Hasta hace pocos minutos este ocioso tecleador logró volver a tener acceso a este su Blog, acto seguido a la cobarde censura...
The ancient law versus the newest technology ...!
Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional...!
http://www.ccardenass.org/imagen/justicia.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_FVD0BR2Mc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuwsgGgNJtE
VOIR DIRE...
Procedo a rehacer mi opinión externada el dia de ayer temprano por la mañana en este Blog, misma que fue removida o mejor dicho, censurada, ayer por la noche, seguramente porque a alguien o a algun@s les incomodó, como si el suscrito pretendiera o buscara lucrar con ella, que ingenuidad... Cabe destacar que otras aportaciones en el caso de Libia, tambien fueron removidas, esperando tener tiempo para reinsertar aquellas que logre traer a colación.
Come on guys... the show must go ooonnn...!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLddJ1WceHQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ADh8Fs3YdU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHDIBgEluM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gs4RbGmFY0&playnext=1&list=PLB91D99A7E7B13B82
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WikiLeaks: grand jury hearing opens in US
The FBI has ordered a resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts to testify at a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who faces the possibility of being charged with espionage in the United States.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Photo: REUTERS
The jury, which will decide if an indictment is brought, met in secret in Alexandria, Virginia. The subpoena, which was leaked to the news website Salon.com, indicated that the Department of Justice is seriously examining possible violations of the draconian 1917 Espionage Act.
Prosecutors are keen to show that Mr Assange and his organisation encouraged and abetted the leaking of a vast trove of American military and diplomatic documents, which has stunned and infuriated Washington.
Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst, is suspected of leaking the information and is currently in military custody. Earlier reports said that two students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had aided Mr Manning, though it is not clear if either was the man ordered to testify on Wednesday.
Journalists are not allowed to attend grand jury hearings, which often last more than a year and usually result in a prosecution. However, a non-government party has never been prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
Mr Assange is currently in Britain fighting an extradition order to Sweden for a sexual assault case. His lawyers have argued that Sweden would be merely a stop on the way to extradition in the US.
Related Articles
The Barack Obama administration is in the midst of an unprecedented crackdown against leakers of official material, with five federal prosecutions currently under way."
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"WikiLeaks: Julian Assange sex assault court case branded a 'show trial'
7:45AM GMT 15 Dec 2010
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"WikiLeaks: Julian Assange sex assault court case branded a 'show trial'
The Swedish authorities are turning the sexual assault case against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, into a "show trial", his lawyers claimed.
Image 1 of 2
Mark Stephens speaks to the media outside the City of Westminster Magistrates Court Photo: REUTERS
Mark Stephens attacked the decision by the Swedish authorities to appeal against a judge's ruling to grant the 39 year-old Australian bail.
He said their decision was now a "'persecution" rather than a prosecution and was politically motivated.
He accused the authorities of stopping at nothing to have the Wikileaks founder behind bars, a claim they denied.
"Finally after two hours we have heard the Swedes want to appeal against the bail conditions and put Mr Assange through yet more trouble, more expense and more hurdles," he told reporters outside City of Westminister Magistrates Court.
"It is really turning into a show trial and we will be in court again within the next 48 hours as soon as we have all the information."
"It is an unfortunate state of affairs given that we were obviously very relieved for Mr Assange a few hours ago now that the Swedes have taken this position. But given their persecution of Mr Assange perhaps it is not surprising."
Earlier Mr Stephens praised the celebrities who have backed Mr Assange since his arrest, some of who offered to stump up the £200,000 surety to secure his release.
"We have a number of people who were prepared to stand the surety of £20,000 each," he said.
"Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, John Pilger and Ken Loach, among others, are pillars of the community who have risked their reputation to stand by him [Mr Assange]."
Mr Stephens added Assange was 'worried' about his colleagues at Wikileaks but said he understood they had to carry on their work while he was incarcerated.
Mr Assange's legal team will now take the case to the High Court to secure his release on bail while he continues to await extradition to Sweden.
Mr Stephens said his client “believed in British justice”.
“But there is a problem because he has been granted bail on condition that £200,000 is paid into the court,” he said.
“That is an awful lot of money.”
Mr Stephens said it would take an "inordinate" length of time to get the bail money together.
"Until then we have an innocent man in Dickensian, Victorian conditions in Wandsworth jail," he said.
