Âñÿêèé ðàç, êîãäà WikiLeaks âûêëàäûâàåò ôàêòû â ñâîáîäíîì äîñòóïå, ñíà÷àëà î âîéíå â Àôãàíèñòàíå, à òåïåðü îá Èðàêå, ñàéò îáâèíÿþò â ïðèñòðàñòíîñòè è áåçîòâåòñòâåííîñòè, ïèøåò The Guardian.
"Äåëàëîñü ìíîãî ïîïûòîê îïðàâäàòü âòîðæåíèå â Èðàê, è ñàìûì ðàñïðîñòðàíåííûì è öèíè÷íûì áûëî óòâåðæäåíèå, ÷òî, íåâçèðàÿ íà îòñóòñòâèå ó Èðàêà îðóæèÿ ìàññîâîãî ïîðàæåíèÿ, ïðåêðàùåíèå çâåðñòâ ðåæèìà Ñàääàìà Õóñåéíà áûëî ìîðàëüíîé îáÿçàííîñòüþ (ÑØÀ). Òåïåðü èìåþòñÿ òî÷íûå è ïîäðîáíûå ñâèäåòåëüñòâà èç ïåðâûõ óñò î ñèñòåìàòè÷åñêîì ïðèìåíåíèè ïûòîê èðàêñêèì ïðàâèòåëüñòâîì, ïîñòàâëåííûì Ñîåäèíåííûìè Øòàòàìè íà ìåñòî Ñàääàìà. Õóäøèå ïðàêòèêè ðåæèìà Ñàääàìà, î÷åâèäíî, íå óìåðëè âìåñòè ñ íèì", ãîâîðèòñÿ â ñòàòüå, â ðÿäå ñëó÷àåâ îäíè ïûòêè è èñòÿçàíèÿ âñåãî ëèøü ñìåíèëèñü äðóãèìè.
Ïàðëàìåíòñêîãî ðàññëåäîâàíèÿ ïî íàðóøåíèÿì, äîïóùåííûì Ñîåäèíåííûìè Øòàòàìè íà âîéíå â Èðàêå, íå âåäåòñÿ, è ãëàâíîìó èíñïåêòîðó ÎÎÍ ïî âîïðîñàì ïûòîê Ìàíôðåäó Íîâàêó îñòàåòñÿ òîëüêî ïðèçûâàòü Áàðàêà Îáàìó ê ïðîâåäåíèþ ïîëíîìàñøòàáíîãî ðàññëåäîâàíèÿ. Ýòîò ïðèçûâ, êàê îáû÷íî, áóäåò ïðîèãíîðèðîâàí, ïîëàãàåò èçäàíèå, íî Íîâàê ïðàâ, íàçûâàÿ ðàññëåäîâàíèå ïðè÷àñòíîñòè âîîðóæåííûõ ñèë ÑØÀ ê ïûòêàì çàêîííîé è ìîðàëüíîé îáÿçàííîñòüþ. Ïóáëèêàöèÿ âîçìîæíûõ ñâèäåòåëüñòâ ïðè÷àñòíîñòè ê ïûòêàì íå ÿâëÿåòñÿ áåçîòâåòñòâåííûì è ïðèñòðàñòíûì äåëîì, ýòî - äîëã, ãîâîðèòñÿ â ðåäàêöèîííîé ñòàòüå.
It is not irresponsible or partisan for Wikileaks to publish possible evidence of complicity in torture
Every time WikiLeaks puts facts into the public domain, first about the war in Afghanistan and now about Iraq, it is accused of partisanship and irresponsibility. The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said on 29 July that the release of 90,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan endangered Afghan lives. Little more than two weeks later, Gates admitted in a letter to Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, that the disclosures did not reveal any significant national intelligence secrets. The Pentagon's review had not to date "revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure". This does not stop the same charge being made now about the release of almost 400,000 US documents on Iraq.
