The meaning of Words and the Euphemism for Torture - The US "Enhanced Interrogation" Techniques

If a Rapist called rape an "enhanced seduction technique" would you buy it?

Ted Koppel , BBC World News America - an analysis of US torture. Using the "enhanced interrogation Technique" euphemisms for torture makes it legal?

An analysis by Ted Koppel, BBC News can be watched HERE.

Involuntary psychotropic drug used as part of the "Enhanced Interrogations" Experiment

'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
George Santayana , 1905 - Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284

After this month's release of American Justice Department memo(and HERE) that explicitly approved the use of drugs on prisoners and as revelations emerge that top Bush administration officials gave the intelligence "community" and Pentagon a "green light" to torture, evidence mounts that CIA and Special Operations Command interrogators used mind-altering drugs on those to be "interrogated".

As new evidence emerges of the same patterns of abuse, a look at the Canadian involvement in CIA abuses can be informative. From the complicity in torture to the complicity in Human Experiments by the CIA, the Canadian Government has a documented History of participation in such abuses.

Some information about these facts :

The human experiments discussed in the following clip were conducted by American doctor Ewan Cameron at McGill University's renowned Allen Memorial Institute in the 1950s and 1960s. Canadian MP David Orlikow's wife was one of the victims of Ewan Cameron.

The experiments at McGill University were part of a larger project by the U.S. mind-control research program called MK-ULTRA. The Canadian government also provided funding for the project.The clip starts with a CBC interview with Canadian MP David Orlikow, whose wife was a victim of the CIA experiments in Canada :

WATCH VIDEO at:
http://archives.cbc.ca/society/crime_justice/clips/15125/

Watch an extract of the program CBC - THE HOUR - w/George Stroumboulopoulos, aired January 9, 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/v/suS5BitLqvU

"The Hour" with George Stroumboulopoulos, aired an interview with one of the Canadian victims of CIA experiments in Canada. A story hard to believe and really disturbing but a piece of the Canadian long cooperation with the CIA. It involves drugs, brainwashing, and the CIA.

. In 1998, author Anne Collins published In the Sleep Room about the brainwashing experiments in Canada. Her book inspired the CBC miniseries The Sleep Room which aired in 1998 and won the Gemini for best TV movie or mini-series. An interview with Anne Collins was aired in 2007.

The story was also the theme of a CBC Documentary - WATCH an extract of CBC The Fifty Estate documentary:

. CBC Television's The Fifth Estate first tackled this story in a March 11, 1980 program. The episode of The Fifth Estate referred to in the above clip was aired on Jan., 17, 1984 and followed up on the question of compensation for the victims of Cameron's tests.

The recent new revelations about the use of drugs and other abuses by the CIA have started to emerge since 2004, at least.

And as more evidence emerges, one can only conclude that the long History of abuses by the CIA and its acomplices is far from over. Are MKULTRA style criminal experiments back?

PS: Recently , mass graves containing the remains of indigenous children where found across Canada. Among the sites is the Allan Memorial Institute, McGill University, a MKULTRA experimental centre. Mass grave of children killed there were found north of building, on southern slopes of Mount Royal behind stone wall.(HERE)

Some articles and participants in the "Enhanced Interrogation" Program follows:

On April 22, 2008, The Washington Post published an article where the Pentagon denied the allegations now being confirmed.(HERE)

Also in April 2008 an article by By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor published the opinion of some experts:

“The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs", says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.”

“I came across some evidence that they were using mind-altering drugs, to regress the prisoners, to ascertain if they were using deception techniques, to break them down,” said Jeffrey S. Kaye, a clinical psychologist who works with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco.

At that point it was still unknown if psychologists are involved as among those "health" professionals who involuntarily administered drugs. But , as mentioned in an article by Stephen Soldz in 2008 (HERE) one "should remember that, thanks partly to military support, a number of psychologists can now legally prescribe drugs. And some of those prescribing psychologists were with the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCTs] at Guantanamo. It also should be remembered that in 2003 the American Psychological Association co-sponsored with the CIA an invitation-only Science of Deception Workshop that discussed, among other topics, "What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?" CIA consultant torturers James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were among those invited to attend, as were several of their superiors."

