Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive interrogation techniques provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report. Credit: Fahim Siddiqi/IPS

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

Tuesday’s release by the Senate Intelligence Committee of its long-awaited report on the torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of detainees in the so-called “war on terror” does not go far enough, according to major U.S. human rights groups.

While welcoming the report’s release, the subject of months of intensive negotiations and sometimes furious negotiations between the Senate Committee’s majority and both the CIA and the administration of President Barack Obama, the groups said additional steps were needed to ensure that U.S. officials never again engage in the kind of torture detailed in the report."Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability." -- Donna McKay of PHR

“This should be the beginning of a process, not the end,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The report should shock President Obama and Congress into action, to make sure that torture and cruelty are never used again.”

He called, among other steps, for the appointment of a special prosecutor to hold the “architects and perpetrators” of what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) accountable and for Congress to assert its control over the CIA, “which in this report sounds more like a rogue paramilitary group than the intelligence gathering agency that it’s supposed to be.”

He was joined by London-based Amnesty International which noted that the declassified information provided in the report constituted “a reminder to the world of the utter failure of the USA to end the impunity enjoyed by those who authorised and used torture and other ill-treatment.

“This is a wake-up call to the USA; they must disclose the full truth about the human rights violations, hold perpetrators accountable and ensure justice for the victims,” said Amnesty’s Latin America director, Erika Guevara.

The Senate Committee’s report, actually a 524-page, partially-redacted summary of a still-classified 6,300-page report on the treatment of at least 119 terrorist suspects detained in secret locations overseas, accused the CIA not only of engaging in torture that was “brutal and far worse” than has previously been reported, but also of regularly misleading the White House and Congress both about what it was doing and the purported value of the intelligence it derived from those practices.

Water-boarding, for example, was used against detainees more often and in more of the CIA’s “black sites” than previously known; sleep deprivation was used for up to a week at a time against some suspects; others received “rectal feeding” or “hydration’; and still others were forced to stand on broken feet or legs.

In at least one case, a detainee was frozen to death; in the case of Abu Zubayda, an alleged “high-value” Al Qaeda detainee who was subject to dozens of water-boardings, the treatment was so brutal, several CIA officers asked to be transferred if it did not stop.

While the CIA officers and former Bush administration officials, notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, have long insisted that key information – including intelligence that eventually led to the killing of Osama bin Laden — was obtained from EITs, the report concluded that these techniques were ineffective.

Seven of 39 detainees who were subject to the most aggressive EITs provided no intelligence at all, while information obtained from the others preceded the harsh treatment, according to the report, which relied on the CIA’s own cables and reports.

In some cases, detainees subjected to EITs gave misinformation about “terrorist threats” which did not actually exist, the report found. Of the 119 known detainees subject to EITs, at least 26 should never have been held, it said.

Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, who fought hard for months to release the report over the CIA’s fierce objections, wrote in its Forward that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks, “she could understand the CIA’s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and CIA was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”

“Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security,” according to Feinstein.

For his part, CIA director John Brennan, a career CIA officer appointed by Obama whose role in the Bush administration’s detention programme remains cloudy, “acknowledge(d) that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.”

“The most serious problems occurred early on and stemmed from the fact that the Agency was unprepared and lacked the core competencies required to carry out an unprecedented, worldwide program of detaining and interrogating suspected al-Qa’ida and affiliated terrorists.”

But he also defended the EITs, insisting that “interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” A fact sheet released by the CIA claimed, as an example, that one detainee, after undergoing EITs, identified bin Laden’s courier, which subsequently led the CIA to the Al Qaeda chief’s location.

With several notable exceptions, Republicans also defended the CIA and the Bush administration’s orders to permit EITs. Indeed, the Intelligence Committee’s Republican members released a minority report that noted that the majority of staff had not interviewed any CIA officers directly involved in the programme.

