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Originally posted by Fir3start3r But that's the great thing about blogs in general; they have a tendancy to correct the truth unless of course the whole blog in general is run by crazies...

I guess I should have bolded this part

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Milblogs are done by actual military personel; why wouldn't you?

Are you suggesting the military are crazy?

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Are you suggesting the military are crazy?

No, not exactly. I'm saying that embedded reporters and military personal are far from being an objective source on allegation harmful to their public image, the image of this war, and hence the Administration which won't even allow pictures/video of coffins of dead soldiers to be in the media.

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Originally posted by shaolin_Z No, not exactly. I'm saying that embedded reporters and military personal are far from being an objective source on allegation harmful to their public image, the image of this war, and hence the Administration which won't even allow pictures/video of coffins of dead soldiers to be in the media.

True, but the milblogs aren't any of that.
It's true they have to be careful of their content (for obvious strategic reasons) but for the most part, they've just average joes like you an me that are/were actually there or are at least in the military.

Not sayin' that military is devoid of their own nutbars; some are just off the wall balls

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Friday, September 15th, 2006 Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror' As Spain acknowledges its territory may have been used as a stopover for the CIA's transfer of prisoners known as extraordinary rendition, we excerpt a new documentary by the human rights group Witness. "Outlawed" tells the stories of two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. [includes rush transcript] A Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday by rejecting his revised plan to interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects and approving alternative legislation that he strongly opposed. The Senate Armed Services Committee passed the bill affirming Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits inhumane treatment. The White House wants military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay to maintain the right to use evidence obtained through coercion and to keep elements of prosecution cases secret from those accused. Four Republicans, including Arizona's John McCain and committee chair John Warner, joined Democrats in approving the measure. The White House says it will fight the legislation because it would mean the end of the CIA's program of interrogating detainees. Meanwhile in Europe, the Spanish government has admitted Spain may have been used as a stopover for secret CIA flights in the practice of transferring prisoners known as extraordinary rendition - what others call kidnapping. The news comes a week after President Bush acknowledged for the first time that the CIA has been operating a secret network of overseas prisons. Today we turn to a new documentary that tells the stories of two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. It's called "Outlawed" and it's produced by the international human rights organization Witness. The film highlights the cases of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed. * Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror' - an excerpt of the documentary produced by the international human rights group Witness. RUSH TRANSCRIPT This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution. Donate - $25, $50, $100, more... AMY GOODMAN: Today, we turn to a new documentary that tells the stories of two men who survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention and torture by the U.S. government, working with various other governments worldwide. It's called Outlawed, and it�s produced by the international human rights organization Witness. The film highlights the cases of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed. Mohamed is a 23-year-old Ethiopian national who was arrested by Pakistani forces at Karachi airport in 2002 while boarding a flight to return to his home in Britain. He was then handed over to U.S. custody. His family was given an unclassified copy of his diary. In the documentary Outlawed, Binyam Mohamed�s brother, who wanted to keep his identity concealed, reads from Binyam�s diary. BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] �I refused to talk in Karachi until they gave me a lawyer. I said it was my right to have a lawyer. The FBI said, �The law has changed, there are no lawyers. You can cooperate with us the easy way or the hard way.� On the first day of the interrogation �Chuck� said, �If you don�t talk to me you are going to Jordan. We can�t do what we want here. The Arabs will deal with you.�� NARRATOR: July 21, 2002, Pakistan to Morocco. Mohamed is flown from Pakistan to Morocco in a CIA plane and imprisoned in an undisclosed location. Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. LOUISE ARBOUR: The rendition actually is the transfer of a person who is in the custody of state a to state b with no judicial supervision. NARRATOR: Michael Scheuer, chief architect of the CIA's rendition program. MICHAEL SCHEUER: The goals of the rendition program were only two at the beginning, and I think primarily they remain the same. They were, one, to get individuals off the street, who we knew were senior in al-Qaeda or its allies and who posed a threat to the United States. The second goal of the rendition program was very simply at the time of the capture of any individual or the time a cell was disrupted, to seize whatever documents were available. Interrogation was never a central goal. After 9/11, the rendition program shifted, in the sense that we were going to begin holding people ourselves. BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] �I was taken from airport, blindfolded and cuffed by a van to the security zone. It was when I got to Morocco that they said that some big people in Al Qaeda were talking about me. They told me that the U.S. had a story they wanted from me and that it was their job to get it. They talked about Jose Padilla, and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. The interrogator told me that we have been working with the British. I was surprised that the British were siding with the Americans. I sought asylum in Britain rather than America because it�s known as the one country that has laws that it follows.� NARRATOR: According to the 2006 report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty on behalf of the Council of Europe, governments throughout Europe have actively participated in unlawful CIA operations, leading to the rendition and secret detention of European citizens and residents. BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] �It never crossed my mind that I would end up being hauled half way across the world by the Americans to face torture in a place I had never been, Morocco.� NARRATOR: U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. CONDOLEEZZA RICE: The United States has not transported anyone and will not transport anyone to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured. NARRATOR: Again, CIA analyst Michael Scheuer. MICHAEL SCHEUER: Ultimately diplomatic assurances are worthless. No country, whether it�s the United States or France or Egypt or Saudi Arabia, is going to let you inside their prisons to see how they�re handling their prisoners. BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] �They would say, �There is this guy who would say you are a big man in Al Qaeda.� I would say, �It is a lie.� They would torture me. I would say, �OK it is true,� they would say, �OK tell us more.� I would say, �I don�t know more,� they would torture me again. The guards would say, �America�s really pissed off at what happened, and they have said to the world, �either you are with us or against us.� We Moroccans say, �We are with you,� so we will do whatever they want.�� NARRATOR: Once again, Michael Scheuer. MICHAEL SCHEUER: We, as an intelligence service, because we are fortunate enough to have a large budget, can bring to the table, in dealing with third world intelligence services, money, modern computer equipment, armaments, other things that can attract their interest in working with us. All of those things are important, and they�re necessary to forge the relationship. But there are also elements which make you very cautious about the information you receive from those intelligence services. They are not going to want to give you, for example, information that might make you think the relationship isn't worth the money you�re investing in it. NARRATOR: January 23rd, 2004, Macedonia to Afghanistan. After being beaten, Khaled El-Masri is shackled, blindfolded and pulled onto a waiting plane. He is given two injections and falls unconscious. He awakens shortly before arriving in a prison in Afghanistan KHALED EL-MASRI: [translated] I was then brought to my cell. The next day, I was interrogated by a Lebanese man, also dressed in black, with a south Lebanese accent. And standing in the room were also six or seven disguised men, also all in black. And he shouted at me and said, �You are in a country with no laws. Do you know what this means? We can lock you up here for 20 years or bury you, nobody would know.� PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being. NARRATOR: August 2002, Morocco. Mohamed is tortured by �Marwan� and his masked accomplices. BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] �They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was totally naked. They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut, maybe an inch. At first I just screamed. One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut. He did it once and then stood still for maybe a minute, watched my reaction. It was an agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings, but I was screaming. There was blood all over. �If I told you I was going to teach you � I told you I was going to teach you who is the man,� �Marwan� eventually said. They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as it would only breed terrorists. I suffered the razor treatment about once a month for the remaining time I was in Morocco. It became like a routine. They used to be very slow. Deliberately slow. One would cut me. They would take a rest. Then another would take his turn. �In all 18 months I was there, I never went outside. I never saw the sun, not even once. I never saw any human being except the guards and my tormentors. When the Americans told me in Karachi, �Our friends the Arabs know how to deal with you,� I didn�t really know what they were talking about. Now I understand why the Americans called the Moroccans �our Arab friends.�� AMY GOODMAN: The brother of Binyam Mohamed reading from his detained brother's diary. An excerpt of the documentary, Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the �War on Terror�, produced by the human rights group, Witness.

Source: Democracy Now

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r True, but the milblogs aren't any of that. It's true they have to be careful of their content (for obvious strategic reasons) but for the most part, they've just average joes like you an me that are/were actually there or are at least in the military. Not sayin' that military is devoid of their own nutbars; some are just off the wall balls

No they're not! The military is comprised of the least educated, most brainwashed people on the planet! They follow orders and have been conditioned to submit to a hierarchical authoritarian institutional structure, not question things, or consider the moral aspect of their actions or orders.

