The American Bear

› Afghanistan Arrests Colonel For Turning Over Prisoners to Zakaria Kandahari | Jim White

I just can’t stay away from the continually unfolding story of the death squad in the Nerkh District of Maidan Wardak Province in Afghanistan. Recall that in this post, I came to the conclusion that the death squad seems virtually certain to have been run by the CIA or CIA contractors, making denials of involvement coming from the military meaningless. The role of the shady character known as Zakaria Kandahari, and especially his sudden and complete disappearance once the situation spiraled out of control, seems especially to fit that of someone under the control of a covert CIA paramilitary group that recruits and runs militia groups.

Today, Reuters is out with a report that gives this story yet another huge development. It appears that in the course of its investigations into the disappearance, torture and murders relating to a group of 18 missing men (with the New York Times telling us Saturday that up to 14 of those bodies have now been recovered), Afghanistan has now arrested a colonel in the Afghan army for turning prisoners over to [Kandahari and] the “rogue” militia. [continue]

Related:
Afghans protest against US forces after discovery of mutilated bodies

› New light shed on US government's extraordinary rendition programme | guardian.co.uk

A groundbreaking research project has mapped the US government’s global kidnap and secret detention programme, shedding unprecedented light on one of the most controversial secret operations of recent years.

The interactive online project – by two British universities and a legal charity – has uncovered new details of the way in which the so-called extraordinary rendition programme operated for years in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to avoid detection in the face of growing public concern.

The Rendition Project website is intended to serve as a research tool that not only collates all the publicly available data about the programme, but can continue to be updated as further information comes to light.

Data already collated shows the full extent of the UK’s logistical support for the programme: aircraft associated with rendition operations landed at British airports more than 1,600 times.

Although no detainees are known to have been aboard the aircraft while they were landing in the UK, the CIA was able to refuel during operations that involved some of the most notorious renditions of the post-September 11 years, including one in which two men were kidnapped in Sweden and flown to Egypt, where they suffered years of torture, and others that involved detainees being flown to and from a secret prison in Romania.

The database also tracks rendition flights into and out of Diego Garcia, in the Chagos Islands, and suggests that flight crews enjoyed rest-and-recreation stopovers on the Turks and Caicos Islands. Both are British overseas territories.

The Rendition Project is the result of three years of work, funded by the UK taxpayer through the Economic and Social Research Council, by Ruth Blakeley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent, and Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer at Kingston University, working with Crofton Black, an investigator with the legal charity Reprieve.

“By bringing together a vast collection of documents and data, the Rendition Project publishes the most detailed picture to date of the scale, operation and evolution of the global system of rendition and secret detention in the so-called war on terror,” said Blakeley.

Raphael said: “The database makes a major contribution to efforts to track CIA rendition flights, and provides the clearest picture so far of what was going on. It also serves as an important tool for investigators, journalists and lawyers to delve into in more detail.”

Black added: “The Rendition Project lays bare the inner workings of the logistics network underlying the US government’s secret prison programme. It’s the most accurate and comprehensive resource so far published.”

The data includes details on 11,006 flights by aeroplanes linked to the CIA’s rendition programme since 2002. Of those, 1,556 flights are classed as confirmed or suspected rendition flights, or flagged as “suspicious”, depending on the strength of the supporting evidence surrounding each.

› Revised Guantanamo force-feed policy exposed (2) | Jason Leopold

[…] The [Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)] contains a “General Algorithm for a Hunger Strike”, described in the document as “a simplified outline for the medical management of detainees on hunger strike”.

It notes that, after a prisoner is identified as a possible hunger striker, a medical officer performs a physical examination, and the behavioural healthcare service conducts a psychological evaluation. The prisoner is then “counselled” about the dangers associated with a hunger strike.

“If detainee continues to hunger strike and clinical criteria for the initiation of enteral feeding are met… the detainee may be admitted to the Detention Hospital or designated feeding block if medically stable. Authorisation is obtained via chain-of-command from JTF-GTMO Commander to begin enteral feeding.”

Before being placed into the restraint chair, medical personnel offer the prisoner one last chance to eat voluntarily. If the prisoner refuses, the “medical provider signs [the] medical restraint order” to force feed the prisoner, and encourages him to use the restroom before he is shackled.

