Despite being held for nearly eight years, Yunus, also known as “Saleh Huddin,” was held incommunicado, unable even to contact his family, for six years, and has only recently been allowed to establish telephone contact with his relatives. Reprieve noted its lawyers and investigators had been “told by multiple sources that, as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, he is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.”

As Reprieve explained, this “historic decision” also “marks the first time any civilian legal system has penetrated Bagram, a legal black hole where nearly three thousand prisoners — many rendered from all over the world — have been unlawfully held by the US military for up to a decade.” Unlike at Guantánamo, itself an opaque and unjust facility, but one where civilian lawyers have had access since the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, no civilian lawyer has ever been allowed into Bagram, which, as Reprieve described it, “is notorious for torture and homicides and has been called ‘Guantánamo’s Evil Twin.’”

This is indeed a remarkable development, as the Bagram prisoners have been abandoned by the US courts, despite winning a remarkable — and entirely appropriate — victory in April 2009, when, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates granted habeas corpus rights to three foreigners rendered to Bagram from other countries, and held for many years, asserting that the circumstances in which they were held were essentially the same as those in Guantánamo. However, in May 2010, that ruling was reversed on appeal, leaving the prisoners still stranded by the Obama administration, in what Judge Bates described as “a ‘black hole’ for detainees in a ‘law-free zone.’”

The UK Court of Appeal’s ruling — by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Sullivan — came in response to a habeas corpus application by Reprieve, in which it was noted that the British government had “repeatedly refused to help Yunus,” even though the Abu Ghraib scandal was made public just weeks after his detention.

Reprieve noted that British officials “failed to get him back and said nothing when they learned he had been sent illegally to Bagram,” even though the British government “has always had the clear power to get Yunus back, under the Geneva Conventions and under the relevant ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ which grants control over the prisoner to the UK and explicitly requires Yunus to be returned to UK custody on request.”

Describing the history of Britain’s shameful role in Yunus’ long years of abuse, Reprieve explained:

In February 2009, after years of government denials that the UK had been involved in any rendition operations, then-Secretary of State for Defence John Hutton announced to Parliament that UK forces had captured two men in Iraq in February 2004, and handed them to US forces. In subsequent statements to Parliament, the government revealed that in March 2004, British officials had become aware of the US intention to transfer the men from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The British government admitted its complicity in crime (kidnapping, otherwise called rendition), admitted it was wrong, and appeared to apologize. Yet it did not and refused to identify the men — a crucial step if they are to be reunited with their basic human rights. Indeed, the government has apparently done nothing over the past seven years to ensure that they receive legal assistance.

Reprieve led a complicated and expensive search for the identity of these men, which covered three continents over ten months. One of the men has been identified as Amanatullah Ali and the other as Yunus Rahmatullah.

A spokesperson for Leigh Day also explained how difficult it was to actually represent Yunus Rahmatullah, because of the Obama adminstration’s refusal to allow any lawyer to visit Bgaram. Yunus, the spokesperson said, was “prevented from speaking with or instructing lawyers,” so instructions to act on his behalf “were received through his cousin, who has intermittent communication with the client through the International Committee of the Red Cross.”

In the ruling, Lord Neuberger said there was “a substantial case for saying that the UK government is under an international legal obligation to demand the return of the applicant, and the US government is bound to accede to such an request,” leading Reprieve to state that there was, therefore, “no reason” to think that the US government will not comply with the court’s request.

Reprieve also noted that the US government has already acknowledged that it no longer wishes to hold Yunus. At Bagram, his case was assessed by a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, in which it was concluded that his continued imprisonment was “not necessary.” The review process at Bagram was established by President Obama — and was copied from the system introduced by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, which was described as “inadequate” by the Supreme Court — but, instead of being released, he continues to be held.

As Reprieve noted, “There is therefore no lawful basis for his imprisonment, as the UK government has admitted to the court. The UK therefore has the right — and the duty — to send Yunus home.” Reprieve also stated that, although the British government “has repeatedly declined to state on what legal basis Yunus was rendered, the Geneva Conventions define his rendition as a “grave breach” — that is, a war crime — about which the UK appears to have known in advance,” adding, “The Court of Appeal acknowledges this, and has said the UK may be required under international law to get Yunus out of Bagram — or face being in grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.”

The Court gave the British government just seven days to secure Yunus’s release, or to explain to the court why they cannot do so, and Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, said, “Yunus Rahmatullah’s mother cries herself to sleep at night because the United Kingdom wrongfully arrested her son and has refused to facilitate his release. The legal black hole of Bagram is antithetical to the rule of law, and Guantánamo’s evil twin. The Court of Appeals is right to recognize this injustice and the British government must now do the decent thing, which it has so far repeatedly refused to do — help Yunus return home.”

In addition, Yunus’ solicitor at Leigh Day, Jamie Beagent, said, “This judgment affirms that our client remains the responsibility of the UK under international law. The government must now accept its responsibilities and seek the return of Mr. Rahmatullah from US detention, under the terms of its agreements with the United States.” He added, “We hope that the writ of habeas corpus will finally bring to an end our client’s nightmare of indefinite detention without charge in appalling conditions at Bagram.”

Back in May 2010, Yunus’s mother, Fatima Rahmatullah, issued the following statement:

Yunus is the youngest and closest son to my heart. I lost my other son, his only brother, in a tragic accident. Now, Yunus is my only hope in life. I see him in my dreams; I pray daily that I will see him in my waking hours again. Our family was shocked when we learned that the British government might have been behind Yunus’ disappearance. I am told the British government has refused even to confirm that Yunus was the person they seized six years ago. As a mother, this is a position that I struggle to understand.

As well as tackling the British government’s responsibility for Yunus Rahmatullah, Reprieve is also involved, in Pakistan, with the organization Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), fighting what it describes as “a ground-breaking case filed on behalf of seven Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram Air Base, which challenges the Pakistan government over their role in renditions.”

In addition to Yunus Rahmatullah, the case also involves Awwal Khan, Hamidullah Khan, Abdul Haleem Saifullah, Fazal Karim, Amal Khan and Iftikhar Ahmad, who were “abducted from Pakistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been kept without charge or trial since 2003.” Reprieve added, “One prisoner is merely 16 years of age and was seized two years ago at the age of 14. Another was not permitted to speak to his family for six years, and is believed to be in a grievous physical and psychological condition.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This is timely, of course, as the phone-hacking scandal has not gone away, and, in the last few days, in advance of another appearance by James Murdoch in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on Thursday, News International launched a voluntary compensation scheme for victims of phone-hacking, the day after the Metropolitan police stated that the number of possible victims of News International’s phone-hacking had reached 5,795, which was nearly 2,000 more than the police estimated in July.

In October, the Guardian noted that News International was facing more than 60 new compensation claims, and it seems unlikely, therefore, that the scandal will go away, especially as it has now emerged that, for eight years, a private detective was paid by News International to follow celebrities (including Prince William), and also to follow lawyers (those working for Milly Dowler’s family, who were followed last year and this year) and politicians (including cabinet ministers, and Tom Watson MP, who has made it his mission to expose News International’s wrongdoing).

However, Ann alerted me to the article because she was thinking about me, in a very kind manner, and picked up on a section of Pilger’s speech in which he spoke about a Ministry of Defence document released by WikiLeaks, which stated that there were “three main threats to the ministry’s view of the world” — namely, “Russian spies, terrorists, and by far the greatest threat — independent investigative journalists,” and she was thinking about my investigative work, primarily in connection with Guantánamo.

I tracked down the highlights of the speech that were published in the Socialist Worker, and also a video of the event, which I have made available below, and I thought I’d cross-post John Pilger’s speech, as it is a ringing defense of the independence that is needed from journalists in a world that is generally dominated by corporate interests.

John Pilger at “Reclaim the Media,” October 26, 2011

After Hackgate, it’s likely that Rupert Murdoch’s empire will disintegrate, certainly when the old man dies, and that’s very good news. But Hackgate was a sideshow to a rampant collusion so engrained across the mainstream media that it almost never speaks its name. The undeclared role of our “free media” is to minimize the culpability of our governments. At worst it is to cheer them on, to beat their drums, to dehumanize their enemies.

We journalists love the idea of worthy and unworthy victims. British and American soldiers are always worthy victims, no matter what they’ve done or why they’ve done it. In Libya the revolutionaries, our revolutionaries, are worthy victims. But the people in the city of Sirte were unworthy victims. They were pro-Gaddafi, we were told. So it was OK to rain down fragmentation bombs on them and hellfire missiles to suck the air out of the lungs of their children. Untold numbers of men, women and children were killed and maimed by us.

How did the BBC report it? The city, said a BBC reporter, should be left as a memorial to Gaddafi’s victims. Consider the intellectual and moral contortion required to make that statement. That Gaddafi’s crimes pale against the crimes of our government is unmentionable.

