Torture Comes Home

Ice is using CIA torture techniques against detainees at Alligator Alcatraz, and possibly other immigration detention centers.

We are not talking about water boarding, (yet), but rather locking people in tiny boxes for hours on end.

One of the most horrific torture methods that the CIA employed in its post-9/11 incommunicado "black site" torture chambers was the Confinement Box.

Not many detainees in CIA custody experienced the Box. The most prominent of them is the man known as Abu Zubaydah, the first CIA detainee post-9/11 and someone the agency used as a guinea pig for all who came into their custody later. What follows is not pleasant reading.

For 20 days in August of 2002, after the Justice Department approved a proposed CIA menu of torture including something it called "cramped confinement," Abu Zubaydah was subjected to what the Senate intelligence committee's 2014 inquiry called "enhanced interrogation techniques on a near 24-hour-per-day basis." While the intensive waterboarding the CIA visited upon Abu Zubaydah has forevermore defined whatever passes for the popular understanding of his torture, the waterboarding was by no means the limit of what the CIA did to him.

On his first day of the August torture, after agency torturers slammed Abu Zubaydah's head against a concrete wall, they removed his hood "and had Abu Zubaydah watch while a large confinement box was brought into the cell and laid on the floor." A CIA cable records that they placed the box on the floor of the interrogation room "so as to appear [to be] a coffin." No one can misinterpret that message. But because the CIA was interested in driving the point home, its personnel at the Thailand black site known as Catseye or Detention Site Green "told Abu Zubaydah that the only way he would leave the facility was in the coffin-shaped confinement box."

A CIA medical officer—don't be fooled by the title into thinking they were there to help the detainees—cabled that Abu Zubaydah's liturgy of torture "progress[ed] quickly to the water board after large box, walling and small box periods." ("Walling" is using a rolled-up towel, positioned behind someone's neck and held on either side by someone in front of them, to slam someone's head into a wall.) The large box was the coffin. According to the Senate report, during those twenty days, "Abu Zubaydah spent a total of 266 hours (11 days, 2 hours) in the large (coffin size) confinement box and 29 hours in a small confinement box, which had a width of 21 inches, a depth of 2.5 feet, and a height of 2.5 feet."

………

I say all this because the following description appears in an Amnesty International report released Friday into the conditions of confinement for migrants at Alligator Alcatraz:
The four men interviewed by Amnesty International, as well as Florida-based organizations, told the organization about the ‘box’, described as a 2x2 foot cage-like structure located outside in the yard of “Alligator Alcatraz” where individuals are sent for punishment. Individuals are put in the ‘box’, their hands are shackled and their feet are attached to restraints on the ground. They are unable to sit down or move positions, and are forced to remain there for hours in the heat with hardly any water or protection from the sun, heat and insects. According to a man seeking safety, “People ended up in the ‘box’ just for asking the guards for anything. I saw a guy who was put in it for an entire day.”

A "2x2 cage-like structure… [an] extremely small space that prevents sitting, lying or changing position" has dimensions startlingly reminiscent of those the Senate documented in the black sites. The major difference is that in Florida, the Small Box is exposed to the elements and constructed as a barred cage, whereas in Catseye, it was a closed structure inside the larger closed structure of the black site. And in Florida, the box is used as punishment. According to one of the Alligator Alcatraz survivors in the Amnesty report, people were put into the box simply for alerting the guards to someone's need for medication. "They were taken to 'the box' and punished for trying to help me," the person told Amnesty.

………

Here we have Florida jailers using CIA-pedigreed torture techniques on migrants accused of being in the country without proper authorization, a civil, not criminal, violation. I have many questions about whose idea it was to import the confinement box to Alligator Alcatraz. But in the absence of answers to them at present, I submit to you that its appearance here, structurally speaking, is the direct result of there being no criminal or even substantial political penalties for the architects of the torture program, either at Langley or within the Bush administration. When there is no consequence for torture, torture will persist, going into abeyance—at most—until politically empowered sadists reach for a tool of domination. The lack of consequence ensures it is a matter of time before people who owe their positions of authority to declarations that they seek to dehumanize the vulnerable play a sick game of Well, if we did this to these Terrorists there, why not to these other Criminals here…

(emphasis original)

Every last one of these motherfuckers need to spend the rest of their lives in a 2 foot by 2 fit box. 

Just F%$#ing Shoot Me

I have an ear worm, the Chipmunks Christmas Song.

If I have to suffer, so do you.

I Hate this World

I just heard about, "Monkey Crush Videos."

Don't click through.

Don't Google it. 

If you hear someone talking about it, rat them out to the local police, the FBI, the ASPCA, and anyone else you could possibly imagine.

Human beings are horrible.

It Must Be Election Season

After two decades of dysfunctional, and possibly illegal proceedings at Guantánamo Bay, authorities cut a plea deal with three of the alleged leaders of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Lloyd Austin has revoked the deal.

I have no doubt that the people in question are guilty as hell, but it is also true that the proceedings, both in the sham courts at Gitmo and before that in the CIA torture sites, have so polluted the proceedings that no credible trial is possible.

Unfortunately, because someone is concerned about the inevitable attack ads, they only possibility for a resolution has been unceremoniously dumped:

The US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, has revoked a plea deal for the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and two other defendants, reinstating them as death-penalty cases, according to a memo sent to Susan Escallier, who is overseeing the war court proceedings.

