According to a statement issued by the Committee to Protect Journalists [CPJ] in New York, Allawi “was arrested at al-Karama border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank while leaving the Occupied Territories after a three-week vacation in his hometown near Nablus, Al-Jazeera reported. Allawi’s brother, Musaab, told Al-Jazeera that the journalist intended to cross into Jordan then travel back to Kabul. He had entered the West Bank at the same crossing without difficulty three weeks earlier … [T]he authorities provided no justification for holding the journalist, who carries a Jordanian passport, and said only that it was a ‘security-related arrest’, Al-Jazeera reported. On Thursday, Israeli authorities informed Allawi’s employer that his detention would be extended to eight days, but again failed to provide a reason. Majed Khader, program editor and head of assignments at Al-Jazeera, said Allawi told Salim Waqeem, a lawyer hired for him by Al-Jazeera, that he would be charged with transferring money and orders from Afghanistan to the West Bank if he refused to act as an informant…”

UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post reported on Tuesday 16 August here that “Israel has arrested the Al Jazeera’s Afghanistan bureau chief, a Palestinian, on charges of ties to Hamas. Samer Allawi, 46, was picked up August 10 on the border between the West Bank and Jordan, the Arabic-language satellite station said Tuesday. Allawi was detained August 10 after a three-week visit with family in Sabastia, a village adjacent to Nablus”.

The JPost story added that “An Israeli security official confirmed Allawi’s arrest and court appearance but gave no further details on the case. Walied Al-Omary, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said the military court accused Allawi of making contact with members of Hamas’s armed wing. Al Jazeera Arabic’s website posted footage of Allawi appearing in court in an Israel Prison Services uniform. ‘There is nothing in this investigation that I believe harms Israel, like it is being claimed, or has any relationship with my work in this entire region’, he told the judge”…

The CPJ statement continued: “Allawi will appear with Waqeem in front of an Israeli military judge at the Salim military checkpoint, south of Jenin, on Tuesday, Khader told CPJ. Khader also said that Allawi has not been charged with any crime thus far”.

This CPJ statement is published here on the Al-Jazeera English website, Samer Allawi “is currently in Israeli state custody in a prison camp at Petah Tikva detention centre”.

President Obama’s counterterrorism Adviser John Brenner said to journalists this afternoon/evening that President Obama and his advisers watched the American operation that killed Ben Laden “in real time”, as is shown in this photo just released by the White House [Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the only one showing any emotional reaction here]:

Some 24 hours after the deed, the UN Security Council is convening in consultations about a possible statement.   Matthew Lee of Inner City Press, at the front lines outside the UNSC chambers, has just tweeted that there are going to be changes in a draft text, and/as the  French Ambassador didn’t like the French version…

UPDATE:  Sometime around 3am Jerusalem time, the American Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, Tweeted (@AmbassadorRice): “This afternoon, the Security Council passed a statement welcoming the news that #UBL [Usama Bin Laden] will never again perpetrate acts of terrorism”.

This statement is not yet posted on the website of the US Mission to the UN, and it is difficult to find even on the official UN website.  It is buried down at the bottom of a UN News Centre report on remarks made to the media outside the UN Security Council.  The report says that “Ambassador Gérard Araud of France, which holds the rotating Security Council presidency this month, read out a presidential statement in which the 15-member panel welcomed the news that Mr. bin Laden ‘will never again be able to perpetrate such acts of terrorism’.   The statement urged all countries to remain vigilant and intensify their efforts to defeat terrorism, including by working together to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of terrorist attacks.  ‘The Security Council stresses… that terrorism will not be defeated by military force, law enforcement measures and intelligence operations alone, and can only be defeated by a sustained and comprehensive approach involving the active participation and collaboration of all States, and relevant international and regional organizations and civil society to address the conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism and to impede, impair, isolate and incapacitate the terrorist threat’.”

This Presidential Statement by the UNSC is contained in a UN press release which “also reaffirmed that terrorism could not and should not be associated with any religion, nationality, civilization or group”.

The press release also says that “States must ensure that any measures taken to combat terrorism comply with all their obligations under international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law”.

According to the UN press release, “The meeting began at 5:30 p.m. and ended at 5:35 p.m”. The full text is posted here.

Meanwhile, here, for the record, is what John Brenner said at the briefing in Washington on  Monday, especially about the burial at sea:

“MR. BRENNAN: I have been following bin Laden for 15 years, been after this guy, and I have the utmost confidence in the people, particularly at CIA, who have been tracking him. They were confident and their confidence was growing: This is different. This intelligence case is different. What we see in this compound is different than anything we’ve ever seen before. I was confident that we had the basis to take action. I also, though, had the confidence that the U.S. team that went in there has exceptional skill to do this very capably. So I was a supporter and I know a number of other people were supportive to do this. But the President had to look at all the different scenarios, all the different contingencies that are out there — what would have been the downsides if, in fact, it wasn’t bin Laden? What would have happened if a helicopter went down? So he decided that this is so important to the security of the American people that he was going to go forward with this.

Q Can you tell us more about the role that the U.S. — more of the role of how the U.S. is interacting with Pakistan and are we actively investigating what they knew and didn’t know about Osama bin Laden being there or not?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, a couple things. One, the President mentioned yesterday that he spoke to President Zardari, and a number of senior U.S. officials are in regular contact now with their Pakistani counterparts. We are continuing to engage with them — we’re engaging with them today — as we learn more about the compound and whatever type of support system bin Laden had. I would point out that we’ve had differences of view with the Pakistani government on counterterrorism cooperation, on areas of cooperation, and what we think they should and shouldn’t be doing. At the same time, I’ll say that Pakistan has been responsible for capturing and killing more terrorists inside of Pakistan than any country, and it’s by a wide margin. And there have been many, many brave Pakistani soldiers, security officials, as well as citizens, who have given their lives because of the terrorism scourge in that country. So although there are some differences of view with Pakistan, we believe that that partnership is critically important to breaking the back of al Qaeda and eventually prevailing over al Qaeda as well as associated terrorist groups.

Q John, can you tell us about the burial at sea? Where did it happen? When did it happen?

MR. BRENNAN: The disposal of — the burial of bin Laden’s remains was done in strict conformance with Islamist precepts and practices. It was prepared in accordance with the Islamic requirements. We early on made provisions for that type of burial, and we wanted to make sure that it was going to be done, again, in strict conformance. So it was taken care of in the appropriate way. I’m not going to go into details about sort of the where, but that burial has taken place. It took place earlier today our time.

Q And why?

Q When was that decision made?

MR. BRENNAN: I’m sorry?

Q When was that decision made that he would be buried at sea if killed?

Q Can you explain why –

MR. CARNEY: One at a time.

Q Was it thought through years ago? Was this part of the plan all along?