The slaughter in Fallujah in Iraq was unmentionable too. Thousands were killed. Yet almost nothing of the truth of that massacre appeared in the BBC, ITV or any of the main news.

The American human rights lawyer Richard Falk wrote that, “People in the West are encouraged to see the world through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of Western values and an innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence.”

I’ve been a witness to much of this violence. I’ve glimpsed the overthrow of some of the 50 governments dispatched by the United States, with British support, many of them democracies. In Latin America I’ve seen those tortured by forces approved and backed by our governments. Colonel Gaddafi had the approval and backing of the British government to torture people we didn’t like.

But we, the benevolent ones, are seldom reported as the instigators of this violence, this terrorism that is far greater than anything that Al-Qaida could produce.

Murdoch’s appearance in parliament was great theatre. But why wasn’t he asked about the invasion of Iraq? Why wasn’t he asked about phone calls he made to Tony Blair in March 2003, each followed by warmongering front pages in the Murdoch press? Murdoch’s TV channels and newspapers have supported state violence for most of my career. But Murdoch is not a bad apple.

Consider two studies of the BBC’s coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the University of Wales and Media Tenor. They were barely reported. They found that the BBC’s coverage overwhelmingly reflected the Blair government’s propaganda, such as the lies about weapons of mass destruction. Less than 2 percent of BBC reporting in this critical period allowed dissenting voices, even though a majority of the British public opposed the invasion. That’s less than the most jingoistic American networks.

On 9 April 2003, BBC political editor Andrew Marr stood outside 10 Downing Street. He declared, “Tony Blair said that we would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath. He has been proved conclusively right. And it would be entirely ungracious, even for his critics, not to acknowledge that tonight he stands as a larger man and a stronger prime minister.”

Researchers at John Hopkins University estimate that more than a million people died as a result of the invasion. Their work was first reported in the Lancet in 2006 and the mainstream media sought to discredit it. Why? Because we destroyed the lives of a million people and yet have little idea of the sheer scale of this crime committed in our name.

Last year I interviewed Dan Rather, America’s most famous TV news editor. He and others believe that had journalists challenged and exposed the lies of Bush and Blair, the invasion of Iraq might not have happened. And perhaps those million people would be alive today.

My point is that the trail of blood leads not only to Murdoch, because the most important propagandists are seldom the least credible. It also leads to those who enjoy more public respect, like broadcasters.

A WikiLeaks cable from the US embassy described the extent of the understanding between the BBC and powerful politicians. This is the US ambassador advising secretary of state Hillary Clinton: “I hope you can take some time out to tape an interview with leading British journalist Andrew Marr. It would be a powerful way for you to set out our priorities for Afghanistan/Pakistan. Marr is a congenial interviewer who will offer maximum impact for your investment of time.”

Another WikiLeaks document describes a different kind of journalist. It’s a 2,000-page document from the Ministry of Defence about how to prevent leaks — which was leaked. It said there are three main threats to the ministry’s view of the world. They are Russian spies, terrorists, and by far the greatest threat — independent investigative journalists. No greater compliment can be bestowed on those who do their job independently and fearlessly.

I believe an historic shift is taking place and that social democracy is being drained of its life-force and replaced by corporatism. The convergence of the main political parties is part of this momentous change. Dissent is being criminalized on both sides of the Atlantic. And alongside it all is the mainstream media.

Reading the WikiLeaks cables, what’s clear is that the aim of great power is to eliminate the distinction between journalism and information control.

But the craft of journalism has seen the best of traditions. And these have survived, from Tom Paine right up to Robert Fisk. In other words we were never meant to be the agents of power. We were always meant to be the agents of people.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This is how “Occupy Oakland” described the day’s events on its website:

Huge, enthusiastic, crowds swarmed through downtown Oakland with half a dozen major marches on banks and corporations that shut down Wells Fargo, Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and many others. Police stayed clear of the strikers who ranged freely, from Broadway to Grand Avenue and around the Lake. By late afternoon the crowds had swelled to over 10,000. Waves of feeder marches continued to pour into the Oscar Grant Plaza, including 800 children, parents, and teachers who had gathered at the Oakland Main Library.

The evening march to the Port stretched from downtown to the freeway overcrossing in West Oakland and thousands more protestors kept arriving as the third convergence of the day reached its peak. Over 20,000 people joined the march which made its way to the main entrance of the port and shut it down completely. Port officials confirmed that the workforce was sent home.

Although there was violence late last night between police and a minority of protestors, focusing on this misses the whole point about yesterday’s strike action, which came about as a response to violence, and not as an excuse for it — and, specifically, the violent suppression last week of the “Occupy Oakland” camp, when the police used tear gas, and fired what Reuters referred to as “crowd-control projectiles,” severely injuring one particular protestor, Iraq veteran Scott Olsen, a former member of the Marine Corps, who remains seriously ill in hospital. As Reuters explained, “Doctors and family members have declined to comment on his condition, saying last week that he was awake and communicative, though not able to speak.”

As a result of this unprovoked assault, the 24-year old Olsen has become what Reuters described as “an accidental symbol” of the movement that currently involves occupations in hundreds of US cities and towns, despite a violent response by the authorities in other locations as well as Oakland. As Reuters noted, images of Olsen “lying bleeding on the ground after being hit in the head by a projectile” have “appeared often on social media networks, helping encourage rallies in other cities and drawing more military veterans to the movement.” As Reuters also noted, “The fact that this war veteran fell wounded not on a battlefield in Iraq but in an American city, apparently as a result of police action, strikes many who have followed the Occupy movement as ironic.”

In seeking to understand who Scott Olsen is, Reuters conducted interviews with his “friends, relatives and childhood acquaintances,” which can only reinforce his significance as a symbol for the movement — an ex-military counterpart to the many college-educated and unemployed young people who are also key to the movement’s powerful claims that Western societies, as they are currently configured, have lost touch with many of their own people, and are slaves of Wall Street and corporate interests. As Reuters described it, Olsen is someone “whose personal journey reflects many of the social dynamics that have given rise to the Occupy movement.”

Born and raised in Onalaska, Wisconsin, Olsen “didn’t really want to go to college,” according to Deanna Wolf, the owner of a sandwich shop where he worked for three years, and where his co-workers identified him as “a quiet kid who loved skateboarding, computer games and classic rock, and had a quirky sense of humor.” Wolf added, “He just didn’t think it was the right choice for him,” and explained that he was “drawn to the military” instead, because it apparently “offered him the opportunity to get paid to ‘do what he enjoyed,’ which was playing with computers.”

He served two tours of duty in Iraq, where he worked as a technician rather than being engaged directly in combat, but, as Reuters explained, “he soured on military life,” establishing a short-lived website, “I hate the Marine Corps,” which “served as a forum for disgruntled servicemen.”

Around two years ago, he received an “administrative discharge” from the military, and, although the exact reasons for this are unclear, it is obvious that, after his discharge, Olsen found himself becoming first of all “a critic of America’s wars,” and then an “anti-establishment activist,” not because of any “specific searing experience in Iraq, but rather from a more subtle evolution in the way he saw the world.”

Keith Shannon, who served with Olsen in the Marines, told Reuters, “He started a bit before he got out [but] he got really into it right after he got out.” Deanna Wolf agreed. “When he came back, he had a different perspective,” she said. “He seemed to be very passionate about everything. I guess having seen what he saw it had just given him another perspective. I just saw a change. He had been a funny kid, with a witty sense of humor. He was more serious.”

After he left the military, Olsen worked for a while as a computer network administrator in Illinois, where he “became increasingly involved in the peace movement, and his political activism deepened.” In a Twitter message in March 2010, he wrote, “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people” — a message that is central to the “Occupy” movement.

Olsen’s uncle told Reuters that, after attending a few peace group meetings in Chicago, he joined the hugely influential protests in Madison, Wisconsin in February, when protestors against Republican Governor Scott Walker’s disgraceful proposal to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions suddenly discovered that, inspired by the people’s uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, there was a widespread interest in collective resistance to injustice — whether it was from politicians, bankers or corporations, as I noted in articles at the time (see here, here and here).

He then moved to San Francisco and took up a a job at a software company, while also maintaining his interest in activism, and those who met him at this time noted that he “did not seem to suffer from the kinds of emotional and psychiatric problems that afflict many veterans.” Aaron Hinde, an Army veteran and friend of Olsen’s at Iraq Veterans Against the War, “He just showed up at one of our monthly meetings. It was a real surprise to have a new face just walk in. He just sat down and introduced himself.”

Emily Yates, a musician and another Army veteran, who met Olsen when “he came to her first concert at a neighborhood bar,” said that he helped her “broadcast her show live on the Internet,” and explained, “It’s the fact he has a good job, he can maintain close relationships, which a lot of vets have trouble doing. That’s a litmus test. If he’s dealing with stuff, he’s dealing with it in a healthy way.”

