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NEWS DIGEST 2006.08.10 - 2006.09.30
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Wall Street Journal --

September 27, 2006

THE THREAT TO JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE

By Sandra Day O'connor

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115931733674775033.html

In November, South Dakotans will vote on a state constitutional amendment being
advocated by a national group called "JAIL 4 Judges." If the amendment passes,
it would eliminate judicial immunity, and enable a special grand jury to censure
judges for their official legal determinations. Although the amendment's
supporters claim they seek a "judicial accountability initiative law" (JAIL),
they aspire to something far more sinister -- judicial intimidation. Indeed, the
national Web site of JAIL 4 Judges boasts with striking candor that the
organization "has that intimidation factor flowing through the judicial system."

It is tempting to dismiss this proposed amendment as merely an isolated bout of
anti-judge angst. But while the JAIL 4 Judges initiative is unusually venomous,
it is far from alone in expressing skepticism of the judiciary. In addition to
South Dakota, this election cycle has witnessed efforts in at least three other
states that are designed to rein in judges who have supposedly "run amok."

Not to be completely outdone, Congress also has engaged in recent efforts to
police the judiciary. Seeking to constrain the legal sources that are available
to judges, some members of Congress have advocated measures that would forbid
judges from citing foreign law when they are interpreting the Constitution. In
addition, bills have been introduced in both houses of Congress supporting the
creation of an inspector general to investigate and monitor the federal bench.
Finally, the House of Representatives passed legislation over the summer that
would prohibit the Supreme Court from considering whether the Pledge of
Allegiance's inclusion of the words "under God" violates the First Amendment.

* * *

Directing anger toward judges enjoys a long -- if not exactly venerable --
tradition in our nation. President Thomas Jefferson, for instance, was a
particularly spirited antagonist of judges appointed by the Federalists.
Moreover, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought to increase the number of
Supreme Court justices because the court invalidated several pieces of New Deal
legislation. And I can distinctly remember seeing lawns and highways across the
country that featured signs demanding the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl
Warren.

But while scorn for certain judges is not an altogether new phenomenon, the
breadth and intensity of rage currently being leveled at the judiciary may be
unmatched in American history. The ubiquitous "activist judges" who "legislate
from the bench" have become central villains on today's domestic political
landscape. Elected officials routinely score cheap points by railing against the
"elitist judges," who are purported to be of touch with ordinary citizens and
their values. Several jeremiads are published every year warning of the dangers
of judicial supremacy and judicial tyranny. Though these attacks generally emit
more heat than light, using judges as punching bags presents a grave threat to
the independent judiciary.

Troublingly, attacks on the judiciary are now being launched by judges
themselves. Earlier this year, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker
excoriated his colleagues for faithfully applying the Supreme Court's precedent
in Roper v. Simmons, which prohibited imposition of the death penalty for crimes
committed by minors. Offering a bold reinterpretation of the Constitution's
supremacy clause, Justice Parker advised state judges to avoid following Supreme
Court opinions "simply because they are 'precedents.'" Justice Parker supported
his criticism of "activist federal judges" by asserting that "the liberals on
the U.S. Supreme Court . . . look down on the pro-family policies, Southern
heritage, evangelical Christianity, and other blessings of our great state."

It should come as no surprise that the increased scapegoating of the judiciary
has coincided with an increase in anger directed toward individual judges. In
the last decade, threats and inappropriate communications directed toward the
federal bench have more than quadrupled. According to the U.S. Marshals Service,
complaints about such behavior were being logged at a record-setting pace this
year. And while it is encouraging that Congress recently set aside funds for
federal judges to have home security systems installed, it is deeply dispiriting
that the demand for the systems among the judges was so high. Judge David B.
Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was quite right when
he observed, "Judges must be free to make judicial decisions without the fear of
physical harm to themselves or to members of their families."

Given the escalating criticism that is leveled at judges, it seems appropriate
to bear in mind the reasons that the Framers initially established an
independent judicial branch. In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton explained
why, in our constitutional system, "the complete independence of the courts of
justice is peculiarly essential." Hamilton contended that the judiciary needed
to be distinct from the legislative and executive branches because that was the
best way to guarantee "a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the
laws." Hamilton also believed that judicial independence was necessary in order
to safeguard against "injury of the private rights of particular classes of
citizens, by unjust and partial laws." It is well worth remembering that, far
more often than not in modern times, the judiciary has admirably performed these
two vital tasks: checking the other two branches and protecting minority rights.

An independent judiciary does not mean, of course, that it is somehow improper
to criticize judicial decisions. To the contrary, it is a healthy sign for
democracy that the public is engaged with the workings of the judicial system.
Judges can -- and do -- sometimes render erroneous decisions, but that is why
appeals are allowed to higher courts. Moreover, judges can be -- and are --
subjected to discipline for legitimate reasons. Members of the judiciary cannot
sincerely believe that they should be regarded as above the very laws that they
are charged with interpreting. Ours is, after all, a nation of laws, not men --
or even women.

Nonetheless, we must be more vigilant in making sure that criticism does not
cross over into intimidation. Judges and lawyers certainly play essential roles
in opposing attacks on the judiciary. Indeed, later this week, I -- along with
Justice Stephen Breyer -- am co-chairing a conference on judicial independence
at Georgetown University Law Center. But the legal community needs help from
other sectors of society to ensure that the current mood of cynicism does not
end up compromising the rule of law. This includes members of the business
community. Adam Smith, writing in "The Wealth of Nations," well understood the
importance of an independent judiciary: "[U]pon the impartial administration of
justice depends the liberty of every individual, the sense which he has of his
own security." Without judicial independence, Smith warned, "it is scarce[ly]
possible that justice should not frequently be sacrificed to what is vulgarly
called politics."

More broadly, of course, all of society has a keen interest in countering
threats to judicial independence. Judges who are afraid -- whether they fear for
their jobs or fear for their lives -- cannot adequately fulfill the considerable
responsibilities that the position demands. In these challenging and difficult
times, we must recommit ourselves to maintaining the independent judiciary that
the Framers sought to establish.

*


New York Times Magazine --

September 17, 2006

THE BATTLE FOR GUANTANAMO

At Guantanamo, there has been a relentless struggle between the prisoners and
their guards for influence, power and control. This is the story of that
struggle, and of one colonel's attempt to bring an end to it.

By Tim Golden

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17guantanamo.html


1. A WARNING FROM SHAKER AAMER

Col. Mike Bumgarner took over as the warden of Guantanamo Bay in April 2005. He
had been hoping to be sent to Iraq; among senior officers of the Army's military
police corps, the job of commanding guards at the American detention camp in
Cuba was considered not particularly challenging and somewhat risky to a career.
He figured it would mean spending at least a year away from his family, managing
the petty insurgencies of hundreds of angry, accused terrorists.

"Is this what I went to bed at night thinking about?" he would ask nearly a year
later, as he whacked at mosquitoes on a muggy Cuban night. "No."

Bumgarner, then 45, received his marching orders from the overall commander of
the military's joint task force at Guantanamo, Maj. Gen. Jay W. Hood. A few
weeks earlier, General Hood dispatched the previous head of his guard operation
and two other senior officers for fraternizing with female subordinates. He was
known as a flinty, detail-oriented boss with low tolerance for bad judgment, and
his instructions to the colonel were brief: He should keep the detainees and his
guards safe, Bumgarner says Hood told him. He should prevent any escapes. He
should also study the Third Geneva Convention, on the treatment of prisoners of
war, and begin thinking about how to move Guantanamo more into line with its
rules.

It had been three years since President Bush declared that the United States
would not be bound by any part of the Geneva treaties in dealing with prisoners
in the fight against terrorism. He ordered that American forces treat captives
in ways "consistent" with the conventions but hadn't explained what that meant.
Now, Bumgarner thought, the mandate seemed to be shifting a little. He was being
asked to get more specific.

In the cramped bungalow headquarters of his Joint Detention Operations Group at
Guantanamo, Bumgarner had his operations officer look up the conventions on the
Internet and print out a copy. After nearly 24 years as a military police
officer, Bumgarner knew the document well. He thought it obvious that many of
the rights would never apply to Guantanamo detainees. No one was going to allow
the distribution of "musical instruments" to suspected terrorists, as the
1940's-era conventions stipulated for the captured soldiers of another army. No
one was going to pay the detainees a stipend to spend at a base canteen.

But the assignment was more complicated than just cutting and pasting where he
could. On some level, Bumgarner thought, he was being asked to weigh how far the
military should go to improve the lives of prisoners whom the president and his
aides had labeled some of the most dangerous terrorists alive. Or, as the
colonel put it to me during our first conversation at Guantanamo in March: "How
do you deal with an individual whom the president of the United States and the
secretary of defense have called the worst of the worst?"

