The CIA wasn't the only agency involved in torture of detainees. A newly declassified report by the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that high level Bush officials approved the brutal interrogation techniques used by the military at overseas prisons. So now there's confirmation that the military, not just the CIA CIA were involved, and that Rumsfeld's denials were full of it.

The Senate report documented how some of the techniques used by the military at prisons in Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq — stripping detainees, placing them in “stress positions” or depriving them of sleep — originated in a military program known as Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape, or SERE, intended to train American troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations. [More...]

It's one thing to read the memos. It's another to read how they were executed.

• Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for cooperation.

• Slapping prisoners on the face or abdomen was allowed. So was grabbing them forcefully by the collar or slamming them into a false wall, a technique called "walling" that had a goal of fear more than pain.

Here is the DOJ press release on the four torture memos released today. They are:

• A 18-page memo, dated August 1, 2002, from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

• A 46-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

• A 20-page memo, dated May 10, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

• A 40-page memo, dated May 30, 2005, from Steven Bradbury, Acting Assistant Attorney General, OLC, to John A. Rizzo, General Counsel CIA. [PDF]

Here is the ACLU's press release.

The C.I.A. today announced the closure of overseas CIA prisons for detainees. Private contractors will no longer be involved in interrogating prisoners.

The C.I.A. has never revealed the location of its overseas facilities, but intelligence officials, aviation records and news reports have placed them in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Romania and Jordan, among other countries.

More from CIA Chief Leon Pannetta's statement: [More...]

More prosecutorial misconduct, this time by prosecutors in the case of Guantanamo detainee, Dr. Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi, who brought a habeas petition in federal court. (Background here from our post last week noting that the Government decided to release the Yemeni physician although it's still looking for a country to accept him.)

The Judge issuing the ruling: Emmett Sullivan, the same judge who today threw out Ted Stevens' conviction.

The Justice Department improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a "significant" number of Guantanamo cases, a federal judge has concluded.

The government censored parts of the records, but enough has been made public that it's clear that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated weekly for a serious psychological problem and was questioned about whether he had any suicidal thoughts. The witness provided information in the government's case for detaining Aymen Saeed Batarfi, a Yemeni doctor who the government announced last week it would no longer seek to detain.

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A February, 2007 Red Cross report on the treatment of the 14 high-value detainees held in secret CIA prisons before being transferred to Guantanamo has been released. It's available here (pdf). The report in encrypted so I can't cut and paste excerpts, but the Washington Post has this description of its findings.

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, according a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

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A new report from the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research:

Today Seton Hall Law delivered a report establishing that military officials at the highest levels were aware of the abusive interrogation techniques employed at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay (GTMO), and misled Congress during testimony. In addition, FBI personnel reported that the information obtained from inhumane interrogations was unreliable.

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A federal judge has ruled the detainees at Bagram AFB in Afghanistan can challenge their confinement in U.S. court. The opinion is here (pdf.)

[Judge]Bates noted that the detainees are similar to those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Those detainees won the right to challenge their confinements in federal court under a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year.

....Bates ruled that while the sites were "not identical," the "objective degree of [U.S.] control" was not "appreciably different." Obstacles to resolving the detainees' rights "are not as great as respondents claim," Bates said of the U.S. position. "And importantly," he wrote, the obstacles "are largely of the Executive's choosing," because the men "were all apprehended elsewhere and then brought (i.e. rendered) to Bagram for detention now exceeding six years."

The Obama Administration had sided with Bush on the case.

After seven years, the U.S. has agreed to release Yemeni Doctor Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi from Guantanamo Bay. A petition that circulated by his supporters on the internet described Dr. Batarfi this way:

Dr Batarfi is a 37 year old Yemeni orthopaedic surgeon currently held in Guantanamo Bay whose only crime would appear to be trying to treat civilian casualties in a war zone.

After his post-graduate studies in Pakistan, and inspired by the Afghan trauma victims he had dealt with, he decided to work for a non-governmental organisation to renovate a hospital in Kabul in spring 2001. With the chaos after the onset of the Afghan conflict in late 2001, he was "sold" to the US military by the Northern Alliance.

Why now? [More...]

Two Spanish papers this morning are reporting that the criminal complaint (in spanish, here, pdf) against top Bush Administration lawyers involved in Guantanamo policy has been reopened for investigation. The lawyers are:

• Jay S. Bybee, United States Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit
• Douglas Feith, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
• William J Haynes, Chief Corporate Counsel, Chevron Headquarters
• John Yoo, UC Berkeley School of Law
• Alberto R. Gonzales
• David Addington

The action parallels a criminal probe into allegations of torture involving the American CIA that was opened this week in the United Kingdom.

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Great Britain will investigate the torture claims of former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohammed, who alleges he was tortured while held by the U.S. in secret prisons abroad.

Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed says he was tortured while in US custody in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, with the complicity of MI5.....Mr Mohamed returned to the UK in February 2009 after seven years in custody - four of which were spent in the US camp at Guantanamo Bay.

His allegations are detailed here. Among his claims: His genitals were sliced with a scapel.

Since the onset of the war in Iraq, the U.S. has detained over 100,000 people in Iraq. Very few have been charged with crimes.

Now, as the U.S. prepares to hand over the detention system to the Iraqis, thousands are expected to be freed this summer. Why?

[B]ecause there is little or no evidence against them.

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