AP INVESTIGATION: Cautionary tale from CIA prison

By ADAM GOLDMAN and KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writers
Sun Mar 28, 6:08 pm ET

WASHINGTON – More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison.

Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.

The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.

Little has emerged about the Afghan's death, which the Justice Department is investigating. The Associated Press has learned the dead man's name, as well as new details about his capture in Pakistan and his Afghan imprisonment.

The man was Gul Rahman (gool RAHK'-mahn), a suspected militant captured on Oct. 29, 2002, a U.S. official familiar with the case confirmed. The official said Rahman was taken during an operation against Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (gool-boo-DEEN' hek-mat-YAR') and allied with al-Qaida.

Rahman's identity also was confirmed by a former U.S. official familiar with the case, as well as by several other former and current officials. A reference to Rahman's death also turned up in a recently declassified government document.

The CIA's program of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of suspected terrorists has been debated since it ended in 2006. The Salt Pit case stands as a cautionary tale about the unfettered use of such practices. The Obama administration shut the CIA's prisons last year.

It remains uncertain whether any intelligence officers have been punished as a result of the Afghan's death, raising questions about the CIA's accountability in the case. The CIA's then-station chief in Afghanistan was promoted after Rahman's death, and the officer who ran the prison went on to other assignments, including one overseas, several former intelligence officials said.

The CIA declined to discuss the Salt Pit case and denied a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the AP.

Rahman was taken into custody in Islamabad with four others. They included Dr. Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar's son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.

Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman's family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said.

"If he died there in interrogation or he died a natural death, they should have told his family and ended their uncertainty," Baheer said.

This account of the Salt Pit case was assembled from documents and interviews with both militants and officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials. The Americans spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the case remain classified.

___

Rahman vanished before dawn on Oct. 29, 2002.

He had driven from Peshawar, Pakistan, the northwest frontier city known as a haven for insurgents. Leaving behind his wife and four daughters, Rahman had come to Islamabad for a medical checkup and was staying with Baheer, an old friend.

Rahman, in his early 30s, had worked as a driver for Baheer and in the mid-1990s as a guard for Hekmatyar, who is designated a global terrorist by the U.S.

About 1:30 a.m., U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces stormed Baheer's house and arrested him, two guards, a cook and Rahman.

After a week in custody, Rahman was separated from the others. "That was the last time I saw him," said Baheer, now a member of a Hezb-e-Islami delegation that met this month in Kabul, the Afghan capital, for peace talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Baheer said he was flown to Afghanistan and taken to the Salt Pit, the code name for an abandoned brick factory that became a forerunner of the network of secret CIA-run prisons operating from Poland to Thailand.

The Salt Pit contained a patchwork of small, windowless cells where detainees were subjected to harsh treatment and at least one mock execution, according to several former CIA officials.

"I was left naked, sleeping on the barren concrete," said Baheer. His toilet was a bucket. Loudspeakers blared. Guards concealed their identity with masks and carried torches.

Baheer said his American interrogators would tie him to a chair and sit on his stomach. They hung him naked, he said, for hours on end.

___

As a former Hekmatyar guard, Rahman had a militant's history. His nom de guerre was Abdul Manan. "Some time ago, he was with the jihad," Baheer acknowledged.

That description matches recollections of former and current U.S. officials who said the Afghan brought into the Salt Pit in late 2002 was violently uncooperative.

At one point, the detainee threw a latrine bucket at his guards. He also threatened to kill them. His stubborn responses provoked harsher treatment. His hands were shackled over his head, he was roughed up and doused with water, according to several former CIA officials.

The exact circumstances of Rahman's death are not clear, but the Afghan was left in the cold cell on the morning of Nov. 20, when the temperature dipped just below 36 degrees. He was naked from the waist down, said two former U.S. officials familiar with the case. Within hours, he was dead.

CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., sent a team "to gather the facts," the current U.S. official said. "The guidance was for the people on scene to preserve everything as it was."

A CIA medic at the site concluded the Afghan died of hypothermia. A doctor sent later confirmed that judgment. But the detainee's body was never returned to his family for burial.

A week later, Amnesty International issued a statement saying Baheer was being held without charge and possibly in CIA or FBI custody. No mention was made of Rahman.