At that point, in the spring of 2005, he had little time to consider an answer.
Tensions in the camp were surging, as the detainees tested a fresh rotation of
Army and Navy guards. Of the 530 prisoners then being held at Guantanamo, most
were classified as "noncompliant." The two segregation blocks, which held
prisoners who had assaulted guards, were full. So were two other blocks where
detainees were sent for lesser infractions. "People were in a waiting pattern to
get in and serve their time there," Bumgarner said.

In older parts of the camp, the detainees would sometimes bang for hours on the
steel mesh of their cells, smashing out a beat that rattled up over the razor
wire into the thick, tropical air. Occasionally they would swipe at the guards
with metal foot pads ripped from their squat-style toilets, declassified
military reports say. The detainees rarely tried to fashion the sort of shanks
or knives made by violent prisoners in the United States. But they did manage to
unnerve and incite the young guards, often by splattering them with mixtures of
bodily excretions known on the blocks as "cocktails."

By the time Bumgarner took command at Guantanamo, information had emerged to
suggest that many of the detainees were not, in fact, the hardened terrorists
whom Pentagon officials had claimed to be holding there. Bumgarner did not doubt
that his new prisoners were dangerous, but neither was he wary of getting to
know them better. As he walked the blocks in Camp Delta, the fenced-in core of
the prison, he soon began trying to engage some of the more influential
detainees.

Military and CIA analysts had been studying the Guantanamo population since
the camp opened in January 2002. They observed that there were detainee
spokesmen, who tended to speak English, and religious leaders, or "sheiks," who
issued opinions on questions of Islamic law. There was also a more hidden cadre,
whose leadership the analysts defined as "political" or, when they could direct
the protests of others, "military." Nonetheless, there was much debate over who
the most important leaders were, intelligence officials later told me. Like most
guard officers before him, Bumgarner gravitated toward those who spoke English.

His ambitions were modest. "I was looking for a way, with what General Hood was
wanting, just to have a peaceful camp," he recalled recently. He said his
initial message to the detainees was "Look, I'm willing to give you things, to
make life better for ya, if y'all will reciprocate." What he asked in return was
"Just do not attack my guards."

Bumgarner considered himself a take-charge, solve-the-problem kind of commander.
A big, balding, garrulous man who speaks with a faint Carolina drawl and carries
his 250 pounds easily on a 6-foot-2-inch frame, he grew up the son of a career
Army sergeant in a family where military service was proudly taken for granted.
In high school in Kings Mountain, N.C., a small town in the Blue Ridge
foothills, he played quarterback for the football team and applied to West Point
at his father's urging. He quit the academy after only a few months but joined
the R.O.T.C. to help pay his way through Western Carolina University. At
Guantanamo, he was one of those officers who seemed to relish calling out,
"Honor bound!" (shorthand for the camp motto, "Honor bound to defend freedom"),
when a soldier saluted. Saying goodbye, he favored "Hoo-rah" over "See you
later."

But that image could be deceiving. Before deploying to Cuba, Bumgarner oversaw
the development of detention doctrine at the Army's Military Police School at
Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Like many military police officers, he had been deeply
embarrassed when the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted in May 2004 and was determined
to see its legacy undone. "We were not going to let that happen to us," he said.

At Guantanamo, Bumgarner moved quickly to try to reduce tensions in the camp. If
the detainees wanted clocks on the cellblock walls, he saw no reason they
shouldn't have them. In response to endless complaints from the detainees about
their tap water, he persuaded Hood to approve the distribution of bottled water
at mealtimes. The only stocks available were the soldiers' own, bottled with a
stars-and-stripes label under the vanity brands Patriot's Choice and Freedom
Springs. To avoid any problems, guards were ordered to peel off the labels
before they passed out the bottles.

The detainees did not respond as the military authorities hoped. In late June
2005, two months after Bumgarner took command, some prisoners went on a hunger
strike, calling for better living conditions, more respectful treatment of the
Koran by guards and -- most important -- fair trials or freedom. Although it was
hardly the first such protest, the camp's medical staff worried about the
unusually large number of prisoners involved.

Soon after the strike began, Bumgarner was alerted to a disturbance in Camp
Echo, an area of more isolated cells on the eastern edge of the detention
center. The problem was with a 38-year-old Saudi named Shaker Aamer. The colonel
had not previously encountered Aamer, but he was already familiar with the
legend of detainee No. 239 -- the one his guards called the Professor. They
marveled at his English, which was eloquent, and his presence, which was
formidable. Some intelligence officials said they believed he had been an
important Qaeda operative in London, where he lived and married before moving to
Afghanistan in the summer of 2001. (Aamer has denied having anything to do with
Al Qaeda or terrorism.)

The colonel's immediate concern was that Aamer was giving his guards fits,
pressing one of the sporadic civil disobedience campaigns for which he was
famous. "I finally said: 'That's it! I'm gonna go down to talk to him myself.'"
As Bumgarner remembers it, he burst into the small, hospital-white room as Aamer
sat on his bunk, fuming behind the painted mesh that caged him into one corner.
"You're either gonna start complying with the rules," Bumgarner recalls warning
him, "or life's gonna get really rough." The colonel said he did not mean to
threaten physical force, only to emphasize strongly that Aamer's few privileges
-- like, say, his use of a toothbrush -- hung in the balance.

Aamer, who wore a thick black beard and had his hair pulled back in a ponytail,
was unimpressed. The prisoner, who was not wearing his glasses, squinted for a
moment, trying to read the officer's insignia. "Colonel," he finally said,
"don't come in here giving me that."

As Bumgarner settled into a white plastic chair, Aamer crossed his legs on the
bunk and began to talk about his life. He spoke about his family, his travel to
Afghanistan, his feelings about the United States. He told of working as an
interpreter for American troops in Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war, and
of later working at a coffee shop outside Atlanta.

"I got the impression that he was hanging around in clubs, drinking," Bumgarner
told me. "He loved women. But he said he had realized the error of his ways."
Aamer had a revelation, he told the colonel, "that this life of running around
with women and boozing it up was the wrong path."

"It was part of his charisma, that drawing me in," Bumgarner said later. "He
became a person."

Much of the conversation centered on Aamer's thoughts on the detention operation
and what could be done to improve it. The Saudi's ideas, it seemed, were perhaps
not so far from Hood's. "His implication was that if you applied the Geneva
Conventions fully, everything would be just fine in the camps," Bumgarner
recalled.

After almost five hours, Aamer asked the colonel if he had made someone very
angry. "Otherwise, you wouldn't be in Guantanamo.

"Nobody survives Guantanamo," he added. "You won't survive, either."


II. A PERMANENT PLACE

As part of the military's standard tour of Guantanamo, visitors are driven to
the end of a two-lane road that winds up to the northeast corner of the naval
base on which the prison sits. They pause there on a small hill overlooking a
locked gate that leads into Fidel Castro's part of the island. The tour guide,
usually a young Marine corporal with a black Beretta pistol strapped to his
thigh, then recounts a brief history of Communist efforts to drive the American
forces away.

At one point, the corporal says, the Cubans tried to cut off the Americans'
water supply. They trained floodlights on an American guardhouse to keep the
soldiers inside from getting any sleep. But such annoyances were merely that.
The United States never surrendered an inch of the 45 square miles it has
occupied under a disputed lease since 1903, following the Spanish-American War.
"We're not as big a presence as we once were," one tour guide, Cpl. Denis R.
Espinoza, who is 22, said earlier this year. "But we're still here, and we're
going to stay."

In the Land of Unsubtle Metaphors that is Guantanamo Bay, the message of the
tour is transparent: the United States fought a dangerous, implacable enemy here
once before, in another war that seemed without end. Had we not held our ground
then, the argument goes, the world might now be a darker place.

Despite the intense criticism it has drawn, the detention camp at Guantanamo has
proved one of the more resilient institutions of the Bush administration's fight
against terror. It has weathered a 2004 Supreme Court decision that allows
prisoners to challenge their detention in the federal courts. Scandals over the
abuse of the detainees have come and gone, but Guantanamo has endured.

When President Bush announced broad changes in policies for the detention and
prosecution of terror suspects on Sept. 6, he said the government "will move
toward the day when we can eventually close the detention facility at Guantanamo
Bay." But by sending 14 important CIA captives there and pushing to try
prisoners before reconstituted military tribunals, he appeared to be extending
the life of the detention center for the foreseeable future. Even if many more
detainees are sent home and dozens are tried, administration officials
acknowledged, the United States could easily end up with 150 or 200 others whom
it would want to hold indefinitely and without charge. As to how the military
should treat such men, Washington offered only the most general guidance.

