Priests on trial for Arizona torture protest

Two California priests, Fransiscan Father Louis Vitale and Jesuit Father Steve Kelly, related to the Catholic Worker movement, were arrested in November 2006 for trespassing at Ft. Huachuca military base in Southern Arizona. They knelt in front of the entry gates to the base to pray, with 120 other protesters, and asked to deliver a letter to the former Chief of Military Intelligence in Iraq. Both have served time for Fort Benning "School of the Americas" protests. They were arraigned April 3 and are awaiting trial in June. From the group Pace e Bene and Redwood City Catholic Worker House respectively, the two are seasoned advocates of non-violence. According to the California Catholic Daily:

Vitale and Kelly were among 120 protesters at Ft. Huachuca. They claim U.S. military intelligence teaches torture interrogation techniques at Ft. Huachuca -- the same techniques used at Abu Ghraib and, allegedly, at Guantanamo.

It was at Ft. Huachuca that Vietnam-era manuals advocating torture techniques were translated into Spanish for use at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia -- a center that, critics have long said, has trained police and military officers who tortured and killed political enemies of repressive Latin American governments.

In November, Vitale and Kelly were arrested for kneeling to pray on the road leading to Ft. Huachuca’s gate. They face federal and state charges for refusing to follow police orders and for trespass. The priests attempted to speak to enlisted soldiers and to deliver a letter to Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast. “Nothing justifies the inhumane treatment of our fellow brothers and sisters,” said the priests’ letter. “Torture is a useless and unreliable tool that leads to an accepted practice of terrorization and the rationalization of wrongdoing.”

Fast had been chief of intelligence in Iraq, responsible for overseeing Abu Ghraib at the time of the tortures there. Exonerated of wrongdoing by military investigators, she was given command of the military intelligence center, located at Ft. Huachuca, in 2005.

Both Vitale and Kelly have been imprisoned before for anti-war and anti-torture civil disobedience. Vitale served time in 2002 and 2006 for protests at Ft. Benning and, in 2003, for obstructing traffic in San Francisco and blocking the entrance to the British Consulate there in protest of the Iraq War. Kelly has served time for attempting to disarm nuclear weapons delivery systems.

“I believe it is a way to raise consciousness,” Vitale told the San Francisco Faith in 2003. “I’m a strong a believer in something Martin Luther King called the ‘theology of stepping off the curb,’ as when he went to Selma and places like that. It’s putting your body there in a non-violent way.”

If convicted in June, Vitale and Kelly could be sentenced to up to ten months in prison.

It is a small victory that the priests will remain free during the pre-trial period. Here is the text of the letter they attempted to deliver to Major General Barbara Fast:

To: Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast -
We are here today as concerned U.S. people, veterans and clergy, to speak with enlisted personnel about the illegality and immorality of torture according to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions.

We condemn torture as a dehumanization of both prisoners and interrogators, resulting in humiliation, disability and even death. In addition to the hundreds of detainees who have died, we are also concerned about U.S. military personnel. Alyssa Peterson committed suicide after participating in the torture of Iraqi prisoners. Lynndie England and others have been imprisoned for their illegal activities.

We are here today at Ft. Huachuca in solidarity with tens of thousands of people at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Ft. Benning, Georgia (formerly known as the School of the Americas) to say that the training of torturers must immediately stop. Nothing justifies the inhumane treatment of our fellow brothers and sisters. Torture by U.S. military personnel has reached alarming proportions and has horrified people around the world.

We are convinced that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is unconstitutional. We totally reject its conclusions. Torture is a useless and unreliable tool that leads to an accepted practice of terrorization and the rationalization of wrongdoing.

We are here today to repent and clearly state that because of our sense of moral and human decency we condemn torture. NOT IN OUR NAME.

Signed this 19th day of November, 2006 -

Louis Vitale,OFM
Steve Kelly, SJ

Biographical data on Vitale and Kelly:

Fr. Louie Vitale is a member of Pace e Bene, whose mission is "to develop the spirituality and practice of active nonviolence as a way of living and being and as a process for cultural transformation." Fr. Vitale is also a co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based organization that has opposed nuclear weapons testing for a quarter of a century. Fr. Vitale recently served six months in jail following his arrest at the Ft. Benning vigil in November, 2005, and was ejected from congressional hearings in September after speaking out against the Military Commissions Act.