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Friday, September 15th, 2006 Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights As President Bush admits the existence of secret overseas CIA prisons, we take a look at the U.S. government's shadowy program of extraordinary rendition with the authors of the new book: "Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights." [includes rush transcript] The first book documenting the US government practice of extraordinary rendition has just been released. It's called "Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights." We speak with the book's authors, A.C. Thompson and Trevor Paglen. * A.C. Thompson, staff writer at the San Francisco Weekly. In 2005 he won a George Polk Award for his investigative reporting. * Trevor Paglen, an expert on clandestine military installations and is the author of the two-volume study "Secret Bases, Secret Wars." AMY GOODMAN: The first book documenting the U.S. government practice of extraordinary rendition has just been released. It's called Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights. I�m joined here in San Francisco by the book's authors, A.C. Thompson and Trevor Paglen. A.C. Thompson is a staff writer at the San Francisco Weekly. In 2005 he won a George Polk Award for his investigative reporting. Trevor Paglen is an expert on clandestine military installations and is the author of the two-volume study, Secret Bases, Secret Wars. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! A.C. THOMPSON: Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: Congratulations on this book. It's just coming out next week. This, your first interview. Tell us about the �torture taxi.� Why did you call it that? A.C. THOMPSON: Because basically the CIA has created this whole network, this whole fleet of planes to ferry terrorism suspects to dungeons around the world and to hold them indefinitely. And we thought part of the story that people weren't really looking at was the actual vehicles. If you�re going to take people to foreign countries, you have to have planes, you have to have pilots, you have to have an infrastructure. We felt like that was a way into the story to start looking at it and start sort of reverse-engineering and taking apart the whole program. AMY GOODMAN: And tell us what you found. Who is doing these rendition flights? Where did you go in this country? A.C. THOMPSON: We went all over the country. So we went -- we started off going to Reno. Then we were in suburban Massachusetts to rural North Carolina. So we were all over. But the planes -- many of the planes fly out of a rural airfield in Smithfield, North Carolina, that a CIA front company set up years and years ago after the Vietnam War, after the Church Commission hearings, and is basically a perfect place to fly secret operations out of, because it's isolated, it's small, and people don't really pay a ton of attention to what's going on there. AMY GOODMAN: Trevor Paglen, what's this company called? TREVOR PAGLEN: The name of the company is Aero Contractors out of Smithfield, North Carolina. AMY GOODMAN: Is this the same company that ran Air America during Vietnam? And can you explain what that is? A.C. THOMPSON: You know, Air America was this sort of Vietnam era covert airline of the CIA that was directly controlled by the CIA and run by the CIA. And after Vietnam, basically the CIA moved out of the airline business just a little bit, and it relinquished a little bit of control. But they ask an Air America pilot, a guy who had worked for them for many years and retired, 'Hey, can you set up a new airline for us, and we'll help you set it up. You can run it. We'll give you contracts. You can fly our guys, but it will be your little baby.' And his name was Jim Rhyne, and his company was Aero Contractors out of North Carolina. And according to a former Aero pilot, the CIA told Rhyne, you know, �Set the company up somewhere that's three hours flying distance from D.C. so you can always be in close touch with us and pick up our CIA agents,� but also that �you're not going to be under the kind of scrutiny you would be if you were flying every day out of Dulles Airport.� AMY GOODMAN: So what did you find? Which planes were flown out of Smithfield? What about the beginning of your book, where you talk about Nevada, the Nevada test site, Trevor? TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, it's not only Aero Contractors that flies these planes. There are several other companies that do similar kinds of things. But Aero Contractors is the main one. One of the things that called attention to these aircraft was something unusual that happened in 2002. In December of 2002, four planes filed flight plans to the Nevada test site, and there's a kind of community of aviation enthusiasts who pay attention to airplanes that go to unusual places and noticed these airplanes, started talking about them in online forums and started tracking them using FAA data. It turns out that these airplanes then began flying to what one of these guys called "very interesting places," places like Kabul, Libya, Morocco, and as information accumulated about these planes, it became very, very -- increasingly clear that these, in fact, were CIA airplanes and in fact were involved in this extraordinary rendition program. AMY GOODMAN: How did it become clear? TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, it became clear, because stories started coming out. People like Khaled El-Masri began describing these disappearances. And when you looked at the flight logs then of these aircraft, they would correspond to some of these former detainees' accounts. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking with Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson about their book Torture Taxi. Talk about the people who track these planes. TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, it's an unusual community. It's a kind of hobbyist community. A lot of them don't necessarily have -- they don't do this for political reasons. It's a kind of curiosity. There's a kind of almost like an aesthetics to it, looking at a system and trying to decode how it works, and this is something that people do as a hobby. A.C. THOMPSON: So one of the guys that we hung out with had a homemade radar system that he was tracking U-2 planes on, and so we went with him outside a military base in Northern California while he tracked in real-time U-2 planes as they flew through the air on test flights. I mean, that's the sort of thing that these people are doing. And so what we did is sort of adopted their techniques. 'Ok, so you know how to track planes. You know where they go. You know that even a CIA plane has to file a flight plan with the FAA. Let's use that information and figure out where these suspicious planes that we've linked to the CIA are going.' AMY GOODMAN: Last year, when Democracy Now! producer Elizabeth Press and I went to Ireland, we interviewed an Irish activist who had been documenting and logging U.S. flights coming in and out of Shannon Airport in Ireland. Tim Hourigan of the Mid-West Alliance Against Military Aggression was among the first to document the secret use of Shannon by the United States for extraordinary rendition. This is an excerpt of what he had to say. TIM HOURIGAN: The government was trying to cover up and minimalize everything that was going on at the airport, everybody saying that, you know, there's nothing secretive or furtive going on at the airport. It was denied at the highest level in this country. And then some people set up a peace camp and started, you know, showing photographs of what was going on, giving figures, registration numbers of aircraft. And the state wasn't particularly happy with that. Following a few actions, including the disarmament actions by Mary Kelly and the Catholic Workers, a high court injunction was sought to evict everyone in the peace camp and to prevent us from entering the grounds of the airport, where we had been monitoring before. It has had very little effect, because we just got a telescope, and we do it from, you know, a mile away. AMY GOODMAN: Do you think most people in Ireland know what's happening at Shannon Airport now? TIM HOURIGAN: They didn't before, but they certainly do now. They know that it has been used, but they -- there's still more that's being covered up like the renditions you referred to. The jet involved in that, I have seen it at Shannon Airport and we have logged it a few times. And it's never been inspected at Shannon Airport. None of the military flights at Shannon Airport have been inspected. The particular jet has been -- has come through Shannon last year, the year before, going from the Middle East to the States. It's never been inspected. We have lodged complaints with the police, who are known as the Garda Siochana in this country, and they have never inspected that. So there�s still a lot more we don't know, like are people being brought through in chains off to Guantanamo Bay. You know, we know there are troops coming through. That's not even disputed anymore, but what's on the military cargo flights, what type of weapons are being brought, what type of explosives, and are people being brought through for torture? That's still being covered up by the authorities. AMY GOODMAN: Tim Hourigan used to work at Shannon Airport in the aviation industry. Now he sits outside the fence, spotting these planes, monitoring and putting the numbers up of their -- the tail numbers up on the internet. We're talking with Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson. Their book is called Torture Taxi. Trevor, these kind of tail spotters? TREVOR PAGLEN: Exactly. Tim is unusual in this community because he is doing this for political reasons. He thinks of this sort of thing as documenting a crime scene, for example. But many, many other people do something similar, which is stand around airports, take down the tail numbers of people. They'll post this information to online forums. And so, what -- in these online forums, there's a huge amount of accumulated information about where different airplanes have been, for how long they have been there, where they may have come from, where they�re going to. There's a kind of a history record in them, in a way, that you can use to start correlating that information against former prisoners' accounts and so forth. AMY GOODMAN: Could you also talk more about how these groups work, with fictional boards of directors, now talking about the secret -- the plane companies, how they function, how they cover up? A.C. THOMPSON: Well, one thing that's interesting is, I come from a background of doing corporate investigations for newspapers, and when you start looking at the kind of companies that the CIA is using to run these aviation companies to fly these planes, things don't add up, very quickly. So you start noticing when you pull the corporate registration documents for these companies, for example, that almost none of them have actual real concrete headquarters. The only addresses you can find for these companies are at the addresses of their lawyers. And you would expect, 'Okay, this is a plane company; they are going to be situated next to an airport with a hangar that a plane is in.' But most of them aren't like that at all. It would just be -- we would get the information on the company, and it would be run out of a little lawyer's office, who knew nothing about aviation. And there was no way to find the actual humans who supposedly staffed these companies. And when you would look at, say, registration documents for three different years for a particular company, you would find that the signatures for the supposed CEO on these documents looked completely different each year. AMY GOODMAN: You have signatures, one Colleen A. Bornt in your first chapter -- "Signatures. There's something wrong with the signatures on these documents" -- and you compare the name twice. A.C. THOMPSON: Exactly, and when you see something like that, especially when you've been doing this for a long time. You say, �Oh, this is not right.� But beyond that, when you put somebody's name into a good, high-end online database and you can't find any proof that they live anywhere, and they are supposed to be a CEO of a company, that gives you another clue that something is not right. AMY GOODMAN: Is there evidence that when CIA connections get exposed they change their name or they move on? A.C. THOMPSON: That was one of the really interesting things in this project, is early on in our research, we did a story about one of these companies based out of Nevada. We went and visited them, and the first time we visited them, there was one name on the door of the lawyer's office, and the next time we came back, that name was no longer on the door, and they were basically going under a different name. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about Afghanistan? Khaled El-Masri talks about being taken there and so many different people -- Moazzam Begg, before he was in Guantanamo, he was in Afghanistan. A.C. THOMPSON: We wanted to go to Afghanistan, because that seems to be one of the hubs for extraordinary rendition, guys like Khaled El-Masri. And it's one of the places that the most information has leaked out about. Very little information has leaked out about Romania or Poland, for example, where we believe people also have been taken. So we went to Kabul looking to sort of find out what we could find out on the ground, to talk to people, human rights folks, the UN, average folks, and see what we could learn about these secret facilities. And when we got there, we kind of learned to a certain extent that we were only looking a tiny piece of the story. We were interested in the CIA prisons and what was happening in them. And people in Afghanistan said, �You need to look at all of the military detention facilities in the country� -- and there's more than 20 -- because basically people are being held incommunicado. They're being tormented. They are not being -- they can't be visited by the UN or by human rights experts or even by the government of Afghanistan. And now it seems that some of these extraordinary rendition victims are getting mixed up with the military prisoners and getting moved over into military facilities from the CIA's secret facilities. AMY GOODMAN: One of the people you talk about is a commissioner of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, who was trying to get into these prisons and document what's happening. A.C. THOMPSON: And Dr. Bidar down in Gardez, Afghanistan is completely frustrated because he's been trying to get in there for years, and he can't get in there. They won't let him in there, and this is a respected, prominent guy who is pro-American. So he's interviewed scores and scores of people who had been held in these prisons. And I tell you, the things that these men had to say when we interviewed them were really chilling. I mean, they were absolutely terrifying, and they sounded just like Abu Ghraib. They loosed dogs on the men, snarling German Shepherds. They were held naked for days. They weren't fed for days. They were put in stress positions that were horribly painful and beaten if they broke from those positions. They were beaten over and over again. They weren't told why they were there. They were interrogated relentlessly for days for being supposed Taliban or al-Qaeda sympathizers. They weren't given the things they needed to properly practice their religion. I mean, all kinds of just horrendous stuff. Dr. Bidar told us about one man who was forced to sit on a chair, he said, that penetrated his anus, that something was forced into his rectum torturously while he was tied to this chair. I mean, it was really revolting stuff. As we were talking to these gentlemen, I mean, some of them would start crying. Our driver, who was a tough Afghan former boxer left the room and started crying. I mean, it was really brutal. AMY GOODMAN: So what do you make of President Bush famously saying we don't engage in torture, Trevor? TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, when he says, "We don't torture," he is not using the common sense definition of torture. When he says the word �torture,� he means something that was concocted by people like Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo. And the thing that -- the definition that they made of �torture� is something far beyond what we would normally consider torture in our everyday language. So he's not using the same definition that most of us would use. AMY GOODMAN: Would you say sitting on a chair with something inserted in your rectum would be considered torture by that definition? TREVOR PAGLEN: I think most people would consider that torture. I think Bush would not consider that torture, according to the legal memos that have been produced around this. AMY GOODMAN: Trevor Paglen, you are a military geographer. What does that mean? TREVOR PAGLEN: That means that I study the geographies that the military creates, looking at bases here domestically and overseas, and just trying to understand how the military works around the world. AMY GOODMAN: You're a specialist in secret bases. That's what you do? TREVOR PAGLEN: That's one of the things I look at, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: What are the secret bases in this country? TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, the most famous secret base, I guess, would be Area 51, which a lot of people have heard of as a kind of mythical place. Well, it's a real place. It's been there since -- it just had its 50th anniversary. It was built in 1955. It's in Nevada. AMY GOODMAN: And are some of these "torture taxi" flights -- are they taking off from these areas? Is there a correlation? TREVOR PAGLEN: Not so much. These bases are more for weapons testing and aviation, and I guess the correlation is that the planes that fly in and out of these secret bases behave very similarly to the way that these CIA planes behave. And so, that's the correlation, I guess. AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised, A.C., by what you learned as you wrote this book, Torture Taxi? A.C. THOMPSON: You know, I think that the stories that we heard in Afghanistan were surprising. You know, and I�ve written about police abuse in America for many years and about people being abused in American prisons. But the sort of similarity of the stories we heard from prisoners, the intensity of them, it kind of took us aback a little bit, and it was pretty gripping. You know, the other thing that surprised us was just to realize that when you are the CIA, you do actually leave footprints all over the country, and you do leave paper trails, and there are ways to figure these things out. And, you know, we sort of had this idea early on that the CIA is dark, vast and omnipotent and that unless you are an intelligence community insider, you can't really penetrate and figure out what they�re doing. Well, actually that's not true, and that was one of the surprising things to us. AMY GOODMAN: In our headlines today, we talked about the Spanish Foreign Minister acknowledging its territory may have been used as a stopover for the CIA's transfer of prisoners, known as extraordinary rendition. How significant is this? TREVOR PAGLEN: Well, they're -- these alleg-- He didn't have to use the word �may.� It seems pretty clear that Spain was used as a stopover and as a staging point for a lot of these operations. That's well-documented, and that's not even a controversial thing for him to say. AMY GOODMAN: And what about the secret prisons around the world? There was a huge to-do when Human Rights Watch said that these secret prisons were in Romania, were in Poland. A.C., what's your understanding of where they are? A.C. THOMPSON: You know, the thing that's interesting is that when you start tracking the CIA flights, you can start getting an idea that these facilities are moving. So for a while the flights are going into Romania and Poland. And then, when news starts trickling out, then the next thing you notice is that there's more flights going to someplace like Morocco, and that's the interesting thing, is that the locations seem to be moving. But the President says, �Okay, we're going to take 14 guys, and we're going to take them out of the secret prisons. We've finally admitted there are secret prisons, and we're going to try them before these military commissions.� I don't think that gives you an idea of the scale of the situation. I mean, most experts on this, most human rights activists and journalists who've followed it think at least 150 people have been dumped into these secret prisons. And so that kind of vastly understates the scale of the problem. AMY GOODMAN: And very finally, in this country, the places where you have traced these �torture taxis� taking off from? TREVOR PAGLEN: They take off -- they're all over the place. You see flights to places like Tulsa, to Maine, obviously D.C., Florida. They are constantly moving around the United States, as well. AMY GOODMAN: And they�re carrying prisoners? TREVOR PAGLEN: No. Well, we assume no. A.C. THOMPSON: You know, we don't know, when they�re moving around domestically in the country, we don't know what they�re doing. You know, the former CIA pilots say partially they�re just moving CIA guys around, as well as moving prisoners. AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for joining us. The book is called Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights. Our guests -- they are the authors of the book -- Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson. Thanks very much for joining us.