What impact the CIA's prisoners might have on the camp's operations is
unclear. Already, though, Guantanamo has been the scene of an extraordinary
struggle between the detainees and their guards. Only a few episodes of this
conflict have come to light, like the suicides of three prisoners in June. But
what has hardly been glimpsed is the dynamic that developed as military officers
tried to deal more closely with the detainees, easing the harsh conditions in
which they have been held and asking for compliance in return.

This article presents a view inside the prison based on interviews with more
than 100 military and intelligence officials, guards, former detainees and
others. It shows that as pressure built among the prisoners and some threatened
even to kill themselves in protest, Bumgarner and other guard officers -- acting
as much on instinct as policy -- took surprising steps to contain the upheaval.

That experiment illuminates the challenge the United States faces in continuing
to detain indefinitely some 460 men at Guantanamo, only 10 of whom have been
formally charged with crimes. Perhaps not surprisingly, the military has sought
to keep what has taken place there under wraps. Asked recently about his
dealings with the detainees and those of his staff officers, General Hood would
respond only through an Army spokesman, saying, "Operational security precludes
any public discussions that could potentially jeopardize the lives of detainees
or the security force at Guantanamo."

Rather than making Guantanamo go away, the administration has tried to make it
smaller and less objectionable. The ruins of Camp X-Ray, the provisional
facility where the first prisoners were held in cages, are slowly being
swallowed by the jungle. Tour guides display them as proof of Guantanamo's
progress. Inside the existing camp, a barricaded precinct of the quaint,
50's-era naval base where off-duty soldiers play softball and stop to eat at
McDonald's, the guides point out Camp 6, a new $30 million facility modeled
after a county jail in southern Michigan.

But the detainees have long memories, and the portraits drawn by those who have
been released -- sometimes horrific, often impossible to verify -- have shaped
global perceptions in ways that the Bush administration has been unable to
overcome. Their stories have been set down in books, films, plays and raps, most
of which depict an Orwellian world that is by turns brutal, calculated and
inept.

"Every country has its own way of torturing people," Rustam Akhmiarov, a
26-year-old Russian who was arrested in Pakistan and ended up in Guantanamo,
told me after his release. "In Russia, they beat you up; they break you
straightaway. But the Americans had their own way, which is to make you go mad
over a period of time. Every day they thought of new ways to make you feel
worse."

Over the last two years, human rights groups and the International Red Cross
have noted some improvements. Hood said that the use of more extreme
interrogation methods was curtailed within months of his taking command, around
the time that the Abu Ghraib scandal became public. Yet the larger questions
that indefinite detention at Guantanamo raises -- how to forestall the
radicalization of the detainees; how to control men who have only the slimmest
hope of freedom -- have never been resolved by senior policy makers. They have
been left to military officers on the ground.


III. OUT OF THE DARK AGES

As Colonel Bumgarner landed at Guantanamo in April 2005, he sensed that the
military was in the midst of what he called "sort of an effort to normalize
things." The Pentagon wanted to streamline the guard operation as part of a push
toward a more modern, less labor-intensive detention facility. It also wanted to
present a more humane face to the world. Both goals required lowering the level
of conflict within the camp.

After his first briefing from Hood, Bumgarner put the printout of the Geneva
Conventions on his desk and left it there. "I had my staff look at it," he said.
"For me, it was the only black-and-white piece of something that I could reach
out and grab for guidance."

At that point, White House officials were still opposed to adopting even the
most basic Geneva standard for the treatment of prisoners, a provision that bans
"outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading
treatment." Bumgarner considered such issues above his pay grade. He tried to
deal with the detainees man to man. "Human beings are human beings," he said in
one of a series of conversations. "I always think that I can deal with anybody.
I feel like dialogue can't hurt."

Weeks before he would meet the Saudi prisoner Shaker Aamer, Bumgarner came
across a tall, wild-eyed detainee who was screaming at the guards in British-
accented English. It wasn't clear what his problem was, but when the colonel
asked, the man quickly calmed down. "You are creating these problems by the way
you are treating us," the prisoner said.

A day or two later, Bumgarner had guards deliver the man to Juliet block, a
small, fenced-in courtyard beside his command center where Red Cross
representatives meet with detainees at aluminum picnic tables. He asked a guard
to uncuff the prisoner's hands. "It puts them in a much better mood to talk to
you," the colonel explained.

Prisoner No. 590, Ahmed Errachidi, was a handsome 39-year-old Moroccan who spent
17 years in London. He worked as a chef at a string of restaurants, including
the Hard Rock Cafe, before traveling to Afghanistan after the United States
began bombing the country in October 2001. The military authorities accused him
of belonging to a radical Moroccan Islamist group and training at a Qaeda camp
in Afghanistan, charges that his lawyers have disputed. Intelligence officials
told me they did not consider him a high-value detainee and noted that he had
been hospitalized for manic depression. But the guards, impressed by his
influence and sense of self-importance, had nicknamed him the General.

Errachidi seemed rather surprised to be sitting down with the commander of the
detention group, Bumgarner told me. But in that meeting on June 6 and a second,
longer one two days later, Errachidi seized the chance to inventory the
prisoners' grievances: The water was foul, he said, and the food terrible. The
detainees were angry about the guards' habit of walking loudly through the
cellblocks at prayer times and even angrier that "The Star-Spangled Banner"
sometimes played over distant naval-base loudspeakers during or right after the
evening call to prayer.

The General "kept talking about 'the dark ages,'" Bumgarner would later recall.
The prisoner complained, for example, that the guards often referred to the
detainees in demeaning ways, calling out when they were moving a prisoner that
they had "a package" ready.

"We are not 'packages,'" Errachidi told the colonel. "We are human beings."

After the first meeting, Bumgarner received a piece of paper from a guard. It
was a drawing by Errachidi, a sort of map. In one corner, it showed a shaded
area labeled "the Dark Ages." From there, a path wound through a thicket of
obstacles. They had labels like "No packages," "Better food" and "Turn the
lights down." At the end of the path, Errachidi had drawn what looked like an
oasis, with water and palm trees.

Back at Bumgarner's command center, some of his staff officers wondered about
the wisdom of trying to solve such complaints. They were used to their
commanders walking the blocks and occasionally speaking to prisoners; they were
not accustomed to sit-downs. Nor did they see why they should be the ones to
pick through the Geneva provisions and suggest whether the detainees might be
entitled to elect their own representatives or attend educational programs.

"We're the guys on the ground," the detention group's former operations officer,
Maj. Joseph M. Angelo, told me not long ago. "So why was I making
recommendations on what portions of the Geneva Conventions we should implement?
That just struck me as kind of weird."

Still, the unease of Bumgarner's staff did not compare with the reaction he got
from the intelligence side of the Guantanamo task force. There had long been
tension between the two military units, but this time members of the Joint
Intelligence Group "were furious," one staff officer recalled. There were few
privileges to give out at Guantanamo, this officer and others said, and
interrogators felt they should be the ones to dispense them -- in return for
cooperation from the detainees.

Before he deployed to Cuba, Bumgarner's military police superiors had been
emphatic that he should stick to his responsibilities and leave his counterparts
in military intelligence to their interrogations and analysis. Bumgarner wasn't
worried about stepping out of his lane. "I run the camps," he said.

Bumgarner set about trying to solve the problems he saw. He instructed members
of the guard force to stop referring to the detainees as "packages." On
compliant blocks, he had guards start turning down the lights between 10 p.m.
and 4 a.m. and stop moving prisoners during those hours to allow the detainees
to sleep. To avoid disturbing their prayers, he ordered guards to place yellow
traffic cones spray-painted with a "P" in the cellblock halls at prayer times.
He asked his aides to see that "The Star-Spangled Banner" recording would be
played at least three minutes before the call to prayer.

Another of Bumgarner's senior staff officers, Maj. Timothy O'Reilly, a reservist
who is a lawyer in civilian life, began to recognize some of what he was seeing
from jails and prisons in the United States. "The ultimate nirvana for anybody
in law enforcement or corrections is compliance," he said earlier this year. "In
order to run an effective prison, you need to have people comply with your
orders, and that's no different from the smallest jail to the biggest high-
security prison."

But Guantanamo was clearly unlike other prisons in one important respect: The
detainees found much less incentive to obey the rules. To some, exile to the
discipline or segregation blocks was a source of status and pride, military
intelligence officials said. And the punishments were limited. Striking or
spraying urine on a guard brought 30 days' segregation, the maximum length of
any punishment under Geneva rules. There was no such thing as getting a few more
years tacked on to your sentence.