Fr. Steve Kelly is a member of the Redwood City Catholic Worker community and has served time in federal prison for the nonviolent direct disarmament of nuclear weapon delivery systems. In December, 2005, Kelly served as chaplain for Witness to Torture, a delegation of over two dozen U.S. anti-torture activists who defied the U.S. embargo of Cuba with a peaceful march through that nation to the gates of the Guantanamo Bay navel base and prison camp.

Hypocrisy: shock and awe on the body

One of the biggest madams operating an "escort service" for Washington DC professionals is being tried for tax evasion and running an illegal prostitution business. Before federal judges could gag order on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, she pulled the biggest name from her "46 pounds" of paper phone records. Regular customer: ultra conservative Harlan K. Ullman, who coined the term "shock and awe" in 1996 and saw his dream come true in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq. Ullman is at the think-tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies.



Besides the obvious irony of the inventor of this theory of "domination" regularly needed to pay for sex, it behooves us to remind of the connection between the shock and theory, torture and sexual domination. William Plaff wrote in the International Herald Tribune, back in 2004:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called "shock and awe." It was meant as intimidation. We will do these terrible things to demonstrate that nothing will stop us from conquering our enemies. We are indifferent to world opinion. We will stop at nothing. [...]Destroying cities and torturing prisoners are things you do when you are losing the real war, the war your enemies are fighting. They are signals of moral bankruptcy. They destroy the confidence and respect of your friends, and reinforce the credibility of the enemy.

Diane Christian reminds us of Rumsfeld and Bush's supposed inability to look at the Abu Ghraib photos, and the US media's puritanical need to censor the images:

But the Abu Ghraib images are not easily repackaged. They're pornographic not just obscene and while our warwagers are excellent at evading and repackaging violence they're stopped cold by sex. The scenes we've seen so far are full of Iraqi genitals and hooded faces and grinning American soldiers.

President Bush finds them sickening and unAmerican; Rumsfeld labels them disgusting and can not imagine that any officer could order such a thing. The six indicted are characterized as bad apples and degenerate and not real American soldiers. But the pictures seem deliberately and even proudly posed.

Interestingly, as these pictures are broadcast in the US they are usually blurred so that we don't see genitals. This is in the interest of our sensibilities for our general culture doesn't look publically at genitals except in works of art. Most of Muslim culture doesn't even allow naked genitals in art. Islamic miniatures of Adam and Eve (Christian artists' favorites for requiring nudes) usually show them modestly covered. Commentators on the prison images speak of how shamed a Muslim man is to be made naked. A boyish US female soldier in one picture grins and points to the genital of a bound captive; in another she holds a naked prisoner on a leash. In other pictures the prisoners are forced into real and simulated sexual acts. There are more and worse terrible pictures and video as yet unpublished.

'Sadistic' Rumsfeld said shaking his head with disbelief and contempt. He doesn't learn from the pictures, much as the President never has doubts. 'They are not us, they are evil, they are unAmerican,' they say. But the problem is not sadism-getting sexual pleasure from inflicting pain. The problem is inhumanity-torturing, murdering, raping human beings. The problem is not sex titillation but violence. Torture is a legitimate child of war-if I am willing to kill you, why should I stop at mutilating, humiliating and torturing you, the enemy, the evil one? Why can I not bend you to my will, make you talk, take away your manhood or rape your womb? I can. But I must be sober steadfast chaste in style lest I betray enjoying your pain.

What I believe about the morality of sexwork/prostitution/escorts is essentially irrelevant. Based on their own standards alone, recently we have enough proof that the neoconservative movement is hypocritical to its core.

Flannery O'Connor and Abu Ghraib

One of a couple of books receiving attention this year about the deeper meanings of the scandal of Abu Ghraib, and the reaction of Americans to it, is "A Good War is Hard to Find," by David Griffith. He was inspired by some of the themes contained in the American fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, who brutally represented some of the deepest hypocrisies and contradictions, or 'discrepancies,' in the American soul. The New York Times reviews the book, and provides the first chapter. Quoting from it:

CATHOLIC WRITER FLANNERY O'CONNOR would have considered the images of the prison scandal grotesque, but not in what she called "the pejorative sense"-of just plain images of ugliness and ignorance. For O'Connor-whose characters are some of the most memorable grotesqueries in American literature-the grotesque makes visible hidden "discrepancies" between character and belief. Such images "connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye."