Rahman's family, Baheer said, went to the Red Cross in Islamabad and Kabul. They are still uncertain of Rahman's fate, he said.

"The Americans have had enough time," said Baheer. "They should expose all those missing people who have died. After nearly eight years, enough is enough."

___

At CIA headquarters, the agency's inspector general learned about the Salt Pit death and the existence of the agency's secret interrogation program. The inspector, John Helgerson, began an investigation into the death as well as a special review of the program.

The case appeared to prod the CIA to codify its interrogation program. The same month that the detainee died, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center started training courses for interrogators, according to public documents.

The following year, the CIA issued guidelines covering the use of cold in interrogations, with detailed instructions for the "safe temperature range when a detainee is wet or unclothed."

But harsh interrogation techniques continued for four more years.

When the inspector general's report on the Salt Pit death emerged, it focused on decisions made by two CIA officials: an inexperienced officer who had just taken his first overseas assignment to run the prison and the Kabul station chief, who managed CIA activities in Afghanistan. Their identities remain classified.

The report found that the Salt Pit officer displayed poor judgment in leaving the detainee in the cold. But it also indicated the officer made repeated requests to superiors for guidance that were largely ignored, according to two former U.S. intelligence officials.

That raised concerns about both the responsibility of the station chief and the CIA's management in Langley. Similar concerns about CIA management were later aired in the inspector general's review of the CIA's secret interrogation program.

"The agency — especially in the early months of the program — failed to provide adequate staffing, guidance and support to those involved with the detention and interrogation of detainees," the report said.

___

The inspector general referred the Salt Pit death to prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia. Two federal prosecutors, Paul J. McNulty and Chuck Rosenberg, conducted separate reviews. Each prosecutor concluded he couldn't make a case against any CIA officer involved in the death. Neither would discuss his decision.

The former U.S. official familiar with the case said federal prosecutors could not prove the CIA officer running the Salt Pit had intended to harm the detainee — a point made in a recently released government document that also disclosed Rahman's name.

The current U.S. official insisted that the case was adequately scrutinized. The official also said a CIA accountability review board was held in connection with the death.

The CIA declined to discuss whether the two agency officers cited in the inspector general's report were punished.

But when the case was put before Kyle D. Foggo, the CIA's third-ranking officer at the time, no formal administrative action was taken against the two men, said two former intelligence officials with knowledge of the case.

Foggo was later sent to prison on unrelated fraud charges. He did not respond to a letter sent to him in prison.

The unresolved questions about Rahman's death have led to new scrutiny by the Obama administration. A Justice Department criminal inquiry, led by prosecutor John Durham, is aimed at whether CIA operatives crossed the line in a small number of cases including the Salt Pit death.

But several former senior CIA officials questioned the Kabul station chief's career advancement inside the agency after Rahman died. Now a senior officer, the man was promoted at least three times since leaving Afghanistan in 2003, former officials said.

In contrast, the former officials said, the CIA's Baghdad station chief was demoted in rank after the death of an Iraqi at the Abu Ghraib military-run prison in November 2003.

"What you see across the board, there is no standard that is applied uniformly," said one former CIA officer, Charles Faddis, who recently published "Beyond Repair," a critical assessment of the agency.

___

Gannon reported from Islamabad. Associated Press writer Robert H. Reid in Kabul and investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York contributed to this report.


Click on title above for article w/ clickable links;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100328/ap_on_go_ot/us_cia_salt_pit

The Catholic Church as Victim?

Click on title above to read one mans well-reasoned opinion on those who would paint the catholic church as a victim of the media re: their "pediphile priest" problem.....

U.S. Scores "0" in Human Rights Review / Native Americans

US human rights record reviewed

By Valerie Taliman, Today correspondent

Story Published: Mar 26, 2010



ALBUQUERQUE – The “listening session” held by the U.S. State Department on March 16 at the University of New Mexico Law School drew more than 100 Native leaders, legal scholars and human rights activists, many of whom called on the United States to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Testimony from presenters spanned an array of key issues including rights to self-determination, land, natural resources, sacred sites and religious freedom.