“There is no reason whatsoever for this report to ever be published,” said the Committee’s ranking Republican, Sen. Saxby Chambliss. “This is purely a partisan tactic” which he said was designed to attack the Bush administration. Republicans also warned that the report’s release would endanger U.S. service personnel and citizens abroad by fuelling anti-American sentiment, especially in the Muslim world.

But Sen. John McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in the Vietnam war, defended the report, calling it “a thorough and thoughtful study of practices that I believe not only failed their purpose …but actually damaged our security interests, as well as our reputation as a force for good in the world.”

McCain has championed efforts to pass legislation outlawing torture, particularly because Obama’s 2009 executive orders prohibiting such practices could be reversed by a future president.

Passage of such a law – whose prospects appear virtually nil in light of Republican control of both houses of Congress for the next two years – is one of the demands, along with release of the full report, of most human-rights groups here.

“The Obama administration and Congress should work together to build a durable consensus against torture by pursuing legislation that demonstrates bipartisan unity and fidelity to our ideals,” said Elisa Massimino, director of Human Rights First.

Many groups, however, want Obama to go further by prosecuting those responsible for the EIT programme, a step that his administration made clear from the outset it was loathe to do.

“We renew our demand for accountability for those individuals responsible for the CIA torture programme,” said Baher Azmy, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has represented a number of detainees at Guantanamo, including Abu Zubaydah, in U.S. courts. “They should be prosecuted in U.S. courts; and, if our government continues to refuse to hold them accountable, they must be pursued internationally under principles of universal jurisdiction.”

“The report shows the repeated claims that harsh measures were needed to protect Americans are utter fiction,” according to Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth. “Unless this important truth-telling process leads to prosecution of the officials responsible, torture will remain a ‘policy option’ for future presidents.”

Noting that health professionals, including doctors and psychologists also played a role in the EITs, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also called for legal accountability. “For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director.

“The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability,” she said.

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at Lobelog.com. He can be contacted at ipsnoram@ips.org

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Member governments, security companies and civil society organisations on Thursday formally created the first international body to be tasked with the monitoring and oversight of private military contractors’ adherence to human rights standards and international law.

Advocates say the move is significant, formalising a sector whose actions – and for whom the potential for judicial repercussions – have often fallen into legal grey areas amidst the complexity of conflict and humanitarian emergency."Things get lost in the jurisdictional shuffle, particularly if any of their employees commit human rights violations.” -- Gabor Rona of HRF

Yet critics warn that the voluntary agreement lacks sufficient enforcement mechanisms while potentially legitimising the privatisation of armed conflict, a process that has been on a steep climb over the past two decades.

In late 2011, under the guidance of the Swiss government, founding states, security companies and NGOs formally agreed upon the substance of what is known as the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC). The code offers guidance for security contractors on their responsibilities under international law, on resolving complaints of rights violations and on ongoing monitoring of adherence to the ICoC principles.

Thursday saw the formal creation of the ICoC Association, at a summit in Geneva. The body will now be mandated with overseeing companies’ adherence to the ICoC guidelines.

“There have always been significant regulatory gaps when it comes to the activities of private military contractors,” Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, an advocacy group that served as a founding ICoC civil society group, told IPS.

“Sometimes, for instance, they are registered in one country but are recruiting in another country while operating in a third country. So things get lost in the jurisdictional shuffle, particularly if any of their employees commit human rights violations.”

Rona mentions the so-called Nisour Square massacre, when 17 Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad in 2007 by military contractors with the U.S. company then known as Blackwater Worldwide (now renamed Academi), allegedly in self-defence. Despite official U.S. findings that those killed were innocent, jurisdictional confusion has dogged the prosecutions, and Rona says there has been “huge uncertainty” over whether the accused will be held accountable.

That case is ongoing. Last week, a judge directed the U.S. government to speed up the proceedings, giving a deadline of Oct. 21 for the U.S. Justice Department to decide on what charges it will file.

Broad buy-in

The use of private security contractors, particularly by the United States and Europe but also by global extractives companies, has increased substantially in recent years.