Take Cpl. Graner, for example. His pick-up truck still parked in the driveway of his Uniontown, Pennsylvania home at the time the pictures broke into the news, bears a license plate with the word Jesus and a picture of a cross. There is also a smooth stone in, appropriately enough, a "weed-choked" flower bed in front of his house, painted with a verse from the book of Hosea: "Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to see the Lord, until he comes and showers righteousness on you." [Hoses 10:12 NIV]

This stone is mentioned in most of the early news coverage of the scandal, treated as a bit of profound irony, the kind of coincidence newspaper reporters salivate over. How could a man with this bit of scripture displayed in his "postage-stamp" of a front yard, as one Pittsburgh news weekly described it, commit such atrocious acts? It's an irony the media isn't equipped to engage at any depth.

Such ironies were the stuff of O'Connor's stories. Her characters think of themselves as Christians or otherwise "good people," but their actions or attitudes reveal otherwise. Their pride blinds them to their own flaws, and only violence-usually from an unlikely source-opens their eyes, and offers them a chance at redemption.

Griffiths continues this same passage in an earlier article at Godspy magazine, and I find his viewpoint provocative and different, and I also love O'Connor, so:

For O'Connor, her native American South was the perfect landscape against which to paint her grotesque figures. But to Catholics in the 1950's O'Connor's fascination with bizarre characters from the nation's most Protestant region was unsettling. She addressed their "certain impatience" with her work in 1963 at a speaking engagement at Georgetown University, in a speech titled "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South":

The American Catholic trusts the fictional imagination about as little as he trusts anything. Before it's well on its feet, he's busy looking for heresy in it. The Catholic press is constantly broken out in a rash of articles on the failure of the Catholic novelist. The Catholic novelist is failing to reflect the virtue of hope, failing to show the Church's interest in social justice, failing to show life as positive good, failing to portray our beliefs in a light that will make them desirable to others.

O'Connor accounts for this by accusing the Catholic reader of being "more Manichaean than the Church permits... by separating nature from grace."

"Manichaeism"—or Dualism—was a third-century religion inspired by a Persian, Mani. It claimed the universe was governed by two eternal, separate—and equal—forces: Good and Evil. Dualism has a certain attraction for Christians. In fact, in his Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said, "I personally think that next to Christianity, Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market." But, Lewis continued, "It has a catch to it." Lewis, drawing from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, does his usual brilliant job of refuting Dualism, and showing why Christianity is not dualistic—that the one eternal principle in Christianity, God, is good, that everything God made is good, and that evil is merely a perversion of the good:

"And do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers that enable evil to carry on are power given to it by goodness. All the things which enable a man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things—resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why dualism, in a strict sense, will not work."

How to account for evil, then? Lewis continues: "God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right." Evil is the pursuit of good things—pleasure, money, power, etc., "by the wrong method."

That's O'Connor territory. Her stories reveal the hidden evil residing in the human heart, the pursuit of good that masks a secret pride.

Some have questioned her preoccupation with the sins of upright, decent people. But there's a significant precedent—in the Gospels. Consider the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector:

"Two people went up to the temple area to pray; one was a Pharisee and the other was a tax collector.

The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, 'O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector.

I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.'

But the tax collector stood off at a distance and would not even raise his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and prayed, 'O God, be merciful to me a sinner.'

"I tell you, the latter went home justified, not the former; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and the one who humbles himself will be exalted." [Luke 18:10-14]

The parable seems overly harsh on the Pharisee. But that's only because we've forgotten what pride is. Lewis reminds us: Pride is "the essential vice, the utmost evil... it is the complete anti-God state of mind." Then there's St. Thomas Aquinas: "Pride extinguishes all the virtues and destroys all the powers of the soul, since its rule extends to them all."

Pride sets us against each other, and, most important, against God. To cure us of it, God allows us to sin. Again, St. Thomas: "the gravity of sins of pride is shown by the fact that God allows man to fall into other sins in order to heal him from pride."

