Spokane judge orders CIA interrogation lawsuit to trial

SEATTLE — A federal judge in Spokane on Monday officially denied a request to throw out a lawsuit against two psychologists who helped design the CIA’s harsh interrogation program used in the war on terror.

In his written order, U.S. District Judge Justin Quackenbush said a jury will hear the lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three former detainees against James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, who were under contract with the federal government following the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The lawsuit claims the psychologists “designed, implemented, and personally administered an experimental torture program for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” Under the program, detainees were subjected to physical assaults and sleep deprivation, forced to stand for days in diapers with their arms chained overhead, doused with icy water and stuffed into boxes, the ACLU said.

Quackenbush heard arguments from both sides on July 28 and issued a partial ruling in which he said he would consider whether all three detainees, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud and the estate of Gul Rahman, who died in custody, should be included the lawsuit.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/judge-orders-cia-interrogation-lawsuit-to-trial/

Justifying Torture: CIA Psychologist’s Book Defends His Role

WASHINGTON ― A former CIA contractor who is being sued for his role in the spy agency’s torture program argues in a forthcoming book that his actions were legal, morally justified and necessary to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

In “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America,” James Mitchell and his coauthor, Bill Harlow, deliver a firsthand account of how he joined the CIA’s interrogation program in 2002 as an adviser and eventually became one of the agency’s top interrogators, using techniques now widely recognized as torture against suspected al Qaeda members imprisoned at secret torture locations, known as black sites.

In his book, Mitchell is dismissive of former interrogators who say that building rapport with prisoners is more effective than violent coercion. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Mitchell says, saved lives.

Mitchell was one of two psychologists hired by the CIA in 2002 to help develop ways to break down detainees’ ability to resist interrogations. He and his colleague John “Bruce” Jessen worked at the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) school, where they taught U.S. troops how to endure brutal treatment if they were taken captive by a country that does not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Under Mitchell and Jessen’s guidance, the CIA used modified SERE techniques against suspected terrorists between 2002 and 2008.

President Barack Obama banned enhanced interrogation techniques in 2009, and the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA program, using code names for Mitchell and Jessen, in 2014. Mitchell admitted his role in the program to Vice News in 2014, but his book, which will be released Tuesday, is his comprehensive defense of his work with the CIA and the methods they used.

Mitchell, one of the few public faces of the CIA’s torture program, may appear in court next year in a civil case brought by former CIA black site prisoners. He has a vested interest in convincing readers that he was motivated by a sense of patriotic duty and that the interrogation techniques used by the CIA were less horrifying than described in a 500-page report by its Senate overseers...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/james-mitchell-cia-psychologist-book_us_583cccd4e4b04b66c01b90cd

Appellate Court Reinstates Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit Against Private Military Contractor

RICHMOND, Va. - Today, a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a lawsuit against private military contractor CACI Premier Technology, Inc. (CACI) for the corporation’s role in torture and other inhumane treatment at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. A lower court had dismissed the case, ruling that CACI’s responsibility for its established role in the torture was a “political question” to be left to the discretion of the political branches and unreviewable by the courts, and that a “cloud of ambiguity” surrounds the definition of torture. This was the fourth time the case has been before the court of appeals.

“There is no question that torture is unlawful under domestic, military, and international law. The only issue in this case is whether CACI will be held accountable – or treated with impunity – for its role in torture at Abu Ghraib,” said Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Baher Azmy. “Today’s decision reaffirms the role of the courts to assess illegality, including torture, and we are optimistic this case will finally move forward and our clients will have their day in court.”

In its ruling today, the Court firmly rejected CACI’s argument that its conduct was beyond the reach of the courts. As the concurring judge emphasized, “It is beyond the power of even the President to declare [torture] lawful…. The determination of specific violations of law is constitutionally committed to the courts, even if that law touches military affairs.” The court concluded, “the military cannot lawfully exercise its authority by directing a contractor to engage in unlawful activity.”