MR. BRENNAN: The COAs — the course of action and the subsequent decisions that would have to be made have been developed over the course of the last several months. Senior officials, and there was a working group that was working this on a regular basis, if not a daily basis, over the last several weeks, looking at every decision and based on what type of scenario would unfold, what actions and decisions would be made. It was looked at from the standpoint of if we captured him, what will we do with him? Where would he go? If he was killed, what will we do with him, and where would he go? And it was determined that it was in the best interests of all involved that this burial take place, again, according to Islamic requirements, at sea.

Q Why at sea?

Q Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?

MR. BRENNAN: It was determined that that — there is the requirement in Islamic law that an individual be buried within 24 hours. Went inside of Pakistan, carried out the operation, he was killed, he was removed from Pakistan. There were certain steps that had to be taken because of the nature of the operation, and we wanted to make sure we were able to do that in the time period allotted for it. Going to another country, making those arrangements, requirements, would have exceeded that time period, in our view. And so, therefore, we thought that the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.

Q John, did you consult a Muslim expert on that?

MR. BRENNAN: We consulted the appropriate specialists and experts, and there was unanimity that this would be the best way to handle that.

Q And last question. Do you know if detainees at Gitmo have been informed of what has happened to –

MR. BRENNAN: I do not know.

Q There are reports that he was wrapped in a weighted white sheet. How secure is that? Are you confident the body is not going to –

MR. BRENNAN: Burials at sea take place on a regular basis. The U.S. military has the ability to ensure that that burial is done in a manner that is, again, consistent with Islamic law, as well as consistent with what the requirements are for a burial at sea. And so that burial was done appropriately.

Q And so today lawmakers are urging — possibly reconsidering or reevaluating aid to Pakistan, maybe attaching strings to military aid there. Was the White House –

MR. BRENNAN: I think people are raising a number of questions, and understandably so. Again, we’re in just the first day after the operation, and he was found in Abbottabad outside of Islamabad. I’m sure a number of people have questions about whether or not there was some type of support that was provided by the Pakistani government. So I think people are raising these questions and how we’re going to have to deal with them.

Q Is there a visual recording of this burial?

MR. CARNEY: We’ve got to get other people a chance here. Mara.

Q Just a quick question about the burial and then something else. Was there an imam there? Was there a religious –

MR. BRENNAN: It was done appropriately with the appropriate people there.

Q Okay. And a question — I don’t know if this is for you or for Jay. The President is going to speak to the bipartisan leadership tonight at this dinner. What is he going to say about this that’s different than what he said before and that’s particularly geared to them? Can you just give us a preview?

MR. BRENNAN: Well, you’re going to have another 20 hours of information that has been acquired since what he said to the nation last night. I think what he’s going to try to do is to give the congressional visitors here an update on that. Last night, we didn’t have some of the analysis that was done. Now, we can say with 99.9 percent confidence that this was bin Laden. So it’s those types of things, as well as to explain to the Congress, in many respects, some of the unique features of this mission, which were the extreme compartmentation of it; how it was kept so closely held within our government; why it was done in a unilateral fashion — and so things along those lines.

Q There’s been some reporting that the burial — that the U.S. offered the body to the Saudis for a burial, but they declined. Is that true?

MR. BRENNAN: We, after we had confidence that it was bin Laden and that he was dead, we took the steps that we had agreed to in the interagency that were necessary to ensure that that burial entity was the most appropriate thing to do. And so we touched base with the right people. I’m not going to go into any details about who we might have consulted with in the aftermath of his death and before his burial” …

Can we go back to life the way it was before?

Because, for sure, there’s no way to ask any questions about this.

[Though, there are probably videos that will be shown later...]

U.S. President Obama said it was a “targetted operation”… which “took care to avoid civilian casualties”.

After 9/11, our time of grief, Americans came together, Obama said. “We were also united in our resolve to protect our nation and to bring those who committed this vicious attack to justice. We quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, an organization headed by Osama Bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe. So, we went to war against Al-Qaeda to protect our citizens, our friends and our allies … In Afghanistan, we removed the Taliban government which had given Bin Ladan and Al-Qaeda safe haven and support, and around the globe, we worked to capture or kill scores of Al-Qaeda terrorists, including several who were a part of the 9/11 plot”, he said. “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of Osama Bin Laden the top priority in our war against al-Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle or defeat his network”…

Obama never once said the word “terrorist” or “terror” [this was one of the significant style changes in his administration]. No, this is a war against Al-Qaeda, Obama said, several times.

“There is no doubt that Al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us”, Obama added, so the U.S. “must be vigilant, at home and abroad”…

The U.S. then issued a worldwide travel alert and advisory to all U.S. citizens.

A warden message received on Monday afternoon from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem says: “Given the uncertainty and volatility of the current situation, U.S. citizens in areas where recent events could cause anti-American violence are strongly urged to limit their travel outside of their homes and hotels and avoid mass gatherings and demonstrations … We urge U.S. citizens to keep in regular contact with family and friends”.

In his announcement, Obama also said that Bin Laden’s “demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity … justice has been done”.

Osama Bin Laden has been killed, somehow, in a “showdown with U.S. forces” in a luxurious villa in a heavily-fortified compound in Pakistan — a country which insisted he was not there, and where U.S. forces have been operating for years, while supposedly searching for Osama Bin Laden and his amorphous Al-Qaeda Organization, which any misfit or rebel who wanted to antagonize could claim to be part of (whether true or not, claims were accepted, usually without question, if convenient).

The villa was reportedly in, or on the outskirts of, Abbotabad, about two hours north of Islamabad. [And, the villa was reportedly about 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy.]

According to a report in The Guardian, here, the villa was identified last August, the U.S. was certain in February that Bin Laden and family were there, and Obama gave the order to get him on 29 April.

The same report added that “It was a surgical operation, he said, carried out by a small team and lasted only 40 minutes … The US force ran into a problem with one of their helicopters which had to be abandoned, but only after being destroyed by explosives set by the American troops”.

Some Pakistani forces reportedly accompanied the U.S. soldiers.  Now, they say they’re not sure who fired the shot that actually killed Osama Bin Laden.  But, there can never be another autopsy, a forensic examination, because, the U.S. says, his body has been “buried at sea” — according to Muslim tradition (which is NOT to bury a dead person at sea, but in the earth).

This happened within a very few hours — at 0200 in Washington DC time — and that would be according to Muslim (and Jewish) tradition which prefers burial (in earth) within 24 hours. The military operation apparently started just after 8pm, and Obama made his announcement after 10:30 pm, the time it was supposed to take place …

The U.S. took charge ["custody", Obama said] of the body, and then said no country was willing to take the body for burial…

That’ll make it easy, they must have thought.

