War on Terror

Released/Deceased Gitmo Detainees: A List

Due to a FOIA request, the Pentagon has quietly released a list of all Guantanamo detainees who have been released or transferred or who have died in custody as of October 6, 2008 [PDF @ DoD].

Also be sure to download their previously released list of all DoD Gitmo detainees as of May 12, 2006 [PDF @ DoD].

————-

Pentagon Censors Former Torturer’s Book

Defense Department cuts 93 sections, including unclassified, publicly available material.

On Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman says:

Writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, a former special intelligence operations officer, who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago, has written a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.” In it, he details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006. He conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than a thousand and was awarded a Bronze Star for his achievements in Iraq.

In his op-ed, he writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in [Iraq] have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Alexander has also written a book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

In his interview with Goodman, he reveals Pentagon censorship at work:

AG: Why was it so hard to get your book out of the Pentagon? I mean, you’ve got the book. You have to hand it in to be vetted, but they wouldn’t release it.

MA: Yeah, you know, I turned it in in the middle of July, and they’re supposed to do the review within 30 days, and they didn’t do that. I missed the first printing date. When they finally did come back with a review of the book after two months, they had extracted an extraordinary amount of material. There was 93 redactions made. I sued — you know, I sued the Department of Defense first to review the book and then to argue the redactions, because they had redacted obvious unclassified material, things that I had taken straight out of the unclassified field manual and also some items that were directly off the Army’s own Web site. So, eventually they acquiesced on 80 of the 93 redactions. And if you — when you read the book, you’ll see that the redactions within — some of the redactions are still in the book, because we had to go to print before we had the results of the appeal.

Pentagon docs: expenditures in Iraq & elsewhere

——————

Today in its Freedom of Information Act reading room, the Pentagon has posted 202 pages of documents related to its Iraqi Freedom Fund transfers/expenditures from 2002 to 2006:

DOD reading room [PDF | 9 megs]

Memory Hole mirror

The Government Accountability Office explains the Iraqi Freedom Fund:

“The Iraqi Freedom Fund is a special account providing funds for additional expenses for ongoing military operations in Iraq, and those operations authorized by P.L. 107-40 (Sept. 13,2001), Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other operations and related activities in support of the global war on terrorism.”

Some sample pages from the Pentagon’s FOIA release:

——————————–

(more…)

Gitmo interrogation video released

For the first time, video of an interrogation at Guantanamo Bay is available to the public. In it, we see 16-year-old Omar Khadr being interrogated in late February 2003. Khadr is a Canadian citizen, and a court in that country ordered the 7-1/2 hours of the video interrrogation released after Khadr’s attorneys filed a motion. DVDs containing the footage had been turned over to Khadr’s defense team by the Pentagon.

Today, the law firm released a 10-minute compilation culled from the entire footage. Several versions are available on YouTube and other sites, but most are truncated. The video below is the entire thing (9:54 long).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7b90ecYJVY

The full 10-minute version is also available as a Windows Media file at the CBC’s website here [WMV]

Fourteen pages of documents were also released, and were posted to the CBC website here [PDF]

———————————–

Further reading:

‘You don’t care about me,’ Khadr sobs in interview tapes [CBC]

The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr [Rolling Stone, 2006]

The Case of Omar Ahmer Khadr, Canada [Human Rights First]

Pentagon page on military commission proceedings against Khadr [Defense Dept]

{Added July 19:}

How did Omar Khadr end up in Guantánamo? [Guardian of London]

Book: Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr

—————————————