CCR lawyers say the lower court’s ruling was essentially a return to the widely discredited Bush-era legal theories of Torture Memo author John Yoo. Constitutional scholars, military officers, and human rights groups submitted briefs in support of reinstating the lawsuit.

Salah Hassan, one of the plaintiffs in the long-running case, reacted to the news: "Today, part of justice was achieved and this is something wonderful, not only for me and the other plaintiffs, but for all the just causes in the world. I wish to see in the coming period a ruling in our favor in this case. No doubt the result will be a white light in the process of justice in the world at the time."...

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2016/10/21/appellate-court-reinstates-abu-ghraib-torture-lawsuit-against-private-military

Spokane-based psychologists admit harsh treatment of CIA prisoners but deny torture

SPOKANE — Two former Air Force psychologists who helped design the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects acknowledge using waterboarding and other harsh tactics but deny allegations of torture and war crimes leveled by a civil-liberties group, according to new court records.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued consultants James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen of Washington state last October on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, including one who died, creating a closely watched case that will likely include classified information.

In response, the pair’s attorneys filed documents this week in which Mitchell and Jessen acknowledge using waterboarding, loud music, confinement, slapping and other harsh methods but refute that they were torture.

“Defendants deny that they committed torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, nonconsensual human experimentation and/or war crimes,” their lawyers wrote, asking a federal judge in Spokane to throw out the lawsuit and award them court costs.

The records don’t say why Mitchell and Jessen don’t consider the techniques to be torture. They declined to respond to many of the ACLU’s allegations, saying much of the information is classified.

“This is historic,” ACLU attorney Dror Ladin said Wednesday, whose group also has sued the CIA and its former Director George Tenet over a program that has since been discontinued and widely discredited. “Until now, no one responsible for the CIA torture program has ever been forced to admit their actions in court...”

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/psychologists-behind-cia-interrogation-tactics-deny-torture/

The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built

The CIA paid torture teachers James Mitchell and Bruce Jesser more than $80 million. As they now live out their wildest dreams, their barbarity has cost the U.S. far more.

Call them the houses that torture built: Two sprawling luxury homes purchased by the CIA-contracted psychologists at the center of the scathing Senate report.

James Elmer Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen are not the first Americans to employ waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” against our enemies. 

But they are almost certainly the only ones to get rich doing it.

They did so by employing what is widely dismissed as “voodoo science” based on misapplied principles in a program that CIA records suggest produced little, if any, intelligence of significant value.

And they might have gotten even richer. The Senate Intelligence Committee report says they secured a contract with the CIA in 2006 valued “in excess of $180 million.”

The CIA canceled the deal three years later, but by then the duo had received $81 million. They had more than enough to build fabulous new domiciles that surely at least equal their wildest dreams.

Mitchell’s pied a torture is in Florida. Records describe a waterfront residence on six-tenths of an acre and appraised at more than $880,000, with 4,233 square feet of living space, four bathrooms, a three-car garage, a pool, central air-conditioning, and a wooded walkway leading to a lakeside combination dock and gazebo.

Jessen’s is in the state of Washington, situated on 15 acres and appraised at $1,599,900. Records describe this house as 6,916 square feet, with six bedrooms and eight bathrooms. An aerial image shows what appears to be a spa, roiling water apparently carrying no nasty connotations.

“We are proud of the work we have done for our country,” Mitchell and Jessen have said in a joint statement...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/12/the-beach-houses-that-torture-built.html

http://jameselmermitchell.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Elmer_Mitchell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Jessen

GTMO 2016: Special report

Berkeley Students Protest John Yoo

Female guard testimony illegally redacted in 9/11 hearing: lawyers

Lawyers for five men charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks argued on Monday that government officials illegally redacted testimony about treatment of Muslim prisoners made during a pre-trial hearing at Guantanamo Bay.

The dispute arose over blacked-out testimony by a female guard in October about whether women guards at the U.S. military base in Cuba should be barred for religious reasons from touching Muslim prisoners.