In 1990, for instance, military personnel outnumbered private contractors by 60 to 1, according to a report released last year by Jordi Palou Loverdos, a Spanish lawyer. By 2003, when the war began in Iraq, that ratio had dropped to 10 to 1, and by the 2010 these figures were essentially equal.

“By 2007, it is estimated that around 190,000 contractors were working in Iraq on U.S.-funded contracts,” the report states. “Furthermore, this shift to the private sector has created a highly prosperous industry, with revenues’ estimations ranging from 20 to 100 billion dollars annually. The rapid growth … clearly reflects the new business face of war.”

As of the beginning of this month, more than 700 security companies headquartered in dozens of countries worldwide have signed on to the ICoC. Primary government support for the process has come from the United States and United Kingdom, as well as Switzerland and Australia.

Corporate interest has also come substantially from these countries. Some 208 British private security companies have signed on to the ICoC, for instance, as have 64 from the United States – the two leading suppliers of private contractors.

“There is broad buy-in – I’ve seen no indication that companies in certain countries are uninterested or boycotting this process,” Human Rights First’s Rona says. “But the true success of this initiative will be when states make participation and compliance a condition for government contracts – hopefully that will be the trend.”

Critically, both the United States and United Kingdom have already taken steps to tie membership in the ICoC Association to lucrative government security contracts.

“Aware of the influence we have and the role we play as a client and regulator in this sector, we have committed to using our contracting processes to support this process,” Betty King, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, stated Thursday.

“We believe [this initiative] can play an important role in improving the standards for, and conduct of, private security companies [PSCs] operating in complex environments. This is imperative because, while we do our best to ensure responsible conduct by those PSCs which we contract and supervise, misconduct by other PSCs can sour public perceptions and undermine the positive impact of all PSCs.”

Legitimising mercenaries

King noted that the U.S. government sees domestic legislation and regulation as the primary methods of overseeing the private security sector, but also stated that international efforts such as the ICoC play “an important role in raising industry standards”.

Indeed, membership in the ICoC Association remains strictly voluntary, with the potential negative impact on contracts being the only real enforcement mechanism – though many are hoping that will constitute significant motivation. At the same time, a similar draft framework on private military companies’ conduct is currently being negotiated before the U.N. Human Rights Council, and it appears that would be legally binding.

That discrepancy has led some rights groups to warn against the potential impact of the ICoC guidelines.

The ICoC “leaves these firms to police themselves, lacks teeth and fails to tackle the dangerous privatisation of war,” Ruth Tanner, campaigns and policy director for War on Want, a British charity, said Thursday.

“The code is a limited voluntary mechanism, does nothing to change the culture of impunity that [private military and security companies] enjoy, and represents a licence for abuse … The code will be used by companies to legitimise the industry and by government to sidestep proper controls.”

Tanner is calling instead for “national regulation, alongside legally binding international mechanisms” and expresses support for the discussions currently taking place before the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The U.N. intergovernmental working group tasked with dealing with this issue is currently slated to meet for a third time in December. Its mandate was recently extended by two years, through March 2015.

Momentum appears to be building in the push to close down the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where 166 inmates, 86 of whom have been cleared for release, remain held without charges.

On Wednesday, a U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing focused specifically on the merits of shuttering the prison. It was the first such meeting in four years, and comes just a few months after U.S. President Barack Obama renewed a pledge he first made in 2008 to close down the detention centre.

U.S. groups advocating for the closure of the facility believe Wednesday’s hearing is another sign that change may be imminent.

“It feels like we are getting to a tipping point on this issue,” Elisa Massimino, president of the Washington-based watchdog group Human Rights First and one of the witnesses at the hearing, told IPS shortly after she gave testimony.

Massimino notes that, in addition to Obama’s recently renewed pledge, the hearing also comes on the heels of new controversies that have put the issue of closing down the prison “back on the radar screen”. She cites revelations of operating costs that are higher than previously understood and the ongoing force-feeding of hunger-striking inmates.