"It is impossible to say how long it will take before Julian Assange is out. The problem is £200,000 cannot be put in by cheque as that takes seven days to clear.
"So I have to go around to find cash and have it delivered to court, and until the court has it an innocent man stays in jail."
Mr Stephens branded the bail conditions "Orwellian" and said he would ask to relax them at a later date.
He warned the extradition process could take "many years" and highlighted the ongoing ordeal of Gary McKinnon, the British computer expert wanted in the US for hacking into military computer systems.
The lawyer said his client could not speak to other prisoners at Wandsworth Prison and was locked up for 23 hours a day.
He added that mail was not getting through and a copy of Time magazine featuring Assange was "ripped up by the censors" and he was only given an empty envelope.
Mr Stephens said author Hanif Kureishi and filmmaker Michael Moore were among the people who offered to give surety on behalf of the WikiLeaks founder.
"These are pillars of the community prepared to stand their reputation behind Julian Assange," he said."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8202414/WikiLeaks-Julian-Assange-sex-assault-court-case-branded-a-show-trial.html
---
In the long years of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — perpetuated, lamentably, by President Obama — in which soldiers are terrorists, and terrorists are “warriors,” and both of these parties are “enemy combatants” or “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” those called upon to play a part in this dangerous aberration from international norms have frequently rebelled, placing their allegiance to the Constitution above the President’s whims, for example, in the cases of the many military defense attorneys who fought against the government, as well as defending their clients, in the Military Commission trial system that was ghoulishly resuscitated by Dick Cheney in November 2001.
Prosecutors, too, have resigned rather than take part in an unfair process, including, most famously, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who resigned rather than prosecuting torture victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who denounced the system’s inability to deliver justice in September 2008, leading, in part, to the release of former child prisoner Mohamed Jawad.
Also of note is Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions from September 2005 to October 2007, when, having been a stauch advocate of the Commissions, he resigned because he had been put in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s senior lawyer Wiliam J. Haynes II, who believed in using information derived from torture in the Commisisons, thereby crossing a line that Davis was not prepared a cross.
Col. Davis is now the executive director of the Crimes of War Project, and he and I have been in touch for several years now, as I have covered aspects of his post-Guantánamo history (see here) and have cross-posted some opinon pieces he has written about Guantánamo (see here, here and here), and during my visit to the US in January to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, I was delighted that he agreed to take part in a panel discussion about Guantánamo that I had put together for an event at the New America Foundation (and also see our Russia Today interviews here).
Below, I’m cross-posting his latest offering about Guantánamo, an important review of flawed intelligence and the use of torture — at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “War on Terror” — that was published by Der Spiegel in the wake of the recent release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002.
“The Government’s Narrative Was a Lie”
When he arrived at Guantánamo in 2005 as chief prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis thought that he would be dealing exclusively with fanatical terrorists. But he soon realized that many prisoners shouldn’t have been imprisoned at all. In a contribution for SPIEGEL, he describes his path from idealism to disillusionment.
When I became the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo in September 2005, I arrived having heard the same stories Bush administration officials like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been telling the public: the Guantánamo detainees were the worst of the worst, a bunch of totally committed terrorists that were all closely connected to Osama bin Laden. I recall especially the claim a senior official made that the detainees were so vicious they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of the airplanes carrying them to Guantánamo just to kill Americans. They painted a picture of men that were so bad you thought: thank God they are locked away at Guantánamo.
Then I began reviewing files — some of them like the ones that have now been published on the Internet — and talking with people who had been involved with the case for a long time. I began to understand that, in large part, the government’s narrative had been a lie and that the picture of the detainees as a homogenous group of extremists so committed to terrorism that they all had to be locked away forever was distorted.
There clearly were — and there clearly still are — some incredibly bad men held in detention at Guantánamo. But it was equally clear that a significant number were simply teenagers, old men, or foreigners captured walking around in Afghanistan with a Casio watch like the ones that al-Qaida handed out in its Afghan training camps — people who did not come close to matching the label of “the worst of the worst.”
While I had doubts about some of the cases, I honestly believed that the cases we would choose to prosecute, a few dozen out of a detainee population of several hundred at the time, would get full, fair and open trials. I said a number of times in comments to journalists and in other public presentations I gave that televising the trials on Court TV would be fine with me so everyone had the opportunity to watch. I believed we were committed to doing this right and, therefore, we had nothing to be ashamed of or try and hide from public view.