The short-lived deal came 16 years after prosecution of the three men began.

On Wednesday, Escallier announced that she signed a deal with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two of his accomplices, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarak Bin ‘Attash and Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi. Defense lawyers had requested that the men receive life sentences in exchange for the guilty pleas.

In Friday’s memo, Austin argued that due to the “significance of the decision to enter into pre-trial agreements with the accused in the above-referenced case, responsibility for such a decision should rest with me as the superior convening authority”.

………

News of the original plea deal elicited sharp criticism from Republican lawmakers, including Mitch McConnell and JD Vance, who decried the deal, and the New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who accused the Biden-Harris administration of betraying the American people.

This is simply cowardice.

Justice Denied

Following a jury deadlock, a mistrial has been declared in the lawsuit against the contractor CACI for torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Our military tortured people there, and CACI requested the torture, but some of the jurors thought that CACI was indemnified through the, "Borrowed Servant Doctrine," which in this case means an employment leasing agency is not responsible for damages caused by those employees under the direction of their clients.

So, CACI was claiming that the Army ordered them to cooperate with torture, and since the Army has sovereign immunity, no one can get sued.

As Joseph Heller might have put it, "Catch 22."

A judge declared a mistrial Thursday after a jury said it was deadlocked and could not reach a verdict in the trial of a military contractor accused of contributing to the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq two decades ago.

The mistrial came in the jury’s eighth day of deliberations. The deliberations went far longer than the trial itself.

The eight-member civil jury in Alexandria deadlocked on accusations the civilian interrogators who were supplied to the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 had conspired with soldiers there to abuse detainees as a means of “softening them up” for questioning.

The trial was the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors in the 20 years since photos of detainee mistreatment — accompanied by smiling U.S. soldiers inflicting the abuse — shocked the world during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Reston, Virginia-based CACI had argued that it wasn’t complicit in the detainees’ abuse. It said that its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case and that any liability for their mistreatment belonged to the government, not CACI.

Multiple jurors told The Associated Press that a majority of the jury sided with the plaintiffs, but they declined to give an exact numerical breakdown among the eight-member panel.

The jury sent out a note Wednesday afternoon saying it was deadlocked, and indicating in particular that it was hung up on a legal principle known as the “borrowed servants” doctrine.

CACI, as one of its defenses, has argued it shouldn’t be liable for any misdeeds by its employees if they were under the control and direction of the Army.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers tried to bar CACI from making that argument at trial, but Brinkema allowed the jury to consider it.

Because, of course she did.

The fix was in.

………

During the trial that began April 15, lawyers for the three plaintiffs argued that CACI was liable for their mistreatment even if they couldn’t prove that CACI’s interrogators were the ones who directly inflicted the abuse.

They argued that the interrogators had entered into a conspiracy with the military police who inflicted the abuse by instructing soldiers to “soften up” detainees for questioning.

The evidence included reports from two retired Army generals, who documented the abuse and concluded that multiple CACI interrogators were complicit in the abuse.

Those reports concluded that one of the interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, lied to investigators about his conduct, and that he likely instructed soldiers to mistreat detainees and used dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.

………

CACI officials initially had serious doubts about his ability to work as an interrogator, according to evidence introduced at trial. An email sent by CACI official Tom Howard before the company sent interrogators to Iraq described Stefanowicz as a “NO-GO for filling an interrogator position.”

CACI initially sent Stefanowicz over to Iraq not as an interrogator but as a screener, but he testified that the Army — desperately short of interrogators at a prison with a rapidly expanding population — promoted him to interrogator within a day of his arrival.

Trial evidence showed that CACI defended the work of another of its interrogators, Dan Johnson, even after the Army sought his dismissal when photos of the Abu Ghraib abuse became public, and one of the photos showed Johnson questioning a detainee in a crouched position that Army investigators determined to be an unauthorized stress position.

You know the old saying, "No justice, no peace, know justice, know peace."

Unless and until the senior figures who directed and in many profited from torture are held to account, those who follow them will be encouraged to engage in similar malfeasance.

No Accountability

We now have testimoney that Gina Haspel personally supervised torture at CIA black sites.

She was director of the CIA for 3 years after this, and probably still has the highest level security clearance. 

The fact that there are never any consequences for the our elites is corrosive to our society:

During Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to become director of the C.I.A. in 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein asked her if she had overseen the interrogations of a Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, which included the use of a waterboard.

Ms. Haspel declined to answer, saying it was part of her classified career.

While there has been reporting about her oversight of a C.I.A. black site in Thailand where Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded, and where Ms. Haspel wrote or authorized memos about his torture, the precise details of her work as the chief of base, the C.I.A. officer who oversaw the prison, have been shrouded in official secrecy.

But testimony at a hearing last month in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, included a revelation about the former C.I.A. director’s long and secretive career. James E. Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the agency’s interrogation program, testified that the chief of base at the time, whom he referred to as Z9A in accordance with court rules, watched while he and a teammate subjected Mr. Nashiri to “enhanced interrogation” that included waterboarding at the black site.

Z9A is the code name used in court for Ms. Haspel.

………

Defense teams have been asking military judges to exclude certain evidence from the war crimes trials of accused Qaeda operatives as tainted by not just torture but also cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. In May, that meant revisiting what happened nearly 20 years ago at the secret prison in Thailand.