Many attempts were made to justify the invasion of Iraq, but one of the most frequently and cynically used was that, irrespective of the absence of weapons of mass destruction, putting an end to the barbarities of Saddam Hussein's regime was a moral imperative. Well, now there is chapter and verse, from ringside seats, on the systematic use of torture by the Iraqi government that the US installed in Saddam's place. The worst practices of Saddam's regime did not apparently die with him, and whereas numerous logs show members of the coalition making genuine attempts to stop torture in Iraqi custody, it is clear their efforts were both patchy and half-hearted. In the worst incidents, one can only reasonably conclude that one set of torturers and thugs has been replaced by another.
Only this lot had, and still has, political cover: the cover of Frago 242, a "fragmentary order" which ordered coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as abuse of detainees, unless it directly involved members of the coalition; the cover of all those reports that end with the conclusion "No further investigation"; the cover of the pretence that the US does not keep records of civilians killed. This last claim is flatly contradicted by the war logs, which show there were more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009, a tally which, according to Iraq Body Count, includes 15,000 previously unreported civilian deaths.
Iraq is not Barack Obama's war. He is not George Bush, but there are circumstances, like these, in which his administration is behaving as if he were. Continuing reports of detainee abuse in post-conflict Iraq are plainly not in the interests of a country that will continue to station tens of thousands of troops in Iraq as mentors and advisers. The response to the publication of the war logs by the Iraqi government has been twofold – rage from Nouri al-Maliki's office, which accused WikiLeaks of trying to sabotage the incumbent prime minister's bid to form a new government, and the standard assurance that the interior ministry would follow up all reports of human rights violations. Of the two, the first is more credible. Why should Iraqi authorities be so much more eager to preserve evidence of the crimes committed by their troops than the US is to prosecute its own alleged criminals? Prosecutions of those involved in the unprovoked shooting spree by Blackwater Worldwide in a Baghdad square in which 17 Iraqis were killed, are collapsing. The battlefield may not be a place that lends itself to the preservation of evidence, but sheer lack of official interest is infectious.
There is no ongoing congressional inquiry into US abuses in the Iraq war, and that left the United Nations chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, to call on Mr Obama to order a full investigation. This will be ignored, as it usually is, but Nowak is right when he says the administration has a legal and moral obligation to investigate credible claims of US forces' complicity in torture. It is not irresponsible or partisan to publish possible evidence of complicity in torture. It is a duty to do so. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
Why did we not investigate allegations of murder and torture in Iraq at the time, when it was well known what was going on?
Iraqi soldiers guard a blindfolded detainee during an operation outside Baquba, north of Baghdad Iraqi soldiers guard a blindfolded detainee during an operation outside Baquba, north of Baghdad. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
The most shocking of the revelations in the current batch of leaked Iraq war logs is that most of the acts of torture and murder were committed in the open. They weren't secret. They were tolerated, sanitised – justified, even. Take the Wolf Brigade, the 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos. Everybody knew about them. You would see them in their pick-up trucks wearing balaclavas. When there was a sectarian murder people would talk about the wolves, until they became a shorthand to describe a certain kind of cruel violence. The wolf commandos became killers in the uniform of the Iraqi police.
I recall speaking to UN human rights investigators, western police advisers, diplomats and army officers about what was going on. In 2005 an Iraqi government official confirmed a list of places where she believed torture and murder were taking place. A British police mentor described entering the office of a notorious figure at the interior ministry and found a man with a bag over his head standing in the corner of the office.
Some of us who covered Iraq wrote about what we found. In summer 2005, I described the operation of the torture squads. Human rights organisations prepared their own reports. But nothing very much happened, except excuses.
When the bodies started turning up in western Baghdad in 2004, the official line was that it was former Ba'athists who were being killed. Like the looting that occurred in the aftermath of the fall of Iraq, it was "understood." The victims probably deserved it, was the unspoken intimation. Officials, British and American, were really not that bothered.
Later, when it was men in police uniforms who were doing the killing, reported in the Iraqi papers day after day, the official line was "anyone could buy a uniform" or that these were difficult times and there would be "bad apples".
But they weren't bad apples. I spoke to people who had been taken to the interior ministry and heard the screams. One day a DVD was brought to me of a former interview subject who had been tortured to death after being taken by men in uniform. Like others, I wrote up what I knew. But nothing much ever happened.
