and pray. Charge everybody. Let’s go. Speed, speed, speed.”.
Rather than providing fair, meaningful justice that reflects American principles, recent testimony in the Hamdan, Jawad and Khadr cases shows dogged pursuit of wins in these cases at all costs. The taint of political pressure and the failure to observe basic constitutional guarantees means that any verdict rendered by the military commissions will be regarded as illegitimate by the American public and overseas observers. This country deserves more than trials rushed to provide an election-year win.
The Office of Military Commissions has a new motto: “Freedom through Justice.” Between the taint of political pressure in Mohammed Jawad and Salim Hamdan’s cases and the impending farce of Ali al-Bahlul’s trial, how could this kind of justice possibly not detract from our freedoms?
(Originally posted at Daily Kos.)
Thursday’s hearing in Afghan national Mohammed Jawad’s case brought stunning testimony on serious abuse he suffered at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan as a teenager, as well as military psychologists’ role in crafting abusive interrogation methods for use on Jawad and other prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
On Thursday Special Agent Angela Birt, an Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) investigator who investigated two homicides of prisoners at Bagram prison in Afghanistan, took the stand. Her investigation resulted in confessions from 18 military police for their role in abusing prisoners and findings of probable cause to charge 27 officers for the homicides. Birt’s investigation led her to Jawad because he had been imprisoned at Bagram at the time of the two homicides. Her investigation also uncovered a widespread pattern of abuse that corroborates Jawad’s claims of mistreatment at Bagram prison.
Birt testified that the types of abuse Jawad told her he suffered—being forced to stand for long periods of time in stress positions; forced sleep deprivation; being hit, kicked and beaten; being shackled to the door of his cell; and being hooded and shackled with hand irons, leg irons and a waist chain while moved and in one case pushed down the stairs—mirrored other Bagram detainees’ claims. She also said that Jawad’s claim that he heard the cries and screams of other detainees was a “fairly common” claim of other prisoners locked in isolation who heard other prisoners “crying for their parents and begging for the beatings to stop” during interrogations nearby.
Birt testified that the period of time Jawad was at Bagram—the same period in which these two homicides occurred and the period chronicled in the documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side —“was the worst period of abuse I’ve ever seen” in the 2,000 cases she’s investigated in her 18-year career at CID.
The methods Birt uncovered at Bagram were part of a menu of abusive Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) interrogation techniques also used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Thursday’s hearing in Jawad’s case brought attention to the role of military psychologists belonging to Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs), known as “Biscuit teams,” in developing and refining these abusive techniques for use at Guantánamo Bay. Since 2002 BSCT psychologists have evaluated prisoners’ fears and psychological weaknesses to craft individualized blueprints for torture and other mistreatment, which they passed on to the interrogators. For instance, a Guantánamo psychiatrist advised interrogators to exploit one detainee’s severe phobia of the dark by deliberately keeping him almost totally in the dark.
Earlier media reports (see here, here, and here, and a New England Journal of Medicine article revealed, and recent revelations from a June Senate Armed Services Committee Investigation confirmed, that military psychologists contributed to the development of these abusive interrogation methods.
Sadly, Thursday’s hearing did not add much to the public record on the workings of the BSCT program at Guantánamo Bay. The BSCT psychologist, “Lt. Col. Z,” who was scheduled to testify for the defense today, invoked her right to remain silent—presumably because she feared recounting her role could incriminate herself in criminal activity. Her testimony would have been the first time a member of the BSCT team had testified in a military commissions hearing.
What we already knew was that leaked Guantánamo Bay interrogation logs—which must be read to be believed —show that a BSCT psychologist was present during the highly abusive interrogation of Guantánamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani. (Charges against al-Quatani were suddenly dropped in May, some have speculated because a trial would have turned the spotlight to the torture he endured at Guantánamo Bay.) And BSCT psychologists’ role in aiding torture has been the subject of much controversy among the American Psychological Association (APA), which is holding a referendum among its members to disallow psychologists to participate in such mistreatment.
