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The Original Version. Well worth a listen.
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entertaining POPULAR exclusive FREESTYLE MINDFUL CUTTING-EDGE SOCIO-POLITICAL BLOG AVEC a dollop of SNARK now showing the POPular hilarious samizdat "DONALD TRUMP IS MY (frickin'') GURU"
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- An Algerian prisoner at Guantanamo Bay has accused his guards of using [water torture] on him, his lawyer said Friday, marking the first allegation that the harsh interrogation technique was used at the U.S. military base.
A human rights commission of the Organization of American States, after being informed of the alleged abuse, said Friday that it has asked the U.S. State Department to ensure that Djamel Ameziane is not mistreated and receives medical care.
Officials at Guantanamo and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but they have said repeatedly that all Guantanamo detainees are treated humanely.
Ameziane, who has been imprisoned at Guantanamo since February 2002 without being charged with crimes, told his lawyer Wells Dixon that guards at the base placed a water hose between his nose and mouth and ran it for several minutes. Ameziane said they repeated the procedure several times, nearly suffocating him.
"I had the impression that my head was sinking in water," Ameziane, 41, wrote his lawyer. "I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills."
According to Ameziane's account, during the same incident the guards applied pepper spray all over his body, hosed him down, and left him shackled and shivering in wet clothes in front of an air conditioner in an interrogation room.
Confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and at least two other "high-value" detainees imprisoned at the base in southeast Cuba were waterboarded -- an interrogation tactic that produces the sensation of drowning -- but they were waterboarded at CIA secret prisons before they were transferred to Guantanamo.
Dixon said in a telephone interview the alleged abuse happened early during Ameziane's confinement at Guantanamo.
"He was held down and someone essentially shoved a hose in his face, forcing a stream of water down his nose, mouth and into his lungs I guess," Dixon said.
Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a law group that represents scores of Guantanamo detainees, on Aug. 6 filed a petition on behalf of Ameziane with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, asking that it intercede with the U.S. to protect the detainee.
The group said the commission, which is an autonomous organ of the OAS, agreed and issued "urgent precautionary measures" with the U.S. on Wednesday.
An official with the OAS-affiliated group confirmed it has asked the State Department to ensure he is treated humanely, given medical treatment and not transferred to a country where he could be tortured.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights is empowered to request that a member state adopt specific "precautionary measures" to prevent human rights abuses, but can also urge the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to order that measures be taken, and can submit cases to the court. The United States is a member of the OAS.
"They have closely studied suspects, looking for mental quirks. They have suggested lines of questioning. They have helped decide when a confrontation is too intense, or when to push harder. More than those in the other healing professions, psychologists have played a central role in the military and C.I.A. interrogation of people suspected of being enemy combatants.
But now the profession, long divided over this role, is considering whether to make any involvement in military interrogations a violation of its code of ethics.
At the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting this week in Boston, prominent members are denouncing such work as unethical by definition, while other key figures — civilian and military — insist that restricting psychologists’ roles would only make interrogations more likely to harm detainees.
Like other professional organizations, the association has little direct authority to restrict members’ ability to practice. But state licensing boards can suspend or revoke a psychologist’s license, and experts note that these boards often take violations of the association’s ethics code into consideration.
The election for the association’s president is widely seen as a referendum on the issue. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, plan a protest on Saturday afternoon.
And last week, for the first time, lawyers for a detainee at the United States Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, singled out a psychologist as a critical player in documents alleging abusive treatment.
“It’s really a fight for the soul of the profession,” said Brad Olson, a psychologist at Northwestern University, who has circulated a petition among members to place a moratorium on such consulting.
Others strongly disagree. “The vast majority of military psychologists know the ethics code and know exactly what they can and cannot do,” said William J. Strickland, who represents the Society for Military Psychology before the association’s council. “This is a fight about individual psychologists’ behavior, and we should keep it there.”
At the center of the debate are the military’s behavioral science consultation teams, informally known as biscuits, made up of psychologists and others who assist in interrogations. Little is known about these units, including the number of psychologists who take part. Neither the military nor the team members have disclosed many details.
Defenders of that role insist that the teams are crucial in keeping interrogations safe, effective and legal. Critics say their primary purpose is to help break detainees, using methods that might violate international law.
In court documents filed Thursday, lawyers for the Guantánamo detainee Mohammed Jawad asserted that a psychologist’s report helped land Mr. Jawad, a teenager at the time, in a segregation cell, where he became increasingly desperate.
According to the documents, the psychologist, whose name has not been released, completed an assessment of Mr. Jawad after he was seen talking to a poster on his cell wall. [Someone noticed Jawad was having psychotic symptoms] Shortly thereafter, in September 2003, he was isolated from other detainees [a really wrong thing to do with someone you have noticed is having psychotic symptoms] and many of his requests to see an interrogator were ignored. He later attempted suicide [what a surprise] , according to the filing, which asks that the case be dismissed on the ground of abusive treatment.
The Guantánamo court is reviewing the case. Military lawyers have denied that Mr. Jawad suffered any mental health problems from his interrogation [tell it to the Marines]. On Thursday, the psychologist in the case invoked Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military’s equivalent of the Fifth Amendment.
“This is what it’s come to,” said Steven Reisner, an assistant clinical professor at the New York University School of Medicine and a leading candidate for the presidency of the psychological association. “We have psychologists taking the Fifth.”