For O'Connor, God's providence was realized not despite our sins, but through them. Removing sin from life—or fiction—meant essentially cutting yourself off from the possibility of grace. Life—or literature, becomes either sentimental or obscene, and while "preferring the former, and being more of an authority on the latter," the Catholic reader fails to see their similarity. "He forgets," she continues, that:

sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence and that innocence whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite... Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.

The opposite of innocence? Abu Ghraib, maybe? When we consider the United States, was there ever a country more naively, optimistically moral? But by separating sin from nature, we forever see ourselves as innocent and exceptional—a chosen people ordained by God to rid the earth of evil. Was there ever a greater occasion for pride? Is this the real meaning of the Abu Ghraib photographs? Are these images evidence of the subterranean flaw beneath our benevolent, Christian surface?

For Flannery O'Connor, such contradictions explained Southern literature's tendency toward the violent and grotesque.

The South is struggling mightily to retain her identity against great odds and without knowing always, I believe, quite in what her identity lies. An identity is not made from what passes, from slavery to segregation, but from those qualities that endure because they are related to truth. It is not made from the mean average or the typical but often from the hidden and most extreme.

According to O'Connor, the South was not so much "Christ-Centered" as "Christ-Haunted." She believed that the most challenging images of Christ were pushed aside in the South in favor of more palatable ones, ones that would allow for the continued separation and inequality between the races. However, these sublimated images eventually return as "fierce and instructive" ghosts, to cast menacing shadows across the landscape. These menacing shadows are the raw material of much Southern literature, from the well-mannered, sober Eudora Welty to the drunken tortured genius of Faulkner. And as Susan Sontag pointed out in her New York Times Magazine essay about Abu Ghraib, "The Pictures Are Us," those same ghosts can be seen in the lynching photos of the late 19th and early 20th century.

And so we see America, 2004, also as "Christ-Haunted." Tom Junod's article "Jesus 2004," which appeared in the May issue of Esquire, reports that 80% of Americans believe in Jesus Christ and consider themselves Christian. What differs wildly, however, is exactly who these 80% think they're believing in. Junod's piece reveals there is no consensus, but in general Christ is a good guy, he's there for us when we need him, he's personable, even handsome. Ultimately, Junod's piece suggests the personalization of Jesus, the recasting of Jesus in our own (inevitably disordered) human image. This is a phenomenon O'Connor was witnessing even in the early sixties. Our concept of Christ has, O'Connor wrote, "gone underneath and come out in distorted forms."

Griffith's blog is a good read too.

The Prisoner or: How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

The film had a "limited release" in the US in March after debuting at the SWSX Festival in Austin. I would like to see this in a theater and not on DVD!

In it together: Anglos dodging responsibility, spending (and earning) a fortune

In the UK, the acquittal of two British officers in the killing of Baha Mousa in Basra in 2003 led many to question the use of military trials. The proceedings against a number of officers involved in the death of Mousa all led to acquittals, an apparently cost the British taxpayer over £20 million. The judge who acquitted the men said there was no evidence against the men because there was an obvious, inpenetrable code of silence among those involved. And just today, we learn that 10 British detainees in Basra pulled a quite simple escape.

In Canada, the controversy over the investigation of the "handing over" and disappearance of a Taliban soldier captured on the battlefield to the Afghan Army rages on. Meanwhile, miltary lawyers appointed to defend Canadian Omar Khadr, the only juvenile brought to Guantanamo from Afghanistan, say the cards are stacked against him. The US has used coercion and torture to gather the majority of "admissable evidence." His lawyers also claim the Canadian government is abandonning the now 20-year-old Khadr.

In the US, the beginning of a hearing to determine whether the only officer charged with Abu Ghraib abuses shall face court martial hearings revealed that Sgt Steven Jordan plans to dispute the legality of evidence against him. He claims that investigating Generals Fay and Taguba did not properly inform him of his rights.

Also, Staff Sgt. Ray Girouard was found guilty of negligent homicide in relation to the killings of three prisoners north-west of Baghdad in May 2006. The maximum sentence for this is three years, whereas premeditated murder carries up to life without parole. He was also convicted of covering up the crimes. His attempts to prove he was under orders to "kill at military-age men" and pass responsibility up the military command seemed to have failed. But he raised significant questions about the orders he was given.

