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Calling for Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Today is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

Calling for Accountability on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

Today is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

Today is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, established by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1997, to mark the ratification of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment on June 26, 1987.

As UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan explained on June 26, 1998 (when the day was first marked), “This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable. It is long overdue that a day be dedicated to remembering and supporting the many victims and survivors of torture around the world.”

At the time, Annan lamented that, although over 100 States had ratified the Convention, the use of torture was “still reported” in many of those countries. Nevertheless, for the US and other supposed civilized countries, the creation of the International Day came at a time when, in general, the involvement of Western nations in torture was minimal.

The threat posed by Osama bin Laden had not yet manifested itself in the African embassy bombings of 1998, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and, finally, the attacks on the US mainland on September 11, 2001, which prompted the Bush administration to actively embrace torture. Within a year of the attacks, the president had secured memos purporting to redefine torture, prepared by lawyers in the Justice Department’s (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel, which was supposed to provide the executive branch with impartial legal advice.

President Clinton and “Extraordinary Rendition”

In retrospect, however, the Clinton administration had begun to pave the way for the torture regime that was developed in response to the 9/11 attacks by allowing – or tacitly encouraging – the CIA to become involved in a program of “extraordinary rendition” as early as 1995. Building on a long tradition of kidnapping foreign nationals and bringing them to the US to face justice (the original version of “rendition”), the “extraordinary rendition” program did away with the US courts and allowed the CIA to kidnap terror suspects in various countries and to dispose of them by sending them to Egypt.

The first known “extraordinary rendition” took place in September 1995, when Tal’at Fu’ad Qassim, also known as Abu Talal al-Qasimi, a purported Egyptian militant who had been living in exile in Denmark, was seized in Croatia by US forces and, reportedly, questioned aboard a US Navy vessel and handed over to Egypt “in the middle of the Adriatic Sea.” He was executed in 2000.

Disturbingly, the plan to seize the next five targets of the extraordinary rendition program began on June 25, 1998 (the day before the first International Day in Support of Victims of Torture), when, as The Wall Street Journal explained in 2001, the Egyptian government “issued a prearranged arrest warrant” for Shawki Salama Attiya, who apparently “produce[d] fake visas and other bogus documents” for a cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members in Albania. That same day, Albanian police, with the cooperation of the CIA, seized Attiya. “Several days later,” the report continued, “he was taken, handcuffed and blindfolded, to [an] abandoned air base, north of Tirana,” and flown to Egypt, arriving on July 2, 1998. Over the next month, four other members of the alleged cell were kidnapped and flown to Egypt. Attiya later received a life sentence, while two others were hanged and two others received ten-year sentences. In a bleak postscript, Egyptian Islamic Jihad (which, by this point, was intimately tied to the activities of al-Qaeda through the figure of Ayman al-Zawahiri) responded to the extraordinary renditions by vowing vengeance and the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, which killed 223 people and wounded over 4,000 others, took place on August 7, 1998.

Although President Clinton’s program, which apparently involved no more than 14 renditions, was tightly controlled and included a strict paper trail and a requirement that convictions in Egypt had already been obtained (however unreliable those convictions may have been), the program provided a ready-made template for the Bush administration.

Torture Today

Twelve years after the original International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the landscape has changed profoundly. Seizing on the extraordinary rendition program, the Bush administration involved other countries, including Jordan, Morocco and Syria and established its own secret prisons in countries including Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, as well as indulging in the industrial-scale rendition of prisoners to Guantánamo. It has left in its wake malignant policies, the effects of which have proven difficult to undo, not only at Guantánamo, but also at Bagram in Afghanistan.

This is in spite of the fact that, on his second day in office, President Obama issued an executive order upholding the absolute ban on torture. However, although this purported to mark a clean break with the Bush administration, its impact has been undermined by the refusal of President Obama – or of his Attorney General Eric Holder – to order a thorough, independent investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program. This reluctance to address the crimes committed by the previous administration was signaled before Obama took office, when he explained his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

The impact of President Obama’s torture ban has also been damaged by persistent allegations of torture in a secret prison at Bagram and by the president’s inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, for the closure of Guantánamo, where, as critics rightly point out, the open-ended nature of detention is itself a form of abuse. Although the prisoners have had access to lawyers since 2004 and have been able to lodge habeas corpus petitions since June 2008, the underlying situation is not markedly different from how it was in October 2003, when, in a break with protocol, Christophe Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) told The New York Times, “The open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the population has become a major problem.”