Lawyers for the accused say prisoners' objections to being touched must be respected on religious grounds while a U.S. military official in December said the protests were an attempt to stall proceedings in the slow-moving 9/11 death penalty trial.

The guard, who used the pseudonym Sergeant Jinx, spoke in open court in 2015 about contact between female guards and Guantanamo Bay detainees. She detailed how a guard team would handle prisoners.

Intelligence agencies later scrubbed Jinx’s statements from an online transcript that had been available to the public on a government website...

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guantanamo-idUSKCN0VV2I1

...According to Nevin, the Eighth Amendment is implicated in one of two ways here, and both lead to the conclusion that the policy change may violate the detainees’ rights.

Either the Eighth Amendment flatly prohibits the intentional imposition of punishment on pretrial detainees, or it flatly prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain on detainees. Whether the court analyzes female guard touching as intentional punishment or unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain, Nevin argues, the new policy meets this standard and therefore violates the Eighth Amendment. First, the record bears out the inference that the change in policy was made with an intent to punish—female guard touching was never a problem in the past, and the changed policy occurred amidst “remarks of political leaders that these men should be allowed to rot in hell, that we should return to waterboarding.” Second, Nevin argues, female guard touching is an unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain on these detainees (emphasis added).

To support this conclusion, Nevin explains that all five of these defendants have personal histories of sexualized torture that specifically involved extensive unwanted touching by women and forced nakedness, contrary to their religious beliefs. The torture programs they endured were specifically designed by psychologists to inflict pain based on the degradation of their religion. The forced touching by female guards revives the torture experience and generates intense physiological responses of pain. Nevin asks the court for the opportunity to conduct discovery into whether there is a valid penological purpose behind this policy change or whether the change was made to intentionally inflict punishment or pain on the defendants...

https://www.lawfareblog.com/222-session-transcript-touching-and-technology-woes

Former Guantánamo Chief Summoned by French Court Over Torture Allegations

A French judge has summoned the former chief of Guantánamo Bay, retired U.S. General Geoffrey Miller, to appear in court on March 1 to face allegations of torture against detainees.

Miller presided over the U.S. military prison in Cuba from 2002 to 2004, shortly after then-President George W. Bush approved the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation” tactics, including waterboarding, hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, removal of clothing, and exposure to extreme heat or cold.

Former prisoners of the camp for years have urged international courts to subpoena Miller over his role in the torture and mistreatment of detainees during his time as Guantánamo commander.

The investigation against Miller began after two French citizens, Nizar Sassi and Mourad Benchellali, who were detained at Guantánamo from 2001 to 2004 and 2005 respectively, lodged a criminal complaint against Miller in a French court. The Paris Court of Appeals approved their request last April.

William Bourdon, an attorney who represents some of the detainees in the case, told France 24 on Thursday that it was unlikely Miller would show up because “top U.S. civilian and military officials refuse to be held to account by [foreign] judges.”...

http://disinfo.com/2016/02/former-guantanamo-chief-summoned-by-french-court-over-torture-allegations/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_D._Miller

‘They caused problems’: CIA involved with Gitmo inmates’ suicides – former guard to RT

A former Guantanamo guard, who says he witnessed hunger strike “leaders” being brought to a secret CIA “black site”, is accusing the agency of having staged their suicide to get rid of the “problem”. At the time, the US said the men hanged themselves.
TrendsGitmo hunger strike

On June 10, 2006, the Department of Defense reported that Saudi Arabians Mani al-Utaybi and Yasser al-Zahrani, and a Yemeni citizen, Ali Abdullah Ahmed, “killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact.”

“Two Saudis and one Yemeni, each located in Camp 1, were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards,” Joint Task Force-Guantanamo said at that time, adding that “all lifesaving measures had been exhausted.”

The following day, the camp quickly went into lockdown.

Contrary to the official statement, unsubstantiated reports started to surface, accusing the Bush administration of hiding the truth behind what was described as a “planned event”.