Most recently, when “Occupy Wall Street” began, soon spreading to other cities, Olsen started camping out with protesters in San Francisco, while traveling to work in the daytime, and when police attacked activists in Oakland on October 25, he and other veterans decided to join the Oakland protesters as they sought to regain access to the plaza in which they had been camping. Matt Howard, a friend and former Marine, who is now a student at the University of California, Berkeley, said, “They came out to show support for the occupiers and protesters,” but Olsen, of course, ended up hospitalized, along the way becoming a symbol for the “Occupy” movement as a whole. As Reuters explained, with the attack on Scott Olsen, “Police brutality and the plight of veterans have joined joblessness and income inequality as key issues for many in the movement.”

Reuters also noted that some Conservative bloggers “have called Olsen a traitor, citing his anti-Marine website and his online support for WikiLeaks [and] Bradley Manning,” the former intelligence analyst in Iraq who is accused of providing WikILeaks with the documents — the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, the diplomatic cables and the Guantánamo files — that it has been releasing since last year. However, his friends from Onalaska were not convinced.

Christy De Ruyter, who worked with him at the sandwich shop, and who said she cried when she saw the video of him after he was injured, said, “I was not surprised that he was at a protest, speaking up. Scott had gotten older, he’d grown up and gotten a voice. He wasn’t a completely different person when he came back. He’d just seen a lot things. And I was proud of him, standing up for something he believed in.”

She is not the only one. And I do hope that Scott Olsen recovers fully, so that we can hear more about his beliefs — and his hopes for a better world.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist in Basra, Iraq, was killed by British soldiers in September 2003, his brutalized body bearing 93 separate injuries, after two days of what the judge in the three-year inquiry, Sir William Gage, described as “serious, gratuitous violence” that leaves “a very great stain on the reputation of the Army.”

As the Independent explained in an editorial today, the report is “damning.” The judge found that the “savagery meted out to Mr. Mousa and fellow detainees in Basra in 2003 were not the actions of a few ‘bad apples,’” but were, instead, “the result of systemic, ‘corporate’ failures that meant neither the abusive soldiers, nor their superiors, were aware that forcing detainees to wear hoods and adopt excruciating stress positions contravened both British law and the Geneva Convention.”

The Independent noted, “That any British soldier is unclear about what constitutes torture is disgraceful enough. That there were others who saw what was happening and allowed it to continue is truly shameful.”

In response, Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for Defence, “accepted the vast majority of Sir William’s recommendations, which includes “a total ban on the use of techniques such as hooding, the creation of an independent inspection regime for military detention centres, and an overhaul of soldiers’ training for handling civilian detainees.”

This is appropriate, of course, but the obvious problem that can easily be overlooked is that hooding — and the use of stress positions — were illegal when British soldiers arrived in Basra, having been outlawed by the government of Ted Heath in 1972, following the abuse of IRA prisoners in Northern Ireland.

Phil Shiner, a human rights lawyer who has been involved in seeking accountability for the torture, abuse and murder of prisoners in Iraq, remains deeply concerned abut the use of banned techniques. Speaking to the BBC, he said, “How did it come about that intelligence units were using techniques that were banned in the 1970s — food and water deprivation, stress positions, hooding and the use of noise?”

The BBC noted that, during the inquiry, it emerged that, apparently, “the ban was never made explicit in British army guidance on prisoner of war handling.” The BBC added, “A four-star general was not aware of the Heath ruling. Nor was Adam Ingram, the former armed forces minister.”

If this seems incredible, I’d suggest that it is, and would also suggest that, for those interested in the truth, what is glaringly obvious is that the torture and abuse inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers exactly mirrored what the US military was doing, because the British had, by joining the Americans in Iraq, also fallen under the sway of the Bush administration, and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who had been responsible for implementing exactly the same techniques used by the British in their own prisons — most notoriously, in Abu Ghraib.

In 2005, the Intelligence and Security Committee produced a report, “The Handling of Detainees by UK Intelligence Personnel in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and Iraq” (PDF) which claimed that, “Whilst the UK co-operates with the US both against terrorism and in Iraq, each country has significantly different rules governing the handling, detention, interrogation and classification of prisoners of war, detainees and internees.” The report claimed that “The UK rules governing detention and interrogation … accord with the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,” but as this was so horribly contradicted by the actions of UK troops in Iraq, and as the inquiry did not fall for the “few bad apples” scenario favoured by the Bush administration, the Committee’s findings do nothing to contradict the assumption that the techniques used by the British — or, perhaps more accurately, the absence of restraints on their behaviour — had come, whether directly  or indirectly, from the Americans.

In addition, as Phil Shiner reported yesterday in the Guardian, after explaining, “I act for over 150 other Iraqis in a court of appeal case where the judgment is due next month on our argument that there must be a single inquiry into the UK’s detention policy in Iraq,” the pattern of abuse was so widespread throughout UK forces in Iraq that there must be further investigations. As he stated, the cases “span the period of March 2003 to December 2008, involve at least 14 different UK facilities and implicate numerous battle groups,” and the allegations “are shocking and involve a range of techniques and practices which were simply not on Sir William’s radar: unbelievably debased sexual behaviour, mock executions, vicious threats of rape of detainees’ female relatives, and systematic use of hooding, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, temperature manipulation and solitary confinement for weeks” — all, again, the types of torture and abuse used by US forces.

In Britain, to date, only one former soldier, Cpl. Donald Payne, has been prosecuted and imprisoned for his role in the murder of Baha Mousa. At a court martial in 2007, he “became Britain’s first war criminal,” as the BBC put it, “when he pleaded guilty to inhumane treatment, and was given a one-year sentence. The BBC also toed that he was “the only person to be punished for what happened to Baha Mousa,” although “he told the inquiry that all members of the unit guarding the detainees had kicked and punched them, including an officer.”

As the BBC also explained, “The inquiry heard that Payne had conducted a ‘choir’ of the screams of the detainees.” Former soldier Gareth Aspinall said, “Towards the end of the second day they were all in so much pain that he only had to poke them to get them to make a noise. Cpl. Payne found this funny and when visitors came across they also found it funny.”

In the US, a handful of personnel at Abu Ghraib were blamed for the abuse that was revealed in April 2004, and were subsequently tried, sentenced and imprisoned. In America, however, the Bush administration got away with blaming the abuse on “a few bad apples,” and every branch of the US government has, to date, failed to hold anyone accountable for the 100 or more murders in US custody in Iraq that have never been adequately investigated. The only investigation relating to Iraq that remains open concerns the murder in Abu Ghraib of Manadel al-Jamadi, as was revealed in July, when it also became clear that this investigation — and another involving the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan — were all that was left of the persistent calls by NGOs, lawyers and activists for accountability for those involved in the torture and murder of prisoners in the “war on terror.”

The moral extension of accountability for murders in military custody from the UK to the US is, for me, the most significant knock-on effect of the Baha Mousa Inquiry, although, in closing, I should also note that it ought to show David Cameron what a proper inquiry looks like, as he prepares to push ahead with his whitewash of the security services in his proposed inquiry into British complicity in torture abroad in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as I have explained before, most recently last month, when ten NGOs, including Amnesty International, Liberty and Reprieve, shredded the supposed validity of the inquiry by refusing to take part in it. As I explained at the time:

I hope that the government will face increased pressure to replace the planned whitewash with a full public inquiry, as, for example, with the Baha Mousa inquiry, held under the Inquiries Act of 2005, as Reprieve requested last summer, noting that that particular inquiry, which is due to issue its report on September 8, was “a model of an inquiry functioning efficiently, including the hearing of secret evidence.” Last summer, Reprieve lamented that, under the plan for the torture inquiry, “there is no formal mechanism for civil participation — so Reprieve and other civil organisations will not be allowed access to documents and proceedings,” whereas, under the Inquiries Act, “document classification review proceedings are sophisticated and rightly allow the judge to balance the need for national security against the need for transparency.”

For Baha Mousa’s family, nothing can ever remove the horror of his murder, but as an indictment of the unacceptable brutality of the “war on terror,” and Britain’s shameful involvement in it, the inquiry is to be commended. It needs to be replicated in the US, of course, although that remains unimaginable, and in both Britain and America it should also stand as model of how to conduct inquiries into the wider use of torture.

But that, of course, will not happen until significantly more people care about the crimes that were committed “in our name,” which at present, sadly, appears to be a far-off dream, however much Baha Mousa’s murder ought to remind us of the nightmare of our own making that we’ve been living through for the last ten years.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As a follow-up, Jeff recently wrote another article for Truthout, providing further examples of the use of water as a torture technique, not only in Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to mark my return to work after two weeks away in Greece, I’m cross-posting his latest article as my own follow-up, because I cross-posted his earlier article just before my departure for Athens and Agistri, and I hope that making both articles available here will ensure that they reach new readers who have not yet come across Jeff’s work.