Source: Democracy Now

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Cheney Appears to Confirm US Practices Waterboarding Vice President Dick Cheney has apparently confirmed US interrogators engage in water-boarding � an outlawed practice that creates the sensation of drowning. The admission came during an interview on a right-wing North Dakota radio program on Tuesday. Cheney said he agreed with a listener�s comment that terrorists should be dunked under water if it could save American lives. Cheney added: �that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation." A spokesperson denied Cheney had endorsed waterboarding and said he was referring to broad interrogation procedures. Water-boarding is barred under international treaties that prohibit torture. Report: German Intel Agents Witnessed US Torture In Germany, the magazine Stern is reporting German intelligence officials witnessed the torture of detainees at a secret US detention center in Bosnia just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. The development is the latest to contradict the German government�s assertion it only heard of the secret prisons after the story was exposed last year. A leaked intelligence report says the German agents watched an American interrogator beat a seventy-year old prisoner with repeated rifle butts to his head. The interrogator appeared proud of his actions. One of the Germans agents reported he felt as if he had witnessed a war crime, saying: "The Serbs ended up before the international court in The Hague for this kind of thing."

Source: Democracy Now

Murdochs sick pro-torture channel: Sky News

very different from this:

Not that propaganda in a TV show is a surprise, especialy on the fair and balaned FOX

quote:

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 Is Torture on Hit Fox TV Show �24� Encouraging US Soldiers to Abuse Detainees? This past fall, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with experienced military and FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, met with the creative team behind the hit Fox Television show �24� and tell them to stop using torture because American soldiers were copying the show�s tactics. We speak with two of the delegation�s members -- former Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, who served one year in Iraq and David Danzig, director of the Prime Time Torture Project for Human Rights First. Is torture on television encouraging US soldiers to abuse detainees? Scene from Fox television series �24.� The hit television series on the Fox Television network has a weekly audience of 15 million viewers. Each season of 24 depicts an impossibly tense day in which counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer has just 24 hours to stop a terrorism plot that endangers the country. Faced with this �ticking time-bomb� scenario, Bauer invariably chooses torture to force suspects to divulge critical information. Some of the torture tactics on 24 include drugging, water-boarding, electrocution or power-drilling into a man�s shoulder. In five seasons of the show, there have been no less than sixty-seven torture scenes according to the Parents Television Council - that�s more than one every show. This past fall, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with experienced military and FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24 and tell them to stop using torture because American soldiers were copying the show�s tactics. The meeting was first revealed this month by The New Yorker Magazine. Well the Philadelphia Inquirer reports the show has decided to cut back on torture. Not because of complaints but, they say, because it has become something of a cliche. Tony Lagouranis is one of the former Army interrogator who met the show�s writers in November. He served for a year in Iraq. He joins us from a studio in Chicago. And in our firehouse studio we are joined by David Danzig, director of the Prime Time Torture Project for Human Rights First. He was also in the group that met with the producers of 24. We asked Joel Surnow - the creator of 24 or any representative from the show to be on the program but they denied our request. Tony Lagouranis. Former Army Interrogator. See Democracy Now!'s in-depth interview with Lagournais. David Danzig. Campaign Manager for Human Rights First�s campaign to address abuses that have taken place in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. RUSH TRANSCRIPT JUAN GONZALEZ: Is torture on television encouraging US soldiers to abuse detainees? JACK BAUER: Just tell me what I need to know! How do I find McCarthy? Damn you! Damn you! 4 CCs! AGENT: That�s 8 CCs total, Jack. His vitals are spiking across the line. JACK BAUER: 4 CCs! GRAEM BAUER: Jack, don�t! JACK BAUER: The machine knows you�re lying! I know you're lying! Tell me the truth! Tell me the truth! GRAEM BAUER: [screaming in agony] JUAN GONZALEZ: That's a scene from 24, the hit television series on the FOX Television network, with a weekly audience of 15 million viewers. Each season of 24 depicts an impossibly tense day in which counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer has just twenty-four hours to stop a terrorism plot that endangers the country. Faced with this �ticking time-bomb� scenario, Bauer invariably chooses torture to force suspects to divulge critical information. AMY GOODMAN: Some of the torture tactics on 24 include drugging, water-boarding, electrocution or power-drilling into a man�s shoulder. In five seasons of the show, there have been no less than sixty-seven torture scenes, according to the Parents Television Council. That�s more than one every show. JUAN GONZALEZ: This past fall, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with experienced military and FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24 to tell them to stop using torture, because American soldiers were copying the show�s tactics. The meeting was first revealed this month by The New Yorker magazine. AMY GOODMAN: Well, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports the show has decided to cut back on torture, not because of complaints, but, they say, because it�s become something of a cliche. Tony Lagouranis is one of the former Army interrogators who met with the show�s writers in November. He served for a year in Iraq, joins us in the studio from Chicago. And in our firehouse studio, we�re joined by David Danzig, director of the Prime Time Torture Project for Human Rights First. He was also in the group that met with the producers of 24. We asked Joel Surnow, the creator of 24, or any representative from the show to be on the program, but they declined our request. Tony Lagouranis, tell us why you met with the 24 producers to talk about your concerns. TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, when David Danzig from Human Rights First asked me to go out there and speak to them, I thought it was a good idea, because I did see interrogators copying some of the methods and the posture of -- not specifically 24, but certainly television programs, which increasingly have gotten more egregious with regard to torture. AMY GOODMAN: What did you see? Explain what you saw in Iraq and where you were. TONY LAGOURANIS:[/b] Well, the problem was that when we were interrogating in Iraq in 2004, we were being told that Geneva Conventions didn't comply. So we didn't have training that informed us what to do anymore, because we were taught according to Geneva Conventions. So people were getting ideas from television. And among the things that I saw people doing that they got from television was water-boarding, mock execution, using mock torture. They wanted to hook up one of our translators to an electric generator and pretend that they were torturing him and allow prisoners to see that so that they thought that they would experience the same thing. These were techniques -- I�m sorry, go ahead. AMY GOODMAN: Did you see soldiers watching 24 in Iraq? TONY LAGOURANIS: You know, I wasn't aware of the show 24 in Iraq, but I do remember seeing people watching television shows that depicted torture, and 24 might have been one of them. JUAN GONZALEZ: David Danzig, I�d like to ask you, it�s not just 24, obviously, though it�s the worst example, but you�ve been documenting now an enormous increase in torture on television compared to before 9/11. Could you talk about that and what led you to start this campaign? DAVID DANZIG: That's right. It�s really quite shocking when you look at the way that television deals with torture now, as opposed to before 9/11. Before 9/11 there was an average of about four scenes of torture on television in primetime. Post-9/11 -- JUAN GONZALEZ: Per year. DAVID DANZIG: Per year. Sorry. Post-9/11, that number has jumped to more than 100. But what�s particularly disturbing for us about this is that when you look at who�s doing the torturing, the people who are involved in it have changed. It used to be the bad guys were the ones who tortured, the Nazis or aliens or something like that, and torture never worked. But now it�s people like Jack Bauer. It�s the heroes of these shows -- Sidney on Alias -- and it always works for these people. So the message that 18-, 19-, 20-year-old soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan get is that good guys use this stuff and it works. JUAN GONZALEZ: And invariably, the issue is that the nation's security is at stake, and -- DAVID DANZIG: It�s very seductive to see Jack Bauer every Monday night save the world by using these sorts of tactics. The suggestion isn�t that these sorts of tactics are easy or pretty, but the suggestion is that they work and they make you a hero. AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the meeting, David. Who did you meet with, with 24 -- and we're sorry we weren't able to get anyone from 24 to be on the broadcast -- and their response? DAVID DANZIG: Well, we brought Tony and two other very experienced interrogators, as well as Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, who is the Dean of West Point, to talk to the executive producer of 24 and several of their lead writers. And really our point in bringing them there was to talk to them about the way in which they showed torture. Our view is that it�s really quite boring, what you see on 24. Torture happens, as you say, almost every episode, and Jack Bauer steps up, and bam, bam, bing, uses torture and gets the effects. It almost always works. What we were saying to them is, in the real world, it�s not like that. And the trouble is that what you're suggesting with your show is that it could be or should be. And so, our point was to try and provide them some real world basis for showing torture. We were suggesting to them, hey, what if you made it more like real life, if torture took place and bad things happened as result? What if, for example, the person who was tortured gave out false information, or the person who was being tortured was killed? That would lead to a whole area that would be much more interesting, we said, and much more realistic and wouldn't have this negative consequence. JUAN GONZALEZ: And what was the response you got? DAVID DANZIG: Well, to the credit of the producers and the writers, they were interested in this conversation, and they were really pushing the interrogators. I mean, we were sort of surprised to learn they�re in their sixth season and they didn't spend a lot of time talking to soldiers and interrogators about the way that they do these things. So, for them, this was a really interesting research opportunity. But it�s also very difficult for them, because they have a hugely popular show, and we were suggesting to them that they do something actually a little bit risky, which is change their format. And there�s obviously a lot of money at stake. AMY GOODMAN: Just reading from Jane Mayer's piece in the New Yorker, saying, �The show's villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. In one episode, a fictional President commands a member of his Secret Service to torture a suspected traitor: his national-security adviser. The victim is jolted with defibrillator paddles while his feet are submerged in a tub filled with water. As the voltage is turned up, the President, who is depicted as a scrupulous leader, watches the suspect suffer on a video feed. The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works. A few minutes before the suspect gives in, the President utters the show's credo, �Everyone breaks eventually.�� DAVID DANZIG: Yeah, it�s a little disturbing. The show is, in some ways, an advertisement for torture. Torture works on 24, works on a lot of other shows, too. AMY GOODMAN: Tony Lagouranis, does torture work? TONY LAGOURANIS: In my experience, no. I saw torture in Iraq. I even employed some torture methods. In my experience, it doesn't work. I think that you�re going to get false intelligence when you employ torture methods. JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, Joel Surnow, who is the creator of the show, did not attend your meeting, and he himself has admitted to being a rightwing nut and a friend of Rush Limbaugh. Is it your sense that the show will change at all, or is it your sense that he's really using to create his show to pursue a political agenda? DAVID DANZIG: Well, as Amy mentioned at the top of the show -- at the top of the segment, they have said that they are going to tone down on torture. And it is our hope that they will do this. It's not clear to me which direction they will go. But they've really been the leaders in showing torture in this graphic way and suggesting that it works, and we're hopeful that they'll now be the leaders in stepping back from that and doing what�s really responsible. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to quote Kiefer Sutherland. He's the star. He's Jack Bauer. He makes, what, $10 million an episode. And he was asked by Charlie Rose about this, and Kiefer said, �Do I personally believe that the police or any of these other legal agencies that are working for this government should be entitled to interrogate people and do the things that I do on the show? No, I do not,� he said. $10 million a year, sorry, is what Kiefer Sutherland makes. Tony Lagouranis, you said you were personally were involved with torturing prisoners. What did you do? TONY LAGOURANIS: We used things like hypothermia, stress positions, sleep depravation for long periods of time. I used military working dogs, sensory overload with music and strobe lights. These things were ineffective. And when people did talk, they either told us things that we already knew or they tended to mislead us. A far more effective method of interrogation elicitation, is getting the person to engage you and to speak to you at length. And that way, you know, if you get a large volume of information from the person, if they're speaking for a long time, you can use what they're saying to check their own information, to get them to contradict themselves or to get specific details. With torture, you might get a confession or you might get, you know, a single statement, and that's really very hard to verify in the interrogation booth, what they�re saying. JUAN GONZALEZ: And, David Danzig, when you approached Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan about this, had he been watching the show already? Was he familiar with it, or did you introduce him to it? DAVID DANZIG: He was familiar with it. And, in fact, one of the reasons that he was particularly interested in participating in this trip was that he and other educators, not just at West Point, but other people who taught interrogators, who we have spoken to, have told us that in their classes, Jack Bauer comes up all the time. When I first talked to a colonel at West Point about this, he said, �Oh, my god! 24 is one of the biggest problems I have in teaching my classes. Everybody wants to be like Jack Bauer. They all think that it may be possible or there are times when you should have to cross the line.� AMY GOODMAN: According to Jane Mayer's piece on 24, it�s a favorite of the White House. Surnow, who called himself the rightwing nut, has met with Karl Rove, as well as Tony Snow and Mary Cheney and Lynne Cheney, the wife and daughter of the Vice President. Tony Lagouranis, what do you think of 24's response from your meeting with them? TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, as David said, they were receptive. They were more receptive than I thought they would be. They spoke to us for a long time. They didn�t have to meet with us at all. But, you know, it�s not a surprise that they were resistant to change. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, when you bring a general, [inaudible] -- TONY LAGOURANIS: But I�d like to add also that I think that -- a larger impact than what -- you know, how the interrogators or how the military is affected by 24, it�s really affecting public opinion, too. I�ve been speaking about torture since I returned from Iraq, and people always bring up the ticking time bomb scenario, and they always bring up 24 as a reason why we need to legalize torture. The professionals -- professional interrogators don't want to torture, the military doesn�t want to torture, the FBI doesn't want to torture. The CIA did studies, and they said that torture doesn�t work and it produces false intelligence. Where is this idea coming from that we need to torture to combat terrorism? It�s coming from the media, in my opinion. AMY GOODMAN: Tony Lagouranis, did 24 offer you a job? TONY LAGOURANIS: No, they didn�t. AMY GOODMAN: Well, I look forward to reading your forthcoming book, Tony Lagouranis, former Army interrogator. His book is called Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator�s Dark Journey Through Iraq. And also David Danzig of Human Rights First, thanks so much for joining us.

Source: Democracy Now

Seriously?

Highly doubtful.

It's just looks like another stab at ignorance of personal responsibility to me.
meh.

Re: Not that propaganda in a TV show is a surprise, especialy on the fair and balaned FOX

quote:

Originally posted by shaolin_Z Source: Democracy Now

CNN covered this last week, but does this really suprise anyone? My father, who isn't the most psychological guy in the world, was commenting years ago about all of the video games, and this is no different.

At the same time, I can take both instances for what they are, entertainment (although I don't watch 24). Sadly, I'm not sure everyone can.

How else do you push "propaganda" (well, there are other ways, but this is an obvious place to put it), but I fail to see how that anology applies at all. It's not like there's an agenda to have school kids loose their minds and shoot other kind you know .

quote:

Originally posted by shaolin_Z How else do you push "propaganda" (well, there are other ways, but this is an obvious place to put it), but I fail to see how that anology applies at all. It's not like there's an agenda to have school kids loose their minds and shoot other kind you know .

Depends on who you ask

A little torture never hurt anybody.

I myself love being suffocated.

quote:

Originally posted by Fir3start3r Depends on who you ask

Yes, it really does. It's pretty pointless asking you for sure.

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Originally posted by Capitalizt A little torture never hurt anybody.

Alright, go grab that scalpel, and a glow stick dripped in battery acid that's used to sodomize for "interogation." I'm sure you'll feel differently afterwards haha.

Re: Re: Not that propaganda in a TV show is a surprise, especialy on the fair and bal

quote:

Originally posted by Groundhog Boy CNN covered this last week, but does this really suprise anyone? My father, who isn't the most psychological guy in the world, was commenting years ago about all of the video games, and this is no different. At the same time, I can take both instances for what they are, entertainment (although I don't watch 24). Sadly, I'm not sure everyone can.

I think you missed the point BTW, since the article title is rather misleading. Shows like 24 potray torture as being normal and necessary for "protecting" America from terrorism. That's the message being propagated there. Does that make a little more sense?

EDIT: Make that "24" instead of "Shows like 24" since I can't think of any other shows like that, not that I watch a whole lot of TV anymore anyways. I stopped numbing my mind with TV a long time ago.

Re: Re: Re: Not that propaganda in a TV show is a surprise, especialy on the fair and bal

quote:

Originally posted by shaolin_Z I think you missed the point BTW, since the article title is rather misleading. Shows like 24 potray torture as being normal and necessary for "protecting" America from terrorism. That's the message being propagated there. Does that make a little more sense? EDIT: Make that "24" instead of "Shows like 24" since I can't think of any other shows like that, not that I watch a whole lot of TV anymore anyways. I stopped numbing my mind with TV a long time ago.

No, I got the point entirely. There's a certain portion of the population that feels that it can control the public's thoughts on torture by portraying the "positive" use of it on shows like 24. I was just saying that it's like the video games in that it isn't a realistic depiction of how things work.

Also, when I referenced the games, I wasn't saying that it was supporting kids losing their minds and shooting each other. A lot of those games are either put you in the position of being a US soldier or in a counter-terrorist role. For some feeble minds, this makes the US/counter terrorists always right, justifying their guns over diplomacy methods. When the kids (and young adults) see this role played out all the time, what they see on the news seems par for the course in terms of what they're used to seeing in their games. Have you ever seen how many soldiers in Iraq are playing first person shooters like Counter Strike and SoCom in their free time over there? It's like training, and serves them with the ability to de-sensitize what's going on when they're shooting at someone in real life.

That said, I still play video games like that quite a bit.