Australian Prime Minister's surprise visit to the troops in southern Afghanistan reminds that Australian David Hicks, captured in Afghanistan in 2001, is awaiting his military commission trial. His lawyers are attempting to delay the proceedings, challenging the his very detention in US courts. He will in any case appear in a hearing on March 23, the first time he will have seen his family in 2 1/2 years. Meanwhile, an Australian firm Morris Corporation, won the $65 million contract to supply meals at US Detention facilities in Iraq.

Court-martial hearing for Abu Ghraib officer

The only officer to be charged for offenses relating to the heinous torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2003-4, Lt Col. Steven L Jordan, will face another hearing to decide whether or not he should be court martialed. The military's own Fay Report concluded that he failed to control the situation at Abu Ghraib and failed to adequately train his soldiers. His "Article 32" hearing in October, he claims, was unfair because the presiding officer unfairly admitted written witness statements that were not evidence when ruling.



If the presiding officer in this hearing today decides Lt Col. Jordan should face a court martial hearing, it will tentatively be scheduled for July, according to MSNBC.

The Prisoner

Another documentary on Abu Ghraib, featured in this month's Vanity Fair, is sure to make waves in the US in March. "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" is a surreal film about the arrest of journalist Yunis Khayater. His arrest, caught on tape by documentarist Michael Turner who included the footage in his awarding-winning Gunner's Palace. After the release of this documentary, Turner received an email from a "friend" of Yunis' -- Benjamin Thompson, an American who served at Abu Ghraib. He wanted contact Yunis, saying, "I felt that these people were my good friends and that we survived that hell together with support from one another. I truly love these people."

The story has a number of surreal elements, starting with Yunis' arrest for an alleged, far-fetched accusation that the journalist was plotting to kill Tony Blair. He was plunged into the nightmare world of Abu Ghraib where he met Thompson.

Read more in Vanity Fair, visit the film's site, or see the trailer here.

Rory Kennedy's documentary "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," which debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January, will be airing on HBO in North America next week starting February 22.

Sundance produced a promo piece, with interviews with Kennedy. The film features ex-military intel Sgt. Sam Provance, who has been ostracized for speaking out to the media after reading the Taguba Report.

For schedules, please follow this link to the HBO website.

No avoiding trial for officer charged in Ghraib

The defense of reservist Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan attempted to get the charges against him in relation to the abuses at Abu Ghraib dropped, on the basis that the government waited too long before charging him. The judge rejected these arguments, which followed his arraignment on January 30. Jordan, who was the only officer to face trial in relation to the torture at Abu Ghraib, is charged with lying to investigators, cruelty and maltreatment, disobeying orders, and dereliction of duty. At Abu Ghraib he was an interrogator in his capacity as military intelligence. He was mentioned in the Taguba report as "directly or indirectly responsible" for the abuses at the prison. He faces 22 years prison time.

Virtual Abu Ghraib

The last post ended with a video which raised our interest in the world of video games and online games.

A quick search yielded a free site that claims allow players to "reenact" major moments of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars online. Wired Magazine called these "the mother of all video games."

The most shocking was clearly an episode called "Abu Ghraib MP" which is set up to "wage an assault" on the prison. I gather the idea is to blast away as many 'misbehaving' inmates as possible.



Others including ambush on "Desert Town" in Iraq, calling in "Air Strikes" to obliterate opposition in Afghanistan, and "Bad Neighborhood" which is a simulation of Sadr City.

There is no premium in these games of apprehending or capturing prisoners alive, with the one exception of the Osama episodes.

Year in Review

As this blog was dormant for much of the year, here we provide a detention/interrogation year in review:

January

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay who was a minor when he was detained by US forces in Afghanistan, was arraigned by a military tribunal.

General Geoffrey Miller testifies before Congress regarding the use of dogs on detainees in Abu Ghraib.


February

The final soldier charged with involvement of in the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar was acquitted by US Military Courts.

Human Rights First concludes that 34 prisoners had died in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, and that 8-12 were tortured to death.

Federal judge David Trager throws out the suit by a Canadian who was sent to Syria to be tortured. (In 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar, born in Syria was passing through a New York airport, detained and subsequently "rendered" to Syria and tortured)

Prisoners riot at Policharki Jail in Afghanistan, demanding retrials.