In an American prison, O'Reilly and others noted, an inmate could be a sworn
enemy of the prison authorities, respected among other prisoners, and still try
to "run a good program" -- avoiding trouble in an effort to reduce his time
behind bars. At Guantanamo, compliance with the rules brought only prayer beads,
packets of hot sauce, a slightly thicker mattress. It would not bring early
parole.

Former detainees I met insisted that their defiance was provoked not only by
their despair over their uncertain futures but also by unnecessarily harsh and
arbitrary treatment from the guards. "If people's basic human rights were
respected, I don't think they would have had any of these problems," said Abdul
Salam Zaeef, a former Taliban cabinet minister and ambassador to Pakistan who
was the pre-eminent leader of Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo before his release
in the late summer of 2005. "There were no rules and no law. Any guard could do
whatever they wanted to do."

Like other small, insular groups that live at the mercy of a more powerful
force, the detainees have woven intricate, conspiratorial theories about their
fate. In a closed world where prayer gives structure to daily life and the Koran
is the one possession guards are never supposed to take away, prisoners were
acutely sensitive to any perceived disrespect for their faith. But there were
many other grievances. Some former detainees told me that early on, they were
injected at Guantanamo with psychotropic drugs, a claim that military officials
denied. Later, detainees continued to suspect hidden agents of social control in
everything from the cloudy tap water to the configuration of their cells.

"Those blocks are designed so that you will not rest," says Mohammed al-Daihani,
a government accountant from Kuwait who was sent home last November. "There is
metal everywhere. If anyone drops anything, you hear it. If anyone shouts or
talks loudly, it disturbs everyone. If there is a problem at the other end of
the block, you cannot possibly rest. After two or three weeks, you think you
will lose your mind."

Although the detainees came from diverse backgrounds and more than three dozen
countries, there was only one real prison gang at Guantanamo. The authorities
were convinced it was controlled by Al Qaeda members. An August 2002 study by
the CIA asserted that Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo had quickly begun
"establishing cellblock leaders and dividing responsibility among deputies for
greeting new arrivals, assessing interrogations, monitoring the guard force and
providing moral support to fellow detainees, among other tasks." (The study was
posted in July on the Web site The Smoking Gun; two officials confirmed its
authenticity to me.)

Such conclusions may have been drawn from the actions of detainees like Shaker
Aamer, the man with whom Bumgarner spoke for hours at the end of June. Abdullah
al-Noaimi, a Bahraini student who was released from Guantanamo last November,
described in interviews at his home in Bahrain in June how Aamer initially
organized their cellblock through sheer force of personality. "He's always
laughing and talking, very extroverted," al-Noaimi said. "He was born to be a
leader."

Soon after his own arrival in Cuba, al-Noaimi recalled, Aamer rallied the
detainees on the block to refuse to be weighed by the medical staff -- a largely
meaningless protest, he said, but one that infuriated the guards and thrilled
the detainees. Eventually, he added, Aamer organized the 48-cell block into four
groups of 12, with representatives for each unit and a spokesman for the block.
"It's the same thing John McCain did in Vietnam," said Lieut. Col. Kevin Burk,
who commanded the army's first military police battalion at Guantanamo. "You
continue your resistance."

Some parts of the camp were easier to manage than others. The guards looked on
the roughly 110 Afghans then at Guantanamo as relatively cooperative. They
filled much of Camp 4, the newer wing where Level 1, or "highly compliant,"
prisoners were allowed to live in communal barracks, serving their own food and
moving freely in and out of small recreation yards. Most of the rest of the
Afghans were in Camp 1, for Level 2, or "compliant," detainees. Only a handful
were held in Camp 5, the maximum-security area. Yet as more prisoners were
released, the remainder were becoming a more cohesive group, military officials
and former detainees said. They were also overwhelmingly Arab, and more likely
to have endured more extreme interrogation techniques like sleep deprivation,
sexual humiliation and threats.

Several former detainees insisted that it was not Al Qaeda that bound them at
Guantanamo but a common adversary. In standard prison fashion, they developed
ingenious ways to organize and communicate. They attached messages to long
threads from their clothing with wads of hardened toothpaste and then cast them
into neighboring cells. They shouted into the plumbing to talk between floors in
the maximum-security unit. And as their frustration grew, their ability to
organize was brought to bear in new ways.


IV. AAMER THE HERO

The hunger strike that confronted Colonel Bumgarner in mid-June 2005 escalated
quickly. Of the many strikes since early 2002, few had gone far enough to prompt
doctors to force-feed the detainees through stomach tubes. This time, however,
there were not a handful of hunger-strikers but dozens.

As they often had before, military spokesmen dismissed the protest as a
publicity bid typical of Al Qaeda-trained terrorists. Officers at Guantanamo had
tabulated hundreds of incidents of what they termed "manipulative, self-
injurious behavior." Privately, though, they began to discuss how to respond to
a potential suicide. At the Pentagon, officials dusted off contingency plans for
dealing with a body that would need prompt burial under Islamic law.

Senior members of the Guantanamo staff began to meet regularly with General Hood
to monitor the strike. The chief medical officer, Navy Capt. John S. Edmondson,
M.D., worried about the prospect of having to force-feed large numbers of
detainees. The medical risk was relatively low, but there were other
considerations. "Anytime you're doing a procedure that the patient doesn't want,
it's not a place you want to be," he would tell me later. "What takes
precedence? The patient's rights, or their life? It's not an easy question."

Bumgarner soon turned to Aamer, who had been on strike since around the time of
their first meeting in Camp Echo. During that first encounter, he said, the
prisoner had been "trying to convince me, in a very subtle way, that he could
help control things in the camp." He decided to consider the proposal.

Over a couple of more conversations with Aamer, Bumgarner made his case: He
wanted the detention camp to run more smoothly, to make things easier for
detainees who obeyed the rules. He was prepared to move closer to the standards
of the Geneva Conventions in some parts of the operation, including discipline.
What did Aamer think it would take, the colonel wanted to know, for the hunger
strike to end?

Aamer summarized his discussions with Bumgarner in a statement he dated Aug. 11,
2005, and later gave to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith. In it, he said the
hunger-strikers demanded ending "the secret abuse project of Camp 5" (which he
did not explain) and either bringing the detainees to trial or sending them
home. Meanwhile, they wanted better medical and living conditions. Aamer wrote
that the colonel promised him "that justice would come to Guantanamo at last."
The prisoner, his lawyer said later, had "decided that this was a man who he
could trust."

Bumgarner said he tried always to bring the talks back to what he could deliver:
modest improvements in the detainees' living conditions. He said Aamer told him:
"If you can get me to go around the camps, I can turn this off."

There were no precedents for chaperoned consultations among detainees. But by
July 26, 2005, the number of detainees refusing to eat was at 56, and doctors
were becoming concerned about the health of several of them. Bumgarner decided
to act. "I saw the chance to end it, and I just did it," he said.

The colonel went to see Aamer at a small hospital inside the detention camp. He
was sitting on a bed, one ankle chained to the frame, surrounded by some of the
other more determined hunger-strikers. According to Bumgarner, Aamer told him
that several of the detainees had had a "vision," in which three of them had to
die for the rest to be freed. Still, he agreed to try to persuade them to drop
the protest.

Aamer agreed to suspend his own strike on July 26, his lawyer said, but was
unsuccessful in persuading others. That evening or the next, Bumgarner said, he
had guards retrieve Aamer from the hospital and meet him at Camp 5, the imposing
maximum-security unit. Once inside the heavy doors, they went through the
cellblocks one by one, as Aamer spoke with a handful of the most influential
detainees.

Aamer went first to see Saber Lahmar, an Algerian-born Islamic scholar who was
arrested in Bosnia in a supposed conspiracy to bomb the American Embassy in
Sarajevo. (Lahmar denied any involvement in such a plot.) Trailed by the colonel
and a military interpreter, Aamer continued through the tiers, crouching down to
speak to a handful of others through the slots by which they received their
food. His last stop was the cell of Ghassan al-Sharbi, a 30-year-old Saudi who
studied electrical engineering in Prescott, Ariz. Al-Sharbi, who was later
charged in the military tribunals with joining in an Al Qaeda conspiracy to
manufacture bombs for attacks in Afghanistan, was reluctant to give up the
strike. When he finally agreed, the others went along, two military officials
said.

As they prepared to leave Camp 5, Bumgarner says, he asked Aamer if he needed to
speak with some of the other hunger-strikers there as well. "No," Aamer answered
matter-of-factly. "The others will put the word out."

The colonel and his prisoner drove to Camps 2 and 3. As they entered some of the
blocks -- Bumgarner in his camouflage fatigues, Aamer handcuffed to a chain
around his waist -- the cells erupted with applause.

