|
|
|
-----------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-----------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
CIA, lies and video tapes
Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:44:27 GMT
By Davood Taabbodi, Press TV, Tehran |
|
The CIA’s destruction of videotapes of the interrogations of Guantanamo prison detainees is widely seen as an act which could lead to criminal charges against its agents.
One of the tapes is believed to have shown CIA agents waterboarding the al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah as retired Central Intelligence Agency field officer, John Kiriakou, told the US network ABC.
He said Zubaydah was waterboarded after refusing to cooperate with the interrogators; the technique made him confess to planned attacks.
In this technique, the prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the level of the feet. Cellophane is wrapped around the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.
The Bush administration, infamous for its involvement in prisoner abuse and torture scandals has decided to dispose of any document that might erupt into a new scandal.
The issue came to public attention in 2004 after prominent American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh decided to publish his article "Torture at Abu Ghraib" in The New Yorker Magazine.
An article about heinous sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners was to be released alongside a number of pictures of horrifying crimes by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib - once the infamous home of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers.
After the US network CBS learned thatThe New Yorker was determined to publish the article and images, it decided to discuss the issue in a 60 Minutes II news report, aired on April 28, 2007.
US officials, from the very beginning, have tried to exonerate themselves from these brutal crimes. They maintain that they were unaware of the sordid activities and portray them as isolated misconduct of low-ranking soldiers.
The most painful point about these detainees is that according to a Red Cross report, 70% to 90% of Iraqis imprisoned during the first year of the Iraq invasion "had been arrested by mistake."
As Hersh wrote in his article "There were several thousand, including women and teenagers, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints.”
This revelation opened a Pandora’s box at the White House.
The news of the American troops' outrageous crimes in Iraq shocked the whole world and dealt a devastating blow to Washington’s so-called aim of exporting freedom and democracy to other countries.
Following the 9/11 scenario, CIA interrogators have been using psychological torture in order to break the spirits and souls of detainees and to elicit information from them.
The Guardian disclosed in February 2007 that the government wants to put Jose Padilla, a former American gang member, on trial for allegedly being involved in anti-government plots. But Padilla's lawyers argue that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by his captors.
Padilla was taken to a navy prison in Charleston South Carolina after he was arrested in May 2002. He was kept in a cell 9 by 7 feet, with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days.
He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctuated the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds.
According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defense. He is convinced that his lawyers are "part of a continuing interrogation program" and sees his captors as protectors.
Unsurprisingly, the prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that "Padilla is competent" and that his treatment is irrelevant.
The article added that the techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantanamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived there. They wear blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and are placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music.
These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of "extraordinary rendition" carried out in CIA facilities throughout the world.
The CIA has been running these detention facilities in various places, including Afghanistan, some of the Arab countries and Europe.
Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the "Prison of Darkness" - tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. "Plenty lost their minds," one former inmate recalled. "I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors."
These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in an American court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus - a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. There is only one reason Padilla's case is different - he is a US citizen.
Human Rights Watch revealed the existence of similar secret prisons in Poland and Romania which also unleashed an international outcry.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to soothe the international outcry after Human Rights Watch revealed the existence of similar secret prisons in these two countries. "The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.
The Washington Post reports the CIA has regularly briefed senior members of the House and Senate intelligence committees on its secret prisons and the interrogation techniques used there since 2002. The lawmakers include four Democrats: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Pelosi, Congress member Jane Harman, Senators Bob Graham and Jay Rockefeller.
CIA officials say the controversial practice of waterboarding was among the techniques on display. Except for one instance, no lawmaker is said to have voiced objection through the course of some thirty private briefings. Democrats and some Republicans have raised increasing criticism of water-boarding, but only after its use became publicly known.
US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, former chief of Abu Ghraib had once said that prisoners under her watch were treated ‘humanely and fairly’.
In an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in December 2003, Karpinski claimed that conditions in the prison were better than even many Iraqi homes.
It seems that lying and hiding the truth are rampant, incurable diseases among US officials, their first reaction in an attempt to save their tattered reputation.
|
|
|
|
|
|