UPDATE: At a White House briefing after 9pm Monday night (Jerusalem time), with the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and John Brennan of the President’s National Security team, Brennan said that “we were able to monitor it [the operation] in real time”. He said the COAs [Course of Actions] were determined over the past couple of months: if he’s captured, what do we do with him? And, if he’s killed what do we do. Arrangements for the burial were ready. The appropriate people were there. A decision was taken that the burial in the way it was done was the appropriate thing to do. He would not say exactly where it happened. He said that there have been differences between the U.S. and Pakistan on counterterrorism policy, and that the Pakistani authorities were briefed immediately after the operation. They were appreciative of the fact that there were no Pakistani casualties”.

Brennan, a “counterterrorism” advisor, said that “we are talking to the Pakistanis” about the location where Bin Laden was found, but initially “they seemed as surprised as we were”…

Brennan said that Bin Laden did participate in the firefight when the U.S. raid occurred, but when asked specifically, Brennan said he didn’t know if Bin Laden got his hand on a weapon or fired any rounds.

Others died, too, including “the two al-Qaeda facilitators” [two brothers], one of his sons [Khaled], and “a woman being used as a hostage shield”… presumed to be one of Osama Bin Laden’s wives, Brennan later said, adding that he did not know how it was she was interposed in the line of fire in front of Bin Laden, including whether she put herself in that position herself.

It is not clear whether Bin Laden was buried alone, at sea, or with this wife, and his son…

But, in the best post-Second-World-War American tradition, the U.S. is leader of “the free world”, and no questions can be asked.  [Or, as happened on Monday evening, there will be a press conference with dozens of questions, and not too many full answers...]

There will be no trial.  Osama will not be water-boarded in Camp Guantanamo to extract “the facts” in a full investigation.  We will never know what really happened, and we will believe what suits us.

There is no body to show = no need to know:  just accept our word, we’re the “good guys”?

Just trust the leaders. Or, what’s wrong with you — get the hell out! Go… to Gaza!

On Twitter, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, tweeted (@husainhaqqani) just after 1:15 in the afternoon, Jerusalem time:
**”Official Pakistan statement being released in Islamabad on our US bringing Osama bin Laden to justice 14 minutes ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®”
**”Pak statement: In intelligence driven op, Osama Bin Ladin was killed in the surroundings of Abbotabad in the early hours of Mon morning”
**”Operation was conducted by US forces in accordance with declared US policy”
**”Earlier 2day, President Obama telephoned President Zardari on the successful US operation which resulted in killing of OBL”
**”Al-Qaeda had declared war on Pakistan. Scores of Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorist attacks resulted in deaths of 1000s of innocent Pakistanis”

.

This drama happened because of an unbridled article published in the current issue of The Rolling Stone magazine. Before calling McChrystal back to Washington for this resignation, Obama said that remarks made by the General and members of his staff and reported in the article, entitled “The Runaway General“, showed “poor judgment”.

Obama made the announcement in the White House Rose Garden with Vice President Joe Biden (one of the targets of McChrystal’s aides in the Rolling Stone article) standing just behind his right shoulder.

[See UPDATE below -- the spin reported in the NYTimes says: "The drama began on Monday afternoon, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was flying home from Illinois to Andrews Air Force Base, took an unsettling call from General McChrystal"...]

Obama then convened a meeting of his national security team on Afghanistan and Pakistan (minus McChrystal) in the White House Situation Room with the participation of a larger number of people who McChrystal and his aides had dissed in front of the Rolling Stone reporter, including Biden, National Security Adviser James Jones and, apparently by videoconference, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, and special envoy Richard C. Holbrooke.

McChrystal’s departure was urged by an earlier Washington Post article which reported, on Tuesday, that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told journalists:
(1) “General McChrystal has made an enormous mistake”
(2) “I think the magnitude and graveness of the mistake here are profound”
(3) “The purpose for calling him here is to see what in the world he was thinking”
(4) “I think anybody that reads that article understands . . . what an enormous mistake this was” … [and parents of soldiers] “need to know that the structure where they’re sending their children is one that is capable and mature enough in prosecuting a war”…

According to this WPost account, “ABC News’s Jake Tapper stopped him [Gibbs]. ‘Did I hear you correctly? So you’re questioning whether General McChrystal is capable and mature enough for this job he has?’ ‘You had my quote right’, Gibbs said”.

This WPost article was published yesterday –the day before Obama said “The conduct represented in the recently published article undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system“. And, this WPost article noted that “The insults from McChrystal and his men — packaged with vulgarities, a middle finger and drunken singing in a Paris bar — challenge not just Obama but the sacred concept of civilian control of the military“. It is published here.

And, web commentator Col. Pat Lang wrote on his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis (A Committee of Correspondence), today that “Active duty military people are free to express their opinions to their superiors. They are not and should not be free to use the press against the civilian government”.  This was posted here.  This was interpreted by other comments on Lang’s blog as illustrating how McChrystal had somehow defied “the sacred concept of civilian control of the military”…

But did the General use the press, or was it the other way around???

The “Runaway General” article in Rolling Stone that caused all this fallout reported, among other things, that “The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict” [sic] … “The general’s staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs … and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority” … “The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side” … “Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side” [sic] … This can all be read in full here.

Analyzing the journalistic side of the story, AP reported that “Some of the article’s most biting comments came from McChrystal aides who were granted anonymity in [Michael] Hasting’s piece. But Bates [the Rolling Stone editor] said McChrystal was present when many of the comments were made. ‘Even the quotes that he wasn’t in the room for clearly reflect his thinking and were clearly given with his blessing’, he said. The military leaders knew they were speaking to a working reporter, Bates said. ‘I had a tape recorder and notepad out the entire time’, Hastings told CNN on Tuesday, ‘so it was all very clear that it was on the record’. Hastings said most of the material he gathered from McChrystal and his team came within the first day or two of arriving in Paris, so it wasn’t as if he spent months building a relationship with them. The article describes a night out at an Irish pub, where much of McChrystal’s team got drunk. Rolling Stone’s fact checkers discussed the substance of some of the quotations with the sources before the article was printed, Bates said. But the magazine did not give any of them a chance to read the piece ahead of time or revise quotes, he said”.   This is published here.

*****************************

There was far worse material tucked into the middle of this Rolling Stone profile of McChrystal — two points in particular:

(1) That he had a big had in falsifying accounts to hide the friendly-fire killing in Afghanistan in 2004 of U.S. football star Pat Tillman, and

(2) That McChrystal had close supervisory responsibility at Camp Nama in Iraq in 2006, during a time when there was considerable detainee abuse and torture.

But McChrystal was neither reprimanded nor fired for those things.

And, the Rolling Stone article noted that “In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan”.   This is also posted here.