"He was treated like a rock star, some of the places we would go in," Bumgarner
recalls. "I have never seen grown men -- with beards, hardened men -- crying at
the sight of another man." He paused, searching for an analogy. "It was like I
was with Bon Jovi or something," he said.

Former detainees who witnessed the visits recounted to me that Aamer, speaking
in Arabic, proposed to end the hunger strike and explained that other detainees
in Camp 5 were in agreement. In return, he said, the military authorities
promised to try to resolve problems the prisoners faced and to observe parts of
the Geneva Conventions.

The colonel's subordinates had grown accustomed to his hands-on style of
leadership. But they worried more openly about his meetings with Aamer. The
Saudi, one officer pointedly said, "has an almost hypnotic power over some
people." Two others referred to Aamer as "Svengali."

Bumgarner himself struggled with Aamer's frequent demands. One morning, as Aamer
was being sent off with other officers to brief detainees, he had a new one for
the colonel: Now he wanted to move around without the leg shackles that were
standard for detainees being transported outside their cellblocks.

"Look, Shaker, don't make a big deal out of this," Bumgarner recalled telling
him. "Let's get on to the bigger thing here. I can't take you out of those
shackles."

"I'm not going unless you just handcuff me," the prisoner responded.

"Shaker, don't do this to me," the colonel said. "It's just going to make it
harder."

"No," he quoted Aamer as saying. "I'm not doing any of this."

Bumgarner ordered the shackles removed. The handcuffs stayed on. Aamer finally
went ahead with his briefings to the other prisoners. "It was clearly a risk --
not in terms of putting anybody in danger, but in terms of perception,"
Bumgarner told me later. "But I thought that in the end, in order to keep things
going, I was going to have to do it."

Mullah Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador, had just finished his prayers in
Camp 4 when a sergeant came to his dormitory. "There is someone who wants to see
you," the sergeant said. Zaeef had never had an unannounced visitor at
Guantanamo before.

He found Aamer waiting. The two men had known each other in Camp 1, where they
were briefly neighbors. Zaeef, who spoke Arabic, noted that many of the Arabs
respected the Saudi's leadership. Aamer told Zaeef about his conversations with
the colonel.

"We thought maybe they were becoming softer in their policies," Zaeef recalls.
"Or we thought maybe they were trying to trick us. But we thought that we should
see which one it was."

When I met him in Afghanistan almost a year later, Zaeef still seemed a bit
uncertain about what had taken place. He is an elegant, professorial man who
wears wire-rimmed glasses and the black silk turban favored by the Taliban. He
described the episode during two long interviews in the well-guarded government
guest house on the dusty outskirts of Kabul, where he has lived since returning
home last September.

According to Zaeef, Aamer described a scheme of representation for the detainees
that he had worked out with Bumgarner -- one that vaguely echoed the Third
Geneva Convention's rules for a prisoner-of-war camp. Detainees in Camp 4 were
to choose two inmates to represent them, one for the Afghans and another for the
rest. With guards by his side, Zaeef said he then went from one block to the
next, explaining the situation. After some discussion, he was chosen by
acclamation to represent all of the Camp 4 detainees. Still, Zaeef recalled,
"people were very skeptical."

Nonetheless, most of the hunger-strikers suspended their protests by July 28.
Disciplinary problems on the blocks eased. The mood in the camps swelled
palpably, some military officials told me. Later Bumgarner would refer to this
interlude as "the Period of Peace."

The colonel then turned to some of the issues the detainees had raised during
their strike. He and Aamer were sitting at one of the picnic tables near his
office, debating the camp food, when Aamer insisted that the detainees' meals
were being poisoned.

"That's asinine!" Bumgarner said.

"I don't see you eating the stuff," he said Aamer shot back.

Over a dinner of fish sticks and fries, they began working out a solution. Not
long after, Aamer sat down with the head of the mess hall, the base nutritionist
and a logistics officer on the military staff. According to one officer briefed
on the meeting, Aamer unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn up an
elaborate two-week meal plan with daily suggestions for four different diets: a
standard menu, a vegetarian menu, a vegetarian-with-fish option and a bland diet
for older prisoners and those with intestinal problems. Two officials said
Aamer's proposal eventually became the basis for a new meal plan that raised the
amount of food offered to detainees each day from 2,800 calories to 4,200
calories.

After weeks of discussion with his aides, Bumgarner also instituted a new
program to simplify the discipline in the camp. Under the previous four-level
system, misdeeds were punished with the loss of various "comfort items" like
prayer beads and books, or stints in the discipline or segregation blocks. The
system was so complicated, military officials said, that its application often
seemed arbitrary.

The new plan called for all or nothing. Every detainee was restored to compliant
status and issued all of the comfort items generally available, including prayer
beads and bigger bars of soap. Those who broke the rules would be busted down to
"basic issue," or B.I., with nothing in between. To symbolize the new order, all
detainees in punishment-orange uniforms would be reoutfitted in tan.

The change might have made a dent in the prisoners' abiding sense of
humiliation. The problem, some officers said, was that the plan was set in
motion before enough tan clothing could be requisitioned to outfit all the
detainees. Some of those left in orange complained loudly.

"We did not think that through like we were playing chess," Major Angelo said.
"We thought like we were playing checkers. And that didn't work."


V. THE END OF PEACE

A couple of days after Aamer visited Zaeef to explain the new plan for prisoner
representation, a guard approached Zaeef with a cryptic message. "At 6 o'clock
you are going to go somewhere," he said. At the appointed hour, Zaeef was led
out of the camp and put on the rumble seat of one of the small John Deere
utility vehicles used to transport detainees around the detention center and
driven to Camp 1.

The guards led him to the small, fenced-in exercise yard for Alpha block, where
two picnic tables had been placed. Ala Muhammad Salim, an influential Egyptian
religious leader in the camp who was known as Sheik Ala, was already there. The
two prisoners sat down and began quizzing each other about what was going on.
Four others trickled in. They included Aamer and two of the men he met with in
Camp 5: Saber Lahmar, the Algerian scholar, and Ghassan al-Sharbi, the Saudi
engineer. The sixth was Adel Fattoh Algazzar, a former Egyptian Army officer
with a master's degree in economics. Bumgarner did not attend the meeting, but
when all of the detainees were seated, his deputy arrived with two other
officers. Al-Sharbi acted as the Arabic interpreter.

According to other officers I spoke with, the deputy delivered a simple message:
The six were being asked to provide their input on how to improve conditions in
the camp. Each of the detainees responded in turn.

"Do not mistreat us anymore," Zaeef recalled saying. "Be respectful of our
religion and our Koran. Respect us as human beings, because we are human beings.
If we are criminals, take us to court. But if we are innocent, let us go."

News of the meeting buzzed through the camp. Right away, several former
detainees said, the prisoners began to debate what was taking place. "We had
never talked to the colonels before," Abdulaziz al-Shammari, a Kuwaiti teacher,
said. "But this Bumgarner came around all the time, wanting to negotiate with
us."

The younger detainees pressed Aamer to push past the matter of living conditions
and focus on their demands for trial or release. "The shabab said to him, 'We
must not go only for the small things; we should go to the core issues,"' al-
Shammari said, using the Arabic word for "young people" or "youth."

Mohammed al-Daihani, the Kuwaiti accountant, now released, said that soon after
the colonel and Aamer visited his cellblock, Ahmed Errachidi, the Moroccan known
as the General, challenged others there to analyze the possible motives of their
captors. "He said: 'Why is a colonel from the most powerful country in the world
coming to negotiate with the detainees? They must be under some kind of
pressure.'"

The skeptics on Bumgarner's side were also growing more vocal. "I was one of the
few who thought we should let the leaders come talk to us," the colonel
acknowledged. Hood was clearly uneasy with the negotiations, other officers
said. He told aides not to refer to the six as "the council," as the detainees
did. Still, several officers emphasized, the talks would never have gone forward
if Hood had not approved them.

On the evening of Saturday, Aug. 6, shortly after the council's first meeting,
the colonel convened the six again, officers said. This time, he sat with the
group himself. Aamer had insisted that they should not be handcuffed or
shackled. "These are leaders," he told the colonel.

Bumgarner agreed, and the handcuffs were removed. Guards armed with pepper spray
stood by, while an immediate-reaction team waited just out of sight. The colonel
later summarized his introduction thusly: "You're here. I'm here. You've got my
attention. Tell me what the grievances are, and we'll work through them." He
added, "This place ain't going away, so we might as well make the best of it."

As Zaeef recalled the encounter, Bumgarner made several promises: He would allow
the circulation of religious books among the detainees and try to resolve
problems that arose with the guards. He would assure that the prisoners' food
was "adequate." Zaeef said the most important thing the colonel pledged was to
send another official who would be able to speak with the detainees about their
"future." Bumgarner said he promised only that guards would act "in the spirit
of the Geneva Conventions" and that he would see that Guantanamo's discipline
was consistent with its terms.