It's true that when things sometimes became too embarrassing – too obvious – a local police chief implicated in killings might be removed or officials at the ministry re-organised. But the murder continued. There was a new excuse: the police had been infiltrated by Shia extremists. Which was true, up to a point. Except it wasn't really infiltration, more of an alliance in many places: a coincidence of sectarian interest.
Sometimes I would come across soldiers who would intervene. One day, at the Ministry of the Interior, a group of American soldiers arrived to free some men who were being abused in a facility called the "guest house" which was being guarded by other American soldiers. An argument between two US officers ensued. The beaten Iraqis were released.
Sometimes it was an awful game. In 2007, I was embedded with a US unit in Baghdad, tasked to go after some Shia militiamen suspected of attacking Sunnis. The rules then required an Iraqi police escort. The chief of police found excuses for over an hour to prevent the raid commencing. Everybody knew that the targets were being warned off by the police – or suspected it at least. But nothing much happened except some grumbles at the wasted time. And it is this that makes me angry now when I hear UN officials and politicians, after the event, calling for inquiries. Yes, there we things we didn't know: about the US order not to investigate allegations of murder and torture; the evidence of collaboration. And yes, an inquiry is an absolute necessity. But why now, not then? For who in Iraq did not know about the killing and torture? About the police death squads? About nothing ever really happening to halt it when we had a chance? Investigate, by all means – but it is too late. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
...And yes, an inquiry is an absolute necessity. But why now, not then? For who in Iraq did not know about the killing and torture? About the police death squads? About nothing ever really happening to halt it when we had a chance? Investigate, by all means – but it is too late...
_________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
"Ëèøü íåìíîãèå ïîäîáíûå ïðîÿâëåíèÿ áåñïîðÿäêà ïîïàëè â ïîëå çðåíèÿ íàäçîðíûõ àãåíòñòâ Êîíãðåññà, Áåëîãî äîìà èëè îáùåñòâåííîñòè, ïîñêîëüêó ðóêîâîäñòâî ÖÐÓ íåîäíîêðàòíî çàâåðÿëî, ÷òî ïðîãðàììà áûëà ïðîôåññèîíàëüíîé è óñïåøíîé", - ïîäûòîæèâàåò àâòîð. _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of three former CIA detainees accusing psychologists James Elmer Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, the contractors who designed the agency's post-9/11 so-called "enhanced interrogation" program, of torture, non-consensual human experimentation, and war crimes.
Though plaintiffs Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, and Gul Rahman were all abducted and held in CIA prisons in Afghanistan, none of the men was ever charged with a crime. Salim and Ben Soud are now free and live with their families. Rahman died in a CIA prison in 2002.
"An autopsy report and internal CIA review found that Mr. Rahman likely died from hypothermia caused 'in part from being forced to sit on the bare concrete floor without pants,' with the contributing factors of 'dehydration, lack of food, and immobility due to "short chaining,"'" the ACLU lawsuit says.
Related: Senate Torture Report Finds the CIA Was Less Effective and More Brutal Than Anyone Knew
According to the ACLU's complaint, Mitchell and Jessen, who operated a firm that was paid $81 million over four years by the CIA, "helped convince the agency to adopt torture as official policy." The ACLU said the civil lawsuit is the first to be filed against Mitchell and Jessen since the Senate Intelligence Committee released an executive summary from its 6,000-page CIA torture report last year. But it's actually the second lawsuit targeting the torture architects.
Last December, California civil rights attorney Stephen Yagman quietly filed a false claims act lawsuit against Mitchell and Jessen in an effort to recover the $81 million they were paid for their work for the CIA. That lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year. (Yagman is the plaintiff in the suit; he was stripped of his law license in 2010 after being convicted of tax evasion.)
"[Plaintiffs] were subjected to solitary confinement; extreme darkness, cold, and noise; repeated beatings; starvation; excruciatingly painful stress positions; prolonged sleep deprivation; confinement in coffin-like boxes; and water torture," according to the ACLU lawsuit. "Defendants are directly liable because they experimented on Plaintiffs by seeking to induce in them a state of 'learned helplessness' to break their will by means of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment."
"The nature of what they did," Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, said of Mitchell and Jessen, "has been banned since Nuremberg."
