American Footprints » detainees

Radicalizing al-Awlaki

Brian Ulrich — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:55:03 +0000

The Jamestown Foundation has some interesting information on Anwar al-Awlaki, who probably played a role in radicalizing Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan and would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab:

“In November 2001, an American Muslim cleric told the Washington Post that he had no sympathy for the perpetrators of 9/11, that Muslims and non-Muslims needed “more mutual understanding,” and that the Taliban had no right to impose the burqa on women (Washington Post, November 19, 2001). The cleric, Shaykh Anwar al-Awlaki, is the same man who is now believed to have played a major role in radicalizing Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. army psychiatrist who killed 13 American soldiers at Fort Hood last November, and 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to detonate explosives aboard an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day…

“There is a huge difference between the moderate statements al-Awlaki made in the period between 2001-2002 and the radical views he has expressed since 2007. In the intervening period, al-Awlaki moved to Yemen, where he was banned from re-entering the United States and detained without charge in a Yemeni prison for over a year. Al-Awlaki believes he was imprisoned at the request of the United States, but describes his detention as “a chance to review the Quran and to study and read in a way that was impossible out of jail. My time in detention was a vacation from this world” (Interview with Infocusnews.net [Anaheim], September 17, 2008). The shaykh says he was interrogated in prison by the FBI about his connections to the 9/11 terrorists (Interview with cageprisoners.com, December 31, 2007).”

Maybe al-Awlaki was secretly a militant while in this country. However, from the information presented in the article, it sounds like he was only radicalized by his stay in prison, a process understood to be important in many Arab countries.

A Precedent that will Reach to Himself

Eric Martin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:06:14 +0000

Andrew Sullivan is right:

The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.

This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:

Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.

Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.

The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. [emphasis added]

Don’t it make you proud? Don’t you wonder why the Obama administration would want to politicize criminal conduct by actually investigating torture and holding those that tortured accountable under the law?

As for the techniques, maybe we took diapering tips from the North Koreans, one of our new sources of emulation. And for those that don’t consider the use of sleep deprivation and stress positions (let alone waterboarding) torture, here are some passages from Kim Yong’s horrific tale of torture at the hands of the North Korean regime, some of whose torture methods Dick Cheney and George Bush adopted for the US government:

I was completely sleep deprived and could not react any longer. I had lost track of how many hours or days had passed. But I knew that if I told them what they wanted to hear, there would be no other punishment but a death sentence waiting for me. At moments, the sleep deprivation became so severe that I simply wanted to surrender, but I bit my lips to remain silent. As time went by, the interrogators became more and more furious.

Kim Yong was subjected to certain forms of physical torture that even Cheney didn’t push for, such as bamboo under the fingernails and electric shocks. And yet, according to Yong, stress positions were amongst the most grueling:

One of the worst tortures I endured was to have my body, waist down, submerged in water in a tiny cell that prohibited me from moving. The cell was so tiny that I had to bend slightly in order to fit my body in…[Later] they put me in solitary confinement in a tiny cell about two feet wide and five feet long and ordered me not to move an inch. When I couldn’t bear the pain any longer, they brought me blank paper and made me write confessions.

Ironically, the Republican Party, which has come to stand for full throated support of torture for various categories of detainees (inevitably, and in practice, the innocent and guilty), is prone to flag lapel pin demagoguery and other ostentatious displays of ostensible patriotism. And yet, Party members seem entirely unaware of just how contrary their support of torture is to the vision of the revered, if only in the abstract, founding fathers (let alone the more recent object of adulation, Ronald Reagan).

Consider that George Washington, then facing a truly existential crisis, refused to allow prisoners to be tortured – even as the fledgling republic teetered on a precipice in the midst of an improbable military campaign against the British. Thomas Paine, too, offers no equivocation (via Glenn Greenwald):

An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. [...]

The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto…

And yet the torture cheerleaders attack the patriotism of those that would uphold the values of Washington, Paine, Jefferson, Madison and, even, Reagan - as opposed to the policies and values of Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Yoo, Jay Bybee and David Addington.

Tell me again which group is truly defending America and the ideals we aspire to?

But Now I Don’t Know Why I Feel So Tongue-Tied

Eric Martin — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:51:25 +0000

A little over a month ago, Andrew Sullivan had a fascinating piece on the evolution of the New York Times’ willingness, or lack thereof, to use the term "torture" to describe, well, torture (for definite lack of a better word). As Sullivan demonstrates, prior to the Bush administration, the Times repeatedly and reflexively referred to interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation, waterboarding, hypothermia, stress positions and physical beatings as torture. No euphemism, no equivocation, no even-handed airing of the torturers’ rationale/argument and no concern for the associated political controversy. It was simply torture.

In recent years, however, the Times has begun to use euphemisms to describe those exact same techniques. What was torture was now "intense interrogation," "harsh interrogation and "detainee abuse" – though recently, and to much self-congratulation, the Times has mustered the courage to call what they once freely termed torture, a "brutal mode of..interrogation." Baby steps for a previously ambulatory being.

Not to single the Times out: other major media outlets such as NPR have embarked on the same self-censorship (NPR opting for phrases like "alleged abuse" and "harsh treatment"). The Washington Post referred to torture-produced evidence as "testimony allegedly acquired through coercion of witnesses." Allegedly coerced - so innocuous.

One of the problems that arises when our major media outlets (and political leaders) partake in this Orwellian exercise in lexical obfuscation is that there is an erosion of meaning across the board. The new linguistic conventions adopted to provide political cover for American policymakers that implemented a regime of torture become a form of political cover for all manner of torturers – foreign and domestic.

Consider, for example, the way the New York Times describes the despicable acts of torture inflicted on Iranian protesters by the Iranian regime in recent weeks: "prison abuse." Not even the new-found "brutal" qualifier. "Prison abuse" is the term used in the title of the article, and six times in the body – almost the only descriptor employed. The only exception is when the Times did go as far as to say that one detainee’s family "said he was being subjected to torture."

Apparently, these acts don’t arise to the level of torture:

Some prisoners say they watched fellow detainees being beaten to death by guards in overcrowded, stinking holding pens. Others say they had their fingernails ripped off or were forced to lick filthy toilet bowls. [...]

Although the government has played down the scale of the prison abuses, some detainees’ relatives have come forward recently to confirm them, mostly to opposition-linked Web sites that have provided credible information in the past, including roozonline.com and gooya.com.

Some deaths have been further documented with photographs or videotapes. Hospital officials have described receiving bodies of those killed in protests, with the total far in excess of 20, the government’s initial figure. It is difficult to confirm such reports independently, given the restrictions on reporting in Iran. [...]

“We were all standing so close to each other that no one could move,” he wrote in a narrative posted online. “The plainclothes guards came into the room and broke all the light bulbs, and in the pitch dark started beating us, whoever they could.” By morning, at least four detainees were dead, he added.

In another account posted online, a former detainee describes being made to lie facedown on the floor of a police station bathroom, where an officer would step on his neck and force him to lick the toilet bowl as the officer cursed reformist politicians.

A woman described having her hair pulled as interrogators demanded that she confess to having sex with political figures. When she was finally released, she was forced — like many others — to sign a paper saying she had never been mistreated.

To paraphrase the Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt: In a polarized atmosphere in which many Iranians believe the nation betrayed its most fundamental ideals in the name of repressing political dissent and others believe extreme measures were necessary to save the very nature of the Islamic Revolution, The Times is displeasing some who think “prison abuse” is just a timid euphemism for torture and their opponents who think “prison abuse” is too loaded.

What’s a journalist to do in the post Bush/Cheney world?

(links via Bruce Etling)