What we did learn Thursday was that, according to Jawad’s defense attorney Maj. Frakt, in September 2003, “when an interrogator observed Mohammad talking to posters on the wall of the interrogation room and was concerned about his mental health,” instead of calling a mental health professional to care for him, they summoned the BSCT team, whose psychologist made a “cruel and heartless assessment and recommendations.” Maj. Frakt called the BSCT psychologist’s report, which was classified secret and therefore not discussed in detail in the open court session, “the most chilling document of all.”
And on Wednesday, Dr. Bruce Menely, the chief medical officer at Guantánamo Bay, testified that when Jawad tried to hang himself only months later, on Christmas Day 2003, BSCT psychologists—not regular medical psychologists—were notified of Jawad’s suicide attempt. In Omar Khadr’s hearing Wednesday, Khadr’s defense lawyer Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler noted that, much like in Jawad’s case, military psychologists have met with Khadr to manipulate him and extract more information from him during interrogations.
During his emotional closing argument Thursday, Maj. Frakt asked, “What has this country come to when a licensed psychologist, a senior officer in the U.S. Armed Forces, someone trained in the art of healing broken hearts and mending broken minds, someone with a duty to do no harm, turns her years of training and education to the art of breaking people, to the intentional devastation of a lonely, homesick teenage boy?”
At the end of her examination of Birt, defense attorney Katharine Doxakis asked Birt whether her resignation from the military was because she had become disillusioned with the military after seeing the results of her Bagram abuse investigation. The prosecution’s immediate objection was sustained, and Birt never got to answer the question.
If, as implied by the defense, Birt’s resignation from the military was a stand against torture, why didn’t Guantánamo’s military’s psychologists do the same? Â
The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports that Thomas Hartmann, the Legal Advisor to the Convening Authority in the Department of Defense Office of Military Commissions, was today banned from participating in the upcoming trial of Mohammed Jawad. This is the second time Hartmann’s been banned from acting as the legal advisor in a military commissions trial: the first time was in the case of Salim Hamdan, whose trial just concluded last week.
Rosenberg writes:
Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann’s aggressive advocacy of the trials by military commission — in the media and other public statements — ”compromised the objectivity necessary to dispassionately and fairly evaluate the evidence and prepare the post-trial evaluation,” [Judge Stephen] Henley ruled.
Hartmann has been called out numerous times for his politically motivated meddling in the military commissions, most notably in Ross Tuttle’s Nation article.
Jennifer Turner of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program is in Guantánamo right now observing the pre-trial hearings of Jawad and Oman Khadr. She’ll have more details on Henley’s decision tomorrow.
(Originally posted on DailyKos.)
Two hearings on Wednesday concerned the cases of two of the youngest prisoners of Guantánamo Bay, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, who were both teenagers when they were captured by U.S. forces.
On Wednesday, pre-trial hearings resumed in the case of Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was shot in the back and captured by the U.S. A legal advisor to the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs who is permitted one-on-one "welfare visits" with him tells me Khadr, who is now 21, is laboring through the Ontario seventh- and eighth-grade school curriculum she brings him.
Khadr’s defense attorneys put the issue of Khadr’s age at the time of his capture front-and-center. His lawyers argued that because he was only 15 when U.S. imprisonment and interrogations commenced, Khadr requires a full clinical evaluation by independent—not military—experts on juvenile psychology who can assess the reliability of statements extracted from him and the psychological impact of abusive interrogations and coercive conditions of confinement on a teenager.
Khadr’s defense attorney, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler, said that there are significant segments of Khadr’s time at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan that Khadr won’t discuss with his attorneys, who believe he may be suffering psychological trauma from mistreatment at the hands of U.S. interrogators there. They hope that a trained clinical psychologist will be able to assess whether Khadr’s mental state is consistent with his allegations of torture at Bagram.