………

It was previously known that by the time Mr. Nashiri was waterboarded in late 2002, Ms. Haspel had taken over as the chief of base at the secret prison in Thailand. It has also been reported that she drafted cables relating what happened to Mr. Nashiri and what was learned during his interrogations and debriefings.

But Dr. Mitchell’s testimony went further. He testified that the chief of base observed the sessions, though she did not participate in them.

The law firm that employs Ms. Haspel, King & Spalding L.L.P., declined to comment and referred questions to the C.I.A., which also declined to comment.

………

And although Ms. Haspel’s role as chief of base at the black site in Thailand is widely known, it is still considered a state secret.

………

At her confirmation hearing, Ms. Haspel pledged not to set up any similar interrogation programs.

Yeah, I guess that THAT makes everything OK.  (Not)

She should be in jail, not earning some obscene pay from one of the largest law firms in the world.

CIA Torture Gets Even More Deplorable

It appears that the CIA brought agents in to torture Ammar Al-Baluchi as a training aid.

This is akin to people on the illegal dog-fighting circuit using, "Bait Dogs" to train their dogs to to maul other dogs.

It seems the everyone wanted to be Jack Bauer:

While in the CIA's Lithuania black site, Ammar al-Baluchi had a conversation with an Agency torturer identified in legal documents as NZ7. It was 2005, about two years after the most physically excruciating period of al-Baluchi's torture, which took place inside the total darkness of the CIA prison in Afghanistan known variously as Cobalt and the Salt Pit. After all this time, al-Baluchi had a suspicion.

He voiced it cautiously. Long after that period of acute torture, al-Baluchi repeatedly told his captors that he remained "consumed by fear" that it could return at any moment. Al-Baluchi assured NZ7 that he knew he was being "irrational," according to a never-before-seen CIA inspector general report, but "Ammar described to him his concern that he was being used as an experiment."

As an example, al-Baluchi recounted that when he had been sent to the black site in Vilnius—one of at least five places the CIA caged him—"he was afraid to complain about a pressure sore on his nose." He explained to NZ7 "he was afraid Agency officers had caused it purposely to see what his reaction would be."

The CIA inspector general couldn't corroborate that. But its 2008 study, "Report of the CIA Inspector General Regarding Allegations of Torture Made by Ammar al-Baluchi," found much to validate al-Baluchi's suspicions that the CIA was experimenting on him.

That report came closer than any contemporary CIA document I have ever seen to conceding both that the agency tortured someone and that it was wrong to do so. FOREVER WARS is publishing this extraordinary document today for the first time.

"We now know that the CIA's brutalization of Ammar at the black sites was secretly condemned by the Agency itself," said Alka Pradhan, one of al-Baluchi's military-commission attorneys. "But it didn't stop the U.S. government from holding him in a CIA facility at Guantanamo, and trying to execute him using evidence derived from that very same treatment."

………

Innocent men were tortured in black sites. Ammar al-Baluchi, born Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and a nephew of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, is not one of them. When the Pakistani authorities first detained him, their rapport-based interrogation got him to say that he was part of a plan to attack the U.S. consulate in Karachi. That makes it all the more extraordinary for the CIA inspector general to criticize not only his torture but the very basis for his presence in CIA custody.

According to the timeline presented in the 2008 inspector general report, checked against the 2014 Senate intelligence committee torture report, the Pakistanis detained al-Baluchi on April 29, 2003. Redactions to the inspector general report make it difficult to determine when exactly the CIA rendered him to Cobalt, but according to the Senate report, it was likely May 17, the date the Senate determined that his torture began. The inspector general wrote that "Agency officers were determined to render Ammar and use EITs on him," using an acronym for the CIA's propagandistic euphemism "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." At Cobalt, they tortured al-Baluchi "immediately upon his arrival," the inspector general found. The information he had already given the Pakistanis "made little difference to his circumstances."

Once al-Baluchi arrived at Cobalt—we know it was Cobalt because the inspector general describes the site as enveloped in "total darkness, because there was no lighting in the cells," matching known descriptions of Cobalt—"each of the interrogators NX2 was training used each of the measures on Ammar in order to gain their certification." An interrogator identified as SG1 told the inspector general that "the goal was for NX2 to observe the early 2003 class members employ EITs during an actual interrogation, such as Ammar's, and then to certify class members as interrogators."

Among the interrogation techniques formally approved that January by CIA Director George Tenet were "slaps" to detainees' faces and abdomens. Interrogators interviewed by the inspector general expressed ambivalence about what they actually were in practice. It seems that at least some CIA interrogators experienced cognitive dissonance stemming from their own propaganda about how they weren't torturers: "X7Q [another interrogator] stated that 'no one was beaten mercilessly' and 'I always tried to do the right thing' or 'what was expected.' SG1 opined that Ammar could have thought the facial and abdominal slaps were beatings, even though they were approved EITs." Even though.

………

Sometime in mid-2003, the torture prompted al-Baluchi to experience what appears to have been a psychotic break. "The cable indicated Ammar told [interrogator] X3L that, while he was undergoing standing sleep deprivation, he overheard English-speaking interrogators beat, torture and finally murder his friend/wife Aafia [Siddique] and her family, including her infant child," the report states. A "debriefer" who was with al-Baluchi at multiple black sites over the years told the inspector general that he "had major psychological issues."