Revelations of Torture Since President Obama Took Office

The Obama administration’s refusal to open an official investigation into its predecessor’s record has allowed admissions of torture to fester, unaddressed or cynically ignored, in almost every policy area relating to the detention of “War on Terror” prisoners. Just before Obama took office, for example, Susan Crawford, a close friend of Vice President Dick Cheney and a retired judge who served as the convening authority for the military commission trial system at Guantánamo, admitted that she had refused to press charges against Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi prisoner subjected to a brutal program of “enhanced interrogation” in late 2002 and early 2003, because, as she stated bluntly in an interview with Bob Woodward, “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”

Al-Qahtani was not the only prisoner at Guantánamo who was subjected to torture. According to an official who spoke to The New York Times for an article published in January 2005, as many as one in six of the prisoners held were subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Moreover, in the last year and a half, President Obama’s inaction has been regularly challenged, in reports on the treatment in secret CIA prisons of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006 and in reports of the torture of other prisoners. These have surfaced in the district court in Washington, DC, where judges have been delivering rulings on the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions and to date, have found for the prisoners in 36 out of 50 cases.

In April 2009, a confidential ICRC report on the 14 high-value detainees delivered to the US government in 2007 was leaked to the New York Review of Books. The report, based on interviews with the 14 men at Guantánamo, described how they had been treated in the CIA’s secret prisons and the men’s statements were so disturbing that the ICRC concluded:

The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

That same month, there was further bad news for Bush administration officials. In response to a court order, the Obama administration released four “torture memos,” written in August 2002 and May 2005 by lawyers in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury), which demonstrated a disturbing predilection for twisting the torture statute out of all recognizable shape in an attempt to redefine torture, so that it could be used by the CIA.

This was followed by an unclassified version of a damning 231-page Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into detainee abuse, which, although it managed to avoid the use of the word torture, nevertheless concluded that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.” Those held responsible included President George W. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel (and, later, chief of staff) David Addington, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II, Gen. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, White House general counsel (and later, attorney general) Alberto Gonzales, Guantánamo commanders Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Revelations of Torture in the Guantánamo Prisoners’ Habeas Petitions

In addition, other references to torture have steadily seeped out of the district court in Washington, DC, in the judges’ rulings on the Guantánamo prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions. The first concerned Mohamed Jawad, an Afghan teenager seized after a grenade attack in Kabul in December 2002, who had been put forward for a trial by military commission under President Bush. In Jawad’s case, the government ignored the fact that Army Col. Stephen Henley, the military judge in his proposed trial by military commission, had ruled on two separate occasions in October and November 2008 that the crux of the government’s case against him – two “confessions” made on the day of his capture, the first in Afghan custody and the second, just hours later, in US custody – were inadmissible because they had been obtained through treatment that constituted torture.

Without these confessions, the government essentially had no case, but the DOJ persisted in pursuing his case before Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle, who granted Jawad’s habeas petition last July after repeatedly stressing that the government did not have a single reliable witness and that the case was “lousy,” “in trouble,” “unbelievable” and “riddled with holes.”

In September, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted the habeas petition of Fouad al-Rabiah, a Kuwaiti prisoner, after discovering that his confessions about meeting Osama bin Laden and distributing supplies in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains, during a showdown between al-Qaeda and US forces in December 2001, were completely false and had been conjured up by al-Rabiah after he was subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and other “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In November, Judge Kollar-Kotelly granted the habeas petition of Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian, after she concluded that crucial elements of the government’s supposed evidence were unreliable, because they came from statements made by the British resident Binyam Mohamed, shortly after his arrival at Bagram in May 2004. Judge Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Mohamed’s statements were unreliable because, after he was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, he was sent by the CIA to Morocco, where he was reportedly tortured for 18 months and was then held for another four months in the CIA’s notorious “dark prison” near Kabul.