Khadr’s allegations? We don’t know much about them, since the government has classified a nine-page affidavit in which Khadr describes his mistreatment in Afghanistan. We do know that Khadr has claimed that he was repeatedly interrogated while he was in excruciating pain, hooded and menaced by barking dogs, and threatened with rape.
Although prosecutor Maj. Jeffrey Groharing urged the commission to "give very little weight to an accused terrorist’s claims of abuse" and noted that Khadr’s claims were investigated and unsubstantiated, recent revelations suggest that the investigation of Khadr’s allegations of mistreatment at Bagram prison was patently inadequate. The military intelligence unit involved in interrogations of Khadr at Bagram prison was the same unit implicated in the deaths of two detainees at that prison, and U.S. investigators later recommended that 27 members of that unit be criminally prosecuted. And yet still the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) found it appropriate to find Khadr’s claims of mistreatment unsubstantiated.
All this begs the question of what continued effects of mistreatment Khadr could possibly exhibit after the fact. Video footage of then-17-year-old Khadr’s interrogation by Canada’s Air Force Office of Special Investigations released a month ago provides the first glimpse of an interrogation at Guantánamo Bay. The video, along with an interrogation report (PDF) written a year after the footage was taken, raise concerns not only about the teenager’s mental state at the time of both interrogations, but about the conduct of the interrogators as well.
Also on Wednesday was the military commission hearing of Afghan national Mohammed Jawad, whose case brought new revelations about the "Frequent Flyer" sleep deprivation program, a program we recently learned was used by the Chinese on American soldiers during the Korean War. Jawad, who was 16 or 17 years old at the time of his capture, is not accused of any links to al Qaeda or the Taliban.
As recently as a week ago, reports suggested that at least 17 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have been subjected to the program. But Maj. Jason Orlich, a creator of Guantánamo Bay’s "incentives" program that uses long-term sleep deprivation as a punishment for those who misbehave or fail to cooperate, testified that nearly all of the 350 to 400 prisoners held in two Guantánamo Bay prison camps were subject to the program, which entails waking the prisoners, shackling them, and moving them to a different cell along with all their belongings. Maj. Orlich was reluctant to specify the frequency of the moves, but testified that three-hour intervals "would not be abnormal."
Maj. Orlich also revealed that the Frequent Flyer Program was Standard Operating Procedure (SOP), although it did not appear in writing in the SOPs of that time—begging the question of what other detainee treatment policies were omitted from the written records. According to Maj. Orlich, Guantánamo Bay leadership was aware that the Frequent Flyer Program was in use, and the program was a routine included in what the military calls its "daily synchronization matrix." Maj. Orlich also said that the Frequent Flyer Program was ongoing at the time of his departure from Guantánamo Bay in April 2005, and he had never heard of any order to stop the program. This is despite previous government claims that the program had been discontinued in March 2004.
The fact the program continued at Guantánamo Bay even after it was officially banned isn’t exactly news: On July 10, Jawad’s lawyers announced that prison logs reveal that the Frequent Flyer program was used on Jawad after it was "officially" banned at Guantánamo Bay. According to Jawad’s lawyers, in 2004 the military subjected Jawad to two weeks of sleep deprivation in which Jawad was moved 112 times in 14 days. The Frequent Flyer program was used on Jawad only months after his Christmas Day suicide attempt in 2003.
(Around the same time in July 2004, Canada disclosed a document (PDF) in which Canada’s foreign intelligence director confirms that a similar Frequent Flyer Program was used on Omar Khadr for three weeks to "soften" him for interrogations by Canadian agents in March 2004—when he was 17. Notably, the Canadian judge found that this treatment of Khadr constituted torture.)
When asked Wednesday whether he thought it was humane to move prisoners every three hours, eight times a day, 112 times in two weeks, Maj. Orlich replied, after a lengthy pause, that yes, he believed it was humane.
I wonder what Maj. Orlich was thinking during that pause.
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