*****************************

Meanwhile, the real bottom line: a Yahoo! news story reported tonight that “As President Obama concluded his Rose Garden statement revealing that he had replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the top American commander in Afghanistan, a reporter shouted an impromptu question. “Can the war be won?” he yelled. The president didn’t answer” … This is posted here.

The Rolling Stone article said — before McChrystal was replaced (by General Petraeus, currently head of U.S. Central Command, and the man who brought us the surge in Iraq) — that “When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose”.   This can be found here.

*****************************

UPDATE The New York Times reported on Thursday that: “The drama began on Monday afternoon, when Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was flying home from Illinois to Andrews Air Force Base, took an unsettling call from General McChrystal … The phone connection was scratchy [n.b. - can you imagine, the former commander of American forces in Afghanistan + VP of the USA do not have good phone equipment connections?], and the conversation lasted barely two minutes. General McChrystal told the vice president there was an article coming out that he would not like. Baffled, Mr. Biden asked his staff to investigate, and when he landed, aides handed him the article. After digesting it back at his residence in Washington, Mr. Biden put in a call to Mr. Obama at 7:30 that evening. Hours earlier, the White House had itself gotten wind of the article, and a young press aide named Tommy Vietor distributed copies to all the top officials in Mr. Obama’s national security circle. The press secretary, Robert Gibbs, walked a copy of it to the president in the private quarters. After scanning the first few paragraphs — a sarcastic, profanity-laced description of General McChrystal’s disgust at having to dine with a French minister to brief him about the war — Mr. Obama had read enough, a senior administration official said. He ordered his political and national security aides to convene immediately in the Oval Office
… On Tuesday, while General McChrystal was making the 14-hour flight to Washington, the White House was involved in a whirl of meetings about his fate. Along with Mr. Gates, aides say, four other senior officials were influential: Vice President Biden; the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Adm. Mike Mullen; and Mr. [Rahm] Emanuel. Mr. Emanuel’s opinion and that of other advisers swung back and forth, a senior official said. Mr. Obama seemed inclined toward dismissing the general, but heard out the debate. By Tuesday night, officials said, they ended up hoping that the general would simply resign. Meanwhile, General McChrystal was busy placing calls to apologize to people who were belittled in the article. One of those he called was Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee … By the time he woke up Wednesday morning, President Obama had made up his mind … this is the highest profile sacking of his presidency. The time between Mr. Obama’s first reading of the Rolling Stone article and his decision to accept General McChrystal’s resignation [n.b. -- 36 hours] offers an insight into the president’s decision-making process under intense stress: He appears deliberative and open to debate, but in the end, is coldly decisive” … This NYTimes report is published here.

Dutch government collapses over Afghanistan mission: The Dutch coalition government collapsed Saturday over whether to extend the country’s military mission in Afghanistan, leaving uncertain the future of its 1,600 soldiers fighting there. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende announced that the second largest party in his three-party alliance is quitting … Balkenende made no mention of elections as he spoke to reporters after a 16-hour Cabinet meeting in The Hague that ended close to dawn. However, the resignation of the Labor Party — which has demanded the country stick to a scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan — would leave his government with an unworkable majority, and political analysts said early elections appeared inevitable … Dutch soldiers have been deployed since 2006 in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan on a two-year stint that was extended until next August. Labor demanded that Dutch troops leave Uruzgan as scheduled. Balkenende’s Christian Democratic Alliance wanted to keep a trimmed down military presence in the restive province, where 21 soldiers have been killed. ‘A plan was agreed to when our soldiers went to Afghanistan’, said Labor Party leader Wouter Bos. ‘Our partners in the government didn’t want to stick to that plan, and on the basis of their refusal we have decided to resign from this government’. NATO recently sent a letter to the government asking if it would consider staying longer — a move that the Western alliance normally would do only if it had a clear signal of agreement. ‘The future of the mission of our soldiers in Afghanistan will now be in the hands of the new Cabinet’, said Deputy Defense Minister Jack de Vries” … Opinion polls suggest the Afghan war is deeply unpopular”. The full report is here.

New Name for War in Iraq: “The Obama administration has decided to give the war in Iraq a new name — ‘Operation New Dawn’ — to reflect the reduced role U.S. troops will play in securing the country this year as troop levels fall, according to a memo from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates [to Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander for the region]. Since U.S. forces charged across the Kuwaiti border toward Baghdad in 2003, the war has been known as Operation Iraqi Freedom. The new name is scheduled to take effect in September, when U.S. troop levels are supposed to drop to about 50,000 … Such name changes are not unusual. The name of the 1991 Persian Gulf War changed as the mission changed, from Operation Desert Shield to Operation Desert Storm and then finally to Operation Southern Watch and Operation Northern Watch”. This report is published here

The Gates memo was first reported by ABC Television news, which posted it on its website — 17 Feb 2010 Request to change the name Operation Iraqi Freedom to Iraqi New Dawn: “… to take effect 1 Sept 2010 … Aligning the name change with the change of mission sends a strong signal that Operation IRAQI FREEDOM has ended and our forces are operating under a new mission. It also presents opportunities to synchronize strategic communication initiatives, reinforce our commitment to honor the Security Agreement, and recognize our evolving relationship with the Iraqi government”. The original memo is posted here.

The Guantanamo Naval Base Detention Facility was opened on 11 January 2002, to imprison suspects in George W. Bush’s War on Terror.

At the time that this War on Terror was declared, experts warned that it could be a long time before it could be declared over — a fact which could create multiple problems, including what to do with the detainees being held in various covert facilities around the world.

President Obama has ordered an end to the terminology (“War on Terror”), but it seems that the policies and practices die harder.

Sara Kuepfer Thakkar wrote in her ISN analysis that “The prison at Guantanamo Bay had become a symbol of American abuse of Muslims, a convenient recruiting tool for al-Qaida, and thus a real liability for a war that ultimately can only be won by securing the support of Muslims around the world …

