Diesel Civil Trust

newleft: thepublics: The Monster Testifies at Gitmo Hearing: Former Bagram Interrogator Damien Corsetti Discusses Abuse of Omar Khadr. GUANTANAMO BAY — His nickname wasn’t “Monster,” he admonished the lawyer. It was “The Monster.” That was what the Bagram Collection Point’s interrogators, guards — and most especially detainees — called Army interrogator Damien Corsetti. And it was important to him that the court correctly record his story. Back then — in 2002 at Bagram, and later at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison — Corsetti was as fearsome as his handle. Although acquitted, he went before a court-martial proceeding related to the abuse of a detainee in Iraq. Now, Corsetti is an unemployed veteran of two wars, unable to work because of post-traumatic stress disorder, and an infamous figure in the U.S.’s post-9/11 history of torture. But he testified on Wednesday morning from a remote location on behalf of one of the former inmates at Bagram whom he used to intimidate and brutalize: Omar Khadr, the 23-year old Canadian citizen who has been in U.S. custody for nearly eight years. The large man once known as “The Monster” — the nickname is tattooed in Italian on his stomach — provided rare sworn testimony about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in the Afghanistan war’s early days, the product of what he described as command pressure for intelligence and unclear rules about permissible interrogator behavior.

newleft:

thepublics:

The Monster Testifies at Gitmo Hearing: Former Bagram Interrogator Damien Corsetti Discusses Abuse of Omar Khadr.

GUANTANAMO BAY — His nickname wasn’t “Monster,” he admonished the lawyer. It was “The Monster.” That was what the Bagram Collection Point’s interrogators, guards — and most especially detainees — called Army interrogator Damien Corsetti. And it was important to him that the court correctly record his story.

Back then — in 2002 at Bagram, and later at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison — Corsetti was as fearsome as his handle. Although acquitted, he went before a court-martial proceeding related to the abuse of a detainee in Iraq. Now, Corsetti is an unemployed veteran of two wars, unable to work because of post-traumatic stress disorder, and an infamous figure in the U.S.’s post-9/11 history of torture.

But he testified on Wednesday morning from a remote location on behalf of one of the former inmates at Bagram whom he used to intimidate and brutalize: Omar Khadr, the 23-year old Canadian citizen who has been in U.S. custody for nearly eight years. The large man once known as “The Monster” — the nickname is tattooed in Italian on his stomach — provided rare sworn testimony about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in the Afghanistan war’s early days, the product of what he described as command pressure for intelligence and unclear rules about permissible interrogator behavior.

Report Filed:
05 May 2010,22:25 Zulu

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Three days of hell

areza:

standwithfreeiran:

Part 1: At the start of the Iranian election/post-election
Part 2: As the protests continued…
Part 3: The unimaginable torture…
Part 4: When things got more violent…
Part 5: June 24th - “The Day of the Axes”

There was going to be a gathering at a cemetery in Tehran to commemorate the deaths of the people that have been killed in the protests. It was going to be a peaceful gathering, and wasn’t supposed to turn into a protest. Mousavi was going to seek an OK from the government for the gathering. The Interior Ministry refused to issue a permit for the gatherings. Everyone I knew that was going wasn’t surprised and was all going to show up anyway, especially myself and other people who lost someone in the protests. The gatherings were still planned anyway. I heard that day that even Mousavi and some of the other reformist leaders were going to visit the graves of the protests to also pay their respects to those people. I went to it anyway and was arrested, along with a lot of other people that day.

The only thing that could be described after that when I was arrested and was detained was going to be my three days of feeling like I was in hell. I thought the torture from the first time was bad enough, but it seemed a lot less severe than the torture that was going to happen during those three days in the prison that I was in. Most people had been taken to places like Evin prison or Kahrizak detention center. There was one that most people didn’t even know existed until after the protests — Level Minus Four detention center, an underground detention center that’s part of the Intelligence Ministry. The torture there seemed to be some of the worst, probably worse than that of the other prisons.