She also points to recent statements by prominent lawmakers, such as Senator John McCain, in favour of shuttering the facility.

The witnesses who spoke Wednesday came from varying backgrounds and expressed vastly different viewpoints. While most were in support of seeing the prison shut down, some continued to highlight its importance as a tool in the ongoing U.S. “war on terror”.

“If Guantanamo is closed, it raises the question of where these terrorists will be sent,” Senator Ted Cruz said at the hearing, referring to inmates being held without charge.

“Radical terrorism remains a live threat,” he added, noting recent attacks on U.S. targets in Boston, Benghazi and Fort Hood, Texas.

Frank Gaffney, a commentator who writes for the Washington Times and whose Centre for Security Policy is viewed by many as a lead proponent of Islamophobic views, accused those advocating for the closure of the prison of forgetting why it was established in the first place.

“We are at war because others attacked us,” Gaffney asserted at the hearing.

He testified that the Guantanamo detention centre exists because there is “no better option”, stating that the prospects of sending some prisoners to other countries and bringing others to the United States are too dangerous to be adopted.

Releasing inmates abroad, Gaffney said, brings about the possibility that they could “return to the battlefield”. Meanwhile, bringing them into the U.S. prison system, he continued, offers the possibility that they could proselytise within U.S. prisons, that “sympathetic judges” could eventually authorise their release, or that a large-scale escape could take place.

Gaffney also warned that shutting down Guantanamo would signal weakness on the part of the United States, potentially encouraging more aggressive behaviour by anti-U.S. forces.

Proponents of closing the facility down cast doubt on many of these claims, however.

“Protecting ourselves can still be accomplished by holding [detainees] in the U.S.,” said Adam Smith, a member of the House of Representatives.

Smith pointed out that, along with a great number of murderers and paedophiles, hundreds of criminals convicted of charges related to terrorism are already being held in high-security U.S. prisons.

“The idea that, instead of having 400 terrorist inmates, we have maybe 484 in the U.S., [and that this] is somehow going to massively increase the threat is just ridiculous on its face,” said Smith.

“Terror-creating institution”

Those in favour of closure also argued Wednesday that, while some detainees would likely engage in anti-U.S. activities if released abroad, the prison’s continued existence actually makes the country less safe.

Paul Eaton, a retired major-general in the U.S. Army, testified that Guantanamo harms the international reputation of the U.S., a sentiment supported by a letter sent yesterday by 26 other generals which stated that “Guantanamo is a symbol of torture and injustice not befitting a nation that is a beacon of liberty to the world.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, corroborated these assertions by saying that practices at Guantanamo “make a myth” of the U.S. legal system.

Eaton also claimed the facility works as a recruiting tool for jihadist groups and creates more motivation for terrorism than it suppresses. He referred to it as a “terror-creating institution”.

“[The prison] facilitates the filling of the ranks of Al-Qaeda and other organisations that would attack the U.S.,” Eaton stated.

Multiple speakers at Wednesday’s hearing denounced the financial costs of the prison, noting that for every inmate there, the U.S. government, which is currently cutting budgets elsewhere, spends around 2.7 million dollars a year. This is far greater than the roughly 78,000 dollars it spends annually on inmates being held at the U.S. system’s highest-security prison, Florence ADX in Colorado.

The Florence prison currently holds the only participant in the Sep. 11, 2001, attacks to be tried in civilian court, Zacarias Moussaoui. It also holds Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and the vigilante known as the “Unabomber”, Ted Kaczynski.

While Massimino of Human Rights First expressed gratitude for Wednesday’s hearing, she told IPS that she lamented the absence of any representative of the Obama administration.

She notes that while there is currently a great deal of popular interest in seeing the prison shut down – indeed, Wednesday’s hearing had to be moved to a larger room due to high public turnout – there remains a lack of adequate political incentive to tackle the issue.

“I give a lot of credit to Senator [Richard] Durbin,” says Massimino, referring to the head of the committee that held the hearing. “This issue does not generate a lot of campaign contributions or press coverage, but he has done a great job in trying to keep it on the radar screen.”

