Max Forte's List: National Security State

• Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge claims in a new book that he was pressured by other members of President George W. Bush's Cabinet to raise the nation's terror alert level just before the 2004 presidential election.
• the urgings of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft,
• Ridge said the episode convinced him to follow through with his plans to leave the administration; he resigned on Nov. 30, 2004.

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• threats against family members, including hinting that an al-Qaida suspect's mother would be raped in front of him
• took a power drill and a handgun into the interrogation room, and also staged a mock execution in a cell next door.
• The CIA document, which the agency fought for years to prevent publication of
• "we could get your mother in here. We can bring your family in here".
• the "interrogation technique involves sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee".
• mock execution described as "transparently a ruse and no benefit was derived from it".
• The document quotes a number of officers expressing concern of action against them in the future. One said: "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this... [but] it has to be done."

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• operatives threatened to kill the children of a key September 11 suspect,
• told another his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him.
• the abuse of terror suspects between 2002 and 2004 at secret  CIA “black site” prisons.
• Mr  Obama has repeatedly said that he wants to look forward
• According to the report, written five years ago by the CIA’s former inspector  general John Helgerson, one CIA interrogator told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,  the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks: “We’re going to  kill your children” if there was another terror strike on US soil.
• As Mr Holder reopens investigations into the actions of CIA interrogators,  human rights groups and many Democrats are urging him also to focus on the  Bush-era officials who they claim authorised the abusive methods.
• ACLU.“This was not the result of rogue interrogators but a  programme thought through at the highest levels of the Bush Administration.  The report provides further evidence that torture was authorized by legal  memos of the Justice Department and authorised by senior Bush administration  officials.”
• at least one detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill

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• The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terror suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation, but will monitor their treatment to ensure they are not tortured, administration officials said on Monday.
• adding that no detainees will be sent to countries that are known to conduct abusive interrogations.
• promises of humane treatment, called “diplomatic assurances,” were no protection against abuse.
• “It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture,” said Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush.
• She cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, which offered assurances against torture but beat Mr. Arar with electrical cable anyway.
• A Canadian consular official visited Mr. Arar several times, but the prisoner was too frightened to tell him about the torture, according to a Canadian investigation of the case.
• In addition, the Obama administration is setting up a new administrative interrogation unit, to be housed within the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
• creation of the unit does not mean the C.I.A. is out of the interrogation business. The new unit will include “all these different elements under one group,” he said at the briefing, and would work out of F.B.I. headquarters in Washington.
• High Value Interrogation Group

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• The Conservatives will appeal a federal court ruling that orders the government to repatriate Canadian-born terrorism suspect Omar Khadr from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, the CBC is reporting.
• According to the report, the government has filed a stay pending appeal of a Federal Court of Appeal ruling earlier this month forcing the government to seek Khadr's return, meaning the Supreme Court of Canada will now decide whether to review the case.
• the watchdog for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service concluded the spy agency failed to consider human-rights concerns when its officials interrogated Khadr in Guantanamo Bay in 2003.

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• In a reversal of Pentagon policy, the military for the first time is notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at a camp in Iraq and another in Afghanistan run by United States Special Operations forces, according to three military officials.
• Unlike the secret prisons run by the C.I.A. that President Obama ordered closed in January, the military continues to operate the Special Operations camps, which it calls temporary screening sites, in Balad, Iraq, and Bagram, Afghanistan.
• The Red Cross is allowed access to almost all American military prisons and battlefield detention sites in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Special Operations camps have been excluded.
• The New York Times reported in 2006 that some soldiers at the temporary detention site in Iraq, then located at Baghdad International Airport and called Camp Nama, beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces, and used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball.

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• With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes   to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts   after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency's   arsenal.
• While former Vice President Dick Cheney said the interrogation program was   run by "highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under   the law," the newly released documents suggest otherwise, at least in the   early months.
• The interrogators slapped prisoners, held a handgun to one's head, used power   drills to make threats and left men shackled and naked in frigid rooms until   they cooperated.
• "How cold is cold?" one officer said in the 2004 CIA inspector general's   report released Monday. "How cold is life threatening?"
•  "One officer expressed concern that, one day, agency officers will wind   up on some 'wanted list' to appear before the World Court for war crimes,"   the inspector general wrote.
• Another added, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing   this ... (but) it has to be done."
• And the method of waterboarding used by the CIA did not always resemble the   clinical, closely supervised process that the Justice Department approved. One   official, explaining why interrogators were pouring excessive amounts of water   over a detainee's cloth-covered mouth and nose, said, "It is for real."

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• A British artist made these impressive propaganda posters during the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation.
• The picture to the left was made for Gulbedeen Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami, which then had a London office
• raised no horrified eyebrows in the UK
• Today, however, Hekmatyar is fighting the NATO occupation of his country, and were a British artist to dare paint an Afghan mujahid, with Qur’an in one hand and kalashnikov in the other, standing on an American flag, underneath a calligraphed ‘Allahu Akbar’, he would quite probably be charged under anti-terror legislation.

