Were I an evil super genius, this would be my lair.

Moving on: downside to living in a house in which you have all of your gear set up in the basement – when it all has to be shipped back east and you have to pack it all up and carry it upstairs to the garage and put it all in road cases.

Upside – you have a garage to store empty road cases.

Lots to write about, but sort of not in the mood. There’s a new ‘Newsletter’ feature that you might want to check out. It’s a fun and easy way to send out Christmas cards.

Anyway, here’s a half ass attempt at mentioning something relevant…

“Though the Department of Defense has made a big deal about the major changes being made in the detention procedures at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and the notion that for the first time detainees will have something resembling rights while in US custody, the Obama Administration has made it clear today that those “rights” don’t extend very far.

Today the administration made a filing with the US Court of Appeals in Washington challenging a previous determination by a judge that some Bagram detainees actually had legal rights to challenge their detention.

Though the judge said some of the detainees actually had no legal rights, he determined that foreigners being held there were materially the same as those at Guantanamo Bay, and should be afforded the same rights. The administration is now arguing that they’re not the same, and that giving the detainees actual legal rights could be a threat to the ongoing war effort in Afghanistan.

The “rights” they’ll actually get, rather, are that the Pentagon will actually assign a non-lawyer soldier to them to help them gather evidence in an attempt to prove that they’re not guilty of whatever they’re being accused of. The military will then decide if they want to let them go or not.”

Huffing gear up the stairs suddenly seems rather fantastic, doesn’t it.

September 15, 2009

While President Obama was swept into office by an exhilarating sense of optimism and change, the limbo faced by ‘enemy combatants’ at locations such as Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan remains unaltered, reinforcing speculations that the new administration’s focus on Guantanamo is more a global PR move than an attempt to seriously repair America’s reputation with regards to its flagrant abuse of international laws and conventions.

Following the Supreme Court’s June ruling allowing detainees at Guantanamo to file requests in US courts to discover the charges against them and the evidence on which their detentions are based, four detainees at Bagram attempted to use the precedent to discover the same information. The four men – two Yeminis, a Tunisian, and an Afghan – were granted a hearing by the US District Court in Washington in January during which Bush Administration lawyers argued that the four men could not be granted the same status as they were ‘enemy combatants’ being held in a combat zone. During that hearing, US District Court judge John Bates gave the incoming Obama Administration until February 20th to decide whether or not they wished to alter that position. Last Friday the Justice Department issued the following statement…

“The government adheres to its previously articulated position.”

The world listened for years while President Bush and other members of his administration claimed that Guantanamo housed some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. But as the years slipped by the reality that the majority of those being held at Guantanamo did not pose a threat, and that many of them were even completely innocent, began to raise serious questions in the international community. So too did the reality that many of those held at the facility were tortured, refused access to the International Red Cross, and even proper council for the show trials that the Bush Administration claimed entirely legal.

All of this was sold to the American people, and those of other nations, because of the ‘special nature’ of the global War On Terror. The argument created by Bush Administration legal minds was straight forward – because those being captured were not representatives of any one nation or force thereof, the protections afforded by longstanding conventions and laws did not apply. This argument, which was adopted as official policy, rendered all those detained by the United States, and others, as anything but prisoners of war, allowing for their rights to be summarily denied. Thus, the United States entered a legal black hole from which there was no escape save an admission of wrong doing and sincerely open realization that their own core principles had been betrayed.

While President Obama has signaled that he is somewhat prepared to confront that reality with regards to the detention facility at Guantanamo, his administration very clearly signaled last week that it was not prepared to do the same regarding hundreds of others being held in Afghanistan.

This leads to a very important question. If the United States believes that Afghanistan possesses a functioning democratic government, why aren’t those being detained in Afghanistan being afforded rights under Afghan law? Even more, why, in a supposedly independent democratic nation, does the United States have the authority to hold detainees incommunicado, superseding the authority of the Afghan legal system? Given that detainees are being held at a US military facility within Afghanistan, the answer can only be that the legal authority of the United States holds more sway in Afghanistan than the Afghan judicial system and the Afghan government itself.