On the following Monday, the officers said, the six detainees were allowed to
meet alone in the fenced-in yard. A pair of military interpreters were
positioned nearby to monitor their conversation, officers said. According to
both Zaeef and military officials, the detainees began using pens and paper they
had been given to write notes. An officer observing the meeting interrupted
them: they were not to pass notes, he said. When they insisted on
confidentiality, he stepped forward again. But as the officer moved to
confiscate the notes, some of the detainees popped them into their mouths and
began chewing.

Hood pronounced the experiment over. "'This group is not meeting anymore,"' the
colonel recounts him saying. "'And you are not going to be meeting with them
anymore.'"

The "period of peace" came to an abrupt end. According to various sources --
military officials, former detainees and Aamer's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith --
the detainees were also angered by a few incidents that had taken place over the
weekend before the second council meeting. In one case, a prisoner had been
forcibly extracted from his cell, only to sit waiting for hours to be
interrogated. In another, the questioning of a slight Tunisian detainee by a
much larger criminal investigator ended in a violent scuffle involving a cut
nose, the possible hurling of a mini-refrigerator and the investigator's being
ordered off the island.

A couple of days after the negotiations were shut down, officials said, a riot
broke out in Camps 2 and 3. Dozens of detainees tore up their cells, wrenching
foot pegs from their toilets and using them to try to pry loose the mesh that
separated them. Guards were pulled from the tiers and deployed to surround the
perimeter of the blocks. Water and electricity were shut off, and Bumgarner
finally got on a bullhorn with an Arabic interpreter to persuade the detainees
to be escorted from their ruined cells. The repairs took weeks.

The guard officers were unsure what the detainee leaders had been up to.
According to military and intelligence officials, there were indications that
Aamer and al-Sharbi had been at odds. Al-Sharbi, the accused Al Qaeda bomb
maker, once told a military review panel it was his "honor" to be classified as
an enemy combatant, declaring, "May God help me to fight the infidels!"
Paradoxically, he was believed to be the more pragmatic negotiator, urging that
the detainees try to improve conditions in the camp. But Aamer, who had denied
any involvement in militant activities, took a different position. According to
the officials, he argued more directly that the detainees should use the talks
to pressure the military into either trying them fairly or setting them free.

Aamer told his lawyer the military had "sadly betrayed its word on every
occasion a promise has been made." He blamed the colonel personally. At the
time, Bumgarner said, he felt similarly betrayed. But when he recounted the
story months later, he sounded merely disappointed. "We almost liked each
other," he said of the two Saudis, Aamer and al-Sharbi. "I shouldn't say we
liked each other, but when we spoke together, there was no animosity."

By mid-August, the hunger strike that military commanders thought they had
resolved was picking up strength. Complaints about living conditions were de-
emphasized, military officials and lawyers for the detainees told me. Instead,
the prisoners focused on their future legal status. The renewed protest hit a
peak just after Sept. 11 of last year, with 131 prisoners refusing meals for at
least three straight days, officials said.

Many of the officers doubted that the protesters were willing to take their own
lives. Islamic law strongly forbids suicide. Abdulaziz al-Shammari, the Kuwaiti
teacher who was one of the most frequent hunger-strikers, said he never
considered taking his own life. "We saw that they would not let us die," he said
of the military doctors. "This was merely the most extreme side of the
protests."

Al-Shammari, who has a university degree in Islamic law, was one of a half-dozen
more learned detainees to whom others turned for religious rulings on countless
problems of their captivity. He said he knew of no relevant exceptions to the
prohibition against suicide.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reporting from Guantanamo said that
sometime in the late summer of 2005, Saber Lahmar, the Algerian religious leader
who served on the six-man council, told other detainees of a fatwa that said it
was lawful to take your own life in order to protect state secrets or to defend
the common good. Other detainees spoke about the prophetic dream that Shaker
Aamer mentioned to Bumgarner, in which three prisoners had to die for the rest
to be free, the officials said.

As doctors began to tube-feed the more recalcitrant hunger-strikers, the strike
consumed the medical staff. Specialists were flown in from naval hospitals in
Florida. Most of the detainees maintained their weight at above or near 80
percent of their so-called ideal body weight. But as the strike dragged on,
several slipped below 75 or even 70 percent of that measure, doctors said.

For detainees who obeyed the rules, the military offered new perks. Exercise
time was extended once more. On Hood's instructions, Gatorade and energy bars
were given out during recreation periods. Wednesday became pizza night. Guard
officers suggested soccer and volleyball tournaments to the compliant detainees
in Camp 4. The detainees came back asking that a prize -- two-liter bottles of
Pepsi -- be awarded to the winners. (The detainees disdained Coca-Cola, guards
said.) Before the games could begin, however, the detainees changed their minds,
the officers said. They had concluded that the contest was a scheme by the
military to divide them.

While increasing the incentives for compliance, the colonel also tried to clamp
down on disruptive behavior. The segregation and discipline blocks were
overhauled. The rules became stricter, the guards tougher. When detainees in
segregation tried to shout to one another through the walls, the guards were to
turn on large, noisy fans to drown them out.

Worried about Shaker Aamer's influence, Bumgarner also took an unusual step. In
September, he had Aamer moved to Camp Echo, where he would be even more isolated
than he would be on the segregation blocks. But Bumgarner did not cut off
contacts with the detainee leaders entirely. He approached Zaeef to assure him
that he wanted to continue to improve things for compliant detainees. He also
developed a rapport with Ghassan al-Sharbi.

Al-Sharbi was described by people who know him as an intelligent, almost
ethereal man from a wealthy Saudi family. (In an appearance before a military
tribunal, he sat placidly with his hands folded at the defense table and told
the presiding officer in plain English: "I'm going to make it easy for you guys.
I fought against the United States.") The colonel said he found al-Sharbi a
useful interlocutor and met with him repeatedly. After August, he never spoke
with Aamer again.

The guard officers saw some indications that the tougher approach was working.
The number of detainees in the discipline and segregation blocks fell
substantially. Only later did the officers begin to suspect that the more
combative detainees were so focused on the hunger strike that they had little
energy for other protests.


VI. THE SUICIDES

To some of Colonel Bumgarner's officers, it seemed that the latest group of
hunger-strikers were being allowed to get too comfortable. They had hospital
beds, air-conditioning, attentive nurses and a choice of throat lozenges to ease
the pain of their feeding tubes. The arrangement also allowed some of the
hospitalized detainees to communicate relatively easily.

By late November, while many of the strikers were maintaining their weight, four
or five of them were becoming dangerously malnourished, Dr. Edmondson said. By
sucking on their feeding tubes, they had figured out how to siphon out the
contents of their stomachs. Others simply vomited after they had been fed.

On Dec. 5, the guard force ordered five "restraint chairs" from a small
manufacturer in Iowa. If obdurate detainees could be strapped down during and
after their feedings, the guard officers hoped, it might ensure that they
digested what they were fed.

Days later, a Navy forensic psychiatrist arrived at Guantanamo, followed by
three experts from a Bureau of Prisons medical center in Missouri. Bumgarner
said the visitors agreed with him that the strike was a "discipline issue": "If
you don't eat, it's the same as an attempted suicide. It's a violation of camp
rules." In addition to feeding prisoners in the chair, some of the more
influential hunger-strikers were sent off to Camp Echo with the hope of
weakening the others' resolve. The number of strikers, which was at 84 in early
January, soon fell to a handful.

Lawyers for the detainees were appalled. The lawyers quoted their clients as
saying detainees had been strapped into the chairs for several hours at a time,
even as they defecated or urinated on themselves. The doctors told me later that
they had run out of options. "I would have preferred to have waited," said Dr.
Edmondson, the chief base physician, who other officials said opposed the
restraint chairs. But he added, "I seriously believed that we were going to lose
one of those guys if we didn't do something different."

In the spring of 2006, General Hood and Colonel Bumgarner were suggesting that
the mood at Guantanamo had turned. A handful of hunger-strikers were still at it
-- a few young Saudis and Yemenites, and Ghassan al-Sharbi. But the officers saw
them as zealots whose threat to the smooth operation of the camp could be
controlled. Otherwise, disciplinary infractions and attacks on the guards were
down, they said, and many of the detainees were responding positively to new
incentives for good behavior.

In an interview in late March, Hood said he believed that many young Arab
detainees -- sheltered, passionate young men who had gone to Afghanistan to
fight what they thought would be a noble jihad -- were beginning to see the
light. They hadn't been radicalized at Guantanamo, he insisted. Rather, as
conditions at the camp had improved, their preconceptions about Americans had
worn away. "They discover, 'You guys aren't so bad.'"