March

Times exposes alleged abuses by the secret task force "6-26" in Iraq.

Army Sargeant Michael J. Smith is found guilty on 6 of 13 counts of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib, for the use of dogs on detainees. He gets 6 months jail time, when the maximum sentence would have been 8 years.


April

AP Photographer Bilal Hussein is imprisoned in Ramadi. The US claims he was apprehended with two other militants, surrounded by bombs making material. Journalist defense groups try in vain to get more information on his case.

New data released by the Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project alleges that over 600 military and contractors may have been involved in detainee abuse in Iraq. Only 40 members of the armed services have been sentenced to jailtime, and one civilian.


May

A federal judge dismisses the civil law suit against the American government brought by Khaled El-Masri, a German Lebanese-born man who was abducted by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia in 2003. The rationale: the suit would endanger the US' national security.


June

Limited theatrical release of Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo in the US.


July

Iranian-American filmmaker Cyrus Kar filed suit with the US government over his detention in 2005.


September

America turns Abu Ghraib, empty, over to Iraqi control. Its prisoners were moved to Camp Cropper.

President Bush claims the CIA's secret prisons across the world have been emptied.

A new Army manual for interrogation is published, banning hooding, forced nakedness and other stress positions.

AP goes public with their photographer's detention in Ramadi in April, calling for the US to either charge or release him.


October

President Bush signs the Military Commissions Act into law, according to many legal experts, denying habeas corpus rights to non-US citizens and legal aliens in the US. There is debate as to whether it denies habeas rights to American citizens. The Times calls it "a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy".

Afghanistan's Reconciliation Commission visits Bagram in a bid to get more prisoners released. The number of detainees is thought to be around 500 at the time.

The US (apparently) bombs militants in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area, killing 80 people in Pakistan's tribal area. Many were civilians.

HRW questions NATO's move towards reliance on "close air support" and bombing of civilian regions, and suggests they create a mechanism to compensate civilians affected by bombing.


November

ICG releases a report called "Countering Afghanistan’s Insurgency: No Quick Fixes" suggesting that priority be given to rule of law and fixing the judiciary.

The European Commission concludes that many EU countries were aware of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" flights.


December

The US releases 26 detainees from Bagram Theater Internment Facility. Around 475 are believed to remain.

An ex-Navyman and security contractor in Baghdad reveals to the Times he was kept prisoner for 3 months at Camp Cropper after attemping to blow the whistle on suspicious activities by his firm. He claims he received "less legal council than Saddam."

Pakistan announces it detained over 500 Taleban and handed 400 of them over to the Afghan government.

Bigger Fish to Try

So dog handler Sgt. Smith gets six months in jail for his use of his unmuzzled black German shepherd against detainees at Abu Ghraib. He will also be demoted and fined. It's a start, but in light of evidence brought out in the trial, it does not seem fair to punish only Sgt. Smith. As the New York Times's Eric Schmitt points out, Col. Thomas Pappas and General Geoffrey Miller were directed implicated in the use of dogs in Abu Ghraib. And they are not about to stand trial, Schmitt tries to explain why:

Some military experts said one reason there had not been attempts to pursue charges up the military chain of command was that the military does not have anything tantamount to a district attorney's office, run by commanders with the authority to go after the cases.

"The real question is, who is the independent prosecutor who is liberated to pursue these cases," said Eugene Fidell, a specialist in military law. "There is no central prosecution office run by commanders. So you don't have a D.A. thinking, I'm going to follow this wherever it leads." [...]

Sergeant Smith, who was convicted Tuesday for abusing detainees in Iraq with his black Belgian shepherd, had said he was merely following interrogation procedures approved by the chief intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas M. Pappas. In turn, Colonel Pappas had said he had been following guidance from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who in September 2003 visited Iraq to discuss ways to "set the conditions" for enhancing prison interrogations, as well as from superiors in Baghdad. [...]

But in Sergeant Smith's trial, General Miller was never called to testify. Colonel Pappas acknowledged that he had mistakenly authorized a one-time use of muzzled dogs to keep prisoners in order outside their cells, but he said that he had no idea that dog handlers were using unmuzzled dogs to terrorize detainees as part of the interrogation process. Colonel Pappas had previously been reprimanded and relieved of his command, but was permitted to testify under a grant of immunity. [...]