Of course, the United States never officially declared war on Afghanistan, nor did Canada for that matter. Congress authorized President Bush to employ US forces in a ‘military engagement’, which is not an official declaration of war under the Constitution. This same quasi declaration was also used to provide the authorization of force during the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and Operation Iraqi Freedom (among other instances stretching as far back as the Quasi War with France).

A state of utter legal ambiguity reigns in Afghanistan. The United States possesses the power to detain without charge or trial any individual captured in that country – or elsewhere for that matter that is transferred to that location – indefinitely and without any legal recourse provided them. Under such circumstances, the abuse of prisoners, or even their ‘disappearance’, is almost impossible to reveal – and even then, the propaganda goldmine that is 9/11 assures that even the revelation of wrong doing is commonly dismissed with a single utterance – “they had it coming.”

As a Canadian, it is hard to sit here knowing that Canadian lives have been lost, and remain at stake, while the betrayal of this country’s most basic principles are being trounced by a nation that has used the brave young men and women of our military to help establish such an inexcusable precedent. You can say what you will about the Taliban and al-Qaeda pertaining to their conduct regarding prisoners, but that does not, nor will it ever in any circumstance, justify the diminishment of our own beliefs and principles. For to allow that to occur signifies defeat no matter what the kill sheet says.

February 22, 2009 3 Comments

Its definition is rather straight forward – an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution. Welcome to the reality of some 600 inmates at the notorious US detention facility at Bagram Airbase.

To claim the facility at Bagram merely a ‘detention facility’ is to claim Abu Ghraib a rundown Holiday Inn. It was at Bagram that harsh interrogation practices first began, as vividly recounted in Alex Gibney’s ‘Taxi To The Darkside’ in which numerous military personnel stationed at the base relay their experiences. It was the way station at which detainees were held prior to their transfer to Guantanamo, and the location at which methods used in an attempt to gain ‘actionable intelligence’ were first employed by everyone from untrained military intelligence personnel to the CIA. It was, in short, ground zero for the abandonment of American observance of the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions.

And now the Justice Department, a body in a country half a world away, has ruled that those being detained at the facility have no constitutional rights. The truth is, they have no rights whatsoever…

“The US justice department argues that Bagram differs from Guantanamo Bay because it is in an overseas war zone and prisoners there are being held as part of ongoing military action.”

Fine, it’s a facility in an overseas war zone. If that’s the case then every individual being held has rights under the Geneva Conventions. If they don’t, then it is either not a war zone or the United States is in breach of international law…

“Prof Olshansky said the conditions at the Bagram facility, which is near the Afghan capital, Kabul, were worse than those at Guantanamo Bay, adding that there was a lack of due process available to detainees.

“The situation in Bagram is so far from anything like meeting the laws of war or the human rights treaties that we’re bound to,” she told the BBC.

“There are no military hearings where the detainees can present evidence,” she added. “Torture has led to homicides there that have been admitted by the US.”

“It’s quite a severe situation, and yet the US is planning a $60m new prison to hold 1,100 more people there.”

The US military considers Bagram detainees unlawful combatants who can be detained for as long as they are deemed a threat to Afghan national security.”

Detention without any recourse. It would seem that Afghanistan is not a ‘new found democracy’ after all if it lacks the ability to provide those being detained rights under its own laws. That speaks more to the reality of Afghanistan than anything – that it is not a functioning democracy, that its government is nothing more than a PR regime, and that it is, in truth, nothing more than a de facto American police state.

There are those that argue that the detainees being held at Bagram deserve no rights under international conventions and treaties because they themselves do not observe them. My mother once asked me when I was a child if I would jump off a bridge were everyone else to. It would seem that America’s answer to that question would be yes.

February 20, 2009 6 Comments

What is torture? According to the dictionary it is defined as:

“The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something. Great physical or mental suffering or anxiety.”

With regards to torture, the 17th Article of the Geneva Conventions states:

“No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.”