Proud of Our Efforts
Shortly after I became chief prosecutor, I instructed the members of the prosecution team that we would not use any evidence obtained by torture or any of the enhanced interrogation techniques they thought were unduly coercive. I told them that if they saw something that made them uncomfortable or felt morally or ethically wrong to come see me and we would talk about it. We were not going to see how far we could press the issue and get away with it. We were going to do this so someday our families would look back and be proud of our efforts.
General John Altenburg was the convening authority, the official in charge of the military commissions, when I arrived and he supported me in that decision. I had a tremendous amount of respect for General Altenburg. I was convinced that he was intent on preventing Bush administration political appointees from meddling in the military commissions and giving military law and military lawyers a bad name. Looking back, the beginning of the end for me started with General Altenburg’s departure in late 2006.
General Altenburg was replaced a few months later by Susan Crawford. Ms. Crawford was closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney and had worked for Cheney at the Pentagon. So we went from a career military officer who had proven he could stand up to the administration to a civilian political figure that was connected to the administration.
The atmosphere changed within a few months of Ms. Crawford taking control of the military commissions. A new attorney joined her staff, Brigadier General Tom Hartmann, and he out-ranked me; a point he made clear again and again. General Hartmann began to question my authority to exclude evidence obtained by waterboarding or any of the other methods many call torture. He told me, “President Bush said we don’t torture, and if the President says we don’t, what gives you the right to say we do?”
Exploited for Intelligence
He said the use of those interrogation methods produced good evidence and we should be using it. I asked Ms. Crawford for help, but she refused. I asked Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes for help, but he refused, too. The fact that Haynes wrote the memo authorizing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” should have told me, I suppose, that he was not going to find fault after those techniques were used.
The fundamental problem in the effort to prosecute detainees is that no one was sent to Guantánamo to face prosecution. They were sent there to be exploited for intelligence. At the end of World War II, when people were taken to Nürnberg, the war was over and the sole objective was to prosecute those suspected of war crimes. When detainees were sent to Guantánamo, on the other hand, the war in Afghanistan was, and still is, ongoing. The objective was to get information out of the detainees that would have intelligence value to the soldiers battling the Taliban and al-Qaida. Developing evidence to prosecute detainees for war crimes was just not a high priority.
There was real tension between the intelligence community and the law enforcement community, something I did not appreciate at first. They have different perspectives and different ways of conducting business. The intelligence community is not necessarily concerned with what you did yesterday, they want to know what you are planning to do tomorrow so that they can stop it from happening. They usually operate unseen and their rules are largely secret.
Law enforcement, on the other hand, is concerned with accountability for what you have already done, not necessarily what you are thinking about maybe doing at some point in the future. Their operations are usually more apparent and their rules are generally well known. Sometimes the intelligence and law enforcement efforts are complimentary, but at Guantánamo they were often in conflict.
Connecting Dots that Shouldn’t Be Connected
Another problem was that the military was unprepared to take on the large-scale interrogation mission it inherited after 9/11. We had trained hundreds of pilots and tank drivers, but we did not have a squadron of seasoned interrogators ready to spring into operation. So we largely contracted it out to commercial companies who provided us interrogators, often young people with minimal relevant experience.
I think you can see evidence of that in the case assessments that are available to the public on the Internet: faulty logic, weak analysis, and connecting up dots that should not be connected. Some useful information was developed, but a great deal of the huge volume of information was irrelevant and in many cases it was just wrong. Unfortunately, as a result, some people that should not have been imprisoned for any longer than it took to figure out that they were not the worst of the worst, or even close to it, are still at Guantánamo nine years later.
I remember the day in September 2006 when the high-value detainees reached Guantánamo. We were all very excited and anxious to get the prosecution process started. The military intelligence community at Guantánamo was excited, too. They had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 13 other high-value detainees right there on their doorstep and they were anxious for a chance to interrogate them. Some seemed to think that they could get out of them information the CIA had been unable to extract. We objected and persuaded higher authorities to say the intelligence effort ended when the CIA handed the high-value detainees over to the Defense Department. We wanted a clean break between what happened to the high-value detainees in the past, while they were with the CIA, and our effort to prosecute them now that they were in Defense Department hands.