More Evidence of Water Torture “Depravity” in Rumsfeld’s Military
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 18, 2011

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantánamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past — most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld — have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about “waterboarding” were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month [cross-posted here] documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called “water treatment” in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had “no comment.”

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that “reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantánamo” lacked “any examples of the military’s using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead.”

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo.

“Waterboarding-style” torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA’s description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called “water treatment,” “water torture” and “drown-proofing.”

“The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11″

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not “confess”:

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [force] my head and shoulders [under] the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: “Have mercy on me.”

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, “a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry,” was detained “in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003″ by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, “At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket … They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness.”

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism “czar” who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar’s intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar’s brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantánamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantánamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, “a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered.” The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the “water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run.”

More Water Torture at Guantánamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including “near asphyxiation from water,” were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantánamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantánamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

“They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting,” Dergoul reported. “In all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed.” They continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantánamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did — Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu’ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantánamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantánamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, “until tears stream down his cheeks.”

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme “Water Dousing”

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of “water dousing” that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on “counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities,” which looked at the implementation of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques of the Bush administration, “water dousing” involved “laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes.” The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact,” PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. “This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force — and I was writhing on the ground in pain,” Haydar said.

Another Guantánamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of “three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran.”

Such cases of “water dousing” by Guantánamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville “pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty,” and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because “Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid.”

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to “to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them.”

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, “We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren’t paid to think. We just followed orders.”

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general — including the use of water torture and drowning — that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave “special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs” [enemy prisoners of war], including “maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads.”

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantánamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantánamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be “immediately” re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague “preparation of” “combatant activities,” violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office “focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution.” He added he “did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution.”

Even so, Davis told Truthout, “I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo,” though “others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture.”

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantánamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, “In my time in Camp Delta, I didn’t see or hear of any waterboarding.”

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantánamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantánamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him “prisoners at Guantánamo were routinely waterboarded.” Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard “confirmed that waterboarding, which he called ‘drown-proofing’ took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity.”

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantánamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, “The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration.”

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantánamo detainees, said, “It’s clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can’t talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It’s simply shameful.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

I’m delighted to discover that people remain interested in the Bush administration’s use of torture, and questions of accountability that have been brushed under the carpet by President Obama, not just because terrible crimes have been committed and no one has been held accountable, but also because the topic of America’s torture program has generally slipped off the media’s radar (as has that other abiding topic of interest of mine, Guantánamo, and the 171 prisoners still held).

Jeff has done a great job in pulling together examples of prisoners who were subjected not to waterboarding, but to other forms of torture using water that the Bush administration largely managed to avoid mentioning or being asked to justify, including Murat Kurnaz, who discussed having his head held under water in his book, Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantánamo, first published in 2007, Mohammed al-Qahtani, the most notorious torture victim at Guantánamo, and others — the Mauritanian Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was, notoriously, “broken” by torture at Guantánamo, and who had water poured over him to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake,” the British resident Omar Deghayes, the Algerian Djamel Ameziane (still held, desperate being cleared for release many years ago), and Mustafa Ait Idr, an Algerian living in Bosnia-Herzegovina, released in 2008 after winning his habeas petition, whose torture using water I mentioned in The Guantánamo Files, and in my article, After 7 Years, Judge Orders Release of Guantánamo Kidnap Victims. Also of interest are examples from Iraq, which have also not been publicized widely.

Despite New Denials by Rumsfeld, Evidence Shows US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture
By Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, August 5, 2011

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantánamo, period.”

In his memoir, Known and Unknown, Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees, not at Guantánamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantánamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantánamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Kandahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

According to a report on Kurnaz’s testimony at the time by The Christian Science Monitor, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon replied to the torture charges: “The abuses Mr. Kurnaz alleges are not only unsubstantiated and implausible, they are simply outlandish.”

Whether implausible or not, waterboarding was one of a number of “counter-resistance techniques” requested for use at Guantánamo by Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy, commander of Task Force 170. In an October 2002 memo from Dunleavy’s intelligence chief requesting use of a number of techniques, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions, forced nudity and death threats, there was also a proposal for “Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

In a follow-up memo approving most, but not all of the requested techniques, Department of Defense (DoD) general counsel William J. Haynes II said of the “wet towel” and other so-called “aggressive” “Category III” techniques, “While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

Water Torture at Guantánamo

Evidence regarding waterboarding or other forms of water torture by suffocation or choking at Guantánamo has been reported, but this article is the first collection of the various reports in one place.

Last April, a report by two doctors who were allowed to examine “medical records and relevant case files … of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment,” found at least one case of “near asphyxiation from water (i.e., hose forced into the detainee’s mouth)” and another case where a detainee’s head was forced into a toilet.

The report, by doctors Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis, was published at PLoS Medicine. Dr. Xenakis is also a retired brigadier general in the Army, who has worked as a medical consultant on a number of Guantánamo legal cases.

Additionally, accusations of military waterboarding turned up in a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) report on “FBI Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations” that was released at almost the same time as Kurnaz’s testimony (May 2008). The IG noted that the chief of the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit at Guantánamo told DoD Assistant Attorney General Dave Nahmias, “one of the planned or actual techniques used on [purported 9/11 would-be hijacker, Mohammed] al-Qahtani was simulated drowning.”

In fact, the military admits the use of pouring water over al-Qahtani’s head, as is discussed below.

At another point in the report, the IG describes one FBI agent who “once heard a discussion at GTMO when someone mentioned using water as an interrogation tool and someone else in the group said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that.’” According to the IG report, no FBI agent actually reported seeing waterboarding or water torture him or herself.

Whether or not waterboarding was observed by FBI agents at Guantánamo, we know from the minutes of a “Counter-resistance Strategy meeting” at Guantánamo on October 22, 2002, that waterboarding (called the “wet towel” technique) was discussed (see Tab 7 at link). The meeting included legal officials from the CIA, DIA, the Guantánamo intelligence chief, as well as members of the Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consulting Team (BSCT).

At one point, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantánamo, asked whether SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) employed “the ‘wet towel’ technique.” Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, replied:

If a well-trained individual is used to perform [sic] this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them (i.e., insects, snakes, claustrophobia). The level of resistance is directly related to a person’s experience.

At this point, a BSCT psychiatrist noted, “Whether or not significant stress occurs lies in the eye of the beholder. The burden of proof is the big issue.” Fredman replied, “These techniques need involvement from interrogators, psych, medical, legal, etc.”

Fredman continued, “The CIA makes the call internally on most of the types of techniques found in the BSCT paper and this discussion.” In a reference to the approvals for waterboarding and other techniques given the CIA by Office of Legal Counsel memos a few months before, he added, “Significantly harsh techniques are approved through the DOJ.” There was no indication in the minutes from the meeting that waterboarding was not allowed for Defense Department use.

Waterboarding of Mohammed al-Qahtani

Mohammed al-Qahtani was a Saudi Arabian citizen brought to Guantánamo in early 2002. Ostensibly believed to be a part of the 9/11 plot, when interrogators became frustrated at their inability to get information out of him, or force his compliance, they turned to methods of interrogation that the Guantánamo Convening Authority Susan Crawford would later herself conclude amounted to torture.

By November 2002, al-Qahtani had become the “first subject of a Special Interrogation Plan,” which relied heavily on the military’s SERE torture school techniques, including isolation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and apparently, a form of waterboarding. SERE was created to provide US military personnel with training to resist torture.

Even years before Crawford’s admission, DoD’s Schmidt-Furlow report, looking at early allegations of detainee abuse, concluded that “the creative, aggressive and persistent interrogation of the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan [al-Qahtani] resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment.” No one has ever been charged for such crimes committed against this or any other Guantánamo detainee.

The Schmidt-Furlow report details the use of water torture on al-Qahtani, an aspect of his torture that has been little reported:

On seventeen occasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan['s] head …

There is evidence that the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan regularly had water poured on his head. The interrogation logs indicate that this was done as a control measure only.

Time Magazine published al-Qahtani’s interrogation logs in 2005. The use of water to drench al-Qahtani’s head does not appear to be a “control measure” when it is discussed in the logs themselves.

On December 23, 2002, a log selection describes how interrogators hung pictures of swimsuit models around al-Qahtani’s neck. Then the lead interrogator “pulled pictures of swimsuit models off detainee and told him the test of his ability to answer questions would begin. Detainee refused to answer and finally stated that he would after [the] lead [interrogator] poured water over detainees [sic] head and was told he would be subjected to this treatment day after day. Detainee was told to think about his decision to answer questions.”

The day before, when al Qahtani had refused to look at “fitness photos,” saying it was against his religion, interrogators had “poured a 24 oz. bottle of water over detainee’s head.” The log notes dryly, “Detainee then began to look at photos.”