Gee, I wonder what happened to them.

quote:

US accused on 'missing' prisoners Thirty eight people believed to have been held in secret CIA prisons - or black sites - are missing, according to a report by a US human rights group. The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report also details allegations of torture by a terror suspect who was held in secret custody for more than two years. The group has asked US President George W Bush to reveal the location of these detainees and close all US black sites. Last year Mr Bush said the prisons had all closed and had not used torture. 'Missing' prisoners In a televised address in September, Mr Bush admitted that 14 detainees had been held at secret CIA prisons that used interrogation methods that were "tough" but "lawful and necessary". "The United States does not torture," Mr Bush said at the time. "It's against our laws, and it's against our values. I have not authorised it - and I will not authorise it." He said the prisoners had since been transferred to the US military camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA was not holding any more terror suspects. But in a report published on Tuesday, HRW has named another 38 people who were believed to have been held in secret CIA prisons, who are now missing. Quoting US intelligence officials, The Washington Post says more than 60 people have been held in the prisons since 2001. 'Beaten and burned' The group has called on the US to reveal the location of all detainees held by the CIA since 2001 and end its "illegal" secret detention and interrogation programmes. Palestinian Islamic extremist Marwan al-Jabour told HRW he saw or spoke to a number of those named in the report while he was held by the CIA between 2004 and 2006. Mr Jabour, who was arrested in Lahore, Pakistan in May 2004, also detailed torture tactics he says were used against him while he was in US custody. He says at various periods during his 28-month detention Pakistani authorities kept him naked and chained to a ceiling. He says he was beaten, burned and handcuffed in stress positions. During this time he was also reportedly interrogated by US agents for hours on end, but Mr Jabour says he was only tortured when the Americans were not around. Mr Jabour admits that in 1998 he trained in Afghanistan in the hope of fighting in Chechnya. He also says he helped Arab militants who had fled Afghanistan for Pakistan in 2003, but he denies any links to al-Qaeda or terror activities. EU threat Meanwhile, the US has warned the European Union that ongoing inquiries into secret CIA flights within Europe linked to the black sites are threatening intelligence ties between Europe and the US. The investigations "have not been helpful with respect to necessary co-operation between the United States and Europe," John Bellinger, legal adviser to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said. Mr Bellinger also labelled a European Parliament report into the flights, released earlier this month, as "unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair".

Source: BBC

quote:

Thursday, March 8th, 2007 The Private War of Women Soldiers: Female Vet, Soldier Speak Out on Rising Sexual Assault Within US Military On International Women�s Day, we look at the ongoing global struggle for gender equality and equal rights within the US military. Specialist Mickiela Montoya came face to face with the dangers of rape by her male comrades when she was deployed to Iraq with the National Guard. Eli Painted Crow served in the Army for 22 years including time in Iraq in 2004, facing challenges both as a woman and a Native American. And Columbia professor Helen Benedict is author of a forthcoming book about women veterans of the Iraq war. Today is March 8th, International Women�s Day. Millions around the world are marking the day by celebrating advances made by women and to honor the ongoing global struggle for gender equality and equal rights. One of those struggles is taking place within the US military. In the United States, there are more women serving in the Armed Forces than in any other period in American history. More than one hundred sixty thousand female US soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2003, which means one in seven soldiers is a woman. At least four hundred fifty women have been wounded in Iraq, and seventy one have died -- more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. With the increased number of women serving in the US military, something else is on the rise too: rape and sexual assault by their male comrades. To make matters worse, female soldiers say they can�t trust the US military to protect them. Helen Benedict. Professor at Columbia University�s Graduate School of Journalism. She is author of three books on sexual assault, including �Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault,� and �Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes.� She currently working on a book about women veterans of the Iraq war. Her latest article, on Salon.com, is �The private war of women soldiers.� Spc. Mickiela Montoya. She came face to face with the dangers of rape by her male comrades when she was deployed to Iraq with the National Guard in 2005. Eli Painted Crow. She served 22 years in the Army retiring at the rank of sergeant. In 2004 she served in Iraq and Kuwait. She is member of the Yaqui Nation in Tucson, Arizona. RUSH TRANSCRIPT AMY GOODMAN: Today is March 8th, International Women�s Day. Millions around the world are marking it by celebrating advances made by women and to honor the ongoing global struggle for gender equality and equal rights. One of those struggles is taking place within the US military. In the United States, there are more women serving in the Armed Forces than in any other period in American history. More than 160,000 female US soldiers have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East since 2003, which means one in seven soldiers are women. At least 450 women have been wounded in Iraq, seventy-one have died -- more female casualties and deaths than in the Korean, Vietnam and first Gulf Wars combined. With the increased number of women serving in the US military, something else is on the rise, too: rape and sexual assault by their male comrades. To make matters worse, female soldiers say they can�t trust the US military to protect them. Specialist Mickiela Montoya came face to face with the dangers of rape by her male comrades when she was deployed to Iraq with the National Guard in 2005. She joins me on the line from California. Joining me in our firehouse studio is Helen Benedict, a professor of Columbia University�s Graduate School of Journalism. She�s author of three books on sexual assault, including Recovery: How to Survive Sexual Assault and Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. She is currently working on a book about women veterans of the Iraq war. Her latest article at salon.com is called "The Private War of Women Soldiers." And in San Francisco, we�re joined by Eli Painted Crow. She served in the Army for twenty-two years, including time in Iraq in 2004. She�s the mother of two sons who served in the military and has seven grandchildren. She is also a member of the Yaqui Nation in Tucson, Arizona. And we welcome you all to Democracy Now! Helen Benedict, why don�t we begin with you? What is the private war of women soldiers? HELEN BENEDICT: It�s partly to be treated equally, but it�s mostly to feel safe. The harassment is almost universal -- sexual harassment -- throughout the military. Sometimes it�s more severe than others, but it mounts up, the stress of being constantly pressured for sex and constantly teased -- makes it very hard to do one�s job. And it�s something that the men, very few men, have to put up with. But there�s also the danger of sexual assault and rape. And all the soldiers I�ve talked to are very well aware of that. So they not only have to worry about the dangers of war, incoming fire and so on, but the danger of assault from the very people they�re supposed to trust. AMY GOODMAN: In your survey of women, what have you found in terms of numbers? How pervasive is this? HELEN BENEDICT: The numbers are very hard to assess, because so few people wish to come forth. There is a study of earlier veterans of war that indicates 30% of women are sexually assaulted and/or raped. There are other studies that put the numbers less and some that put them high. The military itself only counts reported rapes by women while they�re still in the military, so their numbers are much lower, because the climate�s very difficult to report in. Sexual assault is higher, because -- more -- which includes attempted rape, but not fully completed, and sexual harassment is up to 90%, is what I found in my studies. AMY GOODMAN: Eli Painted Crow, how long have you been in the Army altogether? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: A total of twenty-two years. I retired in November of 2005. AMY GOODMAN: You served in Iraq and Kuwait in 2004? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: What did you find when it came to sexual abuse, to rape? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: What I saw was a lot of inequities in terms of how female soldiers are treated. There was an actual rape case on the base that I was assigned to, and the way that they handled it was they moved the perpetrator to another site, and, unfortunately, I didn�t get to stay on that base camp to find out what ultimately happened to the female. I know that she reported it, and it was supposed to be private, and before you knew it, everybody knew what was going on. So it wasn�t as confidential and private, in terms of investigating or protecting her as a soldier there. And so, it was shaming, you know? AMY GOODMAN: Describe the overall climate in Iraq. What kind of tone is set, and how did you deal with it, Eli Painted Crow? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, I think that every base has its own climate, depending on what�s going on in the area. I was able to stay in a base camp for a very short time, that there were plenty of females to at least -- you know, they tell you you have to have a battle buddy, and you have to go to the latrine. You can�t go alone. And when I moved to another base camp, what I found -- it was a transitional base camp, where soldiers would come in, refuel, spend the night -- and I found companies coming in with just one female for the whole company, and she had no battle buddy, and nobody even bothered to look at that for these females that were moving in and moving out with these other, you know, male soldiers. There was no support for them, and nobody considered that. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Benedict, you write about the number of women that you surveyed, and particularly, for example, walking to the latrine. HELEN BENEDICT: Yes, quite a few of them told me that they were ordered to not go out at night alone and not to go to the latrines or the showers without a buddy, without another woman. This was not being told to the men, and the problem was that there often weren�t other women to choose, as Eli Painted Crow just said, or it entailed waking somebody up in the middle of the night to get them to go with you. And, you know, the soldiers are working twelve hours a day, on the whole, out there. They�re getting almost no sleep. They wake up all night long for one reason or another. So having to wake somebody up because you need to go to the bathroom is not as light as it may sound. But also, they felt that -- it was a universal recognition that it was dangerous for women out there. And they weren�t talking about danger from the Iraqis, they were talking about, as I�ve said, danger from their fellow soldiers. AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to a clip of Colonel Janis Karpinski. She�s best known for her role as commander of the Abu Ghraib prison, but she has also spoken out on the treatment of female soldiers in Iraq. Last year, she testified at a mock trial known as the Bush Crimes Commission Hearings. COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Because the women, in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go out to the portoilets or the latrines, were not drinking liquids after 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon. And in 120-degree heat or warmer, because there was no air conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep. And rather than make everybody aware of that, because that�s shocking -- and as a leader, if that�s not shocking to you, then you�re not much of a leader -- so what they told the surgeon to do was, �Don�t brief those details anymore. And don�t say specifically that they�re women. You can provide that in a written report, but don�t brief it in the open anymore.� MARJORIE COHN: Was there a commander who saw dehydration listed as a cause of death of a woman, a woman female US soldier, and after that he said "Do not list dehydration as a cause of death anymore�? COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: Yes. MARJORIE COHN: Who was that? COL. JANIS KARPINSKI: General Sanchez. MARJORIE COHN: General Sanchez. Thank you. AMY GOODMAN: That was Colonel, formerly Brigadier General, Janis Karpinski being questioned by the law professor Marjorie Cohn. The general she�s referring to is Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who served as the commander of the coalition forces in Iraq. Professor Benedict, you write about what Janis Karpinski, what the former Brigadier General demoted after the Abu Ghraib scandal, had to say. HELEN BENEDICT: Yes. We talked about it, actually, because I wanted to check with her, because the Army has said that her claims were unsubstantiated. And she described sitting there with the doctor while he explained why these women had died of dehydration. AMY GOODMAN: They died of dehydration. HELEN BENEDICT: They died of dehydration, which -- I mean, it�s quite common for soldiers out there to have serious health problems because of the heat and dehydration. You have to drink liters of water every day to be alright. It�s so hot. AMY GOODMAN: And they were simply afraid to go out alone to get the water, being harassed? HELEN BENEDICT: Yeah. And she told me -- and this is something more detailed than came out in what you just showed -- that there were men who were waiting out there, and they were pulling women into the latrines and abusing them and raping them there. And that�s -- word had spread about this, and that�s why the women were afraid to go out. And I went to the site, the Iraq casualty site, which lists all the deaths, and I did indeed find three deaths of women in the year she was talking about attributed to non-hostile causes, which the Army never seems to really explain, so I think it�s very possible those are three she was talking about. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Professor Helen Benedict, also to Sergeant Eli Painted Crow. And we�re also joined on the phone by Specialist Mickiela Montoya, deployed to Iraq with the National Guard in 2005. Thanks very much for joining us. SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Thank you for having me. AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your own experience in Iraq? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Well, it sounded really familiar to, similar to the experiences that you explained. I didn�t know that it was that climate at the time. I kind of just got used to it and dealt with it and tried to figure out a way around the restroom issue. AMY GOODMAN: How did you figure out your way around going to the bathroom? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: I would still drink the three liters of water usually every day, but I would -- a lot of the females were, like, cutting off the tops of the bottles and in the middle of the night peeing in that and waiting �til the morning to dump it out, so that we would prevent having to wake up in the middle of the night and go out in the dark, because it�s so dark at night. AMY GOODMAN: You carried a knife with you? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Yeah, and I would carry a knife with me later on. AMY GOODMAN: For what purpose? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Just to feel safe, because, I mean, you can�t -- I don�t know. I don�t know, I just felt safer that way. AMY GOODMAN: Safe from the Iraqis? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: No, safe from the other soldiers. I never intended on using the knife for an Iraqi. I had my M-16 for that. But my knife, I always just kept it for another soldier, because any time I would have any type of strong sexual harassment words spoken, I just mainly felt a little bit more secure, and it was visible, too, to the other soldiers. AMY GOODMAN: Did anything specifically happen to you? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Yeah. That�s why I would carry the knife. I remember it was really late, and over there they don�t have electricity, so we run off generators, and if you scream or if you were to yell for help or anything like that, nobody could hear you, because you�re not going to shoot a comrade, because these are your supposed battle buddies. So I would just use the knife as, I guess, a scare tactic, and it worked for me, because after that I never really had a problem. AMY GOODMAN: Eli Painted Crow, who could determine the environment for the women? What could ultimately affect it, change it, for a woman soldier? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: I think it would be -- I think the -- being able to report something anonymously would help -- AMY GOODMAN: Mickiela Montoya. SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: I�m sorry? AMY GOODMAN: Go ahead. SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Oh, I think that being able to help -- I mean, being able to report things anonymously would help, because it would make you feel a little bit more secure on reporting things. But I don�t really know. I can�t think of a good solution. AMY GOODMAN: We�re going to go to break. Then I�m going to put that question to Sergeant Eli Painted Crow, and also to Dr. Helen Benedict: what can make the difference and what kind of climate is set at the top, at the Pentagon. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, on this International Women�s Day. Back in a minute. [break] AMY GOODMAN: As we talk today on this International Women's Day about women at war -- in fact, that�s the title of the forthcoming book of Professor Helen Benedict, professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who has written three other books on sexual assault and abuse. We�re also joined on the telephone from Los Angeles by Specialist Mickiela Montoya, who was deployed to Iraq with the National Guard in 2005. Sergeant Eli Painted Crow joins us in San Francisco. She served twenty-two years in the Army, has served in Iraq and Kuwait in 2004. The setting of the climate, Sergeant Painted Crow, who could determine how a unit, an atmosphere, for women would be? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Who could determine -- the women themselves. It�s very difficult to even -- for me to address that question. You just go in. There�s so much disorganizing, that�s probably the last thing on anybody's mind, any commander�s mind, in terms of the women and how they�re going to be treated. There�s such a lack of education on sexual assault by the commanders, by the soldiers, and even a lot of the times by the female, as to why that happens. And we�re in a hostile environment, so to imagine that when you teach a soldier to hate and to be violent, that you can control that on any level is very difficult. You have to remember that we�re going over there to kill. We lose a lot of values, when you�re out there, and so you become this predator, this aggressor, this whole thing that just doesn�t work out, what you consider the enemy. It just becomes who you are. So what can you expect? I mean, there are no measures there that speak about women having to -- I mean, nobody thinks about you have to protect yourself from your peers, but nobody thinks about that. But you really end up -- they end up being a lot of the times, you know, what you have to take care of yourself from the most, more than what you�re dealing with outside the base camp. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Helen Benedict, what is the Pentagon doing about this? HELEN BENEDICT: They have set up a sexual assault website, which gives directions to soldiers on how to report a sexual assault either anonymously or not anonymously, and it defines it. And they also are now holding classes on what sexual harassment is. Very often if there is a report of an assault, the first response is to hold one of these classes. The trouble is, all the soldiers I�ve talked to say, that this is just a kind of cosmetic. The reality is you can�t report it anonymously. These are closed societies full of gossip. Everybody knows what�s going on, as you�ve already heard. And also, the leadership don�t really want to hear about this, because it disrupts the chain of command, it undermines morale. So the result is that most soldiers don�t say anything, and when they do, they�re shut up. AMY GOODMAN: You talk about the tone being set in Iraq and what a difference it makes when a commanding officer says no in his entire unit. HELEN BENEDICT: Yes, I�ve talked to quite a lot of soldiers who did feel perfectly alright. I mean, I don�t want to suggest that everybody�s being assaulted. I think almost everybody is being harassed, but not every woman is assaulted. The majority aren�t. And there are a lot of soldiers out there who -- male soldiers -- who treat the women as their sisters, just as they treat the other men as their brothers, and who are wonderful and reliable people. And the majority of them are like that. But the tone of that is really affected very strongly by the tone of the commanders. I mean, it does come from the top down a lot. And if the commanders and women are just as bad at this as men, turn a blind eye to it or refuse to take it seriously, or even indulge in it themselves -- �it� being assault and harassment -- then the message gets spread pretty fast that it�s OK. And vice versa, if there�s no toleration of that -- �I want my women in my platoon treated with the same respect and equality as the men, and I won�t put up with anything else� -- that can help a lot. AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to what you describe as the most shocking case of military sexual assault, that of Army Specialist Suzanne Swift. She was arrested and confined to base for going AWOL in 2006, after charges of sexual harassment and assault went unaddressed by the military. She says she was sexually harassed and abused by her commanders in Iraq and here at home. We interviewed Suzanne Swift in September. She spoke about what happened to her. SPC. SUZANNE SWIFT: There's an equal opportunity representative for every company in the Army. They all have one. And they are supposed to report it. And everything that you tell them that has to do with equal opportunity, they are supposed to report it, no matter what. No matter what happens, even if there's no action taken, they have to report it. AMY GOODMAN: Did they report it in your case? SPC. SUZANNE SWIFT: No. AMY GOODMAN: So what did you do? SPC. SUZANNE SWIFT: Nothing. I didn't know. I was brand new to the Army and just basically got thrown into the mix of this company and then sent to Iraq. I had no idea what to do. AMY GOODMAN: Was there more than one officer involved? SPC. SUZANNE SWIFT: Right. Well, the one that I tried to report was my platoon sergeant. And, you know, looking back now, I had a squad leader who literally singled me out to be the person that he was going to have sex with during the deployment. And, you know, I did. I was nineteen. I fell for it, and for months I was like his little sex slave, I guess. It was disgusting and it was horrible, and I didn't know what to do. AMY GOODMAN: And so, ultimately, what happened? SPC. SUZANNE SWIFT: Ultimately, I stopped it. I told him that I didn't want to continue this relationship. And he made my life hell. I mean, a squad leader in the Army is basically -- that's your boss. Everything that you do -- eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, when you go to work, everything -- they can tell you when to do it and how to do it. And he made my life miserable, because I wouldn't have sex with him anymore. AMY GOODMAN: Specialist Suzanne Swift. When she came back from Iraq, she was then going to be redeployed, and she was getting ready to go, but then, as she was making her way to the car, she said to her mother she just couldn�t do it, and she went AWOL. The Eugene police came to her house, to her mother's house, and they arrested her. They handcuffed her, and then she was put back on the base in Fort Lewis. She called her mother, and she said she was put under the supervision of one of the officers who had abused her. Professor Helen Benedict, the latest in Suzanne Swift�s case, she was court-martialed. HELEN BENEDICT: She was court-martialed. She was offered a deal initially. If she would sign a statement saying that she had never been raped in the Army, they would just give her a summary court-martial, which means a reprimanding letter in the file. She refused to sign that, saying she wouldn�t let them make her lie. And so, she was court-martialed. She served a month in prison, December, and she was told she had to stay in the Army for another two years. She was moved to Fort Irwin, I believe, which is very far away from her family, and she may be redeployed. AMY GOODMAN: This is International Women's Day. Sergeant Eli Painted Crow, I wanted to take this a little broader. Why did you join the military twenty-two years ago? And not only as a woman, as a Native American woman, your experiences? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, economic reasons was a very big factor for me in joining the military, and it�s also something that Native people find great honor and great pride in. And it�s very hard to find things that, you know, bring honor to your family and things like that, and so when you join the military, it�s a very -- it feels very good for the family. And it was also a way for me to raise my children and to provide for them. AMY GOODMAN: How high a percentage of Native Americans join the military? Is it a big number? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, as far as indigenous people go, it�s a very big number, proportionate, you know, as far as Natives go. That�s like what all of us do. That�s our entryway to take care of our families. That�s our way to -- our last resort of holding onto that idea of being a warrior, being a provider, being a protector, and so that is a really big deal for Native. I mean, you go to any ceremony, as far as pow-wows go, things like that, the first thing they do is they call a veterans group to come in and post the colors as a way to honor Native soldiers who are serving and have served. AMY GOODMAN: Why did you feel it was important to join the military? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, at the time, it was very, very difficult for me to realize how I was going to raise my children, and I always felt like I needed to be in a place that I could learn some discipline and, you know, really finish something that I had started. And so, I decided to do that. And, actually, it was very encouraged. When I went to see my recruiter, I was divorced at the time, and my recruiter suggested very strongly, he said, "You need to be married or you need to give your children up." Well, I couldn�t give my children up. He goes, �Well, if you have a piece of paper that says you�re married, then you can join.� And so, I looked for my ex-husband, and we remarried so that I could do this, so that I could become part of this military thing. And the illusion around that, as far as what I thought I was getting -- I joined the military to get off of welfare. And after twenty-two years of service and coming home from Iraq and not being supported by the VA or by any of the things that they said I was going to have as a retired soldier, I ended up on welfare. So I went full circle here. I ended up on general assistance coming home, on $258 a month, is what I had to live on. And I had to literally write letters to, like, so many places just to get any kind of help, just to get some doors opened. And I can tell you that most people give up. Most people give up, because it�s so hard to get help. And what I had going for me was that I just had skills in terms of knowing systems. And after twenty-two years, you learn a thing or two about systems, and you really look at language. So that is what helped me. And I developed a support system of women who also encourage me to work on this. But I was ready to lose my house. I lost all my friends initially, when I first came back, because nobody could understand what was wrong with me, and nobody could hear me, and I couldn�t speak it, and I couldn�t participate in the world. So it was really difficult. This whole joining of the Army for me, the military, I thought was going to be this -- I mean, so great. I mean, I had my sons sign up for it. That was like -- my youngest son did eleven years, and my oldest son did two years. And in the end, we�re all broken. My son is broken behind that. He was in an accident and almost died, and in a wheelchair. And I have had to fight for services for him at our VA office, because they refused to help him in so many ways. He doesn�t fit the criteria that the VA designs for certain types of help. They have all this criteria, and then they make memos to budget the money for that VA based on that regulation. But they just redesign it to help themselves, and unless you know that and challenge that, they just say, �Oh, well, you can�t get this help.� And soldiers, who are so used to taking orders and accepting, you know, you�re used to that. They tell you, do this, do that, you do it. And if they tell you you can�t do it, you can�t have it, you don�t argue it. And so, even when you get out, you�re in that frame of mind. And so, many soldiers, young soldiers who don�t know the rules, who don�t know the laws, who don�t know what their rights are, accept what is given to them, as far as, �Oh, you don�t qualify for this.� So there�s just so much. AMY GOODMAN: How did you end up becoming a peace activist, Sergeant Painted Crow? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, this is very important for me, because being Native, I don�t see this as a war, number one. I see this as an invasion that�s committing a genocide to a nation, to a people. I see that we are over there and we are doing the same thing that we did here with the indigenous people of this land, calling it democracy, calling it freedom. Well, it isn't freedom if it�s imposed. And what I learned about the Iraqi people, while I was there, was they're very much like the indigenous people here. They have clans, they have circles, they have their ceremonies, they have their drum. There are so many similarities, and it just really hurt me to realize that here I�m a survivor of this attempted genocide on my people -- and I say �attempted,� because we're still here, even though they want to say we're not, we're erased, we�re not even in the history books -- and here I am over there doing the same thing that was done to me, and so I -- AMY GOODMAN: You said that in the military they refer to Iraq as �Indian country�? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, they referred to -- what they said in the briefing, they called enemy territory �Indian country.� And I�m standing there, just listening to this briefing, and I�m just in shock that after all this time, after so many Natives have served and are serving and are dying, that we are still the enemy, even if we're wearing the same uniform. That was very shocking for me to hear. AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask, Specialist Mickiela Montoya, why you joined the military. SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: I joined when I was seventeen. They had a lot of recruiters at my school, and I wasn�t doing too great in school, and I needed some type of guidance and I needed a way to pay for college. And I decided to join. I was pretty satisfied in the beginning, until later. I joined the National Guard to get the feel of the military, because I wasn�t sure if I was ready to be active-duty. And now I find myself -- I�ve been in four years, and I�ve been active-duty more than half of the time that I�ve been in. And it�s not what I signed up for. But I just pretty much joined for the, I guess, direction. AMY GOODMAN: You are seven-and-a-half months pregnant now? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: Yes. AMY GOODMAN: How much longer will you be in the military? SPC. MICKIELA MONTOYA: I put my paperwork in to get out of the military when I was four months, and I�m still waiting on the paperwork. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Helen Benedict, you have some remarkable statistics in the article you did for salon.com, �The Private War of Women Soldiers.� Can you talk about the statistics from Vietnam to now of sexual assault? HELEN BENEDICT: Yes, most of the statistics have been gathered through studies with veterans, who feel freer to talk than when they�re still in the military. And a lot of the studies gathered women who have come to the VA for help for various things, who are veterans of the Vietnam War and all the wars up through now. And that�s where I found the 30% said they were raped. I found a 71% -- AMY GOODMAN: From Vietnam through the first Gulf War, 30% said they had been raped in the military? HELEN BENEDICT: Yes, so that includes Bosnia and the other places. AMY GOODMAN: 2004 study of veterans from Vietnam and all the wars since, who were seeking help for post-traumatic stress disorder, found 71%? HELEN BENEDICT: Said they were sexually assaulted, yeah. AMY GOODMAN: Sexually assaulted or raped while in the military. And a third study conducted �92, �93, with female veterans of the Gulf War and earlier wars, 90% said they had been sexually harassed? HELEN BENEDICT: Harassed, yes. There are no statistics on Iraq alone at the moment. Those are still being studied, but that�s from previous wars and combinations of wars. AMY GOODMAN: What protection does the military provide? HELEN BENEDICT: There is no protection. I can�t think of a single thing that I would call protection, realistically. AMY GOODMAN: And how did you decide to write this book? You have written books on sexual assault before. How did you come to this? HELEN BENEDICT: Through Mickiela, who we�ve just been talking to. Originally, I met her and another young soldier, and the first thing they said to me was, there are only three things the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke. And then they immediately started talking about how they were harassed and how they were treated by men and how the world in general doesn�t recognize them or respect them for what they�ve done as soldiers. And that�s what ignited my interest. My book isn�t just about sexual assault. It�s going to be about the whole arc of experience, including why people sign up in the first place and their consciences, which is a very important part of it. But this element is making it so horrendously unfair and so much harder on women, in a situation that�s already horrible, that something has to be done about it. AMY GOODMAN: Professor Helen Benedict, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Specialist Mickiela Montoya, thank you. Sergeant Eli Painted Crow, I wanted to ask where your son is seeking help, at which VA? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Fresno VA. AMY GOODMAN: And so, as you watch these hearings and listen to the news coming out around them, have you been able to contact them to let people know what your own son is going through? SGT. ELI PAINTED CROW: Well, I have written many letters. I have written letters to Capitol Hill. I have written letters to -- I�ve contacted my congressman. I�ve even written letters to the governor. I�ve had meetings with the director of the Fresno VA. I mean, my son is finally getting the help that he needs, the mental health help, the medication, because he has a closed-brain injury, the transportation. But it took me months to do it. And it�s in between the time that I need for healing myself. So, I mean, Fresno is just a very small, minute, you know, VA in comparison to the Fort Bliss medical hold, Walter Reed -- AMY GOODMAN: Sergeant Eli Painted Crow, we�re going to have to leave it there, but we will definitely continue to follow your story, as well as the story of your son. Thank you all for joining us.