Nearly 10 years on, former Guantanamo guard Joseph Hickman is stepping forward to unveil what he saw in the few hours leading up to the secretive deaths. Speaking to RT, Hickman shared why he thinks that the US government might have had an interest in silencing the prisoners who “caused a lot of problems for the command” of Guantanamo Bay.

‘CIA Black site’
“At around 5:30pm and 6:00pm on June 9, I went to the tower guards – I was visiting them to see how they were going to perform their duties that night,” the former sergeant of the guard recalled.

While there, Hickman noticed what he thought was an unusually suspicious commotion for a Friday evening.

“I witnessed a van – we used to call it paddy wagon – it was a detainee transport van,” he said. “The van came into the gate, backed up to Camp 1 and took a detainee out of Camp 1 Alpha Block and put him into the paddy wagon and drove [him away].”...
https://www.rt.com/usa/329882-guantanamo-prisoners-suicide-cia/

Shaker Aamer: Gitmo shrouded in lies, even ‘belongings’ are fake (EXCLUS...

Inside Gitmo: America's Shame

The 9/11 trial will, if it happens at all, take place on a patch of dust in the Caribbean, within a high-security facility you can enter only with a notebook and pen (and just one pen), and observe from behind a wall of triple-thick glass. Anyone who wishes to attend will have to first be approved by the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions, the entity in charge of the offshore war court at Guantanamo Bay. It takes three hours and 20 minutes to fly to Guantanamo via military charter from Andrews Air Force Base. A 20-minute ferry ride then takes visitors from Gitmo's airport across the bay to Camp Justice, an almost $12 million tent city built on an abandoned airstrip and housing the heavily fortified maze of trailers, fences and concertina wire known as the "Expeditionary Legal Complex," or ELC, where proceedings are held in a prefab building known as Courtroom II. During proceedings, every word that is spoken is heard in the visitor's gallery after being filtered through speakers on a 40-second delay, which enables a judge to ensure nothing classified slips out. There are no laptops, phones or recording devices allowed in the ELC, and no cameras. Also: no sleeveless shirts or open-toed shoes.

This fortress, which will be disassembled and shipped back stateside if and when Guantanamo ever closes, was constructed in 2008 to try the military's "high-value prisoners," of which there are currently 14, only five of whom – accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-plotters – arguably matter to most Americans. Hearings for the "9/11 Five" can be dramatic events, during which the accused have spontaneously knelt on the floor and prayed, and engaged in other acts of open defiance, requesting during their 2012 arraignment, for example, that the entire 87-page charge sheet be read aloud, a process that took almost three hours. At the start of this same hearing, defendant Walid bin Attash was wheeled into the court in restraints, minus his prosthetic leg. Only after bin Attash "promised to stay on his best behavior" was the fake leg reattached.

On September 21st, 2015, about 40 members of the mobile war court convened at Camp Justice for pretrial hearings in the case of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, an alleged Taliban commander and Al Qaeda leader who virtually no one has ever heard of, and who had nothing to do with 9/11 or any other spectacular act of terrorism. This makes him far more representative of the majority of Guantanamo's inmates, all largely anonymous figures who may or may not have terrorist ties, but wound up at Gitmo after fighting with the Taliban, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A former Iraqi Army soldier who fled to Afghanistan in 1991, Hadi is accused of traditional war crimes, leading attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, among them.

This January will begin the 15th year since the first prisoners of the War on Terror – who the U.S. government referred to then, as now, as "detainees" – began arriving at this scrubby and perpetually broiling U.S.-controlled naval base on the southeast coast of Cuba. Of the 780 original captives, 538 were released by President Bush before he left office. Though President Obama, who has released 135 men, has said he intends to close Guantanamo before he leaves office, as of this writing, 107 prisoners remain interned on the island, at an annual per-inmate cost of roughly $3.4 million. The annual cost of housing an inmate at a federal or military prison, by contrast, is about $78,000. Forty-eight men have been cleared for release, many of them during the Bush administration. Forty-nine are in the purgatorial state known as "indefinite detention," including roughly 30 men the government says cannot be tried but are too dangerous to release. Just 10 prisoners, all "high value," a euphemism for those formerly imprisoned by the CIA, are facing legal proceedings. Three have already been convicted, two with guilty pleas. Seven are currently on trial, though the prosecution of the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing has been frozen indefinitely, and the 9/11 trial has been mired in delays since the men were arraigned in 2012...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/inside-gitmo-americas-shame-20151230