I was aware that some of the detainees were waterboarded. That happened before I was involved with the military commissions. It was part of a CIA program, not a military one.
Separating Intelligence from Law Enforcement
I know a lot of people think the military waterboarded detainees at Guantánamo — and to this day they probably think that it is still happening — but that was not the case and to my knowledge no one was ever waterboarded at Guantánamo. We had what I believe was complete access to information, particularly CIA information. I actually had a harder time getting information from my own colleagues in the Defense Department for some reason. And we were briefed on interrogation techniques that were used by the people who conducted the interrogations.
We had spent months assessing the information available on the high-value detainees and what parts of it we thought we could use in court. Because of the treatment they received in CIA custody and because of concern about exposing CIA personnel or the roles other countries had played, we wanted to separate the intelligence effort from the law enforcement effort to the extent we could.
In early 2007, we created so-called clean-teams made up of military and civilian law enforcement personnel that would try to interview each of the high-value detainees. It was an opportunity to explain to each detainee that he was in a new place, with new people, and under new rules. If the detainee wanted to talk, fine, but it was the detainee’s choice. The sessions I observed looked like a couple of people sitting around a table having a casual conversation. At times there were smiles and laughter.
There was nothing coercive that I saw in those sessions, but the question remains whether after you cross the line can you ever walk it back to the right side. Once you ring the torture bell can you ever un-ring it? We did not know then if the clean-team effort would produce anything useful or if judges would permit it in court, but we thought we had nothing to lose if we gave it a try. That was more than four years ago and we still do not know the answer.
“We Tortured Qahtani”
One case where torture clearly took place at Guantánamo is the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man I believe was supposed to be the real 20th hijacker on 9/11. It was the dirtiest of the cases prior to the arrival of the high-value detainees and I was working on it personally. Once the personnel at Guantánamo realized the detainee they had in custody was the same person that had been turned away at the airport in Orlando, Florida while Mohammed Atta was waiting, they turned up the pressure to get information out of him.
Secretary Rumsfeld approved a harsh interrogation plan and over a period of weeks, Qahtani was separated from the other detainees, held in isolation in the brig, subjected to extreme temperatures, constant loud music, sleep deprivation, forced to stand nude in front of females, restrained in stress positions, threatened with rendition to a country where he would be tortured, threats to his family, and on and on. In an interview published in the Washington Post in January 2009 in the final days of the Bush administration, Ms. Crawford explained why she never sent the Qahtani case to trial. She said: “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”
He is still at Guantánamo. The Obama administration has completely ignored its obligation under domestic and international law to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture. Apparently we are looking forward and pretending nothing bad happened in our past.
The final moment for me was in October 2007. My dispute with General Hartmann over torture and evidence and meddling with the process reached Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England, and he issued an order that said my chain of command was Hartmann and then Jim Haynes. Hartmann did not believe we tortured — remember, President Bush said we didn’t — and Haynes had given legal approval for torture, the memo Secretary Rumsfeld signed. I read the order, saw who had command authority over me, and I resigned.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation."
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Google/comienza/restablecer/Blogger/plataforma/blogs/dias/averia/elpeputec/20110513elpeputec_5/Tes
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+WIKILEAKS&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=9651d7334bd74320
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Assange&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&cad=cbv
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Assange&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&cad=cbv#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Guantanamo&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=ecbf8a9c27052cf6
---------------------------------
"El resistirse a lo irresistible no siempre fortalece a quienes se creen irresistibles, sí, a aquell@s que ‘no mandan obedeciendo a sus mandantes’… Fideiius.
http://eligio-del-awiizotl.blogspot.com/2010/08/911-naves-que-impactaron-las-torres.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd3XU9qyTGA
Earlier Mr Stephens praised the celebrities who have backed Mr Assange since his arrest, some of who offered to stump up the £200,000 surety to secure his release.
"We have a number of people who were prepared to stand the surety of £20,000 each," he said.
"Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, John Pilger and Ken Loach, among others, are pillars of the community who have risked their reputation to stand by him [Mr Assange]."
Mr Stephens added Assange was 'worried' about his colleagues at Wikileaks but said he understood they had to carry on their work while he was incarcerated.
Mr Assange's legal team will now take the case to the High Court to secure his release on bail while he continues to await extradition to Sweden.