Mitchell did not respond to VICE News' requests for comment, and the CIA declined to comment on the ACLU's lawsuit. But in exclusive interviews with VICE News last year, Mitchell acknowledged there "were some abuses that occurred" within the program.
He also said the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to acknowledge in their report that he and Jessen were the unnamed interrogators who raised many of the concerns about "abuses" and "unauthorized techniques" that were used on detainees. Moreover, Mitchell said he is one of the interrogators who reported abuses to the CIA's inspector general against rogue interrogators, which sparked an internal review of the CIA program.
Mitchell first disclosed to VICE News that he personally waterboarded three high-value terrorism suspects detained by the CIA. He said the "whole point of the waterboard was to induce fear and panic."
Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. (Photo via ACLU)
"We didn't think [detainees were] going to provide actionable intelligence in a state of fear and panic," he said. "You have to start the session with the waterboarding, but the questioning happens the next time you come in the room. It's like any sort of thing you fear: The closer you get to it the next time, the more you struggle to get out of it and find an escape. So the moment [a detainee] was most susceptible to beginning to provide information was just before the next waterboarding session. Not in the original one."
He added: "The interrogations I engaged in were monitored in real-time by medical personnel and leadership who could have stopped what I was doing at any time. I was never told I was doing anything outside of authorities. I was told for years that my activities had saved lives and prevented attacks."
Doctors' involvement with various forms of torture has been a dark tradition of sorts, said Leonard Rubenstein, director of the Program on Human Rights, Health, and Conflict at Johns Hopkins University.
In some countries, doctors have served as advisors to help figure out how far a prisoner could be pushed without being killed, Rubenstein said. In Iraq, army deserters routinely had ears cut off and eyes gouged out by doctors working for Saddam Hussein. In the 1950s and 60s, US doctors helped the CIA design its now-discredited "mind control" programs, parts of which involved unwitting American citizens being dosed with LSD. This, Rubenstein believes, created part of the basis for the tactics that Mitchell and Jessen formalized decades later.
"Mitchell and Jessen were sort of the masterminds of torture for the United States," Rubenstein said. "Whether or not they actually tortured these three plaintiffs personally, I think they can certainly be held responsible for creating the program that other people then executed."
Nevertheless, the system has so far "lacked the judicial fortitude to do anything about it," said Dr. Steven Miles, a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Suleiman Abdullah Salim. (Photo via ACLU)
By Miles's count, more than 105 detainees in custody of the CIA and Department of Defense have died during interrogations, but no one has ever so much as been publicly reprimanded for it. All previous legal actions have stalled, and the American Psychological Association (APA) — a report the APA itself commissioned found that top officials at the organization ignored their ethics code at the behest of the Bush administration — has maintained that Mitchell and Jessen remain "outside the reach of the association's ethics adjudication process."
But even if the case gets thrown out, Miles believes it is crucial to keep trying.
"Fundamentally, this is a civil rights issue," he said. "Remember how many lawsuits were brought before we finally dismantled Jim Crow."
Though the executive summary of the Senate torture report prompted the ACLU's suit, the summary was released "with the names of virtually every health professional redacted," said Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
Watch VICE News' 'The Architect,' about James Mitchell.
Getting details like those will be important according to Captain Michael Schwartz, a United States Air Force lawyer who represents high-value Guantanamo detainee Walid bin Attash. However, Schwartz believes the ACLU's odds of obtaining any truly meaningful evidence are near zero.
"To say the experience I've had litigating against, essentially, the CIA, has been an uphill battle doesn't really capture how difficult it actually is," he said. "My case is going nowhere. It's been four years of pretrial litigation; we've essentially made no headway at all."
Even if the ACLU's lawsuit is permitted to proceed past the initial stages, Schwartz doesn't believe much information will be made public. To establish Mitchell's and Jessen's liability, and for the ACLU to recover damages for their clients, Schwartz said the identities of people "who unquestionably committed war crimes" would have to be exposed.
"I have spent the last four years trying to get that same sort of information on behalf of a capital defendant," he said. "If someone facing the death penalty doesn't have a right to it, it's hard to imagine the plaintiffs in a civil suit will." _________________ A la guerre comme a la guerre èëè âòîðàÿ ðåäàêöèÿ Çàáóãîðíîâà