The listening sessions are part of the Universal Periodic Review, conducted every four years by the United Nations Human Rights Council, to examine the United States’ record on legally-binding human rights obligations.

The U.S. has been chastised in the past, and is expected to report on what it has done to implement recommendations made by U.N. human rights bodies.

For example, in 2002, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled the U.S. had violated international human rights laws by seizing the property of Western Shoshone elders Carrie and Mary Dann, and “denying their rights to equality before the law, to be free of discrimination, to a fair trial and to property.”

It was the first time an international body formally recognized that the U.S. had violated the rights of Native Americans.

The ruling supported the Danns’ argument that the U.S. government used illegitimate means to gain control of ancestral Shoshone lands. It also questioned the government’s mishandling of millions of acres of land under the U.S. Indian Claims Commission.

The IACHR found that the ICC claims process – which the U.S. contends extinguished the Western Shoshone rights to most of their land in Nevada – was a flawed process that denied the Danns and other Western Shoshones their human rights.

The IACHR recommended that the U.S. government take steps to provide a fair legal process to determine the Danns’ and other Western Shoshone land rights.

Yet at the listening session, Larson Bill, former chairman of the South Fork Band of Te-Moak, said there has been no progress on recommendations to provide a fair legal settlement for the Western Shoshone.

Again in 2008, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination formally criticized the U.S. for not doing more to prevent and punish violence against Native women. Justice Department statistics revealed one in three women will be raped in their lifetimes; 86 percent of the rapes are committed by non-Indian men.


Sacred places vs. development


At an afternoon panel on sacred sites, Zuni Governor Norman Cooeyate talked about his tribe’s historic efforts to protect Zuni Salt Lake, a sacred place for many tribes, from desecration and de-watering.

Cooeyate said they fought for decades to reclaim 5,000 acres of land from the federal government to establish a sanctuary surrounding Zuni Salt Lake in 1985.

But in 1996, without consulting the Zuni or any other tribes, the state of New Mexico issued a permit to Salt River Project, the third-largest public power utility in the nation, to build a coal mine within the sanctuary boundaries of the lake.

The Zuni did not find out about the proposed mine or permit for three years, and were appalled to find the lease had been signed by a former lobbyist for coal companies who worked at the Interior Department.

They also learned that hydrological studies indicated strip-mining coal would use 85 gallons per minute of water from the aquifer that feeds Zuni Salt Lake, reducing the water table to a level that would hinder the lake’s ability to produce their sacred salt.

“The songs, ceremonies, gathering of minerals, plants and medicines are the central and irreplaceable elements of my people’s religion and cultural practices,” Cooeyate said. “The power of these sacred ecosystems cannot be duplicated or replaced. We want the United States to uphold our right to protect our sacred places of prayer.”


Mining indigenous lands


Numerous speakers addressed uranium mining and its devastating effects on Native communities in the Southwest.

Manny Pino, a college professor and longtime activist from Acoma Pueblo, said his people have lived with a 50-year legacy of uranium mining, with five communities on the Acoma and Laguna reservations most heavily affected by cancer and early deaths.

The village of Paguate lies within 1,000 feet of the Jackpile Mine, at one time the nation’s largest open-pit uranium mine that produced 24 million tons of ore by operating 24-hour shifts 365 days per year from 1953 to 1982.

“The Atomic Energy Commission was the primary buyer, so uranium from Jackpile went directly to build America’s weapons of mass destruction,” Pino said.

“Our people have had to endure radioactivity in their backyard and wind blowing waste tailings onto our land, our crops, and our children. Even today, more than 1,000 abandoned mines on Navajo lands have not been reclaimed. This is the kind of environmental racism that we have to live with.”

Pino applauded President Barack Obama’s decision to close Yucca Mountain, the proposed high-level nuclear waste site on Shoshone lands in Nevada, and urged nations to stop producing nuclear waste since there is no safe place to store it on the planet.

Carletta Tilousi, a Havasupai Tribal Council member, said she was representing the remaining 600 members of her tribe who live at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

“We’re fighting to save our sacred Red Butte and our only source of water now that Denison Mines has begun uranium mining on the north rim.”

The Havasupai and Hualapai nations as well as the federal government have called for moratoriums on new mining around the Grand Canyon, but existing claims are exempt on public lands.