Mr Stephens said his client “believed in British justice”.
“But there is a problem because he has been granted bail on condition that £200,000 is paid into the court,” he said.
“That is an awful lot of money.”
Mr Stephens said it would take an "inordinate" length of time to get the bail money together.
"Until then we have an innocent man in Dickensian, Victorian conditions in Wandsworth jail," he said.
"It is impossible to say how long it will take before Julian Assange is out. The problem is £200,000 cannot be put in by cheque as that takes seven days to clear.
"So I have to go around to find cash and have it delivered to court, and until the court has it an innocent man stays in jail."
Mr Stephens branded the bail conditions "Orwellian" and said he would ask to relax them at a later date.
He warned the extradition process could take "many years" and highlighted the ongoing ordeal of Gary McKinnon, the British computer expert wanted in the US for hacking into military computer systems.
The lawyer said his client could not speak to other prisoners at Wandsworth Prison and was locked up for 23 hours a day.
He added that mail was not getting through and a copy of Time magazine featuring Assange was "ripped up by the censors" and he was only given an empty envelope.
Mr Stephens said author Hanif Kureishi and filmmaker Michael Moore were among the people who offered to give surety on behalf of the WikiLeaks founder.
"These are pillars of the community prepared to stand their reputation behind Julian Assange," he said."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8202414/WikiLeaks-Julian-Assange-sex-assault-court-case-branded-a-show-trial.html
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"Col. Morris Davis Discusses Guantánamo, Torture and Intelligence in the Wake of the Latest WikiLeaks Revelations
13.5.11
In the long years of the Bush administration’s “War on Terror” — perpetuated, lamentably, by President Obama — in which soldiers are terrorists, and terrorists are “warriors,” and both of these parties are “enemy combatants” or “alien unprivileged enemy belligerents,” those called upon to play a part in this dangerous aberration from international norms have frequently rebelled, placing their allegiance to the Constitution above the President’s whims, for example, in the cases of the many military defense attorneys who fought against the government, as well as defending their clients, in the Military Commission trial system that was ghoulishly resuscitated by Dick Cheney in November 2001.Prosecutors, too, have resigned rather than take part in an unfair process, including, most famously, Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, who resigned rather than prosecuting torture victim Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who denounced the system’s inability to deliver justice in September 2008, leading, in part, to the release of former child prisoner Mohamed Jawad.
Also of note is Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor of the Military Commissions from September 2005 to October 2007, when, having been a stauch advocate of the Commissions, he resigned because he had been put in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s senior lawyer Wiliam J. Haynes II, who believed in using information derived from torture in the Commisisons, thereby crossing a line that Davis was not prepared a cross.
Col. Davis is now the executive director of the Crimes of War Project, and he and I have been in touch for several years now, as I have covered aspects of his post-Guantánamo history (see here) and have cross-posted some opinon pieces he has written about Guantánamo (see here, here and here), and during my visit to the US in January to raise awareness of the plight of the remaining Guantánamo prisoners on the 9th anniversary of the prison’s opening, I was delighted that he agreed to take part in a panel discussion about Guantánamo that I had put together for an event at the New America Foundation (and also see our Russia Today interviews here).
Below, I’m cross-posting his latest offering about Guantánamo, an important review of flawed intelligence and the use of torture — at Guantánamo and elsewhere in the “War on Terror” — that was published by Der Spiegel in the wake of the recent release, by WikiLeaks, of classified military documents relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002.
“The Government’s Narrative Was a Lie”
By Morris Davis, Der Spiegel, May 2, 2011
When he arrived at Guantánamo in 2005 as chief prosecutor, Colonel Morris Davis thought that he would be dealing exclusively with fanatical terrorists. But he soon realized that many prisoners shouldn’t have been imprisoned at all. In a contribution for SPIEGEL, he describes his path from idealism to disillusionment.When I became the chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantánamo in September 2005, I arrived having heard the same stories Bush administration officials like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been telling the public: the Guantánamo detainees were the worst of the worst, a bunch of totally committed terrorists that were all closely connected to Osama bin Laden. I recall especially the claim a senior official made that the detainees were so vicious they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of the airplanes carrying them to Guantánamo just to kill Americans. They painted a picture of men that were so bad you thought: thank God they are locked away at Guantánamo.