A guard then “shackles detainee and a mask is placed over the detainee’s mouth to prevent spitting and biting”, states the chair restraint protocol. “Detainee is escorted to the chair restraint system and is appropriately restrained by the guard force.”

A 10 or 12 “French” size (3.3/4mm external diameter) feeding tube is then placed into the prisoner’s stomach through his nostril. He is given a topical anaesthetic, such as viscous lidocaine for his nostril “unless detainee refuses”. A sterile surgical lubricant is applied to the feeding tube.

Medics use a stethoscope and a test dose of 10ml of water to ensure the pipe has reached the detainee’s stomach.

The feeding tube is secured to the prisoner’s nose with tape “and the enteral nutrition and water that has been ordered is started, and flow rate is adjusted according to detainee’s condition and tolerance.”

The manual says a feeding can be “completed comfortably over 20 to 30 minutes”, a claim disputed by Guantanamo prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, who described in a New York Times op-ed the intense pain he experienced from being force-fed.

The administration of two powerful drugs, in addition to a wide range of over-the-counter medication, further undercuts the assertion that force-feeding can be completed comfortably in a half-hour or less. The two drugs at issue, according to the force-feeding policy, are Phenergan, which is used to prevent motion sickness, nausea, vomiting, pain - or as a sedative or sleep aid - and Reglan, which is used to treat heartburn caused by acid reflux. Long-term use of Reglan has been known to cause the irreversible neurological disorder, tardive dyskinesia. [read]

› Revised Guantanamo force-feed policy exposed | Jason Leopold

Hunger striking Guantanamo prisoners who are force-fed a liquid nutritional supplement undergo a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires them to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours, according to documentation obtained by Al Jazeera. The prisoners remain this way, with a 61cm - or longer - tube snaked through their nostril until a chest X-ray, or a test dose of water, confirms it has reached their stomach.

At the end of the feeding, the prisoner is removed from the restraint chair and placed into a “dry cell” with no running water. A guard then observes the detainee for 45-60 minutes “for any indications of vomiting or attempts to induce vomiting”. If the prisoner vomits he is returned to the restraint chair.

That’s just a partial description of the “chair restraint system clinical protocol” which medical personnel are instructed to follow when administering a nutritional supplement to prisoners who have been selected for force-feeding by Guantanamo Commander Rear Admiral John Smith.

The restraint system, published here for the first time, along with the feeding procedures policy, was contained in a newly revised Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for Guantanamo hunger strikers, obtained exclusively by Al Jazeera from United States Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which has oversight of the joint task force that operates the prison.

The 30-page manual contains the most detailed descriptions to date pertaining to the treatment of hunger strikers and prisoners who undergo force-feedings. The SOP replaced a previous SOP issued in 2003 - revised in 2005 - which was declassified several years ago by the Pentagon, albeit with redactions. The new, unredacted policy obtained by Al Jazeera went into effect March 5 - one month after Guantanamo prisoners launched their protest over the inspection of their Qurans.

The procedure appears to have been revised and implemented in order to deal with a mass hunger strike.

“Just as battlefield tactics must change throughout the course of a conflict, the medical responses to GTMO detainees who hunger strike has evolved with time,” says the SOP. “A mass hunger strike was successfully dealt with in [2005] by utilising procedures adopted from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the approach delineated in this SOP.

“However, the composition of the detainee population, camp infrastructure, and policies has all undergone significant change since the initial version of this SOP… Much of the original instruction has been retained in the form of enclosures. In the event of a mass hunger strike, these enclosures can be utilised as they have proven efficacy under mass hunger strike conditions.”

The SOP notes that there are a number of prisoners who have been hunger striking since 2005, who have “proven their determination”, and whose physical frailty have limited Guantanamo authorities’ “options for intervention”. The document goes on to say, “in the event of a mass hunger strike, isolating hunger striking patients from each other is vital to prevent them from achieving solidarity”.

On April 13, guards staged a predawn raid at the communal camp and isolated more than 100 prisoners into single cells in an attempt to bring an end to the protest.

Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer at the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, who reviewed the SOP document for Al Jazeera, said the revised guidelines were troubling because they prohibit doctors and nurses from acting independently and make clear that they are simply “adjuncts of the security apparatus”.