Dr. Reisner has based his candidacy on “a principled stance against our nation’s policy of using psychologists to oversee abusive and coercive interrogations” at Guantánamo and the so-called black sites operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The psychological association’s most recent ethics amendments strongly condemn coercive techniques adopted in the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism campaign. But its current guidelines covering practice conclude that “it is consistent with the A.P.A. ethics code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security-related purposes,” as long as they do not participate in any of 19 coercive procedures, including waterboarding, the use of hoods and any physical assault."
Some detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba will likely never be released because of the danger they pose, and those tried and acquitted will still be subject to continued detention as enemy combatants, a Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, made the remarks as Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni, awaited a verdict in the first war crimes trial to be held under a special regime created for "war on terror" suspects.
Morrell said Hamdan, a former driver of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, could appeal the verdict in US courts.
"But in the near term, at least, we would consider him an enemy combatant and still a danger and would likely still be detained for some period of time thereafter," he said.
Morrell said there were plans for at least 20 more such trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba but he said a significant portion of the detainees being held there would neither be tried nor released.
He said efforts were being made to reduce the size of the population through transfers of prisoners to their home countries for incarceration or release.
"But I think, you know, there are still a significant population within Guantanamo who will likely never be released because of the threat they pose to the world, for that matter," he said.
WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say . . . was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
The three-member court was particularly pointed in its criticism of the argument that says s evidence is reliable because it appears multiple times.
"The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case. This comes perilously close to saying that whatever the government says must be treated as true.
Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true."
MAJOR MICHAEL MORI, the defence lawyer for David Hicks, could be removed from the case after threats from the chief US prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis, to charge him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The intervention may derail Hicks's trial, and possibly prompt his return to Australia. It would take months for a new lawyer to get to grips with the case and the new military commission process.
The Prime Minister, John Howard, has told the US that any action leading to further delays would be unacceptable and would prompt him to demand the return of Hicks, 31, after five years in Guantanamo Bay.
Colonel Davis has accused Major Mori of breaching Article 88 of the US military code, which relates to using contemptuous language towards the president, vice-president, and secretary of defence. Penalties for breaching the code include jail and the loss of employment and entitlements.
Major Mori denied he had done anything improper but said the accusations left him with an inherent conflict of interest.
"It can't help but raise an issue of whether any further representation of David and his wellbeing could be tainted by a concern for my own legal wellbeing," Major Mori told the Herald. "David Hicks needs counsel who is not tainted by these allegations."
Major Mori, who has been to Australia seven times, will seek legal advice. The issue will also have to be raised with Hicks when his legal team next sees him. . . Colonel Davis said Major Mori was not playing by the rules and criticised his regular trips to Australia.
The Central Intelligence Agency has told a federal court that Qaeda suspects should not be permitted to describe publicly the "alternative interrogation methods" used in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas.
In papers filed in the case of Majid Khan, a Pakistani who is among 14 so-called "high-value detainees" recently transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, Justice Department and C.I.A. officials argued that allowing Mr. Khan to disclose details of his treatment could cause "extremely grave damage to the national security."
"Many terrorist operatives are specifically trained in counter-interrogation techniques," says a declaration by Marilyn A. Dorn, an official at the National Clandestine Service, a part of the C.IA. "If specific alternative techniques were disclosed, it would permit terrorist organizations to adapt their training to counter the tactics that C.I.A. can employ in interrogations."
. . Lawyers for Mr. Khan, who lived in Maryland for several years and is accused of researching how to blow up gasoline stations and poison reservoirs, have alleged that he was tortured while in American custody and falsely confessed to crimes.
Intelligence officials have acknowledged that some terrorism suspects were subjected to harsh [sic]interrogation techniques, including sleep deprivation, exposure to heat and cold and a simulated drowning technique. Human rights advocates believe the methods amount to torture, which is banned by international law, but United States officials deny the charge."Well, see, according to Bushist fascism, if you don't actually call it torture, then it's not torture, right?
Detainee [Qari Esmhatulla]: They asked me where I had come from and I told them I came from Rhohaniesha (ph) the shrine. They replied with rage and force and ordered me to say that I had come from Shahi-Kwowt. I don't know it nor did I come from there. When I repeated that two or three times, the beatings started and after receiving a few hard kicks and punches I told them it was fine.Somebody has to take responsibility.
Whe the first group put me in the hands of the second group of Afghani soldiers, and the second group heard about Shahi-Kwowt, they delivered me a couple of butt strokes and demanded that I say that I carried this and that (the grenade and radio).
Assisting Military Officer: Sir, I'd like to interject one thing. The term butt stroke means that "he was hit by the butt of a rifle".
Australian television has broadcast previously unpublished graphic images of the alleged physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
SBS television's Dateline program screened video and still images of the wounds allegedly inflicted on the Iraqis by their American captors.
They included photographs of blood-soaked Iraqi prisoners who had been tortured or shot dead, footage of a prisoner repeatedly slamming his head into a metal door, and a film of naked male prisoners being forced to masturbate in front of the camera.
The Bush administration is reportedly attempting to prevent release of the images in the US, arguing that their publication could provoke antagonism towards the US. . .
George Negus, host of Wednesday's Dateline program, told SBS viewers it was important to televise the images to make the public aware of what taken place at Abu Ghraib prison.
"Despite the currently overheated international climate, we're showing them because they show the extent of the horror that occurred at Abu Ghraib," Negus said. . .
ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh told Dateline the images were evidence of "systemic and widespread abuse" of prisoners by US soldiers.