But hard evidence that U.S. interrogators today have been employing hallucinogens, like the LSD the CIA tested on unwitting subjects for at least 20 years beginning in the 1940s, had yet to surface.

In A Question of Torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy tracks the nightmarish world of the CIA's Project ARTICHOKE and its later metastasis, MKULTRA through two distinct, though overlapping phases:

First, esoteric, often bizarre experiments with hypnosis and hallucinogenic drugs, from 1950 to 1956; then, more conventional research into human psychology until 1963 when the agency compiled the fruits of this costly investigation in a definitive interrogation manual. (Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006, p. 26)

Some extra notes on the usual participants in the "interrogation" program follows:

The US military involvement in the torture scandal has been revealed from a long time now . (HERE)

The privatisation of interrogation and intelligence-gathering first came to light during the investigation of the killing of four private contractors in Falluja on March 31, 2004 . By that time, the investigation named two US contractors, CACI International Inc and the Titan Corporation.

By then Titan, based in San Diego, described itself as a "a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions and services for national security".CACI, which has headquarters in Virginia, claims on its website to "help America's intelligence community collect, analyse and share global information in the war on terrorism".

The Torture Policy - CIA homicides

Intelligence Services ...


An article : "The Bush Administration Homicides" - by John Sifton

Sifton is a private investigator and attorney based in New York. His firm, One World Research, carries out research for law firms and human-rights groups, including in South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. He has conducted extensive investigations into the CIA interrogation and detention program.

For five years as a researcher for Human Rights Watch and reporter, John Sifton helped investigate homicides resulting from the Bush administration’s torture policy. His findings include:

• An estimated 100 detainees have died during interrogations, some who were clearly tortured to death.

• The Bush Justice Department failed to investigate and prosecute alleged murders even when the CIA inspector general referred a case.

• Sifton’s request for specific information on cases was rebuffed by the Bush Justice Department, though it was “familiar with the cases.”

• Attorney General Eric Holder must now decide whether to investigate and prosecute homicides, not just cases of torture.

A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers (“walling”), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.

A review of homicide cases, however, shows that few detainee deaths have been properly investigated. Many were not investigated at all. And no official investigation has looked into the connection between detainee deaths and the interrogation policies promulgated by the Bush administration.

Yet an important report by the Senate Armed Services Committee, declassified in April 2009, explains in clear terms how Bush-era interrogation techniques, including torture, once authorized for CIA high-value detainees, were promulgated to Guantánamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where (as reporter Jason Leopold recently noted at The Public Record) the policies have led to homicides.

The killings, at least some of them, have hardly been kept secret. As early as May-June 2003, The New York Times and Washington Post reported on deaths of detainees in Afghanistan. Two detainees at Bagram air base died after extensive beatings by U.S. troops in December 2002—a case reported by The New York Times and that was also the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Another death involved a man beaten to death by a CIA contractor at a base in Asadabad, in eastern Afghanistan, in June 2003.

In September 2004, the Crimes of War Project, working with investigative journalist Craig Pyes, uncovered a torture murder in Gardez, Afghanistan, in March 2003. Jamal Naseer, a soldier in the Afghan Army, died after he and seven other soldiers were mistakenly arrested. Those arrested with Naseer later said that during interrogations U.S. personnel punched and kicked them, hung them upside down, and hit them with sticks or cables. Some said they were doused with cold water and forced to lie in the snow. Nasser collapsed about two weeks after the arrest, complaining of stomach pain, probably an internal hemorrhage.

In May 2005, as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, I reported on several other cases of torture homicides, including a case in which the military claimed a detainee had died because he was “bitten by a snake.”

To the best of my knowledge, the first death of a U.S. detainee in custody occurred in August 2002—an Afghan detainee named Mohammad Sayari killed by four U.S. military personnel. I first learned about the Sayari case in 2005, reading through a Department of Defense document obtained via a Freedom of Information Act case by the American Civil Liberties Union. The document contained a short description of the incident: A captain and three sergeants “murdered Mr. [Sayari] after detaining him for following their movements in Afghanistan.” The section of the document detailing the result of the investigation was redacted.