ACLU SUES PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO DESIGNED AND RAN CIA TORTURE PROGRAM

LAWSUIT FILED ON BEHALF OF THREE VICTIMS OF CIA TORTURE, ALLEGES WAR CRIMES AND UNLAWFUL HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION

October 13, 2015

SPOKANE, Wash. — Three former Central Intelligence Agency prisoners represented by the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit today against the two psychologists who designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.

The CIA-contracted psychologists, James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, helped convince the agency to adopt torture as official policy, making millions of dollars in the process. The two men, who had previously worked for the U.S. military, designed the torture methods and performed illegal human experimentation on CIA prisoners to test and refine the program. They personally took part in torture sessions and oversaw the program’s implementation for the CIA.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of three men — Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud — who were tortured using methods developed by Mitchell and Jessen, as detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s landmark report on CIA torture. The U.S. has never charged or accused the victims of any crime. One of them was tortured to death, and the other two are now free...

https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-sues-psychologists-who-designed-and-ran-cia-torture-program

Ex-CIA officer to speak on government whistleblowers

CHAPEL HILL

A former counterrorism agent who was the first former CIA officer to publicly acknowledge the use of waterboarding on prisoners will speak Tuesday on the role of whistleblowers in government.

John Kiriakou spent almost 2 years in a federal prison for giving classified information to a reporter. He was released this year.

Kiriakou worked as an analyst and counterrorism officer for the CIA from 1990 to 2004. His 2012 memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror,” tells of his role in the operation that captured Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida organizer and leader under Osama bin Laden.

In 2007, Kiriakou publicly expressed concern about the interrogation of some prisoners captured in the war on terror. He told ABC News that Abu Zubaydah had been subjected to waterboarding, a practice that Kiriakou said he later came to consider torture.

Kiriakou in 2012 was charged with disclosing classified information and admitted in a plea deal to revealing the name of an undercover CIA officer to a journalist.

Kiriakou’s address, “Keeping Government Honest: Whistleblowers, Torture, and America’s War on Terror,” will be at 7:15 p.m. at the Freedom Forum Conference Center at Carroll Hall on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/article41319801.html

GITMO: Detainee Assessment Briefs

On April 24, 2011, Wikileaks began the release of the Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) and related documents for all 779 Guantánamo prisoners. The release was carried out in the Wikileaks website, a myriad other mirror websites, and some of the leading media establishments of the world, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, and La Repubblica. The authenticity of the released material has been recognized by both the Department of Defense and the White House.

DABs are memoranda signed by the commanders of Guantánamo, and make recommendations as to whether a particular prisoner should be released or should continue to be held--a decision that is based on (a) the prisoner's risk to the United States, its allies and its interests, (b) his risk to fellow prisoners, and (c) his continuing intelligence value. DABs contain the candid and comprehensive views of the Guantánamo prisoners by their captors. As well as basic data about the prisoners, their pictures, and testimonies offered by the prisoners themselves. As a consequence of the extraordinary importance of this material, CSHRA has decided to repost these documents below under the names of the prisoners they assess but leave the material embargoed for the time being. Links to the specific evidence of abuse in them will be provided under the prisoners' names...

http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu/projects/the-guantanamo-testimonials-project/testimonies/testimonies-of-the-defense-department/the-detainee-assessment-briefs/detainee-assessment-briefs

U.S. government blocks release of new CIA torture details

U.S. government officials have blocked the release of 116 pages of defense lawyers' notes detailing the torture that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah says he experienced in CIA custody, defense lawyers said on Thursday.

The treatment of Zubaydah, who lost one eye and was waterboarded 83 times in a single month while held by the CIA, according to government documents, has been the focus of speculation for years.

