MCCLATCHY– The long-awaited release Thursday of four Bush-era memos lays out in clinical detail many of the controversial interrogation methods secretly authorized by the Bush administration — from waterboarding to trapping prisoners in boxes with insects — while former President George W. Bush was publicly condemning the use of torture.

The memos were made public by the Justice Department with assurances from President Barack Obama that the intelligence officials who followed their guidance won’t be prosecuted. However, the president’s assurances don’t apply to the former administration officials who crafted the legal justification for the interrogation program.

The newly released memos offer the public the most unvarnished and explicit look yet at once-top secret efforts to psychologically break high-level terrorism suspects.

Despite the graphic description of the techniques, the memos at the time concluded that the tactics didn’t constitute “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” even as Congress was moving to ban such treatment.

The memos reveal that by May 2005 various “enhanced” techniques were used on 28 detainees. Three high-level al Qaida operatives — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri — were subject to waterboarding, a procedure that simulates drowning and is widely regarded as torture. 

Obama said Thursday that the U.S. won’t prosecute CIA officials who used the techniques and ordered the memos rescinded. The CIA interrogators, some of whom were contractors, weren’t identified in the partially censored documents.

Continue reading about Bush Era Interrogations From Waterboarding to Forced Nudity.

© MCCLATCHY, 2009

WASHINGTON POST– The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects – U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike – may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.

The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush’s orders and his aides’ policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated “enemy combatants,” liberal use of “material witness” warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings.

Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact.

For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen’s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.

Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute. But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely intelligence.

“I wouldn’t call it an alternative system,” said an administration official who has helped devise the legal response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “But it is different than the criminal procedure system we all know and love. It’s a separate track for people we catch in the war.”

Continue reading about 2nd Track for Suspects in Terror War.

© COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON POST, 2002

TRUTHOUT– US authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture and agree not to speak publicly about his ordeal in exchange for his freedom, according to British court documents.

A ruling by two British High Court judges, issued in October but released only on Monday, said the U.S. offered former detainee Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain last year – six years after he was first detained as an enemy combatant.

It was the first time details of the plea bargain offer were made public. The ruling said U.S. military prosecutors also asked that Mohamed plead guilty to two charges, accept a three-year sentence and agree to testify against other suspected terrorists.

Mohamed, an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. He claims he was tortured both there and in Morocco, before he was transferred to Guantanamo in 2004.

He was freed in February after months of negotiation between the U.S. and Britain. All charges against him were dropped last year. Mohamed refused to agree to any deal that prevented him from discussing his treatment, Lord Justice John Thomas and Mr. Justice David Lloyd Jones said in the ruling.

“He wanted it to be made clear to the world what had happened and how he has been treated by the United States government since April 2002,” Thomas said in the ruling.

The British judges had ordered that their written ruling be withheld from the public until after Mohamed was released. The judges considered the plea bargain issue during an appeal to the High Court by Mohamed’s lawyers demanding the British government release documents they claim would prove he was tortured.

Issuing a judgment on the case in February, Thomas said there was evidence to show Mohamed was tortured, but that the documents could not be made public because of the British government’s national security concerns.

He said Britain’s government had said releasing the documents could undermine intelligence-sharing with the United States. Mohamed claims British intelligence officers supplied questions to his interrogators and were complicit in his torture – a claim Prime Minister Gordon Brown has rejected.

In investigating Mohamed’s claims, the British court reviewed the draft plea bargain and correspondence between military prosecutors and Mohamed’s lawyers. The ruling quoted testimony from Mohamed’s lawyer about the offer.

“Mr. Mohamed must sign a statement saying he has not been tortured, which would be false. And he must agree not to make any public statement about what he has been through,” Clive Stafford Smith told the court in October, according to the ruling.

The ruling also quotes then-U.S. military prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld as saying Mohamed would be given a date for his release if he agreed to the terms.

Vandeveld – who has since quit his post – had said Mohamed would need to plead guilty to two charges in exchange for a three-year sentence and to testify against other suspects, according to the court documents.

The ruling discloses that, had Mohamed agreed to the plea bargain, the British government told the U.S. it would not allow him to serve the three-year sentence in a UK jail.

Since February, Mohamed has given interviews to the BBC and a British newspaper.

Written by David Stringer / All republished content that appears on Truthout has been obtained by permission or license.

© AP, 2009