On the first day there, when they got us tehre, they staff started to search for severely injured people and gave them a little bit of aid. Some of the injured people had already passed out and a taxi driver that was there looked like he was already dead by that time. All types of government agents came and went. They were moving people. They were forcing people to just walk or to just stand for a really long time to prevent people from sitting down. I had no energy and could barely stand up. I leaned against a wall at one point to try to regain a bit of strength but when I did I was beaten. It looked like they had no idea what they were going to do with all the people that were there.

I noticed there were probably around 100 people that were in each room at first and there wasn’t enough space to sit on the ground. The officers were randomly beating up people in there. They were hitting people in the head and in there faces. They were trying to hit people as hard as they could. I was hit in the face really hard and I felt jaw my break after the fourth strike to my face. The beatings were brutal because they were using all their force and just wouldn’t stop hitting people. They weren’t giving people any food or any water.

The beatings were horrible and were with not only batons/electric batons, but with whatever else they could find. They were beating people mostly with electric batons, and sometimes regular batons. I was hit a few times with an electric baton and it was the worse feeling to have that shock go through my body. After that, they were starting to use cords to lash people with right in the back. I was hit several times with a cord and it was the worst pain that I had ever felt at the time the different times that cord was hitting my back. I had been hung up by my wrists again, and the lashings were so hard but I felt too weak to scream out in pain and my jaw was in pain that I couldn’t even open up my mouth for anything. It hadn’t even been that much time in there and already I was starting to lose all hope of being released and thought this was really going to be the moment that meant death for me.

After what seemed like hours of being hung up by my wirsts with chains, they finally let me out of the chains. I wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen next. The beatings had still continued for everyone that was there. Someone asked me if I knew where we were and I responded to him with just one simple word “Hell.” They were breaking people’s fingers, every other bone that they could break, and these other forms of beatings and of torture. They seemed to only just want to inflict as much pain as possible as they could on everyone they. Anything they knew was going to inflict a lot of pain — they did it. This continued all day. Even through the night, they were depriving people of getting any sleep.

On the second day, it looked like they were getting a little more organized and they started searching for any special cases with the people that were detained. After that, they moved me and some other people to a harsher environment. The beatings continued. I was hung up by my wrists again and was continually beaten and even lashed with a cord. It seemed like it only got a lot worse from the first day in there. I was just hanging there for a while. I was starting to want to death to come to me because I just had this feeling inside that I was not going to be released and I didn’t want to spend years in this kind of place. I was beaten on every part of my body and blacked out a few times. I could feel blood dripped down my back from the lashings and from my head again. My entire body was more than sore. It was like this for hours that day. I was nearly covered in my own blood from the beatings and the lashes.

In the early afternoon a man came in and said that we were going to be released that day. An hour later another person came in and told us that we were going to be in prison for 5 years. They continued to use things like electric cables to beat people with. They were breaking people’s fingers, people’s hands again. I saw some people lose consciousness from the pain and once they regained consciousness the beatings continued again. I lost consciousness a few times in that same time. One of the officers that was there refused to beat any of the detainees, and he looked like he was feeling bad for what was going on, and they arrested him right there and started beating him also. The beatings on everyone continued. I lost consciousness once during that time and woke up and felt blood dripping down my face and down the back of my head, felt a lot of blood dripping down my back. I saw one person that was in the same room that I was die from the severe beatings.

That same day some plainclothes officers came in with papers forcing people to sign them. The papers were all pre-written confessions all in different handwritings saying that the signer is a member of an organization by Mousavi. Some people signed the papers and some others would just fake their names. I didn’t know if I should sign my own name or sign a fake name. I almost didn’t see the point in signing a fake name because they already knew who I was and I thought that if I did that it would only make the situation even worse than it already was. There weren’t enough confession papers for everyone there. They were giving empty promises to people of freedom to people that signed them, but after most people signed them, they were never were released like they were told that they would be.