More than three years after the murder, human-rights groups and I pressed the military for an explanation. The Army revealed that commanders had declined to prosecute any of the four men implicated in the case, although one of the four soldiers received an “administrative reprimand.” In 2006, additional documents obtained by the ACLU disclosed that the Army investigation had found probable cause to recommend charges of murder and conspiracy against the four Special Forces soldiers. According the investigation, the four soldiers had captured the detainee, a civilian noncombatant, and shot him, presumably after interrogating him. (Investigators also recommended dereliction-of-duty charges against three of the men and a charge of obstruction of justice against the highest-ranking, a captain, who admitted to destroying evidence of the crime.) Inexplicably, without a court martial, the case was closed. The captain received a letter of reprimand for “destroying evidence.”

In February 2006, a review by Human Rights First determined that almost 100 detainees died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan and Iraq facilities as of 2005, and that almost half of the cases were clearly homicides. Several cases discussed in the report were clear cases of torture homicides.

To take one example, in December 2003, a 44-year-old Iraqi man named Abu Malik Kenami died in a U.S. detention facility in Mosul, Iraq. As reported by Human Rights First, U.S. military personnel who examined Kenami when he first arrived at the facility determined that he had no preexisting medical conditions. Once in custody, as a disciplinary measure for talking, Kenami was forced to perform extreme amounts of exercise—a technique used across Afghanistan and Iraq. Then his hands were bound behind his back with plastic handcuffs, he was hooded, and forced to lie in an overcrowded cell. Kenami was found dead the morning after his arrest, still bound and hooded. No autopsy was conducted; no official cause of death was determined. After the Abu Ghraib scandal, a review of Kenami’s death was launched, and Army reviewers criticized the initial criminal investigation for failing to conduct an autopsy; interview interrogators, medics, or detainees present at the scene of the death; and collect physical evidence. To date, however, the Army has taken no known action in the case.

Another infamous case from Iraq involved a CIA “ghost” detainee named Manadel al-Jamadi, who was tortured to death by a CIA interrogation team at Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003. Pictures of Abu Ghraib guards Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman posing with al-Jamadi’s dead body, the so-called Ice Man, were among the most notorious of the Abu Ghraib photographs published in April 2004. A CIA officer named Mark Swanner and an interpreter led the team that interrogated al-Jamadi. Nine Navy personnel were also implicated. An autopsy conducted by the U.S. military five days after al-Jamadi’s death found that the cause: “blunt force injuries complicated by compromised respiration.” Reporting by The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and NPR’s John McChesney revealed that al-Jamadi was strung up from handcuffs behind his back, a torture tactic sometimes called a “Palestinian hanging.” After an investigation, the CIA referred the case to the Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution of the CIA personnel involved, but no charges were ever brought. Prosecutors accused 10 Navy personnel of the crime; nine were given nonjudicial punishments, such as rank reductions and letters of reprimand, and a 10th was acquitted.

The government is not unaware of these homicides. In April 2006, a colleague of mine at Human Rights Watch and I met with Department of Justice criminal-division officials and requested information and updates on this case and several others. Justice officials were familiar with these cases, but our pleas for information were rejected.

There may be other CIA homicides yet uncovered. One case of concern involves a detainee in the CIA’s detention program named Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who was arrested in northern Iraq in January 2004. Ghul’s interrogation was discussed in one of the May 10, 2005, Office of Legal Counsel memos signed by OLC head Steven Bradbury. Ghul’s name is mostly redacted but appears by mistake in one part of the memo.

I am starting to suspect that Ghul might be dead. After all, his name was redacted from the OLC memo, unlike that of other CIA detainees now at Guantánamo. Why would the CIA be afraid of mentioning Ghul? CIA doctors appear to have determined that Ghul was in poor health when he was captured, in fact, too unhealthy to be waterboarded. Unlike other former CIA detainees, human-rights groups have not confirmed that he was rendered to Pakistan or to a third country. Did the CIA perhaps torture Ghul to death? We do not know. He has now completely disappeared.