………

NX2 clashed with one of the architects of the torture program, CIA contractor, psychologist, and real-life mad scientist James Mitchell. In his memoir, and confirmed by sworn testimony at Guantanamo Bay in January 2020, Mitchell identified NX2 as "the New Sheriff," who marginalized Mitchell and took over interrogations at Cobalt. "Ammar's assertion that an Agency officer—a man, [redacted] (sic)—gave him 'psychosomatic attacks' probably relates to interrogator NX2's conduct toward him and may have some justification," the inspector general concluded. The New Sheriff, the report recounts, became a rare example of a CIA officer forced out of the torture program—though never prosecuted—for his "exuberant" approach to his task. He is believed to be the late Charlie Wise, who helped the right-wing Contras torture Nicaraguans.

………

I did not have the inspector general report leaked to me. It appeared on Thursday in a federal court filing concerning al-Baluchi's case. There are significant redactions, and a portion of the report did not show up on the case docket at all. But the version of it that was entered into the docket of al-Baluchi's death-penalty military tribunal at Guantanamo around the time of Mitchell's testimony two years ago is almost entirely blacked out. We are publishing it here so it does not languish in obscurity on the legal database PACER.

………

That's because the inspector general described how, formally, both rendition and "enhanced interrogation" were supposed to be operations of last resort. With al-Baluchi, they were first resorts. "The totality of the measures Agency officers used on Ammar almost certainly caused him to interpret the techniques as the 'torture' he has alleged," the inspector general wrote. I've never before seen any CIA documentation, during this period in the agency's history, come this close to a frank admission that it tortured anyone.

Even more astonishing is how scathing the report is about the CIA's justifications for why it needed to render and torture him. "Headquarters' justification for rendering Ammar and using enhanced measures on him was weak," it states bluntly.

………

[Pakistan] captured Ammar and had him in custody – clearly asserting its jurisdiction – so, in custody, he no longer posed "a continuing, serious threat of violence or death to U.S. persons or interests." Then [redacted] ALEC Station [redacted, with a notation 'W87'] [in mid] 2003 told an OIG [office of the inspector general] investigator that since operatives involved in many terrorist plots had been arrested, CTC [the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, which ran the torture] had, in effect, thwarted the operations. As an example, she commented that Ammar had planned, before the [Pakistanis] apprehended him, to attack the U.S. Consulate in [Karachi] (italics added). Headquarters also knew that it was rendering Ammar extra-legally; according to a cable from Headquarters [in early] 2005, "Headquarters understands there are real political consequences for [redacted] in holding [redacted, presumably 'Pakistani'] citizens extra-legally (Italics added).

………

Submission, rather than truth, was the measure of the success of an act of vengeance that the CIA maintains to this day was entirely designed to produce intelligence. It is worth noting that the CIA has an internal rule against human experimentation. Ammar al-Baluchi's experience as "on-the-job practice" for a torture class demonstrates how readily discarded that rule was.

………

Al-Baluchi did not say the same of his interrogators. "They don't know how to analyze and evaluate and make very sound decisions," the report records him telling another detainee in 2006. "[T]hey did not [know] how to start to establish grounds for interrogations in the first place, and the intelligence group did not have experience." To end the torture as fast as possible, he lied to the CIA.

Everyone involved in this, from the torturers to the people at the top of the chain of command, should have been prosecuted, and their clearances stripped, over this.

Instead, they, and their enablers were allowed to get off scot-free, because the worst Constitutional law professor ever™ decided that it was politically expedient to eschew accountability.

We Now Have a First Person Account

Majid Khan, who graduated from Owings Mills High School just down the road from me, went to work for al Qaeda, was captured by the CIA, and tortured, and now at his sentencing hearing, he has revealed in chilling detail his barbaric and cruel treatment at the hands of the US State Security Apparatus.

He has given this statement at his sentencing hearing, and even though the authorities have limited some of the details, this has been something that the government has actively tried to suppress for much of the of his confinement, largely as a part of Barack Obama's whole, "Look forward, not back," bullsh%$.

We really need to hold those who did this accountable, and we need to hold those who prevented accountability accountable as well:

A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account this week of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network.

Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and cruel “enhanced interrogation techniques” that agents used to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.

He spoke about dungeonlike conditions, humiliating stretches of nudity with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in ways that made sleep impossible, and being intentionally nearly drowned in icy cold water in tubs at two sites, once while a C.I.A. interrogator counted down from 10 before water was poured into his nose and mouth.

Soon after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Mr. Khan said, he cooperated with his captors, telling them everything he knew, with the hope of release. “Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he said.

So, like other victims of torture, he said he manufactured tales that his captors wanted to hear: “I lied just to make the abuse stop.”

Mr. Khan offered the dark accounting Thursday evening to a jury of eight U.S. military officers who on Friday deliberated for less than three hours and sentenced him to 26 years in prison, starting from his guilty plea in February 2012.

………

In court on Thursday, Mr. Khan read from a carefully worded 39-page account that did not identify C.I.A. agents or the countries and foreign intelligence agencies that had a role in his secret detention at black sites — information that is protected at the national security court. He expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of radical Islam and Al Qaeda, but also found a way around a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to realize a decade-long ambition to tell the world what U.S. agents had done to him.

The remaining details are at the article, and they are painful to read.

Imagine how painful they were for him to be subject to this barbarity.