That exemption allowed Canadian-owned Denison Mines to begin mining in December 2009, with plans to extract 335 tons of uranium ore per day and haul it more than 300 miles to a mill near Blanding, Utah.

Tilousi said nearly 8,000 new mining claims now threaten northern Arizona, pointing out it would only take one accident to contaminate the Colorado River.


Native inmates’ rights


Lenny Foster, a spiritual advisor and supervisor for the Navajo Nation Corrections Project, spoke of the 30-year struggle to ensure some measure of respect for Native spiritual practices in state and federal prison systems.

“The extreme racism and discrimination toward our spiritual beliefs has made it very difficult for Native inmates to practice and participate in traditional ceremonies,” he said, noting that he has visited 96 state and federal prisons, and counseled more than 2,000 male and female inmates.

He called on the Justice Department to launch an investigation into human rights abuses perpetrated on Native inmates, and to rectify current policies to provide legal protections for the free exercise of religion for incarcerated Indians.

Foster said denial of access to traditional ceremonies is a denial for recovery and spiritual healing.

“The Justice Department has a trust responsibility that encompasses criminal justice, corrections and human rights, including a legal obligation to protect traditional Native spiritual practices.”

Speaking as a private citizen, attorney Donovan Brown said, “There are many federal laws whose intent appears to protect Native American sacred places and religious activities. These laws, however, have been proven useless.”

Brown said Native sons and daughters have served in every branch of the United States military and have unselfishly given their lives on foreign soil fighting for the human rights of other peoples.

“They should not be required to return to their lands only to be denied the inherent and fundamental right of self-determination, to freely determine their own destiny, to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and to live on and manage their lands free of external interference, encroachment and occupation.”





http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/89262307.html

The Last Hope for US

Thanks to Mustang Sally for Passing this Along;

The Last Hope
by Fred Reed

http://lewrockwell.com/

Washington is out of control. It does as it likes, without restraint. It spends American money and American lives to fight remote wars for which it cannot provide a plausible reason. It determines what our children will be taught, who we can hire and fire, to whom we can sell our houses, whether we can defend ourselves, even what names we can call each other. The feds read our email and track the web sites we visit, make us hop around barefoot in airports at the command of surly unaccountable rentacops. They search us at random in train stations without even a pretense of probable cause. We have no influence over them, no way of resisting.
Except, perhaps, to ignore them.


Washington has learned to insulate itself from interference by the population. Huge impenetrable bureaucracies beyond public control make regulations that amount to laws, spending God knows how much money to do God knows what for the benefit of the interest groups that run the government. These bureaucrats cannot be fired and usually cannot be named. Congress, like the bureaucracies, serves not the United States but the big lobbies. The looters of Wall Street wreck the lives of millions, and get millions in bonuses for doing it instead of the end of a rope.
Further, the federal government simply doesn’t work. It is clogged up, constipated, gridlocked, using antiquated technology to do badly things it ought to do and things it oughtn’t. In large part this is because federal hiring rests on the desires of racist and feminist lobbies instead of suitability for the work to be done. Whole departments – HUD, Education – do much harm and little good. IRS is ruthless, incompetent, and unaccountable, the tax laws burdensome and crafted for the benefit of special interests and of Washington. I can change my address with my bank online in five minutes and know that it has been done; IRS requires a paper form and six to eight weeks to effect the change, and you don’t know whether it has been done. The goons of TSA leer at our daughters with their porno-scanners. The VA can easily take six months to provide a veteran’s records, when it could be done online in five seconds. The Pentagon spends a trillion a year, precious little of which has anything to do with defending America, but can’t defeat a small group of badly outnumbered men armed with rifles and RPGs; the intelligence agencies were unable to warn them of the prospect.