Thanks to the likes of John Yoo, in the aftermath of 9/11 the United States went about systematically attacking what it labeled legal ambiguities regarding what constitutes a prisoner of war. It was argued by Yoo, and others, that those captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere were not prisoners of war but rather enemy combatants, and were therefore not assured the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. This precedent led to the current detention system employed by the United States, how detainees may be interrogated, and the ability of the United States to hold individuals indefinitely without any legal recourse. It also set a precedent with regards to the ability of the United States, a signatory of the Geneva Conventions, to both usurp its authority and redefine those aspects of it that challenge US detention and interrogation methods.

In short, the United States took the position of being able to adhere to the Geneva Conventions when it chose to, or disregard or redefine it when it presented obstacles.

By September 11th, 2006, the number of those detained in the War On Terror exceeded 83,000, none of whom, at that time, were charged with definable crimes under International or US law, nor brought to trial. It was during this immense detention roundup that entirely under qualified US military personnel were following wholly ambiguous rules of interrogation, the majority of whom had no training in interrogation techniques whatsoever and were commonly placed in the position of interrogating detainees after periods of instruction that were, in some cases, as short as six hours. Likewise, soldiers stationed at detention facilities were urged by a variety of individuals, from intelligence personnel to military contractors, to help ‘soften up’ prisoners, again despite the fact they had no experience working in such facilities, let alone dealing with prisoners. These were the individuals that were thrown to the wolves following the Abu Ghraib and Bagram scandals while no high level officer or member of the intelligence community, nor any member of the administration itself, was ever held responsible despite the fact that the interrogation directives themselves emanated from the highest offices in US government.

That said; let’s return to the primary question – what is torture?

While there are those that believe that torture is a wholly physical phenomenon, the truth is that since the 1950’s the Central Intelligence Agency has worked diligently on constructing an interrogation platform almost entirely based on psychological manipulation, including the development of LSD and other drugs as part of its chemical interrogation program known as MK-ULTRA (directed by the CIA’s Technical Services Staff, thus the digraph ‘MK’), which was later renamed MK-SEARCH in 1964. During that period, the following routinely occurred under the umbrella of the program:

- Experiments were conducted without the knowledge or consent of test subjects.

- Academic researchers were unaware in numerous cases that their work was being used to help provide the CIA with data.

- US soldiers were dosed with LSD to study its side affects with regards to mind control (Operation Teapot – Subproject 54, Perfect Concussion).

- Pregnant women were exposed to radiation and other substances and the testicles of inmates at an Oregon prison were irradiated without their knowledge (Operation Teapot – Subproject 54).

It is believed that over 150 different subprojects were carried out under the umbrella of MK-ULTRA. Unfortunately, as ‘luck’ would have it, the majority of the records regarding MK-ULTRA were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of Richard Helms, the director of the CIA between 1966 and 1973. As an aside, Helms remains the only CIA director to have ever been convicted of lying to Congress.

So how is this applicable to what is currently transpiring with regards to detainees? The answer is rather straight forward – the CIA’s extensive research into the use of detrimental psychological methods was transformed into the official American handbook on torture. The irony, of course, is that many people do not equate psychological mistreatment with the term ‘torture’, which is, in truth, the genius of its guise. Also of note is that much of the sensory deprivation techniques used by the United States military and CIA were initially researched by Dr. Donald Hebb, a Canadian psychologist, who, at his own admission, has claimed that the prolonged affects of sensory deprivation can easily result in a permanent state of psychosis after a minimum of six to eight days.

For example, take these images that hundreds of millions of people have seen since the detention facility at Guantanamo was opened…

In this photograph, and dozens of others like it, we see detainees at Guantanamo wearing hoods, blackened goggles, ear guards, and mittens. To your average observer this image doesn’t seem all that bad. In fact, it seems rather benign given what the individuals in the photographs have been accused of.

Now take a look at this photograph…

This photograph shows a subject undergoing one of Dr. Hebb’s sensory deprivation experiments. In it the subject is blindfolded, their hands are encased, and their auditory capability has been removed. They are also covered by a blanket, which can be removed and then replaced to control their body temperature and further disorient them (which is also the reason why their hands and feet are covered).