"We submitted 116 pages in 10 separate submissions," Joe Margulies, Zubaydah’s lead defense lawyer, told Reuters. "The government declared all of it classified."

Margulies and lawyers for other detainees said that the decision showed that the Obama administration plans to continue declaring detainees’ accounts of their own torture classified. A Central Intelligence Agency spokesperson declined to comment.

Wiki: John Rizzo

...Rizzo was hired at the CIA in 1976, just after the Church Committee released its report on the assassination of foreign leaders. By 1979, Rizzo became the staff lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, the CIA's clandestine branch.[5] He served as the liaison between the CIA and the congressional investigators studying the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s.[7] Rizzo became Acting General Counsel of the CIA in November 2001, a position that was traditionally filled by someone from outside the agency.[8]...

...The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which ran the U.S. military's SERE program to train U.S. personnel to resist harsh interrogation methods, issued a memo with an attachment written to the General Counsel of the Department of Defense in July 2002.[15] The memo, which was passed on from the Pentagon to Rizzo, referred to the use of extreme duress on detainees as "torture" and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."[16]

Rizzo sent a request to the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel for an opinion as to whether certain interrogation techniques would violate the prohibition against torture. The OLC issued a memo signed by Jay S. Bybeeto Rizzo on August 1, 2002; this was the first of what became known as the Torture Memos, in which Justice authorized specific techniques to be used in interrogations.[17] It approved 10 techniques, including waterboarding.[14] Rizzo concurred on the legality of these techniques and saw to it that they were implemented by the CIA.[18]

Rizzo traveled with David Addington, the Vice President's chief of staff; William Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, to consult with officers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in late September 2002. One week later, a CIA lawyer told personnel with the military intelligence interrogation team at Guantanamo that, "if the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."[19]...

...In early 2005, White House Counsel Harriet Miers told Rizzo not to destroy the tapes without checking with the White House first.[29] Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the chief of the Directorate of Operations, sent a cable to the CIA's Bangkok station ordering the destruction of the tapes on November 8, 2005.[29][30] Rodriguez informed Goss and Rizzo of the destruction on November 10.[29]...

...Rizzo signed off on all CIA directed drone strikes from the start of the program soon after September 11, 2001 until his retirement in October 2009.[3] He claims to have seen one "request for approval for targeting for lethal operation" per month and that roughly 30 individuals were targeted at any given time.[6]

In July 2011, the human rights group Reprieve and Pakistani lawyers called for the prosecution of Rizzo in Pakistan for murder for approving drone attacks that killed hundreds of people.[31][32][33][34] In April 2015, the Islamabad High Court ordered police to open a criminal case against Rizzo and former CIA Islamabad Station Chief Jonathan Bank for murder, conspiracy, terrorism and waging war against Pakistan.[35]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Rizzo

Wiki: Jay Bybee

During Jay Bybee's tenure at the OLC, the CIA acting General Counsel John A. Rizzo requested a legal opinion on detainee interrogation. That request was routed to the OLC by the White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who desired the "ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors."[11] The CIA inquired whether, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it could aggressively interrogate suspected high-ranking Al-Qaeda members captured outside the United States in ways some regard as torture. In effect, the CIA was asking for an interpretation of the statutory term of "torture" as defined in 18 U.S.C. § 2340. That section implements, in part, the obligations of the United States under the Geneva Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

Bybee signed that legal memorandum which endorsed "enhanced interrogation techniques" as lawful. These same techniques are viewed as torture by the Justice Department,[12] Amnesty International,[13] Human Rights Watch,[14] medical experts in the treatment of torture victims,[15][16] intelligence officials,[17] and American allies.[18] This memo has been the source of controversy; critics of his action have called for his impeachment or resignation.[19] Bybee was considered a subject of a war crimes investigation in Spain,[20] but the government decided against prosecution in 2011.

