War On You: Breaking Alternative News

August 23, 2009

The alleged crimes and abuses carried out under the Bush Administration will take centre stage today with the release of a report detailing brutal CIA interrogations, a document that could trigger criminal investigations later this week.

The 2004 report, which has been suppressed until now, documents in grim detail interrogations of terror suspects at secret CIA “black site” prisons between 2002 and 2004, including mock executions, such as threatening a prisoner with a gun and power drill.

The release of the report by the CIA’s former inspector general comes as Eric Holder, President Obama’s Attorney-General, is expected to make clear whether he will appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged abuse where CIA officials exceeded their legal authority.

The CIA report, which is being made public after a federal judge upheld an appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union for its release, has been read by Mr Holder and will play a significant role in his decision whether to prosecute Bush-era abuses.

He is also investigating several cases of detainees dying in CIA custody.

Any step towards prosecuting Bush-era officials — something Mr Obama has said he is reluctant to do but which is being pushed by liberal Democrats — would provoke ferocious opposition in Congress.

Other documents expected to be released today include memos that former Vice-President Dick Cheney has said prove that harsh interrogation techniques produced valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda.

Mr Cheney said earlier this year that he had seen documents containing evidence that lives had been saved because of “enhanced” interrogations. If such a document emerges today the emotive debate about the effectiveness of torture will be reignited.

The CIA inspector-general’s report claims that the harsh interrogation of terror suspects was ineffective, and produced no valuable intelligence.

According to the report, authored by the spy agency’s former inspector general John L Helgerson, in one case interrogators brought a gun and power drill into a session with Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The Saudi prisoner is alleged to have helped plan and carry out the deadly 2000 al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 US sailors.

He was threatened with the gun and the drill and was told he would be harmed if he did not co-operate, according to the report.

In another episode, a gunshot was fired in a room next to a detainee to make the prisoner believe another suspect had been executed. It is illegal under US torture statutes to threaten a detainee with imminent death.

Mr al-Nashiri was one of three detainees subjected to the technique known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning. Mr Obama has described it as torture and banned the practice.

Democrats are particularly focused on Bush-era Justice Department officials who wrote legal opinions for the CIA that justified techniques including waterboarding, and who claimed that threats of imminent death were legal if they did not cause permanent mental harm.

Mr al-Nashiri’s interrogation sessions were videotaped, but the tapes were destroyed by CIA officials in 2005. A federal prosecutor is now investigating the circusmtances of their destruction.

It also emerged yesterday that for the first time, the Pentagon is notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of detainees being held in two secret camps in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Red Cross has had access to the names of prisoners in nearly all the US military’s detention facilities, except for the two camps in question. They are run by US special forces and are said to hold the most dangerous alleged terror suspects captured on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.