Then I began reviewing files — some of them like the ones that have now been published on the Internet — and talking with people who had been involved with the case for a long time. I began to understand that, in large part, the government’s narrative had been a lie and that the picture of the detainees as a homogenous group of extremists so committed to terrorism that they all had to be locked away forever was distorted.
There clearly were — and there clearly still are — some incredibly bad men held in detention at Guantánamo. But it was equally clear that a significant number were simply teenagers, old men, or foreigners captured walking around in Afghanistan with a Casio watch like the ones that al-Qaida handed out in its Afghan training camps — people who did not come close to matching the label of “the worst of the worst.”
While I had doubts about some of the cases, I honestly believed that the cases we would choose to prosecute, a few dozen out of a detainee population of several hundred at the time, would get full, fair and open trials. I said a number of times in comments to journalists and in other public presentations I gave that televising the trials on Court TV would be fine with me so everyone had the opportunity to watch. I believed we were committed to doing this right and, therefore, we had nothing to be ashamed of or try and hide from public view.
Proud of Our Efforts
Shortly after I became chief prosecutor, I instructed the members of the prosecution team that we would not use any evidence obtained by torture or any of the enhanced interrogation techniques they thought were unduly coercive. I told them that if they saw something that made them uncomfortable or felt morally or ethically wrong to come see me and we would talk about it. We were not going to see how far we could press the issue and get away with it. We were going to do this so someday our families would look back and be proud of our efforts.
General John Altenburg was the convening authority, the official in charge of the military commissions, when I arrived and he supported me in that decision. I had a tremendous amount of respect for General Altenburg. I was convinced that he was intent on preventing Bush administration political appointees from meddling in the military commissions and giving military law and military lawyers a bad name. Looking back, the beginning of the end for me started with General Altenburg’s departure in late 2006.
General Altenburg was replaced a few months later by Susan Crawford. Ms. Crawford was closely connected to Vice President Dick Cheney and had worked for Cheney at the Pentagon. So we went from a career military officer who had proven he could stand up to the administration to a civilian political figure that was connected to the administration.
The atmosphere changed within a few months of Ms. Crawford taking control of the military commissions. A new attorney joined her staff, Brigadier General Tom Hartmann, and he out-ranked me; a point he made clear again and again. General Hartmann began to question my authority to exclude evidence obtained by waterboarding or any of the other methods many call torture. He told me, “President Bush said we don’t torture, and if the President says we don’t, what gives you the right to say we do?”
Exploited for Intelligence
He said the use of those interrogation methods produced good evidence and we should be using it. I asked Ms. Crawford for help, but she refused. I asked Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes for help, but he refused, too. The fact that Haynes wrote the memo authorizing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” should have told me, I suppose, that he was not going to find fault after those techniques were used.
The fundamental problem in the effort to prosecute detainees is that no one was sent to Guantánamo to face prosecution. They were sent there to be exploited for intelligence. At the end of World War II, when people were taken to Nürnberg, the war was over and the sole objective was to prosecute those suspected of war crimes. When detainees were sent to Guantánamo, on the other hand, the war in Afghanistan was, and still is, ongoing. The objective was to get information out of the detainees that would have intelligence value to the soldiers battling the Taliban and al-Qaida. Developing evidence to prosecute detainees for war crimes was just not a high priority.
There was real tension between the intelligence community and the law enforcement community, something I did not appreciate at first. They have different perspectives and different ways of conducting business. The intelligence community is not necessarily concerned with what you did yesterday, they want to know what you are planning to do tomorrow so that they can stop it from happening. They usually operate unseen and their rules are largely secret.
Law enforcement, on the other hand, is concerned with accountability for what you have already done, not necessarily what you are thinking about maybe doing at some point in the future. Their operations are usually more apparent and their rules are generally well known. Sometimes the intelligence and law enforcement efforts are complimentary, but at Guantánamo they were often in conflict.
Connecting Dots that Shouldn’t Be Connected
Another problem was that the military was unprepared to take on the large-scale interrogation mission it inherited after 9/11. We had trained hundreds of pilots and tank drivers, but we did not have a squadron of seasoned interrogators ready to spring into operation. So we largely contracted it out to commercial companies who provided us interrogators, often young people with minimal relevant experience.