A memo declassified in 2012 indicates that some in the Bush State Department believed that the methods were illegal under domestic and international law, and constituted war crimes.[21] Secretary of State Colin Powell strongly opposed the invalidation of the Geneva Conventions,[22] and U.S. Navygeneral counsel Alberto Mora campaigned internally against what he saw as the "catastrophically poor legal reasoning" of the memo.[23] Philip D. Zelikow, former State Department adviser to Condoleezza Rice, in 2009 testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee studying the matter, "It seemed to me that the OLC interpretation of U.S. Constitutional Law in this area was strained and indefensible. I could not imagine any federal court in America agreeing that the entire CIA program could be conducted and it would not violate the American Constitution." Zelikow also alleged that Bush administration officials attempted to destroy his memos alleging fault in Bybee's reasoning.[24]...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bybee

HOW GUANTÁNAMO DIARY ESCAPED THE BLACK HOLE AND GOT PAST THE CENSORS (MOSTLY)

The book, in which Guantanamo detainee Mohamedou Ould Slahi tells of his odyssey through overseas prisons and his torture and abuse by the US and its counterterrorism allies, is pockmarked with redactions left by military censors.

The diary was finally published last week, more than nine years after Slahi wrote it, and it jumped onto bestseller lists. But the details of how his lawyers fought for its release are still under seal – highlighting the secrecy that still surrounds everything to do with the U.S. military prison and the 122 men who remain there.

“The starting point is that everything that Mohamedou says, like anything that any Guantanamo detainee says, is considered classified and has to be cleared by the government,” said Hina Shamsi, the director of the National Security Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, who was involved in the negotiations for the manuscript’s release.

Slahi, a 44-year-old Mauritanian educated in Germany, was rendered by the CIA to prison in Jordan in late 2001, then held by the U.S. in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. The government claimed that Slahi had been an al Qaeda recruiter. He admits that he went to Afghanistan in 1990 to fight against the communist government; his brother-in-law was an adviser to Osama Bin Laden; and he’d met one of the 9/11 plotters in Germany. But Slahi maintains that he’d had nothing to do with al Qaeda since 1992, and the U.S. has never charged him with a crime...

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/31/guantanamo-diary-escaped-black-hole-got-past-censors-mostly/

A momentous victory for justice and transparency at Guantánamo

“Fairness” is not a word often associated with Guantánamo Bay, with its hope-starved prisoners who have sat in steel cells, away from their families, for 12 years. “Openness” is not a concept typically applied to the infamous camp, about which President Barack Obama’s administration has hidden more information than even the George W. Bush administration did — down to the current number of hunger strikers protesting their continued detention without charges.

Last week my hunger-striking client Abu Wa’el Dhiab — with the help of an engaged public — managed to win victories for both openness and fairness at Guantánamo. In a pitched court battle, on Thursday we stopped a last-minute bid by the government to hold the first-ever trial of abusive force-feeding at the prison almost entirely in secret. Per Judge Gladys Kessler’s decision on Thursday, the public has the right to hear in court on Monday about the suffering our client endures every day.

Then on Friday afternoon, in perhaps the most significant Guantánamo decision in years, Kessler ordered the release of videotapes showing the cell extractions and force-feedings of Dhiab. For the first time, public knowledge of Guantánamo will not be restricted to U.S. government press releases. Everyone will be able to view and judge for themselves the daily treatment of innocent men such as Dhiab.

It was a long road to get here. More than a year has passed since Dhiab first went to court to try to stop horribly abusive force-feeding techniques used to punish him for his peaceful hunger strike. Arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and eventually transferred to Guantánamo, Dhiab has never been charged with a crime and has been cleared for release since 2009. During his 12 years of imprisonment, one of Dhiab’s sons died, and his family fled the violence of their homeland, Syria. Abu Wa’el means “father of Wa’el,” his preferred name after his son’s passing. Dhiab does not want to die and does not oppose being fed if his health demands. But he will not stop protesting his unjust detention by hunger strike and should not suffer in silence the inhumane methods of his force-feeding...

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/10/guantanamo-forcefeedingabuwaeldhiab.html