That entire night is one that plays over in my head sometimes and it is something that I wish that I could forget more than anything else. After a horrifying day of beatings and torture, I was taken to some solitary confinement room and I was sure it was where I was going to be stuck for those 5 years that I was told I was going to be in prison. I couldn’t even talk because my jaw was sore. I thought maybe this was going to be a time I could sleep a little bit at least and rest my eyes and regained just a little bit of strength. I was given some water by a guard but it was a mistake. The only thing I remembered not long after that was losing consciousness and then waking up, I don’t know how much longer after that, and my entire body felt strange. I felt strange. I couldn’t explain it then and I still can’t explain it now. I found out later what had happened then, that like others there that I had been drugged and raped by a guard. I heard claims of rape happening to men and women in prisons but didn’t think it was going to happen to me. I felt so much shame and more than violated. I had also been beaten while it happened. I felt more beaten up than I had before, I had more bruises all over me, welts on my arms and couldn’t move and could feel welts on my back. Even to this day, I still don’t feel the same because of it.

On the morning of the third day, a man came in and introduced himself as an Intelligence officer. He said that he was going record our confession with a camera. The other people and I that were told this were reluctant as to why this is what they were going to do that. He promised that if one of us confessed in front of the camera that they would free us all and that they would blur our face, that we would have nothing to worry about it. I didn’t believe it when I was told that, because of all the lies the government has said before about being released. It didn’t happen — there was no confession to a camera. There wasn’t any releases of people that were promised that. After that, I didn’t think I was ever going to be released after empty promises twice already and it not happening. The only thing I hoped at that point that was at least my family would know that I love them and would somehow seek to find out the truth about what happened.

Throughout the day, the beatings continued. There were times where I would go over an hour and nothing would happen and I was hoping the beatings were going to continue. When they did, it only added to the extreme pain that I was already in and felt like it made things worse. I almost felt like death was close and in my mind I was hoping that it was. Everything was too much for me to handle and was too much for my body to handle to go through this any much longer. I wanted death at that pointed, it seemed like the only way it was all going to end.

Close to 11P.M. that night, everything stopped for me. They released me and I was just taken to this hospital to be treated for my injuries — injuries on my body and the minor internal injuries, along with some internal bleeding I had. The doctors at the hospital were forced by the government to not ask any questions to patients but to just treat them and not say anything else. They would just treat people and once they were treated, they were out of the hospitals and I wasn’t given any time to recover in the hospital. I was outside of Tehran at the hospital that I was at and knew where I was and stayed at a friend’s house for a couple of days to get some rest.

I will still never know why suddenly they just released me and a few of the other inmates that I was with during those three days. I never want to question it because I felt lucky that I was when I felt like it was never going to happen. The fat of a few people that I knew, I never knew after that and didn’t know if they were still alive after that point. I only hoped that if they were in the same place or in another prison that they were going to be released. I later found out that one of them died in prison from similar forms of torture they were going through. I never felt more lucky to be alive then I did when I was released even though I was badly injured and had a broken jaw and needed to have my mouth wired shut.

Report Filed:
22 February 2010,22:45 Zulu

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Second Circuit Affirms Dismissal of Arar—By Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

“When the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay,” writes Guido Calabresi, the former Yale Law dean and a man widely viewed as the most illustrious living member of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He is lodging his dissent in a 7-4 decision of the en banc court concluding that a Canadian software engineer named Maher Arar has no right to sue government officials. What has Calabresi so worked up?

Report Filed:
11 November 2009,19:04 Zulu

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The IG Report is not for the faint of heart. The details of abuse are so graphic and brutal that it’s hard to read in places. But Glenn is right — everyone should read it (or at least the key parts). People should see precisely what happened. The highlights include: (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees’ faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it “poignant”); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one’s bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) “hard takedowns” (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them). It’s easy to let your mind skim over these. But if you stop and linger over a couple of them — and really take the time to reflect on the individual pain and fear that must have been involved — it makes you sick to your stomach. These acts must be punished.

publius | Obsidian Wings (via retropolitics) (via abbyjean) (via nezua) (via jadedhippy) (via writinggirl2writingwoman) (via robot-heart-politics)

Report Filed:
27 August 2009,19:38 Zulu

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The Scapegoat's Apology

azspot:

The apology came well into the interview, in response to a pressing question about her sense of remorse. It was still tangled with her anger that the photos were made public at all, and was the lamest part of a fascinating interview. Far more interesting, for instance, were her memories of the casual horrors of Abu Ghraib and the moral relativism that was expected of her:

“Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI (military intelligence) the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up,’ you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered… .