The ISN analysis continued: “But the majority of detainees will likely remain in a legal limbo state indefinitely. The evidence for convicting them is too feeble; yet, they are deemed too dangerous to be released. The case of Guantanamo Bay is becoming another indication of how little has changed during the first year of the Obama administration. It gives weight to the argument that Obama has essentially adopted many of Bush’s counterterrorism policies, considering that Bush had already been taking steps to close Guantanamo and modified the system of military commissions during his second term. Meanwhile, new torture allegations at Guantanamo are surfacing. In a disturbing article published by Harper’s magazine on Monday, Scott Horton investigates three mysterious ‘suicides’ allegedly committed by Guantanamo inmates in June 2006. As Horton explains, the military’s narrative of the reported suicides is implausible and does not jibe with other evidence. Drawing on testimonies of officers who were on duty during the night of the three deaths, Horton concludes that the prisoners most likely suffocated during aggressive interrogation at a secret facility that involved stuffing rags in their throats. Not the deaths themselves, but their continued cover-up by the military and various US government agencies, implicate the Obama administration, which has refused to thoroughly investigate the 2006 alleged suicides and other alleged crimes committed inside US detention facilities. The system is broken. No talk of ‘change’ will ever rectify that. True change can only come about by first finding out what kind of abuses have happened inside terrorist detention facilities, and how they have been allowed to happen. The Obama administration needs to eliminate every loophole and secret directive that could be understood as a green light to engage in immoral and illegal practices. Anything less would not be true ‘change’, but simple tinkering with policies that have been wrong-headed from the beginning. Obama has not abolished the Bush-era system of military commissions, nor has he found a new answer to the problem of preventive detention. Meanwhile, the US continues to maintain unsupervised military detention facilities in Afghanistan (such as at Bagram Air Base) and elsewhere, where suspected terrorists are held beyond the reach of the US justice system. Considering their continued existence, new cases of prisoner abuse are just waiting to happen”… This analysis can be read in full here.

From a link in this analysis, it is possible to find the Obama executive order, entitled REVIEW AND DISPOSITION OF INDIVIDUALS DETAINED AT THE GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE AND CLOSURE OF DETENTION FACILITIES, which was signed on 22 January 2009 and published here.

The Obama Executive Order to close Guantanamo Bay Naval Base detention facilities says: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Guantánamo) and promptly to close detention facilities at Guantánamo, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice, I hereby order as follows:
…
Sec. 2. Findings.
(a) Over the past 7 years, approximately 800 individuals whom the Department of Defense has ever determined to be, or treated as, enemy combatants have been detained at Guantánamo. The Federal Government has moved more than 500 such detainees from Guantánamo, either by returning them to their home country or by releasing or transferring them to a third country. The Department of Defense has determined that a number of the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo are eligible for such transfer or release.

(b) Some individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have been there for more than 6 years, and most have been detained for at least 4 years. In view of the significant concerns raised by these detentions, both within the United States and internationally, prompt and appropriate disposition of the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo and closure of the facilities in which they are detained would further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice. Merely closing the facilities without promptly determining the appropriate disposition of the individuals detained would not adequately serve those interests. To the extent practicable, the prompt and appropriate disposition of the individuals detained at Guantánamo should precede the closure of the detention facilities at Guantánamo.

(c) The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. Most of those individuals have filed petitions for a writ of habeas corpus in Federal court challenging the lawfulness of their detention.

(d) It is in the interests of the United States that the executive branch undertake a prompt and thorough review of the factual and legal bases for the continued detention of all individuals currently held at Guantánamo, and of whether their continued detention is in the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and in the interests of justice. The unusual circumstances associated with detentions at Guantánamo require a comprehensive interagency review.
…
(f) Some individuals currently detained at Guantánamo may have committed offenses for which they should be prosecuted. It is in the interests of the United States to review whether and how any such individuals can and should be prosecuted.

(g) It is in the interests of the United States that the executive branch conduct a prompt and thorough review of the circumstances of the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo who have been charged with offenses before military commissions pursuant to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, Public Law 109-366, as well as of the military commission process more generally.

Sec. 3. Closure of Detention Facilities at Guantánamo.
The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than 1 year from the date of this order. If any individuals covered by this order remain in detention at Guantánamo at the time of closure of those detention facilities, they shall be returned to their home country, released, transferred to a third country, or transferred to another United States detention facility in a manner consistent with law and the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.
…
A review of the status of each individual currently detained at Guantánamo (Review) shall commence immediately”…
Again, this Executive Order signed by U.S. President Barack Obama a year ago is posted here.

The Washington Post published, yesterday, an article written by Peter Finn on this matter.

[Before getting into the substance, a point of contention: the use of the word "bemoaned" by the reporter, and by the Washington Post, in this paragraph: "Human rights advocates have bemoaned the administration's failure to fulfill President Obama's promise last January to close the Guantanamo Bay facility within a year as well as its reliance on indefinite detention, a mechanism devised during George W. Bush's administration that they deem unconstitutional". At the very least, characterizing the attention paid to this matter by human rights advocates as "bemoaning" the failures, is a value-laden editorial judgment which dismisses the rigor and importance of the monitoring efforts. This word should be changed to a more neutral and objective term.]

Now, this WPost article reports that “A Justice Department-led task force has concluded that nearly 50 of the 196 detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war, according to Obama administration officials … Human rights advocates have bemoaned the administration’s failure to fulfill President Obama’s promise last January to close the Guantanamo Bay facility within a year as well as its reliance on indefinite detention, a mechanism devised during George W. Bush’s administration that they deem unconstitutional. ‘There is no statutory regime in America that allows us to hold people without charge or trial indefinitely’, said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union … The task force has recommended that Guantanamo Bay detainees be divided into three main groups: about 35 who should be prosecuted in federal or military courts; at least 110 who can be released, either immediately or eventually; and the nearly 50 who must be detained without trial … In a May speech, Obama said detention policies ‘cannot be unbounded’ and promised to reshape standards. ‘We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified’, he said … Administration officials argue that detaining terrorism suspects under Congress’s authorization of the use of force against al-Qaeda and the Taliban is legal and that each detainee has the right to challenge his incarceration in habeas corpus proceedings in federal court … The group of at least 110 detainees cleared for release includes two categories. The task force deemed approximately 80 detainees, including about 30 Yemenis, eligible for immediate repatriation or resettlement in a third country. About 30 other Yemenis were placed in a category of their own, with their release contingent upon dramatically stabilized conditions in their home country, where the government has been battling a branch of al-Qaeda and fighting a civil war. Obama suspended the transfer of any Guantanamo Bay detainees to Yemen in the wake of an attempted Christmas Day airliner attack, a plot that officials said originated in Yemen. Effectively, all Yemenis now held at Guantanamo have little prospect of being released anytime soon.
‘The task force recommendations are based on all of the known information about each detainee, but there are variables that could change a detainee’s status, such as being ordered released by the courts or a changed security situation in a proposed transfer state’, an administration official said. Moving a significant number of detainees to the United States remains key to the administration’s now-delayed plan to empty the military facility. The federal government plans to acquire a state prison in Thomson, Ill., to house Guantanamo Bay detainees, but the plan faces major hurdles. Congress has barred the transfer of the detainees to the United States except for prosecution. And a coalition of Republicans opposed to any transfers and some Democrats critical of detention without trial could derail the possibility of using the Thomson facility for anything other than military commissions, according to congressional staffers … Some European officials, who would like to see Guantanamo Bay closed without instituting indefinite detention, are advocating the creation of an internationally funded rehabilitation center for terrorism suspects in Yemen and possibly Afghanistan. They say such a facility would gradually allow the transfer of all detainees from those countries back to their homelands, according to two sources familiar with the plan. A majority of the detainees slated for prolonged detention are either Yemeni or Afghan, and European officials think the others could eventually be resettled under close supervision. European officials hope to raise the issue at an international conference in London next week that will address the situations in Yemen and Afghanistan … Since Obama took office, 44 Guatanamo Bay detainees have been repatriated or resettled in third countries, including 11 in Europe. The administration anticipates that about 20 detainees can be repatriated by this summer, and it has received firm commitments from countries willing to settle an additional 25 detainees who have been cleared for release, officials said” … This article is published by the WPost here.