In their investigation of detainee abuse, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) noted in a 2008 report that the Navy limited waterboard demonstrations to two pints (32 oz.) of water. A January 13, 2003, memo, described in the SASC report, underreported how much water was poured over Qahtani, saying that “up to eight ounces of water” was poured over Qahtani’s head as a “method of asserting control” when Khatani exhibited ”undesired behavior.”

The SASC report also said that the interrogation plan for another Guantánamo detainee, Mohamadou Ould Slahi, included the practice of pouring water over Slahi’s head to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake.”

Three More Guantánamo Detainees Report Suffocation by Drowning

Besides Kurnaz and al-Qahtani, at least three other detainees have reported being tortured at Guantánamo by application of water meant to cause suffocation, choking or the sensation of drowning.

A 2009 article by Jeremy Scahill outlined the torture and abuse endured by former Guantánamo detainee and British resident Omar Deghayes. Scahill mentions two incidents where the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force, or ERF) used forms of water torture on Deghayes. In one case, the detainee was shackled, his head put into a toilet. The IRF team “pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.”

The IRF or ERF team also came into Deghayes’ cell on another occasion and conducted a simulated or partial drowning:

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. [Deghayes] was totally shackled and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present and they would join in.

According to Scahill, the IRF team conducted this form of waterboarding three times on Deghayes. Note that the presence of medical staff is consistent with the use of medical personnel under CIA descriptions of how they conducted waterboarding.

Another example of water torture involving Guantánamo guards appears in a document related to the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Berber who has been held at Guantánamo for over eight years, despite the fact he never received military or terrorist training, nor fought against the US. According to a 2008 legal filing for Ameziane by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.” [Emphasis added.]

In March 2008, six Guantánamo detainees filed suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for failure “for many years to take any steps to negotiate and secure the men’s release from Guantánamo.” One of the men, Mustafa Ait Idr, who had been rendered to Guantánamo and “taken from his pregnant wife in violation of a Bosnian court order to free him,” also reported use of water torture in a manner remarkably similar to that of Ameziane.

A CCR report on “Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba” said that on one occasion prison guards demanded to search Idr’s cell. Idr cooperated, but they came in, sprayed him in the face with a chemical irritant and put him into restraints.

According to the CCR report, “Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet — submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat.” As a result, Idr’s face was paralyzed for several months.

Other threats to use waterboarding on DoD prisoners, or to rendition detainees for water torture, are also on record. According to journalist Robert Windrem in a 2009 story at The Daily Beast, then-Vice President Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, the head of the M-14 section of the Mukhabarat. According to the article, the official in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials at the time, Charles Duelfer, declined the request.

According to the SASC detainee report, the lead agency for SERE, Joint Forces Personnel Agency, constructed a CONOP (Concept of Operations) plan for use at a Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation center in Iraq. The CONOP recommended use of the “water board.” Military legal figures reportedly objected to that and other techniques, but it is not known whether Special Forces in Iraq used waterboarding or other water torture techniques and the SASC report does not enlighten us on that point.

In another case, former Italian resident and Guantánamo detainee, Tunisian-born Saleh Sassi, reported that in late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantánamo and interrogated him. They “left no doubt about what awaited ex-Guantánamo inmates back in Tunisia: ‘water torture in the barrel’ and other horrors.” Sassi was released and sent to Albania in 2010.

Finally, the DOJ IG report on FBI interrogations referenced earlier describes how an Abu Ghraib prisoner, Saleh Muklef Saleh, was restrained and had cold water poured over him on more than one occasion. One time, according to Saleh’s own testimony, “They gave me one or two bottles of water and they asked me to drink it while I was hungry and they forced me to drink it and I did and I felt vomiting, then they ordered me to drink again and they were looking at me and laughing” (pp. 279-280).

Back in 2008, during the Congressional meeting where Murat Kurnaz testified to the use of water torture upon him, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee commented, “It seems that we have a new definition … If you were wedded to the language of waterboarding, now we have new language called ‘water treatment,’ which may bear on being torture as well.”

To date, there has been no investigation that specifically has looked at the use of types of water torture, including waterboarding or water treatment, on detainees. The military’s current Army Field Manual on interrogation forbids the use of “waterboarding.” It is the only “prohibited action” term that is described with quotation marks around it.

A Human Rights Watch report issued on July 12 called for President Barack Obama “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

The answer has to be that it would be hard to conceive of a neater example of how the military and the intelligence agencies — or the CIA, at least — are at the very heart of government.

The door that is shutting is the one that involves accountability for the many prisoners subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” torture, and, in some cases, murder, in the Bush administration’s “high-value detainee” program. This involved the creation of secret torture prisons in Thailand, Poland, Romania and Lithuania, and, for a while, in Guantánamo, as well as others in Afghanistan and Iraq, the rendition of prisoners between these facilities, and also to the dungeons of allies in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Morocco.

The Bush administration’s program also involved the cynical crafting of memoranda purporting to redefine torture, so that it could be practiced by the CIA. These memos — which will be known forever as the “torture memos” — were written in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) by John Yoo, and approved by his boss, Jay S. Bybee. Yoo was part of a team of lawyers clustered around Vice President Dick Cheney, who were responsible for finding ways to justify the torture program that also involved President Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as other senior officials, including Condoleezza Rice. The other lawyers were: David Addington, Cheney’s former chief of staff and legal counsel; William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; his deputy, Daniel Dell’Orto; former White House counsel (and later Attorney General) Alberto Gonzales; and his deputy, Tim Flanigan.

In President Obama’s America, in which Obama himself came to power declaring his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” none of these men have been held accountable for their actions. In fact, as I explained in an article last week, the President has done all in his power to make sure that those who authorised torture or attempted to justify its use have been shielded from accountability for their actions. As I wrote:

Obama stood by and watched as, in February last year, a four-year internal investigation into John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was cynically overturned by a DoJ fixer, David Margolis. Yoo had written the notorious “torture memos,” issued on August 1, 2002, that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, and Bybee had approved them, but when the investigation concluded that both men had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” Margolis decided instead that they had only exercised “poor judgment.”

Obama also stood by last September when five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the CIA, including the British residents Binyam Mohamed and Bisher al-Rawi, had their lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that had functioned as the CIA’s travel agent, blocked by the administration, and by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed with Obama’s Justice Department that it was appropriate to use the little-known and little-used “state secrets” doctrine to block any attempt to expose the truth in any US court on the basis that it would endanger “national security” — a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court last month.

Last December, we also discovered, via WikiLeaks, that the Obama administration had put pressure on the Spanish government to prevent the courts in Spain from pursuing an investigation into six former Bush administration lawyers — David Addington, William J. Haynes II, Alberto Gonzales, Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy  — for “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.”

As a result, the news that special prosecutor John Durham has completed a two-year investigation into 101 cases involving the CIA’s treatment of detainees, and has concluded that just two deserve to proceed to criminal prosecutions, is truly depressing. President Bush, as we learned in February, is unable to travel outside the United States because, after he bragged in his autobiography that he had authorized torture (the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) lawyers will serve him with a torture complaint wherever he goes, but in the US the only people to face a criminal prosecution are those whose actions are deemed to have exceeded the parameters laid down by John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee.

To be fair to John Durham, his investigation was hobbled from the very beginning, because of the limits imposed on him. As Eric Holder explained in a statement announcing Durham’s conclusions:

On August 24, 2009, based on information the Department received pertaining to alleged CIA mistreatment of detainees, I announced that I had expanded Mr. Durham’s mandate [from that of January 2008, when Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed him to investigate the destruction of videotapes showing the torture of "high-value detainees"] to conduct a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations. I made clear at that time that the Department would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees. Accordingly, Mr. Durham’s review examined primarily whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators, and if so, whether such techniques could constitute violations of the torture statute or any other applicable statute.

Those particular comments — that the Justice Department “would not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees” — is the key to the whitewash that has just occurred, and it is so important that it was repeated in August 2009 by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, when the appointment of Durham was announced. Gibbs noted that “the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted.”

What no one has yet explained is who authorized the revision to the conclusions reached by a four-year internal investigation into the “legal guidance” provided by Yoo and Bybee. As I noted above, that investigation concluded that Yoo and Bybee were guilty of “professional misconduct,” which would have allowed them to be investigated by their bar associations, and might have opened up a clear route to the White House, but veteran DoJ fixer David Margolis was allowed to override the investigation’s conclusions, with his excuse that the two lawyers had merely exercised “poor judgment.”

This was in January 2010, but Holder’s appointment of Durham in August 2009, and his comments at the time, as well as those of the White House, indicate that everyone involved already knew that the results of the OPR investigation would be rewritten so that Yoo and Bybee would be excused. The outstanding questions, therefore, are: did anyone put pressure on the Obama administration to whitewash Yoo and Bybee, and did it happen as part of an agreement between the administration and the CIA prior to April 17, 2009?