Returning to this image (on the left), we see detainees at Guantanamo sitting in stress positions outfitted with much of the same sensory deprivation equipment worn by the test subject in the photograph above.

That said; the application of sensory deprivation represents only the beginning of the process of psychological torture. Once desensitized and physically overwhelmed, the implementation of fear and degradation are then introduced. While not all prisoners are immediately subjected to sensory deprivation, they are subjected to fear and degradation, which is then commonly followed by the application of sensory deprivation, usually represented by being held in small rooms, cages, or cells in stress positions that make it impossible to sleep. This state is then capitalized on by the introduction of fear, degradation, and the implementation of further sensory deprivation techniques, such as the use of strobe lights and loud music in a dark room while enduring painful stress positions – or other techniques such as waterboarding (though it should be noted that waterboarding is a technique that can be employed outright in an attempt to break an individual).

This photograph (to the left) is, perhaps, one of the most familiar images produced during the Abu Ghraib scandal. In it a prisoner is standing on a small box, their head covered, with wires attached to each hand.

The point of this position is to place the prisoner in a state of fear having told them that they will be electrocuted if they attempt to get off of the box or lower their arms. In actuality the wires aren’t attached to anything, but the prisoner is unaware of that because they have been placed on the box while hooded. Thus, they believe that they will be electrocuted if they move.

In truth, it is far worse than having a gun put to your head and the trigger pulled. At least in that scenario you have no control, and the fear is minimized by the fact that it only lasts a few seconds before you’re killed. In this instance the prisoner is placed in the position of fearing death, or extreme pain, based on their own actions. The catch is that if they’re left in that position long enough exhaustion begins to play a significant role, only heightening their fear despite the fact that they’ve become so fatigued that they begin to lose the ability to remain in the position that they have been told will ensure their well being. The psychological impact of this procedure, while obviously perceived to produce results, would most likely end in the prisoner immediately stepping off of the box if it is repeated enough times that they are driven to the point where death is viewed as a release, even given the stringent view of suicide in the Islamic faith.

When cultural and religious elements are introduced into the equation, humiliation also becomes part of the process. In the case of Muslim men, sexual assault or overt sexual behaviour by female interrogators, forced nudity and masturbation, sexual humiliation, and the forced imposition of homosexual acts are all examples of techniques that have been employed because of the offense and trauma they cause. Coupled with the affects of sensory deprivation and fear, the impact of such techniques works to further degrade the mental state of prisoners.

It is in such a state that, according to the tenets of the doctrine, individuals are more likely to divulge information. But, in truth, they are simply more apt to say whatever it is that their captors want to hear because of extreme disorientation – and that is not the production of reliable intelligence.

If you believe that psychological mistreatment does not constitute torture try a simple experiment at home (and no, I am not actually saying that you should do this, I am just demonstrating a point).

First, get a knife, place the blade over your forearm, and cut yourself. If you are too afraid to do it, remember that feeling.

Second, get a friend to blindfold you, place a hood over your head, wrap towels around your feet and hands, bind them together with something, and then have them place you in a small closet with your arms raised over your head. After they do that, have them turn the thermostat up to full.

After that, every hour have them turn the heat off and wait 30 minutes. Then have them place ice cubes or icepacks inside your clothing, leaving them there for 30 minutes. After that have them return, remove the icepacks, place a winter coat on you, turn the thermostat back up to full, bind your hands back together and resume holding them over your head. Repeat this process for 12 hours.

Chances are that you will not last 30 minutes in that closet. If you last four hours, I will bet you that you would rather willfully cut yourself rather than spend another four hours in it.

Ultimately, what is more torturous? Killing an individual outright, physically torturing them to the point that they could die, or driving them psychologically to the point that they want to? It is one thing to be executed by another. It is altogether another matter to be brought to that black precipice at which you would gladly execute yourself.

And yet they deem it legal.

October 5, 2008 24 Comments