The CIA appears to have had some close calls with detainees dying. The May 10, 2005, Bradbury memo suggests that one of the CIA’s detainees—likely Abu Zubaydah or Khalid Sheikh Mohammad—stopped breathing or lost consciousness at one point during their waterboarding: According to the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, in their “limited experience… extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new [possibly lethal] risks.” (To the best of our knowledge, the only “experience” the CIA has with waterboarding being used extensively or in a sustained manner, is with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammad). The memo explains: “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue of psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness. An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately, and the integrator should deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water. If this fails to restore normal breathing, aggressive medical intervention is required….” The memo also notes that CIA doctors present during waterboarding sessions stood by with necessary equipment to perform a tracheotomy if necessary: “[W]e are informed that the necessary emergency medical equipment is always present—although not visible to the detainee—during any application of the waterboard.”

It would be overly simplistic to suggest that every detainee death in U.S. custody and every act of abuse was part of an authorized and ordered interrogation program designed and run from the highest levels of the Bush administration. Some deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to have involved military or CIA personnel going “off the rails” and engaging in abusive conduct beyond what even White House lawyers had in mind when they crafted their “enhanced interrogation” policies. And some torture techniques were already in use in Afghanistan and spread there earlier than they were even formally approved.

Yet directly or directly, abuse spread and worsened—detainees started dying. Unlike torture, however, homicide is an uncomplicated crime. A criminal homicide occurs when a person or set of persons simply causes the death of another without legal justification. There is little nuance, little room for escape. Once a person is dead, the killer and those assisted him, those who solicited his crime or aided or abetted it, are accomplices.

The bottom line is that many detainee homicides in Iraq and Afghanistan were the direct result of approval and orders from the highest levels of government, and that high officials in the government are accomplices. Any meaningful investigation of those homicides would reveal the initial authorizations and their link to the homicides.

Homicide presents legal issues impossible to ignore. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice cannot conclude their deliberations about Bush-era torture policies without closely investigating the homicide cases tied to them. One cannot speak glibly of “policy differences” and “looking forward” and “distraction” when corpses are involved.

Canada, a country with two tiers of citizenship ? Some to be tortured and some to be "respected"?

The Iacobucci Inquiry’s report into the El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin cases has corroborated author Kerry Pither’s account of Canadian complicity in torture.

Canadian participation in Torture has been reported all over the world in the last years, from Syria to Guantanamo.


BBC News - "Canadian 'role in Syria torture" -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7683187.stm

Even recent news show that Canadian Secret Intelligence Services - CSIS - still uses information that might have been obtained by torture

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/611540

On May 13, 2009 - A READING OF "Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror" by Kerry Pither, followed by a discussion and book signing, will take place at 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at Eckhardt-Gramatte Hall at the University of Winnipeg.


Visit:

http://kerrypither.com/2009/04/media-advisory-dark-days-dramatic-reading-in-winnipeg-may-13/

“All of Canada’s Muslim communities live in the shadow of what happened to Maher Arar and these other Muslim men. Their stories have left many of us asking whether in Canada there are two tiers of citizenship, and two levels of democracy, depending on your name, your faith, or your family roots.”—Obby Khan

She will be joined on stage by local Winnipeg personalities Terry MacLeod, host of “Information Morning” on CBC Radio One 89.3 and Ibrahim (Obby) Khan, Winnipeg Blue Bombers offensive lineman #60.

"Dark Days tells the story of a Canadian national security investigation gone wrong through the eyes of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. The book chronicles how all four men were accused of terrorist links, detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture while being interrogated with questions from Canadian agencies. No evidence was ever produced to back the allegations against them and all were eventually released and returned to Canada."

“Most Canadians know about Maher Arar, but few know the extent to which there was a pattern behind his case — that what happened to him happened to at least three other Canadians too,” said Pither.

“All of these men are still working for justice, to clear their names and move on with their lives. For Arar, it’s waiting for the Obama administration to accept responsibilty for its role and clear his name, and for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin it’s about waiting for an apology from the Canadian government for its role in their ordeals,” said Pither. “And for all of us, it’s about ensuring the changes are made to stop this from happening again.”


Pither’s book, shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award last week, has received high praise in Canada and from around the world. Best-selling spy-master John Le Carré, whose most recent work A Most Wanted Man was praised as “one of the most sophisticated fictional responses to the war on terror yet published”(The Guardian, UK), says of Pither’s Dark Days: “Sober, well written and horrific. Grit your teeth and read. These are your rights too.”The Independent’s Robert Fisk, one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between the West and the Middle East, says Pither’s book is “brilliant,” and a “must read.”

