War on Terror

Docs in the news

Lots of document-related news to catch up on..

* Justice Dept releases nine Bush-era memos regarding legalities involving detainees, rendition, eavesdropping, using the military within the US, and that pesky thing called free speech: “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.”

The memos are here. NY Times article here. ProPublica memo depository here.

* CIA admits in court that it destroyed 92 videotapes of interrogations [ACLU]

* “Major RAND study with 300 interviews: Intelligence Operations and Metrics in Iraq and Afghanistan” [Wikileaks]

* Obama Justice Dept helps hide Bush White House emails [AP]

* The White House’s missing documents [Politico]

* British Justice Secretary Vetoes FOIA Release of Iraq War Discussions [Antiwar.com]

* “Navy classifies ship inspection reports” [Navy Times]

* DHS Inspector General: Over 100,000 deportees had children in US [AP]

* Valenti’s Sexuality Was Topic For FBI [WaPo]

Related: “Bill Moyers Responds to Media Probe of His ’Homo Hunting’ Past” [Boston Edge]

* Canadian Government posts 9,500 files on UFOs [Library and Archives Canada]

* Canada: “Weird warnings on FOI material” [Tyee]

New documents on Bush-era torture, secret detention, extraordinary rendition

The documents are available here (scroll down to the sections titled “DOD Document Release” and “Noteworthy Pages from DOD Doc Release” at the bottom of the page).

AlterNet has covered the release: “Explosive New Documents Reveal More Details of Bush-Era Torture, Including Prisoners Tortured to Death.”

From the Center for Constitutional Rights:

February 12, 2009, New York and Washington, DC—Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit confirm Department of Defense involvement in the CIA’s ghost detention program, revealed three prominent human rights groups today. The groups—Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ)—today released documents obtained from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and U.S. Department of State (DOS), resulting from their lawsuit seeking the disclosure of government documents that relate to secret detention, extraordinary rendition, and torture. At a public press conference, the groups revealed that these documents confirm the existence of secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq; affirm the DOD’s cooperation with the CIA’s ghost detention program; and show one case where the DOD sought to delay the release of Guantánamo prisoners who were scheduled to be sent home by a month and a half in order to avoid bad press.

…
Examples of DOD Joint Chiefs of Staff (JS) and TRANSCOM Documents of Interest:

•    JS 986 (May 28, 2004 Information Paper :“Applicability of Geneva Conventions to “Ghost Detainees” in Iraq) shows that the DOD interpreted the “security internee” provisions of the Geneva Conventions to allow for “ghosting” of detainees by prohibiting the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from visiting. It also shows that the DOD recognized that indefinitely prohibiting the ICRC from visiting or failing to notify the ICRC of the existence of detainees was illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
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Obama upholds Bush’s “state secrets” approach

From the New York Times:

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

In the case, Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian native, and four other detainees filed suit against a subsidiary of Boeing for arranging flights for the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terrorism suspects were secretly taken to other countries, where they say they were tortured. The Bush administration argued that the case should be dismissed because even discussing it in court could threaten national security and relations with other nations.

During the campaign, Mr. Obama harshly criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees, and he has broken with that administration on questions like whether to keep open the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a government lawyer, Douglas N. Letter, made the same state-secrets argument on Monday, startling several judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.”

Defense Dept docs on Gitmo, Iraq, GWOT

This afternoon the Pentagon posted several new documents released due to Freedom of Information Act requests:

• Detainees: Incident Reports of Detainee on Detainee Assaults at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Release Date: February 2009 (22 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Global War on Terrorism: Memo from USD-P Douglas Feith to Director, DIA, dated Feb 2, 2002, “Request for Support” (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Global War on Terrorism: DoD Answers to The New Yorker Magazine (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
  
• Detainees: Sampling of Mass Disturbance Incident Reports from NOV 8, 2005 through DEC 2, 2007. Release Date: January 2009 (7 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Detainees: List of Mass Disturbances at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from NOV 8, 2005 through DEC 2, 2007. Release Date: January 2009 (10 MB)  (Posted 11 Feb 09)
• Detainees: Documents relating to Australian and British citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Release Date: January 2009 (Posted 11 Feb 09)

Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel Belatedly Releasing Some Opinions

A friend of The Memory Hole sends along the following, pasted in below. Not only is the Justice Dept’s Office of Legal Counsel - which gives legal advice to the President (and the rest of the Exec branch) - surprisingly releasing some of its zealously guarded opinions, some of these opinions have to do with the conduct of the Bush administration regarding Iraq and the “war on terrorism.” (For background on the reluctance of the Office of Legal Counsel to even acknowledge its opinions - never mind actually release them - see “Current, Future Justice Officials Clash Over OLC Proposal” at Secrecy News.)

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It is fairly surprising how the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is suddenly plopping out a series of its legal opinions at the eleventh hour after claiming for months and years that these opinions — and even the titles of these opinions — were inexorably and entirely classified and restricted.  Some opinions outlined matters of presidential authority and jurisdiction.  In the past eight years, the OLC has released almost none of its opinions until fairly recently when it became a matter of Congressional concern.  This is in extraordinarily stark contrast to prior administrations that published a substantial fraction of its formal legal opinions.

The opinions below were just added to the DOJ OLC website. [All links are to PDF files.]

* LEGALITY OF THE USE OF MILITARY COMMISSIONS TO TRY TERRORISTS (November 6, 2001) (added 1/08/09)

* WHETHER FALSE STATEMENTS OR OMISSIONS IN IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION DECLARATION WOULD CONSTITUTE A “FURTHER MATERIAL BREACH” UNDER U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 1441 (December 7, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* EFFECT OF A RECENT UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION ON THE AUTHORITY OF THE PRESIDENT UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW TO USE MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ (November 8, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* AUTHORITY OF THE PRESIDENT UNDER DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW TO USE MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ (October 23, 2002) (added 1/08/09)

* STATUS OF TALIBAN FORCES UNDER ARTICLE 4 OF THE THIRD GENEVA CONVENTION OF 1949 (February 7, 2002)  (added 1/08/09)

* “PROTECTED PERSON” STATUS IN OCCUPIED IRAQ UNDER THE FOURTH GENEVA CONVENTION (March 18, 2004) (added 1/08/09)

* ASSERTION OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE OVER COMMUNICATIONS REGARDING EPA’S OZONE AIR QUALITY STANDARDS AND CALIFORNIA’S GREENHOUSE GAS WAIVER REQUEST (June 19, 2008) (added 1/08/09)

And this one added a week earlier:

* ASSERTION OF EXECUTIVE PRIVILEGE CONCERNING THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S INTERVIEWS OF THE VICE PRESIDENT AND SENIOR WHITE HOUSE STAFF (July 15, 2008)  (added December 29, 2008)

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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].

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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

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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:

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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]

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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

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