As CNN reported, there were gasps in the room when the head of the Nobel prize committee made the announcement this morning.

The head of the Nobel prize committee explained that Obama won for his extraordinary efforts to improve the international climate and strengthen international diplomacy within the framework of international institutions (e.g., the United Nations).

(He added in a later interview on CNN that “of course, other people have to respond positively” – then he indicated that Obama’s distinction is due to his having given diplomacy a central position.)

The announcement also noted that Obama has revived global hopes of creating a world without nuclear weapons.

The message from the Nobel Prize Committee seems to be: keep up the good work.

It seems to be a form of Positive Reinforcement Therapy, in which rewards are given for good behavior (instead of punishments for being bad…)

The results are not yet in on Obama’s involvement in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

It was good that he has ordered an end to talking about the “war against terror”, and to portraying all Muslims as the enemy.

But is Obama just getting the Nobel Peace Prize for who he is, rather than what he has done?

Obama’s desire to engage in dialog with Iran deserves credit. Mohamed ElBaradei, outgoing head of IAEA, said that “We wasted 6 years on the Iranian issue — we have mismanaged it …I can’t see any other way of handling it other than Iran and the US sitting at the table across from each other …”

Then again, what about the crisis in Afghanistan, where Obama continues to prosecute the war against the nebulous Al-Qaeda group, and many civilians seem to be paying the price. Obama may even be considering sending more troops to Afghanistan, rather than to drawn down forces and withdraw.

My friend and colleague Robert James Parsons, journalist at the UN Office in Geneva, wrote in an email message this morning: “Was Obama three days in office, or merely two, when he signed the order for the bombing of Pakistan? Here at the Geneva Office of the United Nations, on Tuesday and Friday mornings, at the general press briefing, we are updated twice weekly on the plight of the 2.7 MILLION people displaced by the mindless bombing of their homeland, updated as well on a seemingly endless list of schools, clinics, dispensaries etc. destroyed. This is as much a war of aggression against a sovereign country as was the launching of the war against Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq … With regard to Afghanistan, Secretary of State told U.N. Secretary-General that the United States had ‘irrefutable’ evidence proving that the Taliban regime was directly behind the September 11 attacks and that this evidence would shortly be presented to the Security Council, to justify this ‘war of self-defence’. In the meantime, lest precious time be lost, the bombing set up during the summer, proceeded apace. Eight years later to the day, the U.N. Security Council is still waiting for this evidence”.

And Obama continues to talk about “destroying the Al-Qaeda organization”.

There has to be a better way to do it.

To really deserve this peace prize, Obama should wind down these wars … and face up to the issue of torture, and the detention facilities in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq where possibly innocent detainees have been held in an unconsionable legal limbo for years.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore (jointly with the UN Panel on Climate Change), both won the Nobel Peace Prize, but after leaving office.

It was later reported by Haaretz, combining reports from news agencies, that “Obama’s press secretary woke him with the news before dawn and the president felt ‘humbled’ by the award, a senior administration official said. When told in an email from Reuters that many people around the world were stunned by the announcement, Obama’s senior adviser, David Axelrod, responded: ‘As are we’.”

Once fully awake and out of bed, Obama said in front of the cameras later that “I will accept this award as a call to action”

Then, I can’t help recalling the recent words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who wrote recently that “I have no problem with any of the substantive criticism of President Obama from the right or left. But something very dangerous is happening. Criticism from the far right has begun tipping over into delegitimation and creating the same kind of climate here that existed in Israel on the eve of the Rabin assassination. What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, ‘Should Obama be killed?’ The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating. I hope they put the jerk in jail and throw away the key because this is exactly what was being done to Rabin … And Mr. Obama is now having his legitimacy attacked by a concerted campaign from the right fringe. They are using everything from smears that he is a closet ‘socialist’ to calling him a ‘liar’ in the middle of a joint session of Congress to fabricating doubts about his birth in America and whether he is even a citizen. And these attacks are not just coming from the fringe. Now they come from Lou Dobbs on CNN and from members of the House of Representatives. Again, hack away at the man’s policies and even his character all you want. I know politics is a tough business. But if we destroy the legitimacy of another president to lead or to pull the country together for what most Americans want most right now — nation-building at home — we are in serious trouble … We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable”. This Thomas Friedman article can be read in full here.

During the presidential elections campaign before Obama was elected, there was something similar — predictions were wrongly made that because some people could never accept a president like him, he would be assassinated within six months. That, thankfully, proved wrong. But these are indeed stupid, ugly, and irresponsible speculations.

But what I wonder is: will winning the Nobel Peace Prize do anything to stop this, or will it only make it worse?

But, what he provided in the first year of his detention (2003-2004) was untrue: ” ‘KSM, an accomplished resistor, provided only a few intelligence reports prior to the use of the waterboard, and analysis of that information revealed that much of it was outdated, inaccurate or incomplete’, according to newly unclassified portions of a 2004 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general released Monday by the Justice Department.   The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.   Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again … Mohammed, in statements to the International Committee of the Red Cross, said some of the information he provided was untrue.  ‘During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time’, he said … After his capture, Mohammed first told his captors what he calculated they already knew.  ‘KSM almost immediately following his capture in March 2003 elaborated on his plan to crash commercial airlines into Heathrow airport’, according to a document released by the CIA on Monday that summarizes the intelligence provided by Mohammed. The agency thinks he assumed that Ramzi Binalshibh, a Sept. 11 conspirator captured in September 2002, had already divulged the plan”.

So, what reason is there to think that what he told CIA and other personnel in 2005-2006 about Al-Qaeda is true?

Here is the reasoning given in the Washington Post story:  “One former U.S. official with detailed knowledge of how the interrogations were carried out said Mohammed, like several other detainees, seemed to have decided that it was okay to stop resisting after he had endured a certain amount of pressure. ‘Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more of them’, said the former official, who requested anonymity because the events are still classified.  ‘After that point, they became compliant. Obviously, there was also an interest in being able to later say, “I was tortured into cooperating” ‘.’”