Source: Democracy Now

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Reports says FBI abused power to get private records Fri Mar 9, 2007 7:05 PM GMT By James Vicini WASHINGTON (Reuters)- The FBI abused its power by illegally or improperly obtaining telephone, financial and other secret records in investigations of terrorism or espionage suspects, the U.S. Justice Department's inspector general said on Friday. A report by Inspector General Glenn Fine's office sharply criticised the FBI for how, without a court order, it demanded and received records such as customer information from telephone companies, Internet service providers, financial institutions and consumer credit companies. "We believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities," Fine said in releasing the report. National security letters allow the FBI to compel the release of private information without getting authority from a judge or grand jury. Vowing to investigate, Democrats in Congress seized on the report, which comes as they step up criticism of President George W. Bush's administration for weakening civil liberties protections in its war on terrorism. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales praised the report for uncovering "serious problems" in the FBI's use of national security letters, his spokeswoman said. Gonzales told FBI Director Robert Mueller the past mistakes "will not be tolerated" and ordered new safeguards be set up at the FBI, Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said Mueller called the finding of deficiencies "unacceptable". "While we've already taken some steps to address these shortcomings, I am ordering additional corrective measures to be taken immediately," he said. The use of national security letters has grown dramatically, mainly as a result of powers granted to the FBI under the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorism law that Congress approved after the September 11 attacks in 2001. According to the report, requests by the FBI went from about 39,000 in 2003 to about 56,000 in 2004 and about 47,000 in 2005. In investigating abuses of authority, the report found 26 possible violations, including requesting information without adequate authorisation, improper requests under the law and unauthorised collection of telephone or e-mail records. Of the 26 cases, 22 were the result of FBI errors and four were caused by mistakes by those who received the request for the information, the report said. In reviewing 77 investigative files in FBI field offices, the report found that 17 of them, or 22 percent, contained one or more possible violations not identified by the field office or reported to FBI headquarters as required.

The Main Page

The rest is about the "TELEPHONE RECORDS"

The Source

Well, that's one way of getting a "reliable confession."