“It was kind of weird at first. But once I started to see the big picture, I thought, OK, here come these guys, the OGAs (other government agencies), the MIs or even officers, and they don’t even look twice at it. If they approve, then I’m not going to say anything. Who was I to argue?”

Poor Specialist England. She was just trying to be patriotic — “as a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies, so that’s where I got the idea” (to join the Reserves) — but she got caught up, like Lt. Calley, in the darkness of war, which passeth all understanding. “Who was I to argue?”

It’s always the same darkness, is it not? At his trial, Calley protested: “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day… . I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers.”

In both cases, the odd thing was that the darkness got interrupted and they got caught in freeze-frame, enthusiastically carrying out their orders, or perhaps improvising them. But they’d been doing so surrounded by a context — the chain of command — which suddenly vanished when they got caught.

Report Filed:
18:57 Zulu

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President Obama’s decision to allow the Justice Department to investigate and possibly prosecute CIA personnel, and his decision to remove authority for interrogation from the CIA to the White House, serves as a reminder, if any were needed, of why so many Americans have doubts about this Administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.

Cheney criticizes political CIA probe plan | U.S. | Reuters

Report Filed:
25 August 2009,19:02 Zulu

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Reflexive defense torturers

squashed:

I have little use for knee-jerk punditry. Ann Coulter criticizes Obama for taking an “elitist vacation.” Barney Frank was insufficiently dignified when asked a LaRouchie what planet she was from after she asked why he supported a Nazi healthplan. Was Obama’s condemnation of Libya condemny enough? James Carville opened his mouth. I feel the same way toward this that I feel toward celebrity gossip. It’s sensational—but it’s rarely relevant. Occasionally something funny emerges, but generally, when people who are paid to make a big deal out of nothing make a big deal out of nothing, it isn’t news. It’s barely even entertainment. And if it were all vacations and semantics, this political point scoring would all be fun and games.

But it’s not. Some things are important. We need more thoughtful criticism and less reactionary blather. At one point, the Republicans claimed to be the party of intelligent and thinking people. Some of their facts were incomplete and their models have been discredited, but they at least purported to have a fact-based approach. This is no longer the case. Now everything rooted in “common sense.” Of course, common sense is simply stuff that feels right—regardless of your ability to support it. It’s truthiness. It’s a way to give political cover to our fears and prejudices.

We see that in criticism of investigations into CIA abuses. Apparently some of the pundits think CIA agents should be entirely unaccountable because they “imagined themselves to be preserving American lives”. Legally, that defense is about as valid as the “I imagined Jesus told me to kill my children” defense. Protecting your country is not an excuse for attrocity—no matter how unsympathetic your victim is. Neither is being a respected intelligence officer.

And there is no longer room to deny a pattern of abuse in the detention facilities or even to claim that the agents and contractors were simply following orders. Reports include mock execution and threats to rape or kill relatives, in addition to waterboarding and all the things we already know about. The investigation is, if anything, far too narrow in scope and ignores some clear criminal activity. Claiming that it is somehow improper to investigate such egregious is starting to sound ridiculous. The people reflexively defending these crimes are the same one tossing around terms like “moral hazard” in relation to bailing out GM. Maybe it applies in GM’s case—but if you want a real moral hazard, let’s try giving political cover to torturers.

Report Filed:
09:30 Zulu

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Half of the American citizenry is now explicitly pro-torture (and the question even specified that the torture would be used not against Terrorists, but “terrorist suspects”). Just think about what that says about how coarsened and barbaric our populace is and what types of abuses that entrenched mentality is certain to spawn in the future, particularly in the event of another terrorist attack. But even more meaningful is the question itself — it’s now normal and standard for pollsters to include among the various questions about garden-variety political controversies (health care, tax and spending policies, clean energy approaches) a question about whether one believes the U.S. Government should torture people (are you for or against government torture?) That’s how normalized torture has become, how completely eroded the taboo is in the United States.

Glenn Greenwald (via azspot)

Report Filed:
24 June 2009,11:37 Zulu

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