To establish the unreliability of Mohamed’s evidence. Judge Kollar-Kotelly devoted much of her unclassified opinion to a harrowing analysis of his treatment, noting, in particular, “The government does not challenge or deny the accuracy of Binyam Mohamed’s story of brutal treatment,” and reminding senior officials that the UN Convention Against Torture “requires that governments which are party to it ‘ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.'”

The month after the bin Mohammed ruling, Judge Ricardo Urbina granted the habeas petition of Saeed Hatim, a Yemeni, after crediting Hatim’s claims that, while held in the US prison at Kandahar, Afghanistan, before his transfer to Guantánamo:

he was severely mistreated, including being beaten repeatedly, being kicked in the knees and having duct tape used to hold blindfolds on his head. To this day, he cannot raise his left arm without feeling pain. The petitioner also alleges that he was threatened with rape if he did not confess to being a member of the Taliban or al-Qaeda. As a result, he claims that the inculpatory statements that he made in Kandahar were made only because of these threats. He further alleges that after being transferred to GTMO in 2002, he repeated those inculpatory statements in 2004 because he feared that he would be punished if he changed his story.

The most recent example of torture being exposed in the district court came in February this year, when, in the case of Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman, a Yemeni, Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. granted his habeas petition, after refusing to accept the government’s central allegation – that Uthman had been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden – because these allegations had been made by two men (Sharqwi Abdu Ali al-Hajj and Sanad Yislam Ali al-Kazimi), who were held in secret prisons before their transfer to Guantánamo and because “there is unrebutted evidence in the record that, at the time of the interrogations at which they made the statements, both men had recently been tortured.”

The Need for a Thorough Investigation

It should be apparent from these reports that the Obama administration will find it impossible to staunch the flow of torture stories and, moreover, that attempts to do so will only end up destroying whatever lingering credibility the administration has regarding its purported respect for human rights. In January, the DOJ cynically allowed a senior DOJ official, David Margolis, to override the conclusion of a four-year internal investigation into Yoo and Bybee, which had concluded that both men should face disciplinary measures for “professional misconduct,” by stating that they had only exercised “poor judgment.”

However, that same month, the United Nations issued a detailed report on secret detention, which, while cautiously endorsing the changes introduced by the Obama administration, pointedly asked what had happened to the many dozens of prisoners held in the CIA’s secret prisons, or rendered by the CIA to prisons in other countries, who had not ended up in Guantánamo. Moreover, just last week, a psychologist in Texas filed a complaint with the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists regarding multiple ethical violations committed by Dr. James Mitchell, one of the architects of the Bush administration’s torture program.

With more revelations of torture expected in the district court, President Obama would do well to reflect, on this particular day, that when Ronald Reagan signed the UN Convention Against Torture in 1988 he willingly accepted that there are “no exceptional circumstances whatsoever” justifying torture, and also accepted that all signatory countries are obliged to “ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law” and “either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.”

In January this year, Glenn Greenwald noted that, when L. Paul Bremer, then the senior State Department official in charge of terrorism policies, described the Reagan administration’s official policy towards terrorists, he declared that “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are – criminals – and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.” Now, however, we have fallen so far from these ideals that, as Greenwald explained:

The express policies of the right-wing Ronald Reagan – “applying the rule of law to terrorists”; delegitimizing Terrorists by treating them as “criminals”; and compelling the criminal prosecution of those who authorize torture – are now considered on the Leftist fringe … In those rare cases when Obama does what Reagan’s policy demanded in all instances and what even Bush did at times – namely, trials and due process for accused Terrorists – he is attacked as being “Soft on Terror” by Democrats and Republicans alike.

On the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, it is time for Americans who care about justice to demand that the Obama administration stops vacillating on torture, returns to Ronald Regan’s “Leftist fringe,” and initiates a thorough investigation into the torture policies implemented by the Bush administration.

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