That was the date when the President released four previously classified OLC “torture memos” from 2002 and 2005 as part of a court case, but also stated, explicitly, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

For what it’s worth, the criminal prosecutions recommended by John Durham and approved by Eric Holder will investigate the November 2003 murder, in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, of Manadel al-Jamadi, also known as “the Iceman” (which was recently reported by Adam Zagorin of Time, as I discussed here), and the November 2002 murder, in the secret prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit,” of Gul Rahman. This story was first reported by Dana Priest in the Washington Post in March 2005, but it was not until March 2010 that Adam Goldman of the Associated Press uncovered his name and provided crucial details about the circumstances of his death.

In both cases, there are reasons for extremely cautious optimism that any prosecution will not just to sacrifice a few low-level operatives as “bad apples,” but will also look a few notches up the chain of command, as Marcy Wheeler has been reporting on FireDogLake. Overall, however, Eric Holder’s announcement is bad news for accountability, as it suggests that the process of “look[ing] forward as opposed to looking backwards” is almost complete, with just a few loose ends to be tied up before we are all obliged to move on, forever consigning to oblivion any outstanding demands we might have — including a full account of who was held in the “high-value detainee” program, and what happened to those who did not end up in Guantánamo, and, most importantly, another question, asked repeatedly until a satisfactory answer is given: how can it be that senior Bush administration officials and their lawyers broke the US torture statute, which requires torturers to be prosecuted, and got away with it?

June 30, 2011 will go down in history as a very bleak day indeed for US justice.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

The President was absolutely correct in his assessment of the problems with torture, and was also correct to point out how “President Reagan signed, and a bipartisan Senate coalition ratified” the UN Convention Against Torture, which came to force on June 26, 1987, and whose anniversary has been marked, since 1998, as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

However, when President Obama wrote of “paying tribute to all those who are courageously working to eradicate these inhuman practices from our world, and reaffirming the commitment of the United States to achieving this important goal,” and of remaining “dedicated to supporting the efforts of other nations, as well as international and nongovernmental organizations, to eradicate torture through human rights training for security forces, improving prison and detention conditions, and encouraging the development and enforcement of strong laws that outlaw this abhorrent practice,” it was difficult not to ignore the stench of hypocrisy.

The problem, of course, is that, although Obama issued an executive order on his second day in office, upholding the absolute prohibition on the use of torture, he also declared his “belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” and has done all in his power to prevent any senior Bush administration officials or lawyers from being held accountable for authorizing or attempting to justify the use of torture.

As a result, Obama stood by and watched as, in February last year, a four-year internal investigation into John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was cynically overturned by a DoJ fixer, David Margolis. Yoo had written the notorious “torture memos,” issued on August 1, 2002, that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, and Bybee had approved them, but when the investigation concluded that both men had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” Margolis decided instead that they had only exercised “poor judgment.”

Obama also stood by last September when five men subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture by the CIA, including the British residents Binyam Mohamed and Bisher al-Rawi, had their lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that had functioned as the CIA’s travel agent, blocked by the administration, and by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which agreed with Obama’s Justice Department that it was appropriate to use the little-known and little-used “state secrets” doctrine to block any attempt to expose the truth in any US court on the basis that it would endanger “national security” — a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court last month.

Last December, we also discovered, via WikiLeaks, that the Obama administration had put pressure on the Spanish government to prevent the courts in Spain from pursuing an investigation into six former Bush administration lawyers — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; and Jay Bybee  and John Yoo — for “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.”

As a result, Obama’s claims that the US has a “commitment” to eradicating torture, and is also involved in “encouraging the development and enforcement of strong laws that outlaw this abhorrent practice,” are thoroughly unacceptable, stinking of hypocrisy, as I mentioned above.

In fact, as the 24th anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Convention Against Torture passes, the only hope that anyone will be held accountable for torture under the Bush administration (in the US at least, as opposed to other investigations that are underway — in Poland, for example) is in the hands of John Durham. The “respected, Republican-appointed US Attorney from Connecticut,” as Adam Zagorin described him two weeks ago in an important Time magazine blog post, “has begun calling witnesses before a secret federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va.,” in connection with an investigation he began in August 2009, when Attorney General Eric Holder authorised him to investigate the activities of CIA agents, but only those that exceeded the guidelines drawn up by John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee — “roughly a dozen cases” in total.

This appeared, at the time, to be a depressingly weak response to the disgust that Holder apparently felt when he learned the full details of the Bush administration’s torture program, but with hindsight it may have been the only way to pierce the “golden shield” provided to Bush administration officials by the “torture memos.” No clue has been provided as to who authorized David Margolis to clear Yoo and Bybee of “professional misconduct,” but if the decision was out of Eric Holder’s hands, then it remains possible that Holder’s appointment of Durham was genuinely meant to yield results, simply because it focuses only on actions that exceeded the guidelines.

As Zagorin described it, Time had “obtained a copy of a subpoena signed by Durham,” which stated that “the grand jury is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses.” One of the cases identified by Time is that of Manadel al-Jamadi, also known as “the Iceman.” An Iraqi prisoner killed in Abu Ghraib on November 4, 2003, al-Jamadi’s story was the focus of a masterly article in the New Yorker in November 2005, in which Jane Mayer asked, Can the CIA legally kill a prisoner?” (and in the same month Zagorin also wrote an article for Time).

As Zagorin noted in his recent article, although al-Jamadi’s death received “worldwide publicity,” because his ice-wrapped corpse featured in some of the notorious Abu Ghraib photos, only one officer was charged in connection with his death — and acquitted, hence the title of Mayer’s article. Navy SEALs had “injured al-Jamadi during his violent arrest and initial questioning, but an autopsy concluded that those events could not have killed him.” In fact, he had died after “being turned over by the SEALs at Abu Ghraib, kicking and screaming in English and Arabic, [and] placed in a cell with a CIA interrogator and contract linguist.”

Zagorin proceeded to explain that “[o]fficial investigations ruled al-Jamadi’s death a homicide,” because, while in CIA custody, he “was hung on a wall before succumbing to asphyxiation and ‘blunt force injuries.’” The circumstances of his death were so severe that the CIA’s Inspector General “referred the case to the Justice Department” for possible prosecution, “but no action was taken.”

According to Zagorin’s report, Durham is seeking evidence about al-Jamadi’s death from military personnel who served at Abu Ghraib, and “is asking a lot of questions — like who took photographs of the body, and when.” He has also reportedly “asked about civilian contractors at the site, mentioning one by name, and has probed the source of the multiple shoe prints apparently found on material used to wrap al-Jamadi’s body.” One particular individual being investigated has not been named by Durham, but “those close to the case believe that person is Mark Swanner, a non-covert CIA interrogator and polygraph expert who questioned al-Jamadi immediately before his death,” even though he “told investigators several years ago that he did not harm” al-Jamadi.

Zagorin also noted:

Unanswered questions surround the killing. According to official reports, investigators were unable to examine key evidence because the victim’s blood was removed from the floor of the death cell on orders of a US military officer. The CIA allegedly removed a blood-stained hood that had been placed over the victim’s head. A CIA supervisor later admitted he destroyed it. Immediately after the killing, CIA and military personnel argued over who might be blamed; the corpse was iced to slow decomposition and stored in a shower room overnight, before being spirited away with an intravenous tube attached to one arm, creating the impression that al-Jamadi was still alive.

Whether Durham’s investigation will lead to any kind of prosecution is unknown. Zagorin wrote that “any charges involving the CIA, much less accusations of war crimes and torture, could be explosive,” adding that “Durham’s inquiry amounts to a crawl through a political minefield.” This is certainly true, although some observers have always hoped that pinning charges on individuals might encourage them to point up the chain of command to those who authorised their actions, breaking through the protective shield that still surrounds those like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who bear the ultimate responsibility for creating the environment in which al-Manadi was murdered.

There are certainly obstacles to any action. As Zagorin explained, last month Michael Mukasey, Attorney General under George W. Bush, “declared it ‘absolutely outrageous’ that the Justice Department was still looking into potential CIA wrongdoing.” He also noted that seven former CIA directors had asked Holder to scrap the investigation as soon as it was announced in August 2009, and that former Republican Senator Rick Santorum stated that the investigation was “a political prosecution” and “should be terminated immediately,” as he recently launched his Presidential bid.

However, the main reason for doubting that Durham’s investigation will lead anywhere — above and beyond the significance of Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court not to allow a torture suit by 250 former Abu Ghraib prisoners to proceed against contractors at the prison — is John Durham’s previous capitulation regarding his investigations. Under George W. Bush, Durham was tasked with investigating the destruction of videotapes documenting the CIA’s torture of “high-value detainees,” despite a court order to preserve the tapes as evidence.

However, in November last year, after nearly three years, the Justice Department announced that Durham had “concluded that he would not bring a criminal case against the CIA officers,” even though, as the Washington Post explained at the time, “The burning of the 92 tapes on Nov. 9, 2005, was authorized in a cable sent by Jose Rodriguez Jr., head of the agency’s directorate of operations,” and a former senior CIA operations officer told the Post that the tapes were not destroyed “in total innocence,” because “there was a standing order from a federal judge that said not to destroy the tapes, [which] trumps any inside the CIA legal call.”