Indeed, the SOP says that in order to effectively manage hunger strikers, a “close partnership” must exist between the Joint Medical Staff and the Joint Detention Group security force. Rubenstein characterised such a relationship as “Orwellian”.

“It is a very frightening idea that the medical staff is an adjunct of the security force,” Rubenstein said. “The clinical judgment of a doctor or a nurse is basically trumped by this policy and protocol. Doctors are not acting with the kind of professional medical independence [they should]. It’s clear that, notwithstanding references to preservation of detainee health in the policy, the first interest is in ending the protests.”

Rubenstein pointed out the SOP does not provide any direction to medical personnel on how to deal with prisoners who may be suffering from a mental health condition.

Currently there are at least 100 prisoners who are on hunger strike, although some prisoners’ lawyers say that number is much higher.

[…] In a letter sent to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel last month, American Medical Association President Dr Jeremy Lazarus said the force-feeding procedure at Guantanamo “violates core ethical values of the medical profession”.

“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including life-sustaining interventions,” Lazarus wrote. “The AMA has long endorsed the World Medical Association Declaration of Tokyo, which is unequivocal on the point: ‘Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.’”

The United Nations has condemned force-feeding as both a form of torture and a breach of international law. [READ]

› With Bradbury’s Appendix M Opinion and 7th Circuit Vance Decision, the Government Can Torture Any of Us | emptywheel

A few years ago, two contractors, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, sued Donald Rumsfeld and others for the torture they were subjected to at Camp Cropper after whistleblowing about Iraqi and US corruption.

The torture was, in large part, the “separation” permitted in Appendix M. As part of their case implicated Rummy personally, they described how, immediately after Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act, Rummy invented Appendix M as a way to evade the law. At first, the 7th Circuit permitted their Bivens case to move forward. But then the circuit reviewed the decision en banc and dismissed the case. The two have appealed that decision; it is pending a cert decision at SCOTUS as we speak.

… [The] 7th Circuit opinion [in Vance and Ertel v. Rumsfeld] holds that Rummy specifically, and anyone who comes after him, is immune from suit for violating someone’s constitutional rights, up to and including illegal detention and torture. As Steve Vladeck and James Pfander said in an amicus brief on this case to SCOTUS,

The Seventh Circuit’s decision in this case contravenes nearly 300 years of established tradition, this Court’s well-settled precedents, and the United States’ international obligations under the CAT. Operating under the assumption that it was being asked to “create” a new cause of action, the en banc majority took the unprecedented step of conferring, in effect, absolute immunity from liability on U.S. officials who torture citizens abroad.

The opinion is bad enough. Now add in Bradbury’s still extant memo, which permits DOD to stick whatever torture techniques they want in Appendix M and have his sanction for it. The two together allow the government to continue to engage in torture with, as Vladeck puts it, absolute immunity, so long as it happens overseas.

Essential context: The Torture Memo Obama Never Rescinded by Jeff Kaye (I posted a blurb about this last night, but no one cared. You should.)

› WATCH: Condoleeza Rice Defends Torture Program and Confirms Bush's Role in It | American Civil Liberties Union

› UN calls Guantanamo force-feeding torture | Al Akhbar

Force-feeding hunger strikers is a breach of international law, the UN’s human rights office said Wednesday, as US authorities tried to stem a protest by inmates at the controversial Guantanamo Bay jail.

The statement came a day after US President Barack Obama said the military jail at Guantanamo Bay is damaging US interests and vowed a renewed push to close it, as around 100 prisoners take part in a hunger strike there.

A spreading hunger strike among inmates, who are protesting their indefinite detention without charges or trials, has put Guantanamo back in the headlines.

“If it’s perceived as torture or inhuman treatment – and it’s the case, it’s painful – then it is prohibited by international law,” Rupert Coville, spokesman for the UN high commissioner for human rights, told AFP.

Out of 166 inmates held at the remote US naval base in southeastern Cuba, at least 100 are now on hunger strike, according to the latest tally from the Pentagon. Of those, 21 detainees are being fed through nasal tubes.

The military has sent extra medical staff to cope with the hunger strike, which is entering its 12th week.

Coville explained that the UN bases its stance on that of the World Medical Association, a 102-nation body whose members include the United States, which is a watchdog for ethics in healthcare.

In 1991 the WMA said that forcible feeding is “never ethically acceptable”.

“Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied with threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the force feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting,” it said. [++]

› Even Bipartisan Conventional Wisdom Report Says It Was Torture | Marcy Wheeler

The Constitution Project has released a major report on the government’s torture program. You can download the report here.

The report is important and comprehensive, but not without flaws. It took me a matter of minutes to find a number of errors, repetition of dangerous misinformation, and incomplete reporting. While I may lay out some of these problems at more length after the report has had its big publicity splash, suffice it to say the report tends to preference newspaper reporting over actual primary sources, and at times it appears completely unaware of what primary sources say.*

As such, the report represents a cautious, bipartisan, institutionalist view. Which is why its conclusion is so valuable. Because even this cautious, bipartisan, institutionalist report concludes the following (among other findings):

Finding #1

U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.

Finding #2

The nation’s most senior officials, through some of their actions and failures to act in the months and years immediately following the September 11 attacks, bear ultimate responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal and improper interrogation techniques used by some U.S. personnel on detainees in several theaters. Responsibility also falls on other government officials and certain military leaders.

Finding #3

There is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful or reliable.

Finding #16

For detainee hunger strikers, DOD operating procedures called for practices and actions by medical professionals that were contrary to established medical and professional ethical standards, including improper coercive involuntary feedings early in the course of hunger strikes that, when resisted, were accomplished by physically forced nasogastric tube feedings of detainees who were completely restrained.

Finding #19

The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security.

Finding #21

The Convention Against Torture requires each state party to “[c]riminalize all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture, or complicity or participation in torture,” and “proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” The United States cannot be said to have complied with this requirement.

In short: it was torture, it was illegal, it was not valuable, and it still needs to be prosecuted. (And, among other findings implicating it directly, the Obama Administration needs to stop force feeding Gitmo detainees.)

And all that’s ignoring some of the more damning evidence out there.

Let’s see whether bipartisan convention wisdom serves its purported purpose, effecting change in cautious, institutionalist DC.

*I am admittedly biased on this front. I was within a day of being contracted to collect documents for this effort, but someone involved in the process deemed me — at a time when I was already loudly criticizing the Obama Administration for things they’ve done — too partisan for the project. Some of the documents I had already identified at that time are utterly absent from this report; in their place the report claims ignorance.

› Anonymous murder from a safe distance | William Pfaff

The vast majority of America’s Muslim enemies throughout the Middle East, Africa and Southern Asia are fighting because the United States is there. It is not the other way around. Osama bin Laden conceived the 9/11 attacks because U.S. military forces were occupying his country, and this in his mind was an affront to his religion. The best way, and indeed the only way, to call off this so-called titanic collision of civilizations would be for the United States to call off the war with the Muslims. Only America can do this.

Anatol Lieven has a splendid and thoroughly knowledgeable article in the April 4 issue of the New York Review of Books, on the politics of disengaging from the war in Afghanistan. He concludes that it would be dishonorable and unreasonable for the United States “to walk away from all this with the declaration that it is ‘a matter for the Afghans themselves.’”

It would be, but after all that has passed, I cannot believe that the present government and Congress of the United States is capable of rescuing an honorable settlement to this war, especially as both Congress and the president seem to remain persuaded that the war’s formal end should nonetheless see a contingent of U.S. troops left behind after their scheduled departure at the end of 2014. The advocates of staying on say, “Look at Iraq today.” Indeed, but if the U.S. had left a force behind to “stabilize” Iraq, would this have succeeded? I feel certain that this would have merely prolonged the war’s horror.

The drones are evidence that the U.S. is incapable of disengaging from wars that have left ruin in their wake, poisoned Islamic relations with much of the Western world and, with the torture, humiliation and perpetual and illegal imprisonment of its enemies, in defiance of the norms of civilized behavior, destroyed America’s “honor” and the decent respect of mankind it once enjoyed.

Is Washington ready now to end its war in the Middle East — its war with the Islamic Middle East and South Asia? Of course not. Now we have the drones executing mass destruction on the family and tribal scale, in the worst American military tradition, established in Vietnam and Iraq, of anonymous murder from a safe distance, in this case from the White House itself. Who talks about legality, morality — or dishonor?

› Camp Nama: British personnel reveal horrors of secret US base in Baghdad | guardian.co.uk

British soldiers and airmen who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.