None of the people who did this will ever face criminal charges for what they did, and in fact have been promoted and profited from their behavior.  This is an abomination.

How Utterly British

The British Ministry of Devense is saying that it cannot give details on payouts made in response to claims against their troops for torture and abuse because there are too many to count, which is why they want a law passed indemnifying their troops for war crimes.

This is like some twisted take on a Gilbert and Sullivan light opera:

The UK government has received so many complaints from Iraqis who were unlawfully detained and allegedly mistreated by British troops that its defence ministry says it is unable to say how many millions of pounds have been paid to settle the claims.

Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials in London say they can provide approximate figures for the thousands of Iraqis who have lodged complaints against British forces involved in the 2003 US-led invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.

However, they maintain that they cannot disclose how much UK taxpayers’ money has been spent settling their claims, saying that it would take weeks for civil servants to collate the figure.

The department is claiming that it is unable to disclose the sums paid at a time when the UK parliament is about to debate a deeply controversial law which would introduce a partial amnesty for the country’s service personnel who have committed serious crimes - including murder and torture - while serving outside the country.

Known as the Overseas Operation Bill, the proposed new law has alarmed human rights groups, the UK government's political opponents and many ex-soldiers, who fear that it will effectively sanction war crimes by British forces.

………

Even the country’s most senior retired soldier, 81-year-old Field Marshal Charles Guthrie, wrote to the Sunday Times newspaper to warn that the proposed new law would provide room for “de facto decriminalisation of torture”.
Guthrie added that the measures “appear to have been dreamt up by those who have seen too little of the world to understand why the rules of war matter”.

………

Frank Ledwidge, a former army intelligence officer and military historian, warns that the bill - which he calls a “squalid piece of legislation” - could cause more problems than it solves for the MoD and British government ministers.

Ledwidge, who has experience of tracking down war criminals in Bosnia and Kosovo, points out that the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is currently conducting a preliminary investigation into allegations of British war crimes in Iraq, is unlikely to target the interrogators.

“When the ICC does come for us, which it will if this bill is enacted, it won’t be the soldiers they’ll be after,” Ledwidge says. “The men we hunted down in Bosnia were not the trigger-pullers. They were the commanders, the generals and the politicians who sent them and allowed these crimes to happen.”

There are a whole bunch of people who should be in the dock at The Hague for crimes against humanity during the Iraq invasion, and the important ones are the, "Commanders, the generals and the politicians who sent them and allowed these crimes to happen."

Why You Don't Hire or Promote Torturers

Buried in this story is an example of just how toxic CIA torturer Gina Haspel is as head of the CIA.

The CIA torture fetishists are not realists, nor do they show competence or perspective.  Rather, they spend their lives trying to force the world to comply with their own paranoid and twisted version of reality. (Paraphrasing from an online post, whose sourc I cannot find)

Appearing on a video screen was Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, who was monitoring the crisis from the agency’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. In the days before General Suleimani’s death, Ms. Haspel had advised Mr. Trump that the threat the Iranian general presented was greater than the threat of Iran’s response if he was killed, according to current and former American officials. Indeed, Ms. Haspel had predicted the most likely response would be a missile strike from Iran to bases where American troops were deployed, the very situation that appeared to be playing out on Tuesday afternoon.

Though Ms. Haspel took no formal position about whether to kill General Suleimani, officials who listened to her analysis came away with the clear view that the C.I.A. believed that killing him would improve — not weaken — security in the Middle East.

This is why Obama should have jailed CIA torturers instead of promoting them.

Why Are These Folks Not in Jail?

It appears that some schools are routinely fitting disabled students with shock belts.
This is evil beyond belief:

An international body entrusted with upholding human rights across the Americas has called for an immediate ban on the controversial use of electric shocks on severely disabled children in a school outside Boston.

The Judge Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, is believed to be the only school in the world that routinely inflicts high-powered electric shocks as a form of punishment on vulnerable children and adults. About 47 of its students are currently subjected to the “treatment”, which involves individuals being zapped with electric currents far more powerful than those discharged by stun guns.

Disability rights campaigners have tried for decades to stop the practice, which the school’s administrators call “aversive therapy”. So far the institution has managed to fend off all opposition, arguing that electric shocks are an acceptable way of discouraging harmful habits.

Now the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has issued a rare formal notice known as “precautionary measures” that calls for immediate cessation of the electric shocks.

In a seven-page resolution, the Washington-based panel says that the practice poses a “serious impact on the rights” of the vulnerable children at the school, “particularly on their right to personal integrity which may be subjected to a form of torture”.

The commission cites the work in 2013 of the then UN monitor on torture, Juan Méndez, who found JRC’s electric shock technique was a potential violation of the UN convention against torture and other international laws. It also notes several federal agencies and professional groups have called for a ban on “aversive techniques” on grounds they can cause psychological trauma.

They are torturing students, and it must be stopped.

Limitless Corruption on Both Sides of the Aisle

New documents show that notwithstanding her claims to the contrary, Gina Haspel directly supervised waterboarding at a Thailand black site:

In late November 2002, C.I.A. interrogators at a secret prison in Thailand warned a Qaeda suspect that he had to “suffer the consequences of his deception.”

As interrogators splashed water on the chest of the man, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, he pleaded that he was trying to recall more information, according to a newly released C.I.A. cable. As he cried, the cable reports, the “water treatment was applied.”