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• Conservative MP Jason Kenney is coming under scrutiny for his appearance at a rally organized by supporters of a banned terrorist organization.
• A photograph of Kenney at an April rally, organized by the Committee in Defense of Human Rights in Iran, appears on the website of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the Toronto Star reported Thursday.
• The council is the political wing of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), which is one of the names used by the Mujaheedin-e-Khalq.
• The Mujaheedin-e-Khalq is an armed Iranian rebel group formally designated as a terror group by the governments of Canada, the United States and the European Union.
• The Canadian government put the group on its official terror list in May 2005.
• But Human Rights Watch says the group is guilty of serious human rights abuses, including "abuses ranging from detention and persecution of ordinary members wishing to leave the organization, to lengthy solitary confinements, severe beatings and torture of dissident members.''
• "To achieve this Islamic ideology, the use of physical force, armed struggle or jihad is necessary," the statement reads, adding that the organization has been linked to Saddam Hussein, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and has been suspected of collusion in Afghanistan's toppled Taliban regime.
• At a news conference Tuesday, Kenney blasted a trip of opposition MPs who visited Lebanon and suggested Canada should be open to negotiating with Hezbollah.

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• Sleep deprivation, "insult slaps," water dousing and "walling," or slamming a detainee's head against a wall, were techniques used by CIA interrogators to break high-value detainees, according to an agency memo.
• The memo, sent to the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel on December 30, 2004, was released on Monday under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Amnesty International USA and the American Civil Liberties Union.
• U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday named a special prosecutor to probe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisoner abuse cases.

  • Note that the U.S. government, which had this information all along, only now feels pressed into action since human rights groups got their hands on the memo. Why not before? Is the law broken only when the public finds out about it?
  Add Sticky Note
• "The goal of interrogation is to create a state of learned helplessness and dependence conducive to the collection of intelligence," the memo, outlining procedures for handling captured al Qaeda leaders sent to CIA "black site" prisons, said.
• The document, first reported by The Washington Post, said prior to an interrogation session, detainees may be stripped and held in a "vertical shackling position" to begin sleep deprivation.
• Once the interrogation begins, the "insult slap" on the face may be used when the interrogator needs to immediately correct the detainee, the memo said.
• The document said "walling" was one of the most effective interrogation techniques for wearing down detainees physically.
• "An HVD (high-value detainee) may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point or 20 to 30 times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question," the document said.
• Interrogations at CIA prisons occurred in special cells outfitted on one side with a plywood wall to prevent severe head injuries, The Washington Post reported.
• The paper said agency spokesman George Little noted that the interrogation program operated under guidelines approved by top legal officials of the Bush administration.

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• The Pentagon is looking into reports that the military’s public affairs apparatus in Afghanistan has been rating reporters according to their degree of sympathy to U.S. war aims
• The military hired U.S. PR firm The Rendon Group to handle the assessments, Stars & Stripes revealed. Reporters who request embeds have their previous work rated as “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” towards U.S. strategy
• “Bringing democracy to Afghanistan is a massive challenge,” the International Federation of Journalists said. “But it will not be made easier by trying to manipulate media or encouraging journalists to show bias in favor of the military.”
• “If the military pre-approves only certain journalists to report a specific point-of-view or agenda, our decisions cannot be made independently or freely and that threatens our democracy,” The American Federation of Radio & Television Artists said.

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• A week ago, Stars & Stripes broke the story that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had hired The Rendon Group, a D.C.-based media consulting firm, to write assessments of war reporters. The profiles rated journalists as “positive,” “negative” or “neutral” towards U.S. war aims, and were apparently used to deny reporters access to military units, according to follow-on reports by Stars & Stripes.
• On Sunday, the military canceled Rendon’s contract. “As the senior U.S. communicator in Afghanistan, it was clear that the issue of Rendon’s support to U.S. forces in Afghanistan had become a distraction from our main mission,” Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail to Stars & Stripes.

• The Obama administration will largely preserve Bush-era procedures allowing the government to search -- without suspicion of wrongdoing -- the contents of a traveler's laptop computer, cellphone or other electronic device, although officials said new policies would expand oversight of such inspections.
• travelers' laptops, iPods, cameras and other digital devices can be searched and seized when they cross a U.S. border
• "It's a disappointing ratification of the suspicionless search policy put in place by the Bush administration," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union. "It provides a lot of procedural safeguards, but it doesn't deal with the fundamental problem, which is that under the policy, government officials are free to search people's laptops and cellphones for any reason whatsoever."
• Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano yesterday framed the new policy as an enhancement of oversight. "Keeping Americans safe in an increasingly digital world depends on our ability to lawfully screen materials entering the United States," she said in a statement. "The new directives announced today strike the balance between respecting the civil liberties and privacy of all travelers while ensuring DHS can take the lawful actions necessary to secure our borders."
• "Under the policy begun by Bush and now continued by Obama, the government can open your laptop and read your medical records, financial records, e-mails, work product and personal correspondence -- all without any suspicion of illegal activity," said Elizabeth Goitein, who leads the liberty and national security project at the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice.
• Between October 2008 and Aug. 11, more than 221 million travelers passed through CBP checkpoints. About 1,000 laptop searches were performed, only 46 in-depth, the DHS said.