Personnel from two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established.

And many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons.

Codenamed Task Force 121, the joint US-UK special forces unit was at first deployed to detain individuals thought to have information about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Once it was realised that Saddam’s regime had long since abandoned its WMD programme, TF 121 was re-tasked with tracking down people who might know where the deposed dictator and his loyalists might be, and then with catching al-Qaida leaders who sprang up in the country after the regime collapsed.

Suspects were brought to the secret prison at Baghdad International airport, known as Camp Nama, for questioning by US military and civilian interrogators. But the methods used were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a US human rights body but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon.

A British serviceman who served at Nama recalled: “I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown on to the truck.”

On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a number of former members of TF 121 and its successor unit TF6-26 have come forward to describe the abuses they witnessed, and to state that they complained about the mistreatment of detainees. [continue]

› Chief of Iraq Torture Commandos: “The Americans knew about everything I did” | Jeff Kaye

[…] The Guardian report [on direct U.S. involvement in detainee torture and training of death squads in Iraq] should shake up US denial over torture and the role of top US officials, such as former CIA director Petraeus, Obama’s choice for the position after Panetta left to be Secretary of Defense. But US news media have largely ignored the story (though the New York Times noted it, relegating the story to a brief blog commentary), even though a report by Philip Bump at The Atlantic Wire called the Guardian story and video “staggering… blockbuster.” Yet Bump’s March 6 article only has (to date) about 3,600 views.

In a healthy democracy, there would immediate calls for Congressional investigations and hearings. But instead we have silence, as the US state rushes to maintain its right to project organized violence and terror wherever it wishes. [++]

› A Low, Dishonest Decade: New Details for the Iraq War Crime Mosaic | Chris Floyd

The truth-telling of the imprisoned Bradley Manning continues to bear rich fruit, even as he faces a lifetime in prison for acting on principle to save innocent lives and prevent his country from staining itself further with war crimes. This week, the Guardian released a special investigation into the hideous regime of torture that the United States imposed and empowered during its years-long rape of Iraq.The Guardian report draws on the trove of documents that Manning gave to Wikileaks (and the now diplomatically “sequestered” Julian Assange) to provide new details on the direct links of America’s highest officials — including the bipartisanly adored and now much mourned retired apparatchik David Petraeus — to the torture of tens of thousands of Iraqis.

In many ways, of course, it’s hardly a revelation that American forces were deeply involved in torture during the “extraordinary achievement” (B. Obama) in Iraq. Some cranks have been writing about it since the earliest days of the invasion — as in this piece, from August 2003:

Here’s a headline you don’t see every day: “War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals.”

Perhaps that’s not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime’s new campaign to put Saddam’s murderous security forces on America’s payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush’s Iraqi Raj are now doling out American tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo – perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that’s the word, seems to be that these bloodstained “insiders” will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained “insiders” responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad – and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

Naturally, the Iraqi people – even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin “Governing Council” – aren’t exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam’s goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they’re certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also re-opened Saddam’s most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis – men, women and children as young as 11 – seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their “disappeared” loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: “No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave.” Perhaps an Iraqi Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.

There were many, many more where that came from, from many sources, as the mosaic of horror built up, fragment by fragment. Unfortunately, America’s multifarious war crime in Iraq is news that stays news — because awareness of the depth of evil we wrought there has scarcely penetrated the American public consciousness. And of course, the Wikileaks documents give more form and substance to the piecemeal parceling of earlier truth fragments.

The Guardian pieces focus on the long lineage of the American way of torture, as represented by the figure of James Steele, a Special Forces offer who made his bones in the torture racket during the murderous American-backed, American-trained, American-funded “counterinsurgency” campaigns in Latin America during the 1980s. Steele has a little pal back in those days by the name of Davy Petraeus; later, the two worked cheek-by-jowl in Iraq to foment a hell on earth of sectarian violence and state terror.

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos, many of them among the toughest survivors of the old regime, including General Adnan Thabit …With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multi-million dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US tax payer. The exact amount they received is classified. With Petraeus’ almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele’s field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force.

One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban. Shia militia members from all over the country arrived in Baghdad “by the lorry-load” to join the new commandos. These men were eager to fight the Sunnis: many sought revenge for decades of Sunni-supported, brutal Saddam rule, and a chance to hit back at the violent insurgents and the indiscriminate terror of al-Qaida.

