“Secret” Cobalt location must be in Kabul, Afghanistan, one of numerous CIA black sites for torture …

In November 2002, a detainee whose name we may never know was doused with water, shackled naked to the floor, and left overnight in a frigid cell in a CIA black site known as “The Salt Pit” on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. He died of hypothermia. The supervisor of the facility, an agent with no experience as an interrogator or a jailer, ordered him buried in an unmarked grave.

From The Torture Report – Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes.

More and More Questions
Submitted by Larry Siems on Thu, 11/18/2010 - 17:28

I was in Geneva when word leaked out that George Bush’s memoir contained a passage in which he said, “Damn right!” he’d approved the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–who, as we know, waswaterboarded 183 times at the CIA’s secret prison in Poland in the spring of 2003. I was there, like a delegation from the ACLU and representatives from scores of other U.S. and international NGOs, to watch the world question the United States about its human rights record as part of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review process, where the U.S. delegation faced many questions like this one, from Russia:

What administrative and legislative steps are taken by the United States to hold accountable persons (including medical personnel) who had tortured detainees in US secret prisons as well as detention centers in Bagram (Afghanistan) and Guantanamo Bay? What is being done to provide effective remedies to civilian victims of the “war on terror,” including the detainees of the secret prisons and centers in Guantanamo and Bagram?

During the three-hour UPR session, State Department legal advisor Harold Koh assured the assembled nations that the United States was committed to abiding by the ban on torture and inhumane treatment–which explicitly requires nations to carry out criminal investigations of torture allegations, prosecute perpetrators, and make reparations to victims– and stated flatly, “Nothwitstanding recent public allegations, to our knowledge, all credible allegations of detainee abuse by United States forces have been thoroughly investigated and appropriate corrective action has been taken.”

So would the U.S. consider prosecuting those who ordered and approved waterboarding?

More below the fold …

…
So would the U.S. consider prosecuting those who ordered and approved waterboarding? Again Koh pointed to Durham ‘s investigation, saying specifically “the Attorney General has referred this very issue” to the Special Prosecutor. “Those investigations are ongoing. The question is not whether they would consider it; those discussions are going on right now.”

As we saw in Chapter 3, Durham was originally appointed by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey in January 2008 to investigate the CIA’s destruction of the Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri interrogation tapes [pdf]. Incoming Attorney General Eric Holder made no move to expand the scope of Durham ‘s investigation until August 24, 2009, the same day the May 2004 report of the CIA’s Inspector General [pdf] was released. At that time, Holder announced he had asked Durham to open “a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.”

While the scope of this investigation has not been publicly defined, press reports have consistently suggested that it is focused on the death of a detainee at the CIA’s “Salt Pit” facility in Afghanistan, the “gun and drill incident” involving al-Nashiri in Poland, and a handful of other incidents in which CIA agents and contractors had used techniques other than those approved in the torture memos. “I have made clear…that the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees,” Holder has insisted.

Now, in Geneva , Koh was offering the international media the scintillating suggestion that Durham was authorized to look beyond the so-called “improvised techniques” to the use of the enhanced interrogation techniques themselves, waterboarding in particular, which the Obama administration acknowledges is torture.

That was on Friday, November 5, in Geneva . The following Monday, NBC ran Matt Lauer’s interview with George Bush, where the former president insisted that waterboarding was legal “because the lawyer said it was legal.” I was in London then, on my way back to New York . Bush’s claims continued to ricochet around the world: Tuesday morning, the British newspapers were dominated by headlines declaring that U.K. government and intelligence officials disputed Bush’s claim, made in his memoir, that waterboading KSM had foiled a plot to bomb Heathrow airport–a plot, indeed, that British intelligence uncovered a month before KSM’s arrest.

CIA cited Israeli Supreme Court rulings to justify torture, Senate report says | Haaretz |

In a draft memorandum prepared by the CIA’s Office of General Counsel, the “Israeli example” was cited as a possible justification that “torture was necessary to prevent imminent, significant, physical harm to persons, where there is no other available means to prevent the harm.”

The “Israeli example” refers to the conclusions of the Landau Commission in 1987 and subsequent Supreme Court rulings that forbid Israel’s security services from using torture in interrogation of terror suspects, but allows the use of “moderate physical pressure” in cases which are classified as a “ticking bomb,” when there is an urgent need to obtain information which could prevent an imminent terror attack.

Over the years, Israeli human rights organizations led by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel have petitioned the Supreme Court a number of times, and succeeded in outlawing various interrogation methods which the Shin Bet continued to use.

Israel admits torture | BBC News – Feb. 2000 |