Protesters outside the White House in January 2012 demonstrate against torture and indefinite detention on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Bay. Credit: Charles Davis/IPS

By Jared Metzker
WASHINGTON, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Groups promoting human rights here are “cautiously optimistic” that U.S. President Barack Obama’s renewed pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay will be fulfilled.

That optimism is due in part to the language of this year’s proposed U.S. National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA), a massive annual appropriations bill that funds much of the U.S. military and is currently being debated in Congress.

“It feels like there is momentum building toward achieving a bipartisan consensus,” Dixon Osburn, director of the law and security program for Human Rights First, a Washington advocacy group, told IPS. “I’m certainly more optimistic on this than I have been for the last several years.”

In its current form, the 2014 NDAA would give the executive branch, through the secretary of defence, greater authority to remove detainees from the prison, either to transfer them to other facilities or to release them altogether. It would also unblock transfers of detainees to the United States.

The NDAA recently passed through the Senate Armed Service Committee with the provisions related to Guantanamo left intact. These provisions, which would help pave the way for an eventual shutdown of the prison, are expected to be the subject of fierce debate when the Senate votes on the full bill sometime in the coming months.

The current push to close the controversial detention centre is being spearheaded by a renewed pledge made by Obama in late April. At that time, the president spoke in no uncertain terms against the continued existence of the facility, which he had originally pledged to close down at the start of his first term, in 2009."It's not sustainable…the notion that we're going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man's land in perpetuity."
-- U.S. President Barack Obama

“It’s not sustainable…the notion that we’re going to continue to keep over 100 individuals in a no-man’s land in perpetuity,” Obama stated in April, noting that U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been or are being wound down. “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried – that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

Since that renewed call, powerful members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, have come out forcefully in favour of supporting Obama’s efforts to close down the prison. Earlier this month, Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein (the former a Republican and the latter a Democrat) joined White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough on a trip to Guantanamo, afterward releasing a statement advocating its termination.

“We continue to believe that it is in our national interest to end detention at Guantanamo, with a safe and orderly transition of the detainees to other locations,” the statement noted. “We intend to work, with a plan by Congress and the administration together, to take the steps necessary to make that happen.”

Cleared for release

There are currently 166 detainees being held indefinitely at the detention centre in Guantanamo, 86 already determined eligible for released. Due to concerns over where to send them, however, they remain stuck in the prison.

Fifty-six of the 86 inmates cleared for release (and nearly 100 of the 166) are originally from Yemen, a country believed to contain a heavy presence of al-Qaeda affiliates. Previously, a moratorium had been in place preventing repatriation to the country, but last month Obama announced he would lift that moratorium.

Many of the inmates waiting for release are currently being force-fed, following a mass hunger strike that began in February to protest their continued detainment.

“Those who have been cleared are sitting there waiting for the political stalemate to end,” says Osburn.

In addition to human rights concerns, Osburn notes the “exorbitant” costs of holding individuals at Guantanamo. He cites expenses as totalling 1.6 million dollars per detainee per year, a sum much larger than the average cost of holding prisoners in high-security facilities in the United States, which is around 50,000 dollars per year.

Obama’s original pledge to close the prison actually came before he was elected president, in 2008, when he promised that the detention centre would be shuttered within a year of his taking office. Largely due to opposition from Congress, however, the president has failed to follow through on this promise, disappointing human rights advocates.

“We took the president at his word the last time around,” Andrea Prasow, a senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, an international watchdog group, told IPS. “I want to believe it is different this time, but I won’t until I see action.”

Nevertheless, Prasow, too, was “quite hopeful” that action of some kind would be taken on the renewed pledge. She noted that Obama likely views the issue as an important part of his legacy.

“[Obama] is a young president, who will live a long time in this country and see the impact of his decisions,” she said. “Leaving office without having changed this situation would be a grave mistake.”