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Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 David Hicks Becomes First Guantanamo Prisoner to Plead Guilty The Australian citizen David Hicks has become the first Guantanamo prisoner to plead guilty under the Military Commissions Act passed last year. Hicks entered the guilty plea Monday as part of a deal with military prosecutors. Hicks has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the past five years. We speak with Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. [rush transcript included] The U.S. government had originally accused Hicks of conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to engage in acts of terrorism, attempted murder and aiding the enemy but only ended up charging him with a single crime -- providing material support for terrorism. Pentagon officials say Hicks will likely serve his sentence in Australia. Hicks has said he was sodomized, beaten, and subjected to forced injections while in U.S. custody. The military denies the allegations. Hicks appeared in the courtroom wearing khaki prison fatigues and with hair down to his chest - grown, his lawyer said, to pull over his eyes at night to keep out the light and allow him to get to sleep. Before the hearing, Hicks was allowed a two-hour reunion with his father and sister. As the proceedings got under way, Hicks was formally charged and initially deferred entering a plea. But later on his lawyers told the judge he was pleading guilty. Air Force colonel Moe Davis, chief prosecutor for the tribunals. Hicks' guilty plea came after a military judge barred two of Hicks' lawyers from the court proceedings. One of the attorneys had refused to sign a document pledging to follow court rules that hadn't been defined. Legal observers are criticizing the decision. Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights which has represented dozens of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He is author of the book, "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know." He joins me now in the firehouse studio. AMY GOODMAN: David Hicks guilty plea came after a military judge barred two of hicks' lawyers from the court proceeding. One of the attorney�s had refused to sign a document pledging to follow court rules that hadn�t been defined. Legal observers are criticizing the decision. Michael Ratner is President of the Center for Constitutional Rights which has represented dozens of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He is also co-author of the book Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. He joins us now in the firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now! Michael. MICHAEL RATNER: Good morning Amy. AMY GOODMAN: So David Hicks was your first client at Guantanamo Bay? MICHAEL RATNER: The first person represented by any organization was David Hicks, who was represented by me and the Center for Constitutional Rights. He went to Guantanamo January 11, 2002. We read his name in the paper, we called his attorneys in Australia. And we began what was called�we began a petition on his behalf in court to try and get him what we lawyers call the right of Habeas Corpus, to go into court and say to the government, �why are you holding me?� Now some five years later we actually never got him that right in the end. You know twice we won in the Supreme Court, twice the government--the administration went to Congress and took away that right and then Hicks unlike most the others at Guantanamo; there�s still 385 other people there. Hicks and two others have now been charged before this military commission which was established under the Military Commission Act after it had been held unconstitutional in a prior case. So we no longer represent Hicks in front of the commission. We did represent him for purposes of trying to get him for fundamental rights early on in Guantanamo. AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what happened in this case? Yes, he pled guilty, but who his attorneys were, how two got thrown out? MICHAEL RATNER: It's a bit complex in a way. I mean Hicks had been charged early, before the Military Commission, that Military Commission was held unconstitutional, illegal really in the supreme court. Congress then wrote some new rules which many of us are still very critical of which allow evidence from coercion and other-other kinds of illegal evidence in our view would be used for the Commission. So then he goes down, he's in Guantanamo and they put him up for this new Military Commissions trial. He has one military lawyer, Colonel�I mean Captain Michael Mori who was this military lawyer, and had two civilian lawyers, on of them being Josh Dratel. They go down yesterday, or they're there yesterday to represent him. Josh Dratel and the other civilian lawyer eventually aren't allowed to represent Hicks. Josh Dratell said that he was asked to sign a piece of paper adhering to rules and the rules in his view didn�t allow him to have private meetings with his attorney -- with his client. So he then refuses to sign the paper. Then, of course David Hicks is still then represented by Captain Michael Mori and eventually, as you said pleads guilty to this one count, and which people should understand is very different than what he was originally charged with, which included attempted murder and you know all these kinds of things. AMY GOODMAN: Why is that significant, being ultimately only charged with this one count? MICHAEL RATNER: Well, you know, you could argue that initially in these cases the government originally overcharged him tremendously. That they included things like conspiracy to murder, you know fighting against the Americans, all these types of things. In the end, he pleaded guilty to, or he pled to a count saying he materially aided a terrorist organization. I think that we have to look at what happened in the context of Guantanamo. I mean Guantanamo is in the Center�s view and in many people�s view around the world, is a moral and legal and political outrage. You have a man there for five years and the first thing that�s said after he takes this guilty plea is that he's going to be able to serve his sentence in Australia. So you have to say to yourself, how do you get out of Guantanamo? You get out either becuase your country fights hard to get you out, which in this case Australia did not put up a very big battle to get David Hicks out. If you look at how the English citizens got treated, they're back in England. If you look at how the French got treated, they're back in France. So everybody--a number of people were critical of the Howard government in Australia for not fighting to get him back. So Hicks is sitting there saying, well how do I get back? I mean that�s my imagination, I�m imagining that�s what the lawyers have essentially said. This is a way -- this sentence will be served in Australia is what it appears, and therefore he will get back to Australia. Otherwise he's sitting there, conceivable could get a long sentence, whatever he gets and have to serve it in Guantanamo. So this is a way back to Australia and it�s a way out of Guantanamo which as far as I can see right now, most people still don't have. AMY GOODMAN: This is from Reuters, his lawyer saying that they couldn't discuss what prompted David Hicks his decision until after the agreement is final; his decision to plead guilty. But David Mcleod had said on Sunday, Hicks was convinced he could not get a fair trial and expected to be convicted even if he defended the charges. MICHAEL RATNER: Mcleod and others have basically said that this was not going to be a fair process, and that he was going to be convicted. So you are looking at one of the factors here, may well have been as � as going back to Australia. That's something he�s wanted for a long time according to his father. AMY GOODMAN: What about these charges of David Hicks, that he was sodomized, beaten and subjected to forced injections while in US custody? MICHAEL RATNER: Well, the lawyers filed a series of affidavits, particularly in his attempt to get British citizenship. His mother was apparently born in England. And as part of that they filed papers that said that he had been abused, not at Guantanamo, interestingly enough, but after he was picked up in Afghanistan, he was taken to Kandahar, he was taken onto a ship, he was taken off a ship and on to land and the statements in these affidavits are that he was beaten, he was sodomized, etc. And of course apparently the investigation of those abuse allegations according to the US government said that they weren't proven. It seems, considering the context of what happened to a lot of our other clients at the center that there were a lot of credibility in my view to that kind of charge for what happened to people picked up in Afghanistan and in other places. AMY GOODMAN: And the fact Michael Ratner, that his attorneys said that he had grown his hair down to his chest to pull over his eyes at night to keep out the light and allow him to sleep? MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it tells us something about the conditions at Guantanamo, it tells us about having the light on 24 hours, it tells us about really being kept in an offshore penal colony with what the government asserts are no rights. AMY GOODMAN: His father, Terry Hicks, who went down there with his stepsister and had a two-hour reunion with David, said that David has not been able to exercise because he's abused by other prisoners. He said the detainees yell out abuse at him, they say he�s being paid by the CIA, and all this sorta business to spy on them, and that sorta thing. So he's under quite a bit of stress, he won't go out because he's been abused verbally by the rest of the detainees? MICHAEL RATNER: Right, and his father I think goes on to say that David was severely depressed. So you look at this situation and you have, and again, I�m not his lawyer at this point, I don�t know why he actually entered the plea. But if you look at his situation, his father says he's severly depressed or he�s being abused, where he's in conditions where, that are Guantanamo -- are essentially abusive conditions, where if he's convicted he�s going to be spending a long time in Guantanamo. It just seems to drive a situation where you want to get yourself out of Guantanamo really any way you can. AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Michael Ratner, President for The Center for Constitutional Rights. Michael, the Military Tribunals Act that has allowed this to go forward, where does it go from here? Who's the next to be tried and what about this prisoner who was just brought in? Supposedly from one of the secret CIA prisons overseas. MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it's the Military Commission Act and of course its set up a structure for trying people at Guantanamo. Many human rights people, as well as the Center considers many parts of that structure not to be legal, it allows evidence from torture and coercion, it allows hearsay evidence, a number of the charges aren't charges under military law. So there are challenges going on to that Military Commission Act. And challenges, I think there's one right now by Hamdan who was one of the accused, I think of being a driver for Bin Laden. His case is the one that went to the Supreme Court which said that they were illegal in the prior incarnation and the question is whether they say that again after congress has set up the rules. So these are still going to be challenged. But one thing I should say is that the Military Commissions is only a small part of what's going on at Guantanamo. Today there's 385 people at Guantanamo. Fourteen are the so-called high-valued detainees and then there's a 15th person who apparently was brought there. But 385 people, and most of them will never have a chance, if you want to call it that, to ever be tried because the government asserts they can be held indefinitely, forever as enemy combatants without any right to Habeas Corpus. So the governement is focusing us all on Military Commissions, etc., but while we're all sitting here, there's some 385 people or more, being held at Guantanamo without even the right to have an attorney and go to court. So -- in the way that David did. So, we're talking about a situation that in my view is still completely outside of any kind of law. AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates saying Guantanamo should be closed, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telling reporters, she agrees with bush's desire to shut down Guantanamo? MICHAEL RATNER: You know, Bush said this before 2004, before he went to court in the Supreme Court case and won, he said, well, it's in the courts now, we'll wait and see what the Supreme Court says and I want to close Guantanamo. That's almost 2 1/2 years ago, three years ago close. So the question is, is he just saying these words, which is what it sounds like to me, for public consumption, to say yeah I want to close it and then is he coupling it with people like our Attorney General who then says, well the reason that Guantanamo is still open and people are still there is because of what the attorneys are doing. So these guys are saying this in a way for public consumption, but they obviously don�t mean it. If Bush wanted to close Guantanamo, he could close it tomorrow. AMY GOODMAN: How? MICHAEL RATNER: He could simply bring the people into the United States or he could bring them in and give people their fundamental right to go to court on a writ of Habeas Corpus. If he did that, if people got that right to challenge their detention at court, which is what Habeas Corpus is, if they got that right I can guarantee you that the majority of people would not be in Guantanamo, would not be in prison. But there there's no reason, you could run a prison in the United States and give people their constitutional and legal rights . AMY GOODMAN: And Habeas Corpus being stripped by the Military Commission Act, what does that mean and do you see that changing? MICHAEL RATNER: You know when the Center first started thes cases, the key to us was the right to go into court and challenge your detention, it�s a right that we think every human being should have. It's called the right of Habeas Corpus or the writ of habeas corpus. It goes back to 1215. Twice in the Supreme Court has said Guantanamo detainees and others have that right. Twice Bush has gone to Congress and stripped-stripped that right out of the statute books and now we're really going to have to go to the Supreme Court again. In fact we're waiting this week to see whether the Supreme Court is willing to take that case. Possibly we'll hear by Friday whether they�ll take that case and we can have a hearing again before the end of the year in the Supreme Court. I'm hopeful that the court will restore that right of habeas corpus to people. It's the right, it's the distinction between what makes essentially a tyranny vs. a democracy because it tells you whether the government can pick you up and just toss you in a prison. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, Alberto Gonzalez, the firing of the US attorneys and whether he should be resign or be fired? MICHAEL RATNER: I�ve felt, and I�ve said many times that Gonzalez has his hands deep in the blood of the torture conspiracy and program in this country and he does. He's the one that said we shouldn't have Geneva Conventions apply to people. He's one that apparently approved various interrogation techniques. He�s the one that said the president essentially, or approved memos that said you could torture in the name of national security. This is the man that's Attorney General. Yes, they're getting him for the attorney scandal, the prosecutor scandal. But this guy is deeply involved in much deeper violations of fundamental rights in this country. He should not just be resigning. We have tried to actually get him criminally investigated in Germany, in the Rumsfeld case. That's what should be happening to somebody like him. He should be held accountable for his deep role in the torture program in the United States. AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the Center for Constitutional Rights lawsuit against Rumsfeld, the complaint you brought in Germany has just added two more detainees part of the lawsuits? MICHAEL RATNER: Well no the -- the two additional detainees, I don�t think are part of our Rumsfeld case right now. Those are people we are now suing civilly on behalf of -- against Rumsfeld and others in the United States for damages for what happened to them at Guantanamo. So there's these civil suits in the u.s. And there's an attempted criminal investigation we are trying to do against Rumsfeld, Gonzalez and the other people that were authors of the torture program in the United States. AMY GOODMAN: Among them General Jeffrey Miller who was the Commander at Guantanamo? MICHAEL RATNER: I mean, Jeffrey Miller is essentially the link. He's the one who after the Guantanamo interrogation techniques were authorized by Rumsfeld, he implemented them at Guantanamo and then �they somehow migrated into Abu Ghraib and the prisons in Iraq�. And of course how did they migrate? They migrated in the person of General Jeffrey Miller who was sent to Iraq to actually �Gitmo-ize� the interrogation, prison facilities in Iraq . And that�s what led to Abu Ghraib. It's a line you can follow from one to two to three to four, it's just that the American people haven't been informed that that line goes from the very top chain of command from Afghanistan, to Guantanamo, to Iraq. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Ratner, thanks so much for joining us, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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