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• Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States.
• I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power - the disciplining of the body as an object of control - on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other.
• Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation
• As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks."
• A right-wing spin machine, influenced by haters like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, endlessly spews out a toxic rhetoric in which: all Muslims are defined as jihadists; the homeless are not victims of misfortune but lazy; blacks are not terrorized by a racist criminal justice system, but the main architects of a culture of criminality; the epidemic of obesity has nothing to do with corporations, big agriculture and advertisers selling junk food, but rather the result of "big" government giving people food stamps; the public sphere is largely for white people, which is being threatened by immigrants and people of color, and so it goes.
• Nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh unapologetically states that James Early Ray, the confessed killer of Martin Luther King Jr., should be given a posthumous Medal of Honor,
• talk radio host Michael Savage, states on his show, "You know, when I see a woman walking around with a burqa, I see a Nazi. That's what I see - how do you like that? - a hateful Nazi who would like to cut your throat and kill your children."
• This could be dismissed as loony right-wing political theater if it were not for the low levels of civic literacy displayed by so many Americans who choose to believe and invest in this type of hate talk.
• Underlying the culture of cruelty that reached its apogee during the Bush administration, was the legalization of state violence, such that human suffering was now sanctioned by the law, which no longer served as a summons to justice.
• If Hollywood has made gratuitous violence the main staple of its endless parade of blockbuster films, television has tapped into the culture of cruelty in a way that was unimaginable before the attack on the US on September 11. Prime-time television before the attacks had "fewer than four acts of torture" per year, but "now there are more than a hundred."
• Moreover, the people who torture are no longer the villains, but the heroes of prime-time television.
• most celebrated is, of course, Jack Bauer, the tragic-ethical hero of the wildly popular Fox TV thriller "24." Not only is torture the main thread of the plot, often presented "with gusto and no moral compunction," [11] but Bauer is portrayed as a patriot, rather than a depraved monster, who tortures in order to protect American lives and national security. Torture, in this scenario, takes society's ultimate betrayal of human dignity and legitimates the pain and fear it produces as normal, all the while making a "moral sadist" a television celebrity.
• The pornographic glorification of gratuitous, sadistic violence is also on full display in the popular HBO television series "Dexter," which portrays a serial killer as a sympathetic, even lovable, character.
• Morality is irrelevant.... It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood."
•  The celebration of hyper-violence, moral sadism and torture travels easily from fiction to real life with the emergence in the past few years of a proliferation of "bum fight" videos on the Internet, "shot by young men and boys who are seen beating the homeless or who pay transients a few dollars to fight each other."
• The National Coalition for the Homeless claims that "On YouTube in July 2009, people have posted 85,900 videos with 'bum' in the title [and] 5,690 videos can be found with the title 'bum fight,' representing ... an increase of 1,460 videos since April 2008."
• For instance, a recent issue of Maxim, a popular men's magazine, included "a blurb titled 'Hunt the Homeless' [focusing on] a coming 'hobo convention' in Iowa and says 'Kill one for fun. We're 87 percent sure it's legal.'"
• these young "thrill offenders" now search out the homeless and "punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society."
• Hollywood films such as the "Saw" series offer up a form of torture porn in which the spectacle of the violence enhances not merely its attraction, but offers young viewers a space where questions of ethics and responsibility are gleefully suspended, enabling them to evade their complicity in a culture of cruelty.

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• Medical ethics group says physicians monitored 'enhanced interrogation techniques' and studied their effectiveness
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• Doctors and psychologists the CIA employed to monitor its "enhanced interrogation" of terror suspects came close to, and may even have committed, unlawful human experimentation, a medical ethics watchdog has alleged.
• Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not-for-profit group that has investigated the role of medical personnel in alleged incidents of torture at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and other US detention sites, accuses doctors of being far more involved than hitherto understood.
• PHR says health professionals participated at every stage in the development, implementation and legal justification of what it calls the CIA's secret "torture programme".
• "The participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values," it said.
• doctors actively monitored the CIA's interrogation techniques with a view to determining their effectiveness, using detainees as human subjects without their consent. The report concludes that such data gathering was "a practice that approaches unlawful experimentation".
• Human experimentation without consent has been prohibited in any setting since 1947, when the Nuremberg Code, which resulted from the prosecution of Nazi doctors, set down 10 sacrosanct principles. The code states that voluntary consent of subjects is essential and that all unnecessary physical and mental suffering should be avoided.
• The Geneva conventions also ban medical experiments on prisoners and prisoners of war, which they describe as "grave breaches".
• In April, a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found that medical staff employed by the CIA had been present during waterboarding, and had even used what appeared to be a pulse oxymeter, placed on the prisoner's finger to monitor his oxygen saturation during the procedure
• Red Cross condemned such activities as a "gross breach of medical ethics"

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• Jarret Brachman, the former research director at the Combating Terrorism Center of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
• "What's problematic for me is it really humanizes the guy," Brachman said. "I understand the value of these photos for family members, but at the same time this is the guy who planned 9-11."
• it has since "gone viral," with some users posting online statements of support for Mohammed.

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