I think you can see evidence of that in the case assessments that are available to the public on the Internet: faulty logic, weak analysis, and connecting up dots that should not be connected. Some useful information was developed, but a great deal of the huge volume of information was irrelevant and in many cases it was just wrong. Unfortunately, as a result, some people that should not have been imprisoned for any longer than it took to figure out that they were not the worst of the worst, or even close to it, are still at Guantánamo nine years later.
I remember the day in September 2006 when the high-value detainees reached Guantánamo. We were all very excited and anxious to get the prosecution process started. The military intelligence community at Guantánamo was excited, too. They had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 13 other high-value detainees right there on their doorstep and they were anxious for a chance to interrogate them. Some seemed to think that they could get out of them information the CIA had been unable to extract. We objected and persuaded higher authorities to say the intelligence effort ended when the CIA handed the high-value detainees over to the Defense Department. We wanted a clean break between what happened to the high-value detainees in the past, while they were with the CIA, and our effort to prosecute them now that they were in Defense Department hands.
I was aware that some of the detainees were waterboarded. That happened before I was involved with the military commissions. It was part of a CIA program, not a military one.
Separating Intelligence from Law Enforcement
I know a lot of people think the military waterboarded detainees at Guantánamo — and to this day they probably think that it is still happening — but that was not the case and to my knowledge no one was ever waterboarded at Guantánamo. We had what I believe was complete access to information, particularly CIA information. I actually had a harder time getting information from my own colleagues in the Defense Department for some reason. And we were briefed on interrogation techniques that were used by the people who conducted the interrogations.
We had spent months assessing the information available on the high-value detainees and what parts of it we thought we could use in court. Because of the treatment they received in CIA custody and because of concern about exposing CIA personnel or the roles other countries had played, we wanted to separate the intelligence effort from the law enforcement effort to the extent we could.
In early 2007, we created so-called clean-teams made up of military and civilian law enforcement personnel that would try to interview each of the high-value detainees. It was an opportunity to explain to each detainee that he was in a new place, with new people, and under new rules. If the detainee wanted to talk, fine, but it was the detainee’s choice. The sessions I observed looked like a couple of people sitting around a table having a casual conversation. At times there were smiles and laughter.
There was nothing coercive that I saw in those sessions, but the question remains whether after you cross the line can you ever walk it back to the right side. Once you ring the torture bell can you ever un-ring it? We did not know then if the clean-team effort would produce anything useful or if judges would permit it in court, but we thought we had nothing to lose if we gave it a try. That was more than four years ago and we still do not know the answer.
“We Tortured Qahtani”
One case where torture clearly took place at Guantánamo is the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man I believe was supposed to be the real 20th hijacker on 9/11. It was the dirtiest of the cases prior to the arrival of the high-value detainees and I was working on it personally. Once the personnel at Guantánamo realized the detainee they had in custody was the same person that had been turned away at the airport in Orlando, Florida while Mohammed Atta was waiting, they turned up the pressure to get information out of him.
Secretary Rumsfeld approved a harsh interrogation plan and over a period of weeks, Qahtani was separated from the other detainees, held in isolation in the brig, subjected to extreme temperatures, constant loud music, sleep deprivation, forced to stand nude in front of females, restrained in stress positions, threatened with rendition to a country where he would be tortured, threats to his family, and on and on. In an interview published in the Washington Post in January 2009 in the final days of the Bush administration, Ms. Crawford explained why she never sent the Qahtani case to trial. She said: “We tortured Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture.”
He is still at Guantánamo. The Obama administration has completely ignored its obligation under domestic and international law to investigate and prosecute allegations of torture. Apparently we are looking forward and pretending nothing bad happened in our past.
The final moment for me was in October 2007. My dispute with General Hartmann over torture and evidence and meddling with the process reached Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon England, and he issued an order that said my chain of command was Hartmann and then Jim Haynes. Hartmann did not believe we tortured — remember, President Bush said we didn’t — and Haynes had given legal approval for torture, the memo Secretary Rumsfeld signed. I read the order, saw who had command authority over me, and I resigned.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation."http://www.elpais.com/articulo/tecnologia/Google/comienza/restablecer/Blogger/plataforma/blogs/dias/averia/elpeputec/20110513elpeputec_5/Tes
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+WIKILEAKS&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=9651d7334bd74320
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Assange&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&cad=cbv
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Assange&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&cad=cbv#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=FIDEIIUS+Guantanamo&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=ecbf8a9c27052cf6
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"El resistirse a lo irresistible no siempre fortalece a quienes se creen irresistibles, sí, a aquell@s que ‘no mandan obedeciendo a sus mandantes’… Fideiius.
