{"id":1601866,"date":"2024-04-10T06:02:48","date_gmt":"2024-04-10T06:02:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/?p=318295"},"modified":"2024-04-10T06:02:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T06:02:48","slug":"spies-and-their-lies-the-trials-and-tribulations-at-guantanamo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2024\/04\/10\/spies-and-their-lies-the-trials-and-tribulations-at-guantanamo\/","title":{"rendered":"Spies and Their Lies: the Trials and Tribulations at Guantanamo"},"content":{"rendered":"\"\"<\/a>\n
\"\"

A watchtower at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Photograph Source: Gino Reyes – Public Domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The biblical quotation engraved on the marble walls of the lobby of the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s headquarters in McLean, Virginia.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nearly 25 years ago, a group of suicide bombers attacked the U.S.S. Cole off Aden, Yemen, with the loss of 17 U.S. sailors.\u00a0 A Saudi, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to be the mastermind of the attack, was captured in 2002, and was officially charged in 2011 with leading the attack.\u00a0 He has become the longest-running capital murder case at Guantanamo, where his trial is expected to take place next year.
\n<\/span>
\n A major reason for the delay is that al-Nashiri, like so many captives at Guantanamo, was subjected to secret imprisonment by the CIA as well as waterboarding, rectal abuse, and prolonged sleep deprivation.\u00a0 A previous judge at Guantanamo excluded the confessions of al-Nashiri and others because of CIA\u2019s torture and abuse.\u00a0 U.S. prosecutors have asked the Court of Military Commissions to reinstate the confessions, and the rest of this year will be taken up with this issue at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.\u00a0 The new judge, Colonel Matthew Fitzgerald, is the fourth to preside in this case, and he was still in law school when the U.S.S. Cole was attacked and 9\/11 took place.<\/span><\/p>\n

The al-Nashiri case was particularly egregious because his interrogators found him to be compliant, but a senior CIA official ordered the reinstatement of torture and abuse to include waterboarding.\u00a0 The official also ordered the field operatives not to make \u201csweeping statements\u201d in their cable traffic regarding compliance, which pointed to an effort at CIA headquarters to cover-up its misdeeds. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The CIA has always maintained that secret memoranda of George W. Bush\u2019s Department of Justice permitted the use of \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques\u201d to include waterboarding in order to break the will of the captives.\u00a0 The CIA also had the support of psychologists and the American Psychological Association\u00a0 (APA) in conducting the coercive interrogation of terror suspects in Guantanamo and its secret prisons in East Europe and Southeast Asia.\u00a0 Two former military psychologists developed the CIA\u2019s sadistic techniques, \u00a0 which were based on Chinese efforts to obtain false confessions from American prisoners in the 1950s.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ten years ago, the CIA published a series of essays (\u201cRebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program\u201d) to state that the interrogation techniques were \u201cimplemented in a manner consistent with the U.S. laws, the Constitution, and international treaty obligations.\u201d\u00a0 This was a lie!\u00a0 The essays also argued that CIA officials, despite the legal approval of the Department of Justice, \u201cseriously debated the moral and ethnical dilemmas posed by the program.\u201d\u00a0 This was also a lie, and it is noteworthy that former CIA directors and deputy directors, such as Porter Goss, George Tenet, John McLaughlin, John Brennan, General Michael Hayden, and Michael Morell either wrote essays for the CIA publication or sat in on meetings where torture and abuse was discussed without objecting to the interrogation techniques.<\/span><\/p>\n

Brennan never should have been appointed CIA director in the first place.\u00a0 During the Tenet era, he was the chief of staff and deputy executive director, and provided no opposition to decisions to conduct torture and abuse, and\u2014even worse\u2014to render suspected individuals to foreign intelligence services that conducted their own torture.\u00a0 Brennan was also an active defender of the program of warrantless eavesdropping, implemented at the National Security Agency under the leadership of one of Tenet\u2019s successors, General Hayden, then NSA director.<\/span><\/p>\n

President Barack Obama stated that the CIA\u2019s torture program was not representative of \u201cour values,\u201d but he did nothing to make sure that \u201cour values\u201d would not be compromised again.\u00a0 He failed to rein in the CIA during the Global War on Terror, and failed to fire Brennan in 2014 when the CIA director lied to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and tried to block the committee\u2019s report. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was Tenet who told President Bush that it would be a \u201cslam dunk\u201d to provide the intelligence to make the case for war against Iraq, and it was McLaughlin who gave the \u201cslam dunk\u201d briefing at the White House.\u00a0 McLaughlin also provided false intelligence to Secretary of State Colin Powell that was part of the secretary\u2019s deceitful speech at the United Nations in February 2003 to further the case for war.\u00a0 Tenet also lied to Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General John Ashcroft about the extent of the torture and abuse program.<\/span><\/p>\n

In February, Jean Maria Arrigo, a whistleblower who exposed the role of the American Psychological Association in obscuring the role of psychologists in the torture program, died at the age of 79.\u00a0 She revealed the immoral involvement of APA psychologists in the sadistic program, but it was nearly a decade before an independent investigation documented the \u201ccollusion\u201d between the APA and the CIA and the Pentagon.\u00a0 The investigation concluded that the APA suppressed Arrigo\u2019s charges in an \u201cintentional effort to curb dissent.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the many lessons of Arrigo\u2019s experience should be the need for an independent investigation of the Israeli killing of the World Central Kitchen workers instead of relying on the Israeli Defense Forces to investigate themselves.\u00a0 If the aid workers had been Palestinian instead of an international group, then there presumably would have been no investigation of any kind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is important that the ethical issues that arise from national security decision making be an essential part of the foreign policy debate.\u00a0 If not for Ms. Arrigo, perhaps the APA would have continued to collaborate covertly with the CIA and the Pentagon.\u00a0 Ms. Arrigo\u2019s legacy addresses the importance of dissent and whistleblowing.<\/span><\/div>\n

The post Spies and Their Lies: the Trials and Tribulations at Guantanamo<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Brennan never should have been appointed CIA director in the first place.\u00a0 During the Tenet era, he was the chief of staff and deputy executive director, and provided no opposition to decisions to conduct torture and abuse, and\u2014even worse\u2014to render suspected individuals to foreign intelligence services that conducted their own torture.\u00a0 Brennan was also an active defender of the program of warrantless eavesdropping, implemented at the National Security Agency under the leadership of one of Tenet\u2019s successors, General Hayden, then NSA director. More<\/a><\/p>\n

The post Spies and Their Lies: the Trials and Tribulations at Guantanamo<\/a> appeared first on CounterPunch.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":200,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601866"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/200"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1601866"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1603882,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1601866\/revisions\/1603882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1601866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1601866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1601866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}