“All of Canada’s Muslim communities live in the shadow of what happened to Maher Arar and these other Muslim men,” said Khan. “Their stories have left many of us asking whether in Canada there are two tiers of citizenship, and two levels of democracy, depending on your name, your faith, or your family roots.”

“It’s exciting to have this event in Winnipeg to help spread awareness about what happened, and about what needs to be done to prevent this from happening again,” he added.

Admission is free, thanks to local sponsors: Amnesty International - Winnipeg chapter; Canadian Federation of Students - Manitoba; Council of Canadians; CKUW 95.9 FM; Islamic Social Services Association Inc. - Canada; Mayworks; McNally Robinson Booksellers; Peace Alliance Winnipeg; University of Manitoba Student’s Union; University of Winnipeg Students Association.

Philip Zelikow, 9/11 Commission Director, talks about the Bush Torture Program

One Case before Philip Zelikow interview:
“We’re going to change your brain.” As was said to Binyan Mohamed by his torturers in Guantanamo - (HERE)
Clive Stafford Smith, attorney for Binyam Mohamed, who was tortured in several secret places and in Guantanamo, describes what was done and explains that it was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an earlier interview with Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith:

"Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”
________________________________________________

Philip Zelikow : The Torture Program and the use of torture techniques of the "Nineteen Eighty-Four" novel by George Orwell :

by Zelikow: "By 1949 George Orwell could envision the shrewdly calibrated torments that induced his protagonist in “1984” to love Big Brother. Such methods worked all too well, Orwell feared. The United States experimented in the 1950s and 1960s with novel ways of extracting information. But, until 2002, it never considered the kind of systematic and truly Orwellian C.I.A. program that has now been revealed. " (article HERE)





“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.” - Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

THE MOVIE:

USA - NO MORE RENDITION ....to torture!

The CIA officer who was the architect of the "Rendition Program" (kidnapping of people) under Bill Clinton's government, is now out of the CIA.
As a top ex-CIA officer, this "non ordinary man" is no more in favor of the "Rendition Program" as it has been conducted . And he has new ideas for Bill Clinton's Democrat sucessor:

"At this point, I'd rather kill them when we find them, than take them anywhere"...(at 7:26 min)

Listen to his candid "deference" to assassinations worldwide - NO MORE RENDITION...just to torture !
Fault Lines - Obama's 'War on Terror' - 16 Apr 09 (Program HERE)

In 2002 FBI was OUT but CSIS was IN , "visiting" IN Guantanamo ! US Senate Report confirms Rumsfeld responsible for Torture PROGRAM

Confirmation that the USA developed a Torture Program is out by now. Recent released memos also confirm that participation in torture goes from the Military to the CIA...

Documents also show that in late 2001 the FBI refused to participate in the "Torture Program" in Guantanamo and documents show that even in 2003 CSIS went to Guantanamo where the Torture Program was in full gear. With so much information coming out in USA and with the knowledge of CSIS' (Canadian Secret Intelligence Services) "visits" to Guantanamo, one would have to think about the meaning of these CSIS' "visits " to a site running a "Torture Program" ....Isn't this complicity in torture? Is there an explanation to CSIS' visits to "Guantanamo" that doesn't make them, to say the least, bystanders to torture? Can this be brushed off as mere "good faith"? How much involvement do Canadian institutions have with the American Torture PROGRAM? Or is this just a "who cares" issue in Canada?

Recent News on THE AMERICAN TORTURE PROGRAM follow:
"Break Them Down, Leave No Marks" - US Senate Report confirms Rumsfeld responsible for Torture PROGRAM
In USA, after the release of the several "secret memos" this week, it became clear that the United States government developed a Torture Program in which the Military, CIA e etc...were participants. The Torture Program used “interrogation plans” to disorient, abuse, dehumanize, and torment individuals over time . All indications are that the program was intended to GET CONFESSIONS - whatever they were...

It was under the "methods" of this "Torture Program" that a Canadian citizen was "prepared' for the visit of Canadian officials in Guantanamo.
(As posted on April 11, 2009 - all documents available on line at The University of California Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas - click HERE)

The "Program" included the Military, the CIA etc...etc...etc...One more point to think about considering the "very close relationship" Canadians proudly have with USA... To understand the extension of the program:

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