Or, he was tortured into lying … and inventing and making up stories …

We previously discussed the reports that KSM and other alleged High Value Detainees implicated each other after being tortured, here and here.

The Washington Post report adds that “One former agency official recalled that Mohammed was once asked to write a summary of his knowledge about al-Qaeda’s efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction. The terrorist group had explored buying either an intact nuclear weapon or key components such as enriched uranium, although there is no evidence of significant progress on that front. ‘He wrote us an essay’ on al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions, the official said. ‘Not all of it was accurate, but it was quite extensive’. Mohammed was an unparalleled source in deciphering al-Qaeda’s strategic doctrine, key operatives and likely targets, the summary said, including describing in ‘considerable detail the traits and profiles’ that al-Qaeda sought in Western operatives and how the terrorist organization might conduct surveillance in the United States. Mohammed was moved to the U.S. military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006, and his loquaciousness is now largely confined to occasional appearances before a military commission. Back in his 86-square-foot cell at the secret Camp 7 at Guantanamo, he spends most of his waking hours in prayer, according to a source familiar with his confinement who spoke on the condition of anonymity”.

The Washington Post report can be read in full here .

It specifies that “CIA operatives used severe sleep deprivation tactics against a terror detainee in late 2007, keeping him awake for six straight days with permission from government lawyers”.

According to the AP story, “The first episode occurred in August 2007, when interrogators were given permission from the Office of Legal Counsel to keep an unidentified detainee awake for five days, a U.S. government official confirmed … According to the documents, the sleep-deprived prisoner was kept awake by being forced to stand with his arms chained above heart level. He wore diapers, allowing interrogators to keep him chained continuously without bathroom breaks. [[One has to ask who, if anyone, changed his diapers? Wearing soiled diapers for even one full causes serious skin burns from the ammonia in urine ...]] The second incident occurred in November 2007. After again asking permission from Justice lawyers to keep a detainee awake an extra day, interrogators pressed to extend the treatment for another 24 hours, depriving the prisoner of sleep for six straight days. It is unclear from the documents whether the two incidents involved the same detainee. CIA spokesman George Little would not provide the identity of the prisoner referred to in the document … According to the documents, the prisoner was monitored by closed-circuit television. If he started to fall asleep, the chains jerking on his arms would wake him up. If a prisoner’s leg swelled — a condition known as edema, which can cause blood clots and stroke — interrogators could chain him to a low, unbalanced stool or on the floor with arms outstretched“.

The AP report added that “Sleep deprivation beyond 48 hours is known to produce hallucinations. It can reduce resistance to pain, and it makes people suggestible. The State Department regularly lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture in its annual report on human rights abuses … Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, said her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture. ‘It’s a primary method that is used around the world because it is effective in breaking people. It is effective because it induces severe harm’, she said. ‘It causes people to feel absolutely crazy’. She said that in many cases there are lingering effects. ‘My experience in working with survivors, they are still struggling with questions whether they are normal, whether they should have acted as they did when they talked under this kind of pressure’, she said”.

The AP story says that this occurred more than a year “after the Bush Administration abandoned its harshest interrogation methods”, and despite a ruling from the Supreme Court that the prisoners were entitled to the protetctions of the Geneva Conventions”. It added that “even as the Bush administration was scaling back its use of severe interrogation techniques, the CIA was still pushing the boundaries of what the administration’s own legal counsel considered acceptable treatment”.

Now, AP says, “The Obama administration has since rescinded authority for any of the severe methods. Under the rules of the U.S. Army Field Manual, which now governs all interrogations, prisoners must be allowed to sleep at least four hours during every 24-hour period”. This can be read in full here.

It emerged last week that in July 2002, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had authorized waterboarding of al-Zubayda, a Palestinian-born suspected member of al-Qayda captured in Pakistan in March 2002 — who then may have implicated “the mastermind of 9/11″ under torture, while recalling something he had watched on Al-Jazeera television.

Then-Vice President Dick Cheney was also apparently involved, while “then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell were largely left out of the decision-making process” according to a report from Washington by the McClatchy newspaper group that looked into a “narrative” to explain its memos (dated 2002-2005) to the CIA authorizing such techniques, and posted Wednesday on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Web site.

The McClatchy report stated that “Cheney couldn’t be reached for comment. Rice, through an aide, declined to comment”. The report can be reached in full here.

According to a report from the AP late on Saturday, “After Rice provided the critical authorization, formal legal approval for Zubayda’s waterboarding came a few days later in an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department memo … Days after that, the waterboarding of Abu Zubayda began. He would undergo the technique, now deemed torture by Attorney General Eric Holder, 83 times that month“.

The Pentagon has photos of the interrogation sessions in which tactics that appear to be torture were used. The Washington Post reported that some of the photos will apparently be released by the end of May (see below for more).

Another story in the Washington Post reported separately that an attachment to a memo sent to the CIA described “the application of extreme duress as ‘torture’ in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon’s chief lawyer and warned that it would produce ‘unreliable information’. It said that “The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel”. The memo and its attachment (titled “Operational Issues Pertaining to the Use of Physical/Psychological Coercion in Interrogation”) was written by the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), and the Washington Post said it had obtained the full attachment, after parts of the attachment had been quoted in a Senate report on harsh interrogation released this week. The newspaper said that “JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning. The cautionary attachment was forwarded to the Pentagon’s Office of the General Counsel as the administration finalized the legal underpinnings of a CIA interrogation program that would sanction the use of 10 forms of coercion, including waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning”.

Despite this warning, the Washington Post Story says that the Aug. 1 memo written to the CIA afterwards by the Office of Legal Affairs (OLA), concerning the interrogation of Abu Zubaida, draws from the JPRA’s memo on psychological effects to conclude that while waterboarding constituted ‘a threat of imminent death’, it did not cause ‘prolonged mental harm’. Therefore, the Aug. 1 memo concluded, waterboarding “would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.” This WPost story can be read in full here