As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, it may be wishful thinking to consider that, at some point, someone may be held accountable for the many acts of torture and murder that have taken place in the “War on Terror,” but for now John Durham’s ongoing investigation remains the only hope that there will be any kind of accountability within the United States.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Although a handful of serving US military personnel — eleven in total, referred to by President Bush as “a few bad apples” — were prosecuted for the abuse at Abu Ghraib, they were, in fact, scapegoated for implementing a policy that came from the highest levels of government, and which was designed to ensure that all aspects of the detention regime were dependant upon the whims of interrogators — as at Guantánamo, from where the system was exported by its commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was sent to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib with the results that the world saw to its horror in April 2004.

The case that was shunned by the Supreme Court on Monday, Saleh v. Titan Corporation, was an important attempt to extend accountability from the military to the contractors who make up such a huge part of America’s post-9/11 war machine, and who, unlike their official military counterparts, appear to be as much beyond the law as the senior administration officials — and their lawyers — who implemented, approved and oversaw every aspect of the “War on Terror” that should have shocked the conscience — involving torture, “extraordinary rendition,” secret prisons and the miseries of arbitrary detention at Guantánamo. As Human Rights First explained, “Army investigations implicated at least five private contractors in similar crimes,” although “no contractor was ever charged.”

In dismissing the case, the Supreme Court has ensured that the final word on contractors’ responsibilities rests with the D.C. Circuit Court, the appeals court in Washington D.C. that is populated by several notable right-wing ideologues who have been steadily demolishing the habeas corpus rights of the Guantánamo prisoners over the last 18 months until the “Great Writ” has been rendered meaningless. The judges include Senior Judge A. Raymond Randolph, notorious for backing every piece of legislation relating to Guantánamo under the Bush administration that was subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court.

For the Abu Ghraib ruling, another of Randolph’s aged colleagues, Senior Judge Laurence Silberman — also responsible for outrageous outbursts about Guantánamo, masquerading as legal opinion — led a panel that ruled, by two votes to one in September 2009, that “claims against the contractors were precluded under a doctrine the two majority judges called ‘battlefield preemption,’” as the Christian Science Monitor described it, or, as Human Rights First put it, that “the contractors were involved in combat activities and therefore, should be protected from lawsuits.”

In the Circuit Court’s majority opinion, Judge Silberman wrote, “During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim [for damages] arising out of the contractor’s engagement in such activities shall be preempted.”

Silberman also regarded it as significant that, although the government acted swiftly to prosecute military personnel in connection with the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, it failed to tackle contractors for their role. “This fact alone,” he wrote, “indicates the government’s perception of the contract employees’ role in the Abu Ghraib scandal.”

The Christian Science Monitor also explained:

The appeals court also ruled that the former Iraqi detainees were not empowered under the Alien Tort Statute to file a lawsuit in a US court seeking to enforce a violation of the law of nations. The judges said that although torture committed by a government is a violation of a settled international norms, the same act by a private contractor is not.

Judge Silberman claimed, “Congress has never created this cause of action,” stating that, although Congress had “empowered US residents to sue foreign governments for torture,” as the Christian Science Monitor described it, “federal law makers excluded from the law the possibility of filing a similar suit against American military officials overseas, or private individuals working with the US government overseas.”

In the important dissenting opinion, which should have provided an avenue for the Supreme Court to follow, Judge Merrick Garland noted that he would have allowed the Iraqis’ lawsuit to proceed against both Titan and CACI, declaring:

No act of Congress and no judicial precedent bars the plaintiffs from suing the private contractors –- who were neither soldiers nor civilian government employees. Neither President Obama nor President Bush nor any other executive branch officials has suggested that subjecting the contractors to tort liability for the conduct at issue here would interfere with the nation’s foreign policy or the executive’s ability to wage war. To the contrary, the Department of Defense has repeatedly stated that employees of private contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field are NOT within the military’s chain of command, and that such contractors ARE subject to civil liability.

Following the Circuit Court’s ruling in September 2009, Human Rights First’s International Legal Director Gabor Rona stated, “This decision, which was supported by the Obama administration, informs the world that the United States of America has no intention of obeying its moral and legal obligation to provide enforceable remedies to victims of sadistic acts of torture alleged to have been committed by military contractors.” Human Rights First also noted, “Under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CAT), the United States must provide ‘enforceable’ or ‘effective’ remedies to victims for acts of torture and serious abuse.”

In their brief urging the Supreme Court to take up the case, the Iraqis’ lawyers were, of course, aware of these issues, although they specifically made a point of mentioning how private contractors outnumber official US personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how allowing the Circuit Court’s ruling to stand allows them to break the law with impunity.

“There are 217,832 contractor personnel providing services to the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, answering not to the military chain of command but to for-profit corporations who receive a total of over $5 billion annually for their services,” Vincent Parrett wrote in the brief to the court. “This is a case about the commission of war crimes by private actors who violated state, federal, and international law,” he added, pointing out, crucially, that the Circuit Court’s holding “has eviscerated one of the most effective means of deterring them from violating the law.”

In response to the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the case, which was largely ignored in the mainstream US media, Human Rights First issued a press release deploring the decision, and noting the unusual circumstances that preceded the decision, whereby, “[b]efore deciding whether or not to hear the case, the Supreme Court asked the US government, which is not a party to the suit, its opinion on the case,” and that the government, “[w]hile noting the shortcomings of the appellate court’s ruling … recommended that the Court should decline to hear the case, effectively denying victims a remedy.”

In a specific criticism of the Supreme Court decision, which I endorse fully, Gabor Rona stated:

Last week on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, President Obama proclaimed that the United States “will remain a leader in the effort to end torture around the world and to address the needs of torture victims.” Nothing undermines the credibility of the United States as a voice for human rights and for respect for the rule of law more than its hypocritical dismissal of the suffering of torture victims at the hands of the US government and its agents.

Note: Also see Human Rights First’s amicus brief arguing that the decision by the D.C. Circuit to immunize the criminal conduct of private military contractors is incompatible with the United States’ international legal obligations, and Human Rights First’s letter to the Acting Solicitor General, in March this year, urging the government to advise the Court to hear the case and reverse the decision that denies victims a remedy.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As the groups point out, these individuals — who include Sgt. Joe Darby, former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora, Col. Morris Davis, Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld and former CIA Inspector General John Helgersen — upheld America’s values and its laws when the Bush administration had moved over to the “dark side” embraced by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and their contributions deserve to be officially acknowledged, especially as others who actively contributed to the illegal and immoral torture program were rewarded by President Bush.

Obviously, the elephant in the room, when it comes to asking President Obama to honor those who publicly opposed the Bush administration’s torture program, is that this should also be accompanied by a call for the officials who authorized the program (up to and including President Bush, who boasted about authorizing waterboarding — a crime — in his autobiography last year) or attempted to justify the torture program (like John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who wrote and approved what are now known as the “torture memos”) to be prosecuted according to the US federal anti-torture statute.

However, while I regard this as a serious omission, I’m prepared to endorse this campaign, as it is obviously designed to insert a resounding anti-torture message into the mainstream by praising those patriotic Americans who opposed torture rather than through the more confrontational means of demanding that the President — or his Attorney General — fulfil their obligations under the anti-torture statute and the UN Convention Against Torture. It is wrong that anyone should have to tiptoe around this issue, but then America, here and now, rocked by President Obama’s lack of courage and by the mad wailing of his unprincipled and mostly Republican detractors, is not a sane place.

I’m cross-posting below the letter, a follow-up article by the ACLU, telling more of the stories of those who resisted the Bush administration’s lawlessness, and an op-ed from the New York Times, by Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the ACLU, and Larry Siems, director of the “Freedom to Write” program at the PEN American Center, which kick-started the entire process.

Please note that you too can be involved, by visiting this page and signing the petition to President Obama. Whether you are in the US or anywhere else in the world, please consider adding your name to those calling for President Obama to acknowledge those who shone a light for justice in the darkest hours of America’s recent history.

The letter to President Obama

June 16, 2011

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Obama:

We were among the many Americans who strongly supported your executive order prohibiting American personnel from using torture. As you said when you issued the executive order in January 2009 and again at the National Archives in May 2009, torture is inconsistent with our laws and our values and counterproductive as a matter of national security policy.

We are writing to you now to urge you formally to honor the soldiers and public servants who, when our nation went off course, stayed true to our nation’s most fundamental ideals. Honoring these brave men and women would be important in any circumstances, but it is especially crucial now because some have used your administration’s success in locating Osama bin Laden to reopen the debate about torture and to propose that the United States should once again adopt torture as a method of gathering intelligence. Formally commending those who rejected torture would send a necessary message that torture is — and will always be — inconsistent with who we are as a nation.

