Mission & Justice

Ian Cobain; 30/4/08

Britain’s Security Service, MI5, has been accused of “outsourcing” the torture of British citizens to a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency in an attempt to obtain information about terrorist plots and to secure convictions against al-Qaeda suspects. A number of British terrorism suspects who have been arrested in Pakistan at the request of British authorities say their interrogation by Security Service officers, shortly after brutal torture at the hands of agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), has convinced them that MI5 colluded in the mistreatment. Those men have given detailed accounts of their alleged ordeals at the hands of the ISI over the past four years. Some of them appear to have been taken to the same secret interrogation centre in Rawalpindi, where they say they were repeatedly tortured before being questioned by MI5.

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Mark Mazzetti; 28/4/08
USA Intelligence operatives trying to thwart terrorist attacks can legally use interrogation methods prohibited under international law, the US Justice Department has told Congress. The legal interpretation, outlined in recent letters, sheds new light on the still secret rules for interrogations by the CIA. It shows that the Administration is arguing that the boundaries for interrogations should be subject to some latitude, even under an executive order that President George Bush said meant that the CIA would comply with international strictures against harsh treatment of detainees. The Geneva Convention prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity”, but a letter sent by the Justice Department to Congress on March 5 makes clear that the Administration has not drawn a precise line in deciding which interrogation methods would violate that standard and is reserving the right to make case-by-case judgements.

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Scott Horton; 24/4/08

John C. Yoo likes the limelight, but it’s causing him some grief. Of the half-dozen lawyers who played important roles in a Bush administration decision to legalize the use of highly coercive interrogation techniques, only Yoo has emerged as the public face — and target — related to the policy. In 2002 and 2003, Yoo was second in command at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and wrote two memos, one for Alberto R. Gonzales and one for the Pentagon, that provided broad legal authority for the use of extreme measures in the questioning of wartime detainees. Yoo is now a tenured professor at Boalt Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Recently, the National Lawyers Guild launched a campaign to have him fired because of his role in the torture issue. If Yoo were fired on the strength of a public outcry about his ideas on torture, it could send a chill through academia.

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23/4/08

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle. “I’d fall asleep [after the shot],” Mr Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by US forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his lawyer at the military prison in Cuba. After being roused, Mr Nusairi eventually did talk, giving US officials what he later described as a made-up confession to get some peace. “I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.’ ”

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Jonathan Power; 18/4/08

If the US prosecution system weren’t so generally competent, I would advocate referring the US to the International Criminal Court so that senior figures in the Bush administration could be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity, in particular the use of torture. But it is competent, although it has been hamstrung by the clever legal footwork of the Bush administration, plus the use of the presidential veto - as with the recent veto of legislation that would have required the CIA and all intelligence services to abide by the restrictions contained in the US Army Field Manual on holding and interrogating prisoners. We all know that the US practices torture against terrorist suspects - water boarding or simulated drowning is clearly that - and we all know that when a new president is elected, given the clear statements of the remaining three candidates, the practice will stop. What we don’t know is if a new president will have the guts to open the windows in the Justice Department and allow the fresh air of the rule of law to blow into every corner.

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Akiva Eldar;14/4/08

Former United States president Jimmy Carter, who arrived in Israel Sunday, rejects the criticism he’s been subjected to over his planned meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. According to Carter, peace cannot be achieved without talking to all the relevant people, and he will use the meeting to promote efforts to release Gilad Shalit and to uncover the fate of soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser. Carter told Haaretz Sunday in an exclusive interview that he intends to check Meshal’s willingness to accept the Arab League peace initiative. Carter says that acceptance of this plan by Hamas would be a very positive step. Carter said ignoring a large segment of the Palestinian people would make it impossible to achieve peace.

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11/4/08

It is hard to figure why exactly Human Rights Watch (HRW) chose to submit its report entitled “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan” now. The report covers the period between 2001 and 2004. Surely HRW has more up-to-date reports on the human rights situation in the country; dwelling on past accusations which were thoroughly investigated at the time is odd, to say the least. Amnesty International submitted a similar report on the subject in 2006, alleging that Jordan was a “central hub” of secret detention facilities serving in past the so-called US rendition programme. There were repeated allegations during that period that Jordan harbours secret jails to interrogate and incarcerate people accused of committing acts of terrorism. Some human rights NGOs, both local and international, made these charges only to be proven wrong upon closer scrutiny. The National Centre for Human Rights, a well-respected independent human rights watchdog in the country, did go to a great extent to investigate the charges; it discovered there were no secret detention facilities but premises serving national or foreign purposes.

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12/4/08

George Bush has admitted that senior US officials including Dick Cheney had approved CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on key al-Qaeda suspects. The US president told ABC News there was no problem with using the methods and that legal advice the government received allowed the interrogations. “We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it. And, no, I didn’t have any problem at all trying to find out what Khaled Sheikh Mohammed knew,” Bush said on Friday. The CIA has admitted using waterboarding on Mohammed, reportedly al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, who later confessed to planning the September 11 2001 attacks on New York.

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3/3/08

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture says he has credible evidence that the US used a British territory for the secret detention and transportation of terror suspects. Manfred Nowak’s assertion contradicts statements by the UK and US governments that Diego Garcia island was used merely as a refuelling stop for “renditions”. Nowak said on Sunday that he had received information about detentions on the British island from multiple sources. He said detainees and other sources had told him “quite a long time ago” that suspects were sent to the remote outpost and kept there between 2002 and 2003

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