The trial of a second dog handler, Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, is scheduled to begin on May 22, and it may offer another occasion for defense lawyers to try to direct blame at higher levels. Sergeant Cardona's lawyer, Harvey Volzer, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that his defense would include information not revealed in Sergeant Smith's trial. Mr. Volzer said he would seek to have Mr. Rumsfeld, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Mideast, and General Sanchez all testify at Sergeant Cardona's trial.

So there is hope that more scrutiny will be placed on the command structure, both in Congress and in military courts.

Detainee No. 155148

The Washington Post reports that Army Sargeant Michael J. Smith, in his court martial hearing for the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib, has submitted as evidence the famous photo of himself scaring a detainee with a black dog.



Sgt. Smith's defense alleges that he was specifically ordered by superiors to use dogs on Detainee 155148, whose real name is Ashraf Abdullah Ahsy. The defense alleges this detainee was marked as a "high value" and that his continued interrogation was declared a "special project" of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

Sgt. Smith and another dog handler allege that the use of dogs against the detainees was encouraged and approved of by Military Intelligence at the prison.

The Post writes that Col. Thomas Pappas, who ran military intelligence at the prison and was recently granted immunity for his testimony, approved of the use of dogs on certain detainees only days before the infamous photo was taken of Ahsy.

More than other torture techniques like water-boarding, and the use of tight restraints, the question of the use of dogs seems to be the most likely to implicate some of the Pentagon's bigger fish, including Col. Thomas Pappas and General Geoffrey Miller.

Coming to terms with torture

The man whose haunting image changed the world is now an individual, with a name, a face, and a mission. Ali Shalal Qaissi, the man pictured standing on a box, with a black frock and electrodes attached to his fingers, was imprisoned and tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

The New York Times' Hassan Fattah caught up with him and tells his important story.



Qaissi, known as "Haj Ali," now uses the famous image of himself on his business cards.

Based in Amman, Jordan, he founded the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons. He now travels the Middle East raising awareness and funds to support prisoners and their families.

One wonders whether the discussion of torture, in Syria and other nations with dubious records, will transcend criticisms of America and inspire a more generalized discussion of rights and liberties. Haj Ali himself displays surprisingly little ill -will towards the United States.

It must be noted that he has been rejected visas for speaking engagements in Italy and Austria. (This is apparently linked to allegations by Iraqi exiles in Germany that Haj Ali was implicated in human rights abuses in his capacity as Mayor during the Saddam era, allegations which Haj Ali denies.)

Today, those photographs, turned into montages and slideshows on Mr. Qaissi's computer, are stark reminders of his experiences in the cellblock. As he scanned through the pictures, each one still instilling shock as it popped on the screen, he would occasionally stop, his voice breaking as he recounted the story behind each photograph. [...]

Financed partly by Arab nongovernmental organizations and private donations, the group's aim is to publicize the cases of prisoners still in custody, and to support prisoners and their families with donations of clothing and food.

Mr. Qaissi has traveled the Arab world with his computer slideshows and presentations, delivering a message that prisoner abuse by Americans and their Iraqi allies continues. He says that as the public face of his movement, he risks retribution from Shiite militias that have entered the Iraqi police forces and have been implicated in prisoner abuse. But that has not stopped him.

Last week, he said, he lectured at the American University in Beirut, on Monday he drove to Damascus to talk to students and officials, and in a few weeks he heads to Libya for more of the same.

Abu Ghraib victims' statements

The Washington Post made available 14 sworn statements by detainees at Abu Ghraib taken in 2004 about their torture there. The photos are disturbing, but somehow the "voice" of these victims is even more so. They were translated to English by Titan Corporation contractors to the Pentagon.

Abu Ghraib as "Jihad University"

This blog has been following the ACLU's legal battle to release ALL of the Abu Ghraib photos for the better part of a year. The new photos released by Australia's Special Broadcasting Service are indeed from the "batch" that was fought over in the courts.



The timing of the leak of these photos could not be worse for the US government.

Early this week, the New York Times quoted an unnamed American officer as saying, "We don't want to be putting everybody caught up in a sweep into 'Jihad University."' The Military is saying privately that Abu Ghraib is dangerously overcrowded.

He let the dogs out?