The “water treatment” was bureaucratic jargon for waterboarding, and 11 newly released top-secret cables from the time that Gina Haspel, now the C.I.A. director, oversaw the base provide at times graphic detail on the techniques the agency used to brutally interrogate Qaeda captives. Agency leaders and officers were racing to uncover what they feared were large-scale plots against the United States in the chaotic months and years after the Sept. 11 attacks.

As the chief of the base, Ms. Haspel would have written or authorized the cables, according to Tom Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a research organization at George Washington University. The cables, obtained by the archive in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, were redacted to eliminate the names of interrogators and C.I.A. officers involved.

ProPublica previously reported on cables from the Thailand black site, which also offered details of the C.I.A.’s methods. Like those documents, the new cables describe the waterboarding of Mr. Nashiri as well as the use of other torture techniques.
………

But the interrogators appear to have ultimately concluded that Mr. Nashiri was not lying. Some of the cables back to headquarters, apparently written by Ms. Haspel, described him as “compliant and cooperative,” according to the 2014 report on the interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Officials at C.I.A. headquarters were displeased by such comments, directing the field officers to stop making such “sweeping statements” about Mr. Nashiri’s compliance. The superiors in Langley, Va., insisted that he knew more than he was saying.

Ms. Haspel arrived to oversee the Thailand black site in late October 2002. The site was shut weeks later, on Dec. 4, 2002.

Needless to say, it is now clear that the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman and ranking member, Richard Burr and Mark Warner, knew it and aided in the coverup, because they clearly had access to these documents, and either refused to look at them or actively suppressed them.

Not a Surprise

What a surprise.

America's international butt-boy, the UK, was hip deep in the US torture program:

British intelligence agencies were involved in the torture and kidnap of terrorism suspects after 9/11, according to two reports by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

The reports published on Thursday amount to one of the most damning indictments of UK intelligence, revealing links to torture and rendition were much more widespread than previously reported.

While there was no evidence of officers directly carrying out physical mistreatment of detainees, the reports say the overseas agency MI6 and the domestic service MI5 were involved in hundreds of torture cases and scores of rendition cases.

The committee says the agencies were aware “at an early point” of the mistreatment of detainees by the US and others. There were two cases in which UK personnel were “party to mistreatment administered by others”. One has been investigated by the Metropolitan police but the other is still to be fully investigated. 

……

The report dealing with the treatment of detainees details a litany of cases of concern, saying: “We have found 13 incidents where UK personnel witnessed at first hand a detainee being mistreated by others, 25 where UK personnel were told by detainees that they had been mistreated by others and 128 incidents recorded where agency officers were told by foreign liaison services about instances of mistreatment. In some cases, these were correctly investigated but this was not consistent.”
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It said in 232 cases UK personnel continued to supply questions or intelligence to other services despite knowledge or suspicion of mistreatment, as well as “198 cases where UK personnel received intelligence from liaison services which had been obtained from detainees who knew they had been mistreated – or with no indication as to how the detainee had been treated but where we consider they should have suspected mistreatment”.

It would be nice if Jack Straw ends up in the dock over this.

It would be nicer if Tony Blair did.

6 Democrats Who Should Never Get Your Votes Ever Again

They are Senators Joe Manchin (WV), Joe Donnelly (IN), Bill Nelson (FL), Heidi Heitkamp (ND), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), and Mark Warner (VA).

Simply put, they just voted to appoint admitted torturer Gina Haspel as head of the CIA, and this is a direct endorsement of torture, and they know it.

This is not about politics.  This is about right and wrong, and they have morally disqualified themselves from any position of authority.

This is an affront to basic human decency:

What's a little harsh interrogation between friends? President Donald Trump's pick Gina Haspel was today voted in by the Senate as the new head of the CIA, despite playing a key part in post-9/11 torture programs under President George W. Bush.

Her role in destroying the CIA's damning torture tapes in earlier years makes her the perfect spy boss for Trump, the President for whom force, secrecy, and lies are solutions to every problem.

Let me reiterate:  Trump does not matter here.  This isn't about Donald Trump, or the Republican Party, or the Easter Bunny.

This is about torture, and this is about rewarding torturers, which these 6 Senators just did.

Note that this was not an empty gesture.  Their votes were crucial to her approval:

Lawmakers approved Haspel’s nomination 54 to 45, with six Democrats voting yes and two Republicans voting no, after the agency launched an unprecedented public relations campaign to bolster Haspel’s chances. She appears to have been helped, too, by some last-minute arm-twisting by former CIA directors John Brennan and Leon Panetta, who contacted at least five of the six Democrats to endorse her bid to join President Trump’s Cabinet, according to people with knowledge of the interactions.

Do the math.  If they had all voted against the torturer, it would have been 48 to 51, if just 5 of them had voted against the torturer, Haspel would still had been rejected by 1 vote.

There is a special place in hell for these cowards.

Spelunking Helmet, the Official Hat of Congressional Democrats

So, now there are two Democrats who are saying that they will vote to confirm torturer Gina Haspel as head of the CIA, Joe Manchin, and Joe Donnelly.

It turns out there is low level of moral depravity that conservative Democrats will affirm out of abject cowardice.

It is also a losing proposition in the long run, when Democrats refuse to stand up for the basic standards, their voters know that they will refuse to stand up for them:

The Senate appears to be moving full speed ahead on confirming Gina Haspel as director of the CIA.