"I think the hard-core people have lost ground over the last four years," Hood
said. "They are clearly losing ground."

As he prepared to turn over his command in April to Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris
Jr., Hood was upbeat about the future. "We are going to establish the most
world-class detention facilities, and we are going to show the world that we're
doing this right," he said. "Every provision of the Geneva Conventions related
to the safe custody of the detainees is being adhered to. Today at Guantanamo --
and, in fact, for a long time -- the American people would be proud of the
discipline that is demonstrated here."

Six weeks later, as guards in Camp 1 patrolled one of the blocks, they came upon
a detainee comatose in his cell and frothing at the mouth -- symptoms of an
apparent overdose. "Snowball" -- the guards' radio code for a suicide attempt --
was called out over and over. In all, five detainees were found to have ingested
medication that they and others had hoarded, and guard officers concluded that
at least three were making serious suicide attempts. (Military spokesmen said
that only two had really tried to kill themselves.)

Later that afternoon, May 18, a riot broke out among the "highly compliant"
detainees in Camp 4 as guards moved to search their dormitories -- and their
Korans -- for pills and other contraband, officials said. Detainees in one block
of the camp set on guards who stormed their barracks after another guard saw a
staged hanging and mistakenly called out "blizzard," the code for multiple
suicide attempts. The guards' quick-reaction force fired rounds of rubber
bullets and voluminous blasts of pepper spray to contain the disturbance.

Doctors later determined that the detainees had ingested sleeping pills,
antianxiety medication and antipsychotics -- whatever they could get their hands
on. Since none of the men had been prescribed the medicines they took, it was
evident that other detainees had colluded in the plan. (A cache of about 20 more
pills was later found in one prisoner's prosthetic leg.) Still, the military
authorities seemed uncertain how to respond.

Some officials recalled the detainees' premonition about three of them having to
die. The medical staff tried to more closely monitor detainees with mental-
health problems. But that screening apparently did not factor in the possibility
that the men might have been determined to kill themselves for other reasons --
like loyalty to a cause.

Sometime before midnight on June 9, three young Arab men, who were being held
near one another in a single block of Camp 1, moved quietly to the backs of
their small cells and began to string up nooses that had been elaborately made
from torn linens and clothing. The bright lights had been turned down for the
night. Still, the prisoners had to work quickly: guards were supposed to walk
the block every three minutes.

After anchoring the nooses in the steel mesh walls of their cells, the three --
Mani al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal al-Zahrani, both Saudis, and Ali Abdullah
Ahmed, of Yemen -- piled clothing under their bedsheets to make it appear that
they were asleep. They stuffed wads of fabric into their mouths, either to
muffle their cries or perhaps to help themselves suffocate. At least one of the
men also bound his legs, military officials said, apparently so he would not be
able to kick as he died.

With the nooses pulled over their heads, the prisoners slipped behind blankets
they had hung over the back corners of their cells and stepped onto their small,
stainless-steel sinks. The drop was short -- only about 18 inches -- but
adequate. By the time they were discovered, doctors surmised, the men had been
asphyxiated for at least 20 minutes and probably longer. Military and
intelligence officials said it appeared that the other 20-odd prisoners on the
block knew that the suicides were being prepared. Some may have prayed with the
men, the officials said, and a few may have assisted in carrying out the plan.
What is certain is that in contrast to most previous suicide attempts at the
camp, none of the detainees made any effort to alert the guards.

When doctors reviewed their files on the three men, they found that none of them
had shown signs of depression or other psychological problems. All three had
been on hunger strikes -- one of them since the previous August -- and at least
two of them had been evaluated when they abandoned their protests. One doctor
recalled one of the men telling him brightly: "I'm sleeping well. I feel well.
No problems."

What the men hoped to communicate by their deaths may have been contained in
brief notes they left behind in Arabic. The notes have not been made public, and
a Navy investigation into the suicides continues. But military leaders at
Guantanamo were not waiting on its outcome. They concluded immediately that the
suicides were a blitzkrieg in the detainees' long campaign of protest. At a news
conference hours after the suicides, the new Guantanamo commander, Admiral Harry
Harris, described them as an act of "asymmetric warfare."


VII. TIGHTENING UP

I sat down with Colonel Bumgarner one blazing afternoon in late June, as he was
preparing to give up command. He looked tired and stressed, and slumped into a
chair in his small, cluttered office. As Shaker Aamer did the previous summer,
Bumgarner used words like "trust" and "betrayal." Bumgarner, at the time we
spoke, was briefly suspended from duty while the military investigated whether
he improperly disclosed classified information to a North Carolina newspaper
reporter who, around the time the suicides occurred, had been in Bumgarner's
headquarters reporting a feature article on the colonel from Kings Mountain. (He
was absolved of any wrongdoing.) But he seemed more worried by something else:
Had he completely misunderstood the prisoners he was trying to reach?

"We tried to improve their lives to the extent that we can -- to the point that
we may have gone overboard, not recognizing the real nature of who we're dealing
with," he said. "I thought they had proven themselves. I'm ashamed to admit it,
but I did not think that they would kill themselves."

Bumgarner said he could not discuss the suicides because of the Navy's
continuing investigation. But several officials said that the three detainees
had taken advantage of some of the colonel's quality-of-life reforms, including
the nighttime dimming of lights and the availability of extra clothing. There
were also indications that Ghassan al-Sharbi, the colonel's onetime
interlocutor, had helped plan the suicides, two of the officials said.

Looking back, Col. Kevin Burk, the commander of the military police battalion,
said: "With any population like this, you're going to have a battle. It wasn't
like we were all going to 'Kumbaya' together. But we were trying to find that
middle ground, where the tension in the camp would even out. As far as we could
see, no one had really tried to find that equilibrium before."

It is unclear if or when the military might try again. By most appearances,
Guantanamo has been tightening up. Since the May riot and the suicides, the
military has increased security to prevent further disturbances or deaths. In
its ruling on the military tribunals in June, the Supreme Court left the
government no choice but to abide by the minimum standards of treatment
contained in the Geneva Conventions. But what other privileges and freedoms the
detainees are allowed may come even more into question as the Guantanamo
population is winnowed down to a harder core and joined by the most notorious
terror suspects captured by the CIA

One hint of Guantanamo's future may lie in the retrofitting of Camp 6, the
brand-new medium-security facility that was to have opened this summer. Until
this spring, the new camp was to embody the sort of conditions Colonel Bumgarner
and other officials had hoped to institutionalize, with spaces for communal
meals and larger recreation areas where compliant detainees could play soccer
and other sports. After the riot and the suicides, the camp was substantially
remade. When it eventually opens, military officials said, it will look somewhat
more like Camp 5, the maximum-security unit down the road.

[ Tim Golden, an investigative reporter for The Times, has been writing about
terrorism and detention issues since 2004. ]

*


AP --

September 16, 2006

CIA'S SUSPECT INTERROGATIONS SCRUTINIZED

By Katherine Shrader

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CIA_INTERROGATIONS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA believed it was operating lawfully in detaining and
interrogating 96 suspected terrorists at locations from Thailand to Europe,
until the Supreme Court this summer demolished that legal foundation.

The CIA is now squarely in the middle of election-year politics as Congress
tries to write new definitions that could reshape the intelligence agency's
program.

"At the end of the day, the director - any director - of the CIA must be
confident that what he has asked an agency officer to do under this program is
lawful," CIA Director Michael Hayden wrote employees on Thursday.

President Bush was more blunt: "They don't want to be tried as war criminals,"
he said at a news conference Friday.

The high court's ruling in June, in a case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan,
essentially said that the Geneva Conventions on the rights of wartime prisoners
should apply to the suspected terrorists in CIA custody.

That meant that for the first time since the interrogation program was born in
2002, the Justice Department could not give the CIA a written opinion on whether
its techniques still were legal.

Spy agencies rely on such opinions to justify activities that get little, if
any, public scrutiny.

To Bush, the CIA and their allies, the law urgently needs to be changed to
protect the interrogation program, which they consider one of the most important
ways to deter attacks against the United States.        Buy AP Photo Reprints

"The Hamdan decision in effect calls a time-out in the war on terror," said
Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

But the program's detractors say a fix is needed to prevent further damage to
the U.S. image abroad and to reduce risks to U.S. military personnel who may be
caught by enemies.

"The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against
terrorism," retired Gen. Colin Powell, the former secretary of state, wrote Sen.
John McCain. The Arizona Republican is resisting Bush's call for more lenient
rules on interrogations.

The CIA's practices raised concerns almost from the day that the agency began
questioning detainees suspected of terrorist links.