Petraeus and Steele would unleash this local force on the Sunni population as well as the insurgents and their supporters and anyone else who was unlucky enough to get in the way. It was classic counterinsurgency. It was also letting a lethal, sectarian genie out of the bottle. The consequences for Iraqi society would be catastrophic. At the height of the civil war two years later, 3,000 bodies a month were turning up on the streets of Iraq — many of them innocent civilians of sectarian war that ignited on both side.

Again, it’s been known for years — to anyone who wants to know — that the vicious sectarian civil war in Iraq was deliberately seeded and pushed by the Pentagon brass and their White House bosses. [For an in-depth look, see Ulster on the Eurphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War in Iraq.] As the Guardian investigation confirms, Petraeus was hip-deep in the process. [continue reading (it gets worse)]

› John Brennan and Obama's Transparency Test | Jane Mayer

“I must tell you, Senator, that reading this report from the committee raises questions about the information that I was given at the time, the impression I had at the time.” - John Brennan at the SSCI confirmation hearing

[…] For four years, a handful of staffers for the Senate Intelligence Committee have been performing the essence of oversight, as required by the law. As such, they have been proxies for the public. Working often seven days a week in catacomb-like basement offices, they have culled through some six million pages of nearly indecipherable internal intelligence documents in search of the truth. From this research, they have compiled a six-thousand-plus-page report [on the CIA’s so-called “Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation” (RDI) program] with something like thirty-five thousand footnotes. To make it more digestible, they have boiled this down to the three-hundred-page summary cited by Brennan. Yet it’s unclear if even in this abbreviated form, it will ever see the light of day.

After a majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee voted last December 13th to approve the report, with most but not all Republican committee members opposing it, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman, sent it to the C.I.A. for comment. Why the C.I.A. should be in the position of editing and potentially censoring an independent critique of its wrongdoing is unclear. But at any rate, Feinstein told the agency it had sixty days to get back to her with its response, which presumably included its suggested edits of material too sensitive to release. That deadline has now passed. Whether Brennan will revive the process is unknown. Brennan sidestepped any commitment to release the report during his confirmation hearings, and President Obama has so far not addressed the issue. Without support from the Administration, Feinstein is left out on a limb.

Brennan’s careful choice of words in describing what he learned from the report underscores the urgency of it reaching a broader audience. He specifically singled out the unreliability of “the information I was given at the time” as the reason for changing his mind now. Piecing that comment together with other public statements made by several of the senators who have also read the report, what emerges is the strong suggestion that the report did not just uncover cruel and unjustifiable interrogation and detention practices by the C.I.A. but, perhaps more significantly, it revealed a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials, who appear to have misled the White House, Justice Department, and Senate about the efficacy of their clandestine programs.

Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, released a statement saying the report found that “the C.I.A. repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress.”

Similarly, during the Brennan confirmation hearings, Colorado’s Senator Mark Udall stressed, “Inaccurate information on the management operation and effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s detention-interrogation program was provided by the C.I.A. to the White House, the D.O.J., Congress, and the public. Some of this information is regularly and publicly repeated today by former C.I.A. officials, either knowingly or unknowingly. And although we now know this information is incorrect, the accurate information remains classified, while inaccurate information has been declassified and regularly repeated.”

And the usually mild-mannered Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, slammed those running “this detention interrogation program” as “ignorant of the topic, [it was] executed by personnel without relevant experience, managed incompetently by senior officials who did not pay attention to details, and corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest.”

If so, the report is not just ancient history but a vital, cautionary lesson about relying blindly on the C.I.A. to assess the value of its own intelligence gathering—a lesson that Obama, and all presidents, would be foolish not to heed.

And yet there is no indication that Obama has read the report or even its summary. Nor is there any indication that his National Security Council staff has any interest in the study. Obama has said that when it comes to the issue of torture during the Bush years, he prefers to “turn the page.” He’s pointed out that his Administration has banned “enhanced interrogation techniques” by executive order, but another Administration can just as easily re-authorize them. Without access to this meticulous, tragic, and available history, what’s to stop the country from repeating it? Before turning the page, the President might do well to make sure he, and the rest of us, can read it.

Release the Report.

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