The Intelligence Committee is expected to vote to advance her nomination to the floor during a closed business meeting scheduled for Wednesday morning, and a Saturday morning announcement by Indiana Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly further reduced the suspense.

“I believe that she has learned from the past, and that the CIA under her leadership can help our country confront serious international threats and challenges,” Donnelly said in a statement. “Importantly, Ms. Haspel expressed to me her commitment to be responsive to congressional oversight and to provide her unvarnished assessment — both to members of Congress and the president.”

Donnelly’s office said the Indiana Democrat met Thursday with Haspel, the current acting director of the CIA.

The same night, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Penceappeared together Indiana at a rally in support of Donnelly’s Republican challenger Mike Braun.

During the event, Trump and Pence criticized Donnelly for his voting record, while also pushing him to support the CIA nominee. In his statement, the senator said the support Haspel has received from the intelligence community was an important factor in his decision.

The people in the intelligence community who are supporting her are covering their own asses.

Either they were complicit in torture, or they are interested in sucking up to a woman who they see as being the next head of the CIA, and either their boss, or their client.

The ultimate fault lies with Barack Obama, who should have prosecuted torturers, but instead retained and promoted them.

There is Bad, Really Bad, and ………

So egregiously bad that so bad that the Washington Post editorial board is forced to do the right thing.

It's Gina Haspel wot done it. Between her torture, her aggressive support of torture, and her oleaginous performance before the Senate Intelligence Committee, it was too much for the WaPo editorial board.

I would note that Fred Hiatt's merry band of psychopaths, cheered the invasion of Iraq, destroying Libya, the Whitewater investigation, Bush's purge of US attorneys, privatizing social security, supporting Trump's border wall even as they called it stupid, privatizing education, and letting Richard Cohen near a typewriter.

I had though that there was no limit to their stupid, but Gina Haspel is just a bridge too far for them:

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency, faced a clear test when she appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday. After a 33-year career at the agency, she may be, in many respects, the most qualified person ever nominated to the post, as one Republican senator contended. But she has a dark chapter in her past: her supervision of a secret prison in Thailand where al-Qaeda suspects were tortured, and her subsequent involvement in the destruction of videotapes of that shameful episode.

As Sen. Mark R. Warner (Va.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, made clear from the outset, Ms. Haspel needs to clearly repudiate that record. She must confirm that techniques such as waterboarding — now banned by law — were and are unacceptable, and she must make clear that she will never again accept orders to carry out acts that so clearly violate American moral standards, even if they are ordered by the president and certified by administration lawyers as legal.

Ms. Haspel did not meet that test. She volunteered that the CIA would not on her watch engage in enhanced interrogations; she said she supported the “stricter moral standard” the country had adopted after debating the interrogation program. Pressed by Mr. Warner and several other senators, she eventually said she “would not allow CIA to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal.” What she would not say was that the torture she oversaw was immoral, or that it should not have been done, or that she regretted her own role in it — which, according to senators, included advocating for the program internally.

That ambiguity matters at a time when the United States is led by a president who has cheered for torture, who lacks respect for the rule of law and who demands absolute loyalty from his aides. Unfortunately, it makes it impossible for us, and others for whom the repudiation of torture is a priority, to support Ms. Haspel’s nomination.

The Post's editorial page is the 2^nd most likely to be contradicted on the facts (a close race that the bat sh%$ insane Wall Street Journal editorial board won), but Gina Haspel is too much for them.

Honestly, I did not think that this was possible.

It looks like Gina Haspel is looking to drop out from her nomination as head of the CIA, because she finds it embarrassing that she is a torturer:

Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to become the next CIA director, sought to withdraw her nomination Friday after some White House officials worried that her role in the interrogation of terrorist suspects could prevent her confirmation by the Senate, according to four senior U.S. officials.

Haspel told the White House she was interested in stepping aside if it avoided the spectacle of a brutal confirmation hearing on Wednesday and potential damage to the CIA’s reputation and her own, the officials said. She was summoned to the White House on Friday for a meeting on her history in the CIA’s controversial interrogation program — which employed techniques such as waterboarding that are widely seen as torture — and signaled that she was going to withdraw her nomination. She then returned to CIA headquarters, the officials said.

Taken aback at her stance, senior White House aides, including legislative affairs head Marc Short and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, rushed to Langley, Va., to meet with Haspel at her office late Friday afternoon. Discussions stretched several hours, officials said, and the White House was not entirely sure she would stick with her nomination until Saturday afternoon, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

My guess is that someone on the Senate Intelligence Committee is requesting some highly more documents from the CIA about her record, and she is freaking out.

I'm not sure if I want to see her withdraw, or I want to see her crucified at a confirmation hearing, but both are a positive outcome.

Gina Haspel Will Fit Right In

You hear about the CIA's "MK Ultra" program around the fever swamps of conspiracy theorists, but it actually did exist, and it turns out that it was worse than I could have imagined.

The CIA tortured mental patients in the 1960s under this program:

In the 1950s and 60s, a Montreal hospital subjected psychiatric patients to electroshocks, drug-induced sleep and huge doses of LSD. Families are still grappling with the effects

Sarah Anne Johnson had always known the broad strokes of her maternal grandmother’s story. In 1956, Velma Orlikow checked herself into a renowned Canadian psychiatric hospital, the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, hoping for help with postpartum depression.