The government doesn’t work. It is broken. It can’t be fixed. It can’t be fixed because only those within it could, and their interest lies in not fixing it.
The only remedy short of armed rebellion is civil disobedience at the level of the states. Clear constitutional justification for refusal to obey Washington lies in the Tenth Amendment:


“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
A great many states now begin to do a great many things counter to Washington’s wishes. I think it wise to keep resistance within the framework of the Constitution, but the entire question comes down to a blunt truth: No law extends beyond the lawmaker’s power to enforce it. Congress can pass a law against gravitation, but can’t prevent things from falling when released from a height. The federal government made alcohol illegal but, in the face of massive public disregard, couldn’t make it stick.
What happens if, as may happen, California legalizes marijuana – not just for contrived medical purposes, but legalizes it, period? I search in vain for the Marijuana Clause in the Constitution. The feds do not have the manpower to enforce federal laws within California without the help of the police of California. What happens if a state passes a law saying that its citizens cannot be forced to buy health insurance? What can Washington do? It can persecute individuals, but a state, or thirty states, are another thing. The FBI can arrest any one person, but it cannot arrest Wyoming.
Much depends on how sick people really are of the ever-growing thicket of laws, regulation, imposed political correctness, surveillance, and having to live according to the dictates of remote elites with whom they have nothing in common.


At bottom, Washington’s power is economic. The feds rely for control on taxing money from the states and giving some of it back in exchange for obedience. They cannot arrest Wyoming, but they can deny it federal highway funds. This technique provides de facto control over everything from kindergarten to MIT.


Now, if Idaho passes a law (I’m making this up) saying that no restrictions on the ownership of guns will be enforced within the state, Washington might choose discretion over valor and ignore it. Legalizing marijuana, however, or refusing to accept compulsory medical care, would be a direct if not necessarily intentional challenge to the power of the central government. The feds could not afford to let either of these things slide. The danger of the precedent to the grip of the governing classes would be too great. A deadly serious confrontation would ensue.
What could, or would, the federal government do in response to defiance? Send the Marines to occupy Sacramento? Or the FBI to arrest Arnold and the legislature of California?
Or cut off California’s financial water? No bailout for the state’s tottering economy, no more fat subsidies to the universities, and so on?
The question is how ugly might things get. Washington may be able to make the states back down. It may not. The peril for the feds is that it might occur to the states that, while they get their money from Washington, Washington gets its money from the states. The central government depends absolutely on the states, whereas the states would get along swimmingly without the current central government.
How tired are Americans of a dysfunctional, oppressive Washington, unconcerned for its citizens, unaccountable and tending fast toward the totalitarian, that sprawls across the continent like an armed leech of malign intent? That is the question. The first time a populous states says “No,” if such a state ever does, we will get the answer. The United States has been free, prosperous, and reasonably well governed for a long time. It no longer is. Things go downward, within and without.
Nothing lasts, change comes, and things break. We shall see. Give it five years.
March 18, 2010
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well and A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be. His latest book is Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle. Visit his blog.
Copyright © 2010 Fred Reed


--
[W]hether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is
certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had,
or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.
- Lysander Spooner (1808–1887)

Government: The application of whatever force is required
to accomplish a particular objective.

Politicians Party with Leadership PACs

Watchdogs say getaways promote special interests' influence.


http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/slideshow?id=8666323

Grave Matters Attended Today in Congress

H.R.4214

Title: To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 45300Portola Avenue in Palm Desert, California, as the "Roy Wilson Post Office".
Sponsor: Rep Bono Mack, Mary [CA-45] (introduced 12/7/2009) Cosponsors (45)
Latest Major Action: 3/4/2010 House committee/subcommittee actions. Status: Ordered to be Reported by Unanimous Consent.

H.R.946
Title: To enhance citizen access to Government information and services by establishing that Government documents issued to the public must be written clearly, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Rep Braley, Bruce L. [IA-1] (introduced 2/10/2009) Cosponsors (10)
Related Bills: S.574
Latest Major Action: 3/11/2010 Placed on the Union Calendar, Calendar No. 248.
House Reports: 111-432

American Military Dad Uses Waterboarding to Dicipline His FOUR YEAR OLD Daughter

This is what happens when we as a country refuse to refute the use of waterboarding or any other kind of torture...for any reason.

Click on title above for article about the Waterboarding Dad. We just have to ask ourselves, what kind of a message does "being ok" with torture send to our children, or to the world? What does it say for us as human beings? I shutter to even think of it!

Thanks to GRISTOON for the loan of the "Bush Waterboarding Liberty" pic and for making it enlargeable and suitable for printing. (Click on pic to enlarge)