Centro de Alerta para la Defensa de los Pueblos
Investigación, análisis, documentación y denuncias sobre la injerencia y subversión contra los pueblos de América Latina
Investigación, análisis, documentación y denuncias sobre la injerencia y subversión contra los pueblos de América Latina
"Noam Chomsky*: Estados Unidos es el mayor terrorista del mundo..."
Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology*
Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology*
EEUU despilfarró miles de millones de dólares del area social de Irak
“We don’t do body counts”.- General Tommy Franks
http://www.cubadebate.cu/reflexiones-fidel/2010/08/03/emplazamiento-al-presidente-de-estados-unidos/
"Hey, bad guys: If it is certain that you in God trust, you should not be afraid, just let the music play…!”. FIDEIIUS (Fideiius).
http://eligio-del-awiizotl.blogspot.com/2010/08/911-naves-que-impactaron-las-torres.html
ACCESO AL AGUA POTABLE, DECLARADO DERECHO FUNDAMENTAL: TRIUNFO DE LA HUMANIDAD A INSTANCIA DE EVO MORALES, C. PRESIDENTE CONSTITUCIONAL DE LA REPúBLICA DE BOLIVIA…
Perseguido por EEUU: Camarógrafo estadounidense que filmó imágenes del 11/9 enfrenta extradición
The Washington Post: Estados Unidos es el vergonzoso suministrador de armas al narcotráfico
*)
"Tres generaciones se han echado a perder por mi culpa: Rius"
"Tres generaciones se han echado a perder por mi culpa: Rius"
*)
"Noam Chomsky: Los cables de WikiLeaks revelan un “profundo odio a la democracia por parte de nuestra dirigencia política”
“Debemos comprender -y los Papeles del Pentágono son otro ejemplo claro- que una de las principales razones del secreto gubernamental es proteger al gobierno contra su propia población”
"Noam Chomsky: Los cables de WikiLeaks revelan un “profundo odio a la democracia por parte de nuestra dirigencia política”
“Debemos comprender -y los Papeles del Pentágono son otro ejemplo claro- que una de las principales razones del secreto gubernamental es proteger al gobierno contra su propia población”
*)
Stépahne Hessel: “No estoy aquí para testimoniar sobre lo que pasó en Chile. Estoy aquí para hablar en nombre de la evolución del derecho internacional, que siempre es demasiado lenta. Para mí este juicio representa un paso adelante porque vivimos en un mundo en el que los crímenes impunes pesan sobre la conciencia internacional” (Referida por Anne Marie Mergier en “ Sentencia implacable”
Stépahne Hessel: “No estoy aquí para testimoniar sobre lo que pasó en Chile. Estoy aquí para hablar en nombre de la evolución del derecho internacional, que siempre es demasiado lenta. Para mí este juicio representa un paso adelante porque vivimos en un mundo en el que los crímenes impunes pesan sobre la conciencia internacional” (Referida por Anne Marie Mergier en “ Sentencia implacable”
Universal Rights and Universal Values... But that is romantically substantive for those who try to ignore the Universal Jurisdiction and its procedures to evade justice... FIDEIIUS (Fideiius)
Los cables sobre México en WikiLeaks
Los cables sobre México en WikiLeaks
Sitio especial de La Jornada sobre WikiLeaks"http://wikileaks.jornada.com.mx/
"En una extensa entrevista con 60 minutes, Julian Assange, fundador de Wikileaks, dice: “Somos activistas por la libertad de expresión. No se trata de salvar a las ballenas, se trata de darle a la gente la información que necesita para apoyar o no la caza de ballenas. ¿Por qué? Son los ingredientes crudos que se necesitan para hacer una sociedad justa. Sin ellos, simplemente estás navegando en la oscuridad”.- Julian Assange. (Tomado de 'La Jornada')
Be Traist...!
Just let the hammock swing...!
P.D.: "Agua de Coco Pa' Toch@s" *
"Once again, the cat is shaking the roof...!" *
A FREE K’
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