She was in and out of the clinic for three years, but instead of improving, her condition deteriorated – and her personality underwent jarring changes.

More than two decades passed before Johnson and her family had an explanation, and it was much stranger than any of them could imagine: in 1977 it emerged that the CIA had been funding experiments in mind-control brainwashing at the institute as part of a North America-wide project known as MK Ultra.

At the time, the US agency was scrambling to deepen its understanding of brainwashing, after a handful of Americans captured during the Korean war had publicly praised communism and denounced the US.

In 1957, this interest brought the agency north of the border, where a Scottish-born psychiatrist, Ewen Cameron, was trying to discover whether doctors could erase a person’s mind and instill new patterns of behaviour.

Orlikow was one of several hundred patients who became unwitting subjects of these experiments in Montreal in the late 1950s and early 60s.

if you are not truly horrified by this, miy might have a future at Langley.

Not Just a Torturer; Torturer in Chief

It turns out that Gina Haspel was the direct supervisor of the whole CIA torture program:

Long before Donald Trump ever nominated Gina Haspel to run the CIA, a memoir from a former CIA top attorney contained a line with the power to do serious damage to her chances.

Haspel’s informal nomination ran into immediate jeopardy last month over her 2002 supervision of the agency’s first secret black-site prison, located in Thailand, where two early detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, were tortured. (She directly ran the black site, though after Zubaydah’s most intense period of torture that year.)

But in his 2014 book, John Rizzo, a longtime senior CIA lawyer, indicated that Haspel was responsible for the incommunicado detention and torture not of two men, but of dozens, potentially. Former intelligence officials interviewed by The Daily Beast have portrayed Haspel’s experience similarly.

………

“Jose installed as his chief of staff an officer from the Counterterrorist Center who had previously run the interrogation program,” Rizzo wrote.

That’s a substantially broader declaration than the history already dogging Haspel, the agency’s deputy director, whom the White House formally nominated as its next CIA director late on Tuesday.

………

Rizzo, who was acting CIA general counsel during much of the time the torture program occurred, insisted that the passage was correct then—and is still right today.

“All I can say is that I stand by everything I wrote in my book about the tapes episode, and no one from the Agency has asked me to correct anything I wrote,” Rizzo told The Daily Beast. He did not answer follow-up questions.

………

This isn’t the first time that legacy has been a problem for Haspel. In 2013, she was unable to take her old boss Rodriguez’s position in 2013. At the time, a knowledgeable former CIA official recalled, there was confusion and surprise that someone with Haspel’s background in torture could have been a credible candidate for such a senior position.

“To the best of my understanding, she ran the interrogation program,” the official said.

“Her becoming director absolutely terrifies me,” continued the former CIA official. “Once I heard her name, I immediately thought, ‘Oh, God.’”

Back then, in a story first reported by The New York Times, Feinstein—then the Senate committee chair—made it clear to then-director John Brennan that she objected to Haspel leading the CIA’s clandestine service. Brennan chose another chief.

It should be noted that Brennan was a big fan of torture and the torturers, and Obama eventually made him head of the CIA.

So much for looking forward, and not back.

“If Ms. Haspel is confirmed, it will send a terrible message to the world broadly, and to the officers of the CIA more superficially,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. “The CIA, and its former officers, are pushing so hard for Ms. Haspel to be director because if she’s confirmed, it essentially exonerates her, the CIA and all of these former senior CIA officials from their involvement in or their defense of the torture program.”

And this final paragraph is why Congress should NEVER approve her as head of the CIA.

Even if the statute or limitations has expired, these are people who did profound and enduring damage to the United States, and they should never EVER hold any sort of clearance ever again, much less become the head of the agency.

And Macedonia Achieves Moral Superiority over the United States

It is admittedly a VERY low bar, but the Balkan nation has apologized for its role in aiding the torture of Khaled El-Masri over a decade ago.

From the US, who tortured him unmercifully for months, crickets:

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) has formally apologized to a man it unlawfully seized, held incommunicado, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency 14 years ago, during the secret CIA rendition and torture program which followed the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

Macedonian security personnel detained Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen, at Macedonia’s border on December 31, 2003, and interrogated him in secret for over three weeks. They then delivered him to CIA agents who flew him to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned for almost four months in inhuman conditions, and then further mistreated him in a notorious CIA facility. In late May, the CIA reverse rendered El-Masri to Europe, and then left him on a roadside in Albania, long after American authorities had concluded that they had mistakenly captured the wrong man.

On December 13, 2012, in a case brought on El-Masri’s behalf by the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found the FYROM in breach of several provisions of the European Convention of Human Rights and awarded compensation of €60,000, which the government subsequently paid.

Now, six years later, in a letter to El-Masri dated March 28, 2018, Macedonia’s minister of foreign affairs, Nikola Dimitrov, has expressed his “sincere apologies and unreserved regrets” for what he described as the “improper conduct of our authorities” in 2004. He also noted the “immeasurable and painful experiences and grave physical and psychological wounds you suffered” as a result.

And the only response of the US, in response to a spectacular bit of incompetence has been to invoke the state secrets privilege in order to prevent his day in court.

Welcome to American exceptionalism.

That sound you hear is Alexis de Tocqueville spinning in his grave at about 10,000 RPM.