In your remarks at the National Archives, you reflected on the United States’ response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001. You said, rightly, that “all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight.” Perhaps worst of all, as you observed, “during this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens — fell silent.”

Not everyone remained silent. As advocates from the ACLU and PEN American Center recently observed, “[t]hroughout the military, and throughout the government, brave men and women reported abuse, challenged interrogation directives that permitted abuse, and refused to participate in an interrogation and detention program that they believed to be unwise, unlawful and immoral.”

There were soldiers and government employees alike that recognized — as you did — that in using torture not only had we “failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions” and “failed to use our values as a compass,” but that we had compromised the security we sought to protect.

We owe a debt to the public servants who rejected torture. The US government has a long history of honoring the brave acts of our soldiers and public servants who have courageously taken a stand to preserve our government’s integrity and American values. Recognizing those who opposed the violation of the most fundamental humane treatment standards would send a message to current government personnel across all agencies that they have a personal responsibility to ensure that torture prohibitions are upheld. Today, as voices are raised once again in support of torture, your administration should reinforce the public’s understanding that our national values require a complete rejection of prisoner abuse.

Honoring those who stood up against cruelty would not exhaust our national responsibility to reckon with the abuses that were committed in our name, but it would be a significant step, and a crucial one. By officially acknowledging those public servants who safeguarded our principles even as fear caused us to compromise our commitments, your administration would send a clear message to all Americans about who we are and what we stand for as a nation.

Sincerely,

American Civil Liberties Union
Amnesty International, USA
Center for Victims of Torture
Human Rights First
Human Rights Watch
National Religious Campaign Against Torture
Open Society Foundations
PEN American Center
Physicians for Human Rights
The Rutherford Institute

In an accompanying article, the ACLU spelled out who some of the principled individuals are who refused to pt their allegiance to the President above their allegiance to the Constitution.

Honor Those Who Said “No” To Torture

President Obama has disavowed torture, but he has been reluctant to examine the Bush administration’s abusive interrogation practices. By refusing to examine the past, we betray the public servants who risked so much to reverse what they knew was a disastrous and shameful course.

These courageous individuals include:

Sgt. Joe Darby is former Army Reservist best known as the Abu Ghraib whistleblower. Then 24-year-old Darby was serving in Iraq when he discovered a set of photographs showing other members of his company torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery anguished him, but ultimately he burned the photos onto a CD and delivered it with an anonymous letter to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Celebrated by some, and threatened with death by others, Darby has said that he “never regretted for one second” turning in the photographs.

Former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora led an effort inside the Department of Defense to oppose legal theories put forward by Justice Department lawyers that justified the use of coercive interrogation techniques. Mora argued that the techniques were ineffective and unlawful.

Col. Morris Davis, an Air Force officer and lawyer, was appointed to serve as the third Chief Prosecutor in the Guantánamo military commissions system. Col. Davis made clear that he would never permit the introduction of evidence extracted through waterboarding and insisted that the proceedings be transparent. Col. Davis resigned from his post in 2007 [after he was placed in a chain of command under Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes ii, who had played a role in introducing and defending the torture program, and who wanted information derived through the use torture to be used in the military commissions].

Lt. Col. V. Stuart Couch, a veteran Marine pilot and prosecutor, volunteered to return to active duty to help achieve justice for a fellow Marine who had been co-pilot on the second plane that struck the World Trade Center. A self-identified evangelical Christian, Couch ultimately decided he could not seek a conviction based on statements obtained through torture [in the case of Mohamedou Ould Slahi], stating that the abuse violated basic religious precepts of the dignity of every human being.

Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld was the lead prosecutor in the military commissions case against detainee Mohammed Jawad, who was a teenager when he was captured in Afghanistan. After learning about the abuse and torture that Jawad was subject to in custody, Vandeveld decided he could no longer continue with the case. He later filed an affidavit in support of the child prisoner’s case, referring to himself as Jawad’s “former prosecutor and now-repentant persecutor.”

Former CIA Inspector General John Helgersen wrote a meticulously researched report [PDF] documenting some of the abuses that had taken place in CIA prisons, questioning the legality of the policies that had led to the abuse, and characterizing some of the agency’s activities as inhumane.

So far, our official history has honored only those who approved torture, not the courageous men and women who rejected it. For example:

George J. Tenet, former CIA director who signed off on torture, was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Bush.

Geoffrey D. Miller, a retired United States Army Major General who oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-valorous military and civilian decoration of the United States military.

Steven Bradbury, a former Justice Department lawyer responsible for some of the infamous “torture memos,” received awards from the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Agency.

Top officials of the Bush Administration approved the torture of prisoners, but brave men and women throughout the military and the government challenged the policies, called out abuses, and worked to end the use of coerced evidence. These courageous individuals should be honored for their integrity and their commitment to real American values.

Honoring Those Who Said No
By Jameel Jafeer and Larry Seims, New York Times, April 27, 2011

In January 2004, Spec. Joseph M. Darby, a 24-year-old Army reservist in Iraq, discovered a set of photographs showing other members of his company torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. The discovery anguished him, and he struggled over how to respond. “I had the choice between what I knew was morally right, and my loyalty to other soldiers,” he recalled later. “I couldn’t have it both ways.”

So he copied the photographs onto a CD, sealed it in an envelope, and delivered the envelope and an anonymous letter to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Three months later — seven years ago today — the photographs were published. Specialist Darby soon found himself the target of death threats, but he had no regrets. Testifying at a pretrial hearing for a fellow soldier, he said that the abuse “violated everything I personally believed in and all I’d been taught about the rules of war.”

He was not alone. Throughout the military, and throughout the government, brave men and women reported abuse, challenged interrogation directives that permitted abuse, and refused to participate in an interrogation and detention program that they believed to be unwise, unlawful and immoral. The Bush administration’s most senior officials expressly approved the torture of prisoners, but there was dissent in every agency, and at every level.

There are many things the Obama administration could do to repair some of the damage done by the last administration, but among the simplest and most urgent is this: It could recognize and honor the public servants who rejected torture.

In the thousands of pages that have been made public about the detention and interrogation program, we hear the voices of the prisoners who were tortured and the voices of those who inflicted their suffering. But we also hear the voices of the many Americans who said no.

Some of these voices belong to people whose names have been redacted from the public record. In Afghanistan, soldiers and contractors recoiled at interrogation techniques they witnessed. After seeing a prisoner beaten by a mysterious special forces team, one interpreter filed an official complaint. “I was very upset that such a thing could happen,” she wrote. “I take my responsibilities as an interrogator and as a human being very seriously.”

Similarly, after Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told interrogators that they could hold Guantánamo prisoners in “stress positions,” barrage them with strobe lights and loud music, and hold them in freezing-cold cells, FBI agents at the naval base refused to participate in the interrogations and complained to FBI headquarters.

But some of the names we know. When Alberto J. Mora, the Navy’s general counsel, learned of the interrogation directive that Mr. Rumsfeld issued at Guantánamo, he campaigned to have it revoked, arguing that it was “unlawful and unworthy of the military services.” Guantánamo prosecutors resigned rather than present cases founded on coerced evidence. One, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch of the Marines, said the abuse violated basic religious precepts of human dignity. Another, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld of the Army, filed an affidavit in support of the child prisoner he had been assigned to prosecute.

There were dissenters even within the CIA. Early in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began an investigation after agents in the field expressed concern that the agency’s secret-site interrogations “might involve violations of human rights.” Mr. Helgerson, a 30-year agency veteran, was himself a kind of dissenter: in 2004 he sent the agency a meticulously researched report documenting some of the abuses that had taken place in CIA-run prisons, questioning the wisdom and legality of the policies that had led to those abuses, and characterizing some of the agency’s activities as inhumane. Without his investigation and report, the torture program might still be operating today.

Thus far, though, our official history has honored only those who approved torture, not those who rejected it. In December 2004, as the leadership of the CIA was debating whether to destroy videotapes of prisoners being waterboarded in the agency’s secret prisons, President Bush bestowed the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director who had signed off on the torture sessions. In 2006, the Army major general who oversaw the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo was given the Distinguished Service Medal. One of the lawyers responsible for the Bush administration’s “torture memos” received awards from the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the National Security Agency.

President Obama has disavowed torture, but he has been unenthusiastic about examining the last administration’s interrogation policies. He has said the country should look to the future rather than the past. But averting our eyes from recent history means not only that we fail in our legal and moral duty to provide redress to victims of torture, but also that we betray the public servants who risked so much to reverse what they knew was a disastrous and shameful course.

Those who stayed true to our values and stood up against cruelty are worthy of a wide range of civilian and military commendations, up to and including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Honoring them is a way of encouraging the best in our public servants, now and in the future. It is also a way of honoring the best in ourselves.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.