General Geoffrey Miller, the official charged with designing Guantanamo as it is known today, and the man who brought the same techniques to Abu Ghraib this week to not incriminate himself by testifying in the trial of dog handlers.



Two handlers based in California will go on trial in the coming months.

There is evidence to suggest that General Miller either loosened the rules surrounding the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib or turned a blind eye to their use during interrogation.

For civilians, the right not to testify if that testimony could incriminate is known as the "invoking the 5th [amendment]". In military justice it is known as invoking Article 31. According to the Reuters story linked to above:

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said he could not recall another general or admiral invoking Article 31 rights.

"You're not supposed to invoke it unless you are, in fact, suspected of an offense," Fidell said, while adding that merely invoking it does not prove Miller is guilty of wrongdoing.

US: no handover of detainees to Iraqis

The US military will continue to keep detainees and prisoners in custody instead of handing them over to Iraqi custody, following the revelation of abuses in secret Iraqi facilities last month. Even after Abu Ghraib and the deaths of detainees at Bagram, the US has decided that it is better than the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

The New York Times reports that General Gardner, who took over control of forces in Iraq on November 30, will require sites under the control of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior to be inspected before the US begins handing over detainees. (Ironically, the US will not allow unhampered access for the Red Cross to inspect American facilities in Iraq.)

According to the US military's own accounting, the US prisons in Iraq are at 120% of capacity. Abu Ghraib is 40% over capacity. The prison population has almost doubled in the past year.

On a similar and strange note, following the release of formerly "high-value" detainees such as the infamous Ms. Anthrax (Huda Ammash) by the US, the Iraqi government complains that it would like to re-arrest them.

Interrogation contractor on PR warpath

CACI, the infamous contractor to the CIA used for interrogation in Iraq until the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, continues to attack its critics even when it seems the public has largely forgotten or overlooked their role in abuse of detainees.

A Minnesota alternative magazine recounts the reponse of irate CACI president J. P. London, who wrote a strange letter contesting a recent story by the magazine about CACI's lobbying efforts in Congress. The prior article referred to the fact that CACI and other contractors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars indirectly promoting conflict, or the expansion of conflict, in order to further profit from them.

In his "I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms" letter, London quotes various figures in the Abu Ghraib investigation out of context and constructs his case over two pages . This would be a laughing matter for the Minnesota magazine, if it were not for the threat of legal action by CACI, as the firm recently sued Air America radio for $10 million dollars for defamation.

This posturing can only be intended to distract from the fact that CACI is involved in a class-action suit for its role in the abuse of various Iraqi detainees, and that the company, which had virtually no experience in the field of interrogation, has seemingly soiled its reputation for good by getting involved in it.

Horror in Iraq: who is mimicking who?

Two Iraqi businessmen report, as a part of their lawsuit in US court, that they were thrown into the lion cage in one of Saddam's palaces, shortly after the invasion of their country, by US troops. They were beaten repeatedly and asked where Saddam was and about weapons of mass destruction, and experienced numerous "mock executions."

And this same week US troops burst into the putrid basement of a building of the Ministry of the Interior in a Baghdad suburb, to discover 173 undocumented, tormented, tortured prisoners. There were teenagers in the group, and according to some, the vast majority were Sunni Arabs. (This discovery did not surprise many Iraqis, especially Sunni.)

The Deputy Ministry of the Interior, Hussein Kamal, after inspecting the prisoners, which he claims he was totally unaware were in the Ministry's custody, said to CNN, "I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

In the past year numerous reports, by Sunnis, Iraqi human rights groups, Western human rights groups, and major western media have detailed the brutal free reign of certain elements Iraqi defense forces.

The building in question was reportedly run by "police commandos" and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior has vehemently denied their connection to a group with links to Iran called the Supreme Council for Iraqi Revolution.

The Iraqi government consented to these raids after meetings with the American ambassador and military commanders, according to American officials.

In a rather ironic twist, after Abu Ghraib and last week's allegations of secret CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division, the commander of the raid, stated to the LA Times that he would "hit every last one" of the secret detention facilities.

It seems clear that any investigation into this discovery will prove that the combination of torture and impunity that the Bush administration has cultivated during the occupation has indeed provided fertile ground for the Iraqi version to flourish.