The Associated Press story mentioned earlier (above) says that the revelations have “ignited a backstage battle between former Bush officials over a crucial May 2002 meeting that paved the way for use of waterboarding on a suspected al-Qaida leader. The fracas over who was responsible for authorizing use of the simulated drowning tactic and other harsh techniques on captured suspect Abu Zubayda is raising new questions about that 2002 decision and follow-up moves that allowed the CIA to use the now-banned techniques. Some former Bush officials argue that they were not properly warned by CIA officials about the potential perils of the severe methods, while others insist there were explicit cautions. A former senior Bush administration official familiar with the deliberations told The Associated Press that during a meeting of Bush senior officials in May 2002, then-CIA director George Tenet, backed by agency lawyers and CIA officers, reassured former NSC director Condoleezza Rice, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and others that waterboarding and other harsh techniques were both safe and necessary. The former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s continuing sensitivity, said Tenet and other CIA officials did not mention the techniques’ potential legal and physical dangers.
Tenet was not available for comment Saturday. Rice and other former Bush administration principals involved in or aware of the May 2002 meeting have not responded to efforts by the AP to obtain comment in recent days. Rice told the Senate Armed Services Committee last fall that she and other senior Bush officials were told that the harsh interrogation methods would not cause significant psychological or physical harm. But a former senior intelligence official also aware of the internal 2002 discussions disputed that account. He dismissed the charge that Tenet had presented the harsh methods to the NSC as the only possible option. The intelligence official, who also spoke with anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said the CIA had insisted on having the program legally reviewed to be sure it comported both with U.S. law and policy. The intelligence official noted that senior policymakers and lawyers were responsible for fully evaluating the potential impacts of the CIA proposal. A Senate Armed Service Committee report released last week said that along with Tenet, Rice and Ashcroft, others attending the critical May 2002 session were then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former NSC deputy adviser Stephen Hadley and John Bellinger, then-legal adviser to the NSC”.

The AP story provides this new information: “Almost simultaneously to the NSC’s decision to approve harsh interrogations, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency had sent a memo to the Pentagon’s general counsel’s office outlining the methods that would come to be used in CIA interrogations, including waterboarding, slamming detainees into walls, stress positions, and dousing detainees with cold water. The memo said the methods ‘may be very effective in inducing learned helplessness and ‘breaking’ detainees’ ‘will to resist’.’ But in a separate attachment, the training officials told Pentagon lawyers that harsh physical techniques could backfire by making prisoners more resistant. They also said that if the use physical methods on prisoners were discovered, the public and political backlash would be ‘intolerable’. The attachments were included in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s release of documents and in a fuller copy obtained Saturday by the AP. They also warned that harsh techniques cast into doubt the reliability of the information gleaned during the interrogation. ‘A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers in order to get the pain to stop’, the training officials said in their memo. The attachment also discussed the fact that using extreme physical and psychological coercion — with the word extreme underlined to differentiate from the methods used in survival training — would constitute torture. It is unclear whether Rice, Tenet or others on the NSC or at the CIA saw that memo and its warnings against using extreme methods”.

The AP story added that “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee in September 2002, said she was not informed back then that the CIA methods had been used on prisoners. But former CIA Director Porter Goss disputed that Saturday in an opinion piece in the Washington Post. Goss was at the time chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and received the same briefings. Goss wrote he was ‘slack-jawed to read that members claim to have not understood that the techniques on which they were briefed were to actually be employed; or that specific techniques such as ‘waterboarding’ were never mentioned’.” This AP report can be read in full here .

Meanwhile, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapportur against Torture, Manfred Nowak of Poland who is a law profesor in Austria, has said that “The U.S. is obligated by a United Nations convention to prosecute Bush administration lawyers who allegedly drafted policies that approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics against terrorism suspects … [Nowak said that ] Washington is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to prosecute U.S. Justice Department officials who wrote memos that defined torture in the narrowest way in order to justify and legitimize it, and who assured CIA officials that their use of questionable tactics was legal. ‘That’s exactly what I call complicity or participation’ to torture as defined by the convention, Nowak said at a news conference [in Vienna on Friday]. ‘At that time, every reasonable person would know that waterboarding, for instance, is torture’. Nowak and other experts said that a failure to investigate and prosecute when there was evidence of torture left those responsible vulnerable to prosecutorial action abroad. ‘If it should turn out … that the (U.S.) government and its authorities are not willing to prosecute those where we have enough evidence that they instigated or committed torture, then there is also an obligation on all other 145 states’ party to the convention to exercise universal jurisdiction, Nowak said. That means countries would have an obligation to arrest the individuals in question if they were on their soil and extradite them to the U.S. if Washington gave clear assurances they would bring them to justice. In the absence of such assurances, it would fall upon the respective country to take the individuals to court … Nowak also said any probe of questionable CIA interrogation tactics must be independent and have thorough investigative powers. This AP report can be read in full here.

According to this AP report, Nowak said it was up to courts and prosecutors “to prove that the memos were written with the intention to incite torture”.

The Washington Post reported that photographs of interrogation sessions “to be released by May 28, include 21 images depicting detainee abuse in facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan other than the Abu Ghraib prison, as well as 23 other detainee abuse photos, according to the American Civil Liberties Union and a letter from the Justice Department sent to a federal court in New York yesterday. In addition, the Justice Department letter said ‘the government is also processing for release a substantial number of other images’ contained in dozens of Army Criminal Investigation Division reports on the abuse. ‘This shows that the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not aberrational but was systemic and widespread’, said Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney involved with the 2004 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that led to the promise to release the photographs. ‘This will underscore calls for accountability for that abuse’. Singh called for an independent investigation into torture and prisoner abuse and said it should be followed, if warranted, by criminal prosecutions … A Pentagon official disputed Singh’s remarks that torture was systemic. ‘What it demonstrates is that when we find credible allegations of abuse, we investigate them’, said a senior defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter … [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates voiced concern that the release of photos, along with disclosures of interrogation memos and other materials, could cause unrest and create further problems for U.S. troops serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere”.
This Washington Post article can be read in full here.

And, another Washington Post article says that Jay S. Bybee, who, while at the Justice Department OLS in 2002 signed the 1 August OLA memo which “offered a helpfully narrow definition of torture to the CIA” (the WPost says these “legal justifications for harsh interrogations … have become known as the ‘torture memos’), is now a sitting federal judge on the Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit (apparently in Las Vegas, Nevada). He also reportedly teaches occasionally at the University of Nevada. According to the WPost article, two of Bybee’s staff lawyers who were at a dinner he hosted last May at a public restaurant said that Bybee suggested he could not feel proud of this previous legal work. The article also reported that “his misgivings appeared evident to some in his immediate circle”, and added that a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke anonymously, said “I’ve heard him express regret at the contents of the memo … I’ve heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I’ve heard him express regret at the lack of context — of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety … On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him”.

This WPost story added that “Democratic lawmakers, human rights groups and others have called for Congress to impeach Bybee, complaining that his 2003 Senate confirmation came more than a year before his role in the memos was known. ‘If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed’, said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), adding that ‘the decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign’. Democrats blocked the nomination of former Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II to the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit because of his role in supporting aggressive interrogations of military detainees. Haynes withdrew his nomination in 2007″.

The story also reported that “Congress, the American Bar Association and the United Nations are [all] mull[ing] inquiries”. And it said that “Bybee’s friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington … was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, ‘Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?’,” according to one of his friends. This WPost article can be read in full here.

I wonder how Condi feels…