Early in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, senior military officers were
so concerned about the CIA's practices that they took steps to ensure that
military personnel were not in the room during CIA interrogations, said a
government official familiar with both military and intelligence operations. The
official and others in government and on Capitol Hill spoke recently about the
sensitive CIA activities on the condition they not be identified.

But Gary Berntsen, the commander of a CIA team in Afghanistan in the fall of
2001, said CIA personnel initially did not have time for interrogations - a term
from the military and intelligence world that implies the use of specific
techniques to coerce information from prisoners.

Instead, he said, intelligence officers conducted cursory interviews of newly
captured fighters to see if they had information they wanted to share.

"We were seizing one city after the next," Berntsen said. "There were hundreds
of people" in custody.

He credits a British team in Afghanistan with finding a tipster in December 2001
who knew the details of a Singapore plot to use 21 tons of explosives to try to
blow up the U.S., British, Israeli and Australian embassies in a follow-up
attack to the Sept. 11 strikes. "We were desperate to find the next attack,"
Berntsen said.

Not long after the March 2002 capture of top al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah,
the CIA's practices became more formal. Agency operatives knew Zubaydah had a
wealth of information because of his role as a recruiter and his close ties to
al-Qaida's senior leadership, but he was not cooperative.

The CIA decided it would need to hold high-value terrorists such as Zubaydah for
an extended periods in an effort to extract information. They also began using
some "enhanced interrogation techniques" with success.

One senior U.S. official said "only a fraction" of the agency's 96 high-value
detainees have experienced those techniques because "the least obtrusive means
are used."

Yet by mid-2004, the CIA's inspector general had completed a report on the
treatment of detainees after the possible involvement of CIA personnel in the
deaths of at least four prisoners. The review covered interrogation tactics.

Current and former U.S. officials say some techniques are well-known: exposing
prisoners to cold, disorienting them or depriving them of sleep. The most
controversial is waterboarding, when a detainee is strapped to a board and has
water run over him to simulate drowning.

Bush administration officials say the Justice Department has deemed the CIA's
practices lawful. In addition, the senior U.S. official said the House and
Senate Intelligence committees have now been told everything about the CIA's
overseas prisons and interrogation program, except the countries where the
prisons were.

But a congressional aide disputed that. The aide said briefings for the Senate
committee took place only recently and that the administration has denied the
committee access to materials it needs to fulfill its oversight role of the CIA.
For example, the committee's top Democrat, West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller,
has not been able to see the Justice Department's legal opinions.

The Supreme Court's decision froze the interrogations and led the administration
to turn over the last 14 prisoners in CIA custody to the military officials
running a prison for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The next step is up to Congress. Lawmakers are struggling over how to write
legislation creating rules for how to try suspected terrorists and how to
specify the lengths that authorities can go in questioning these detainees.

A bill favored by McCain and two other influential Republican senators would
prevent CIA personnel involved in the detention program from being sued or
prosecuted for their actions. The CIA wants the Congress to go one step further
and bless its actions.

In his memo last week to CIA personnel, Hayden also said he wants Congress to
define in U.S. law terms of the Geneva Conventions that bar "humiliating and
degrading treatment" and "outrages upon personal dignity."

Human rights groups see the effort as an end run and contend established
military rules could be applied to all government agencies, including the CIA.

Said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch: "The only point
in having a CIA program is to use techniques that go well beyond what is
permitted by the Army Field Manual."

[ Associated Press writer Anne Plummer Flaherty contributed to this report. ]

*


San Diego Union-Tribune / AP --

September 14, 2006

TEXTS OF THE LETTERS RELEASED THURSDAY WRITTEN BY
COLIN POWELL AND CONDOLEEZZA RICE ON DETAINEE LEGISLATION


http://www.uniontribune.net/news/nation/terror/
20060914-1513-powell-riceletters.html

ASSOCIATED PRESS

3:13 p.m. September 14, 2006


* POWELL'S LETTER:

Dear Senator McCain:

I just returned to town and learned about the debate taking place in Congress to
redefine Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. I do not support such a step
and believe it would be inconsistent with the McCain amendment on torture which
I supported last year.

I have read the powerful and eloquent letter sent to you by one (of) my
distinguished predecessors as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Jack Vessey. I fully endorse in tone and tint his powerful argument. The world
is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism. To
redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put
our own troops at risk.

I am as familiar with "The Armed Forces Officer" as is Jack Vessey. It was
written after all the horrors World War II and General George C. Marshall, then
Secretary of Defense, used it to tell the world and to remind our soldiers of
our moral obligations with respect to those in our custody.

Sincerely,

Colin L. Powell


* RICE'S LETTER:

Dear Mr. Chairman (John Warner):

Yesterday we discussed how the Department of State viewed the international
legal obligations that flow from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, in
comparison with other relevant legal standards in U.S. law.

Our international partners expect that we will undertake good faith
interpretations of the Conventions' text, consistent with their object and
purpose. In a case where the treaty's terms are inherently vague, it is
appropriate for a state to look to its own legal framework, precedents, concepts
and norms in interpreting these terms and carrying out its international
obligations. Such practice in the application of a treaty is an accepted
reference point in international law. The proposed legislation would strengthen
U.S. adherence to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions because it would
add meaningful definition and clarification to vague terms in the treaties.

In the department's view, there is not, and should not be, any inconsistency
with respect to the substantive behavior that is prohibited in paragraphs (a)
and (c) of Section 1 of Common Article 3 and the behavior that is prohibited as
"cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment," as that phrase is
defined in the U.S. reservation to the Convention Against Torture. That
substantive standard was also utilized by Congress in the Detainee Treatment
Act. Thus it is a reasonable, good faith interpretation of Common Article 3 to
state, as the proposed legislation does, that the prohibitions found in the
Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 fully satisfy the obligations of the United
States with respect to the standards for detention and treatment established in
those paragraphs of Common Article 3.

The Department of State supports this legislation and we believe it will help
demonstrate to our international partners that we are committed to compliance
with Common Article 3.

Sincerely,

Condoleezza Rice

*


Washington Post --

September 14, 2006

ARMITAGE'S LEAK

By Robert D. Novak

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/13/AR2006091301572.html

When Richard Armitage finally acknowledged last week that he was my source three
years ago in revealing Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee, the former deputy
secretary of state's interviews obscured what he really did. I want to set the
record straight based on firsthand knowledge.

First, Armitage did not, as he now indicates, merely pass on something he had
heard and that he "thought" might be so. Rather, he identified to me the CIA
division where Mrs. Wilson worked and said flatly that she recommended the
mission to Niger by her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Second,
Armitage did not slip me this information as idle chitchat, as he now suggests.
He made clear that he considered it especially suited for my column.  Who's
Blogging?

An accurate depiction of what Armitage actually said deepens the irony of his
being my source. He was a foremost internal skeptic of the administration's war
policy, and I had long opposed military intervention in Iraq. Zealous foes of
George W. Bush transformed me, improbably, into the president's lapdog. But they
cannot fit Armitage into the left-wing fantasy of a well-crafted White House
conspiracy to destroy Joe and Valerie Wilson. The news that he, and not Karl
Rove, was the leaker was devastating for the left.

A peculiar convergence had joined Armitage and me on the same historic path.
During his quarter of a century in Washington, I had had no contact with
Armitage before our fateful interview. I tried to see him in the first 2 1/2
years of the Bush administration, but he rebuffed me -- summarily and with
disdain, I thought.

Then, without explanation, in June 2003, Armitage's office said the deputy
secretary would see me. This was two weeks before Joe Wilson outed himself as
author of a 2002 report for the CIA debunking Iraqi interest in buying uranium
in Africa.

I sat down with Armitage in his State Department office the afternoon of July 8
with tacit rather than explicit ground rules: deep background with nothing said
attributed to Armitage or even to an anonymous State Department official.
Consequently, I refused to identify Armitage as my leaker until his admission
was forced by "Hubris," a new book by reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn
that absolutely identified him.

Late in my hour-long interview with Armitage, I asked why the CIA had sent
Wilson -- who lacked intelligence experience, nuclear policy expertise or recent
contact with Niger -- on the African mission. He told The Post last week that
his answer was: "I don't know, but I think his wife worked out there."

Neither of us took notes, and nobody else was present. But I recalled our
conversation that week in writing a column, while Armitage reconstructed it
months later for federal prosecutors. He had told me unequivocally that Mrs.
Wilson worked in the CIA's Counterproliferation Division and that she had
suggested her husband's mission. As for his current implication that he never
expected this to be published, he noted that the story of Mrs. Wilson's role fit
the style of the old Evans-Novak column -- implying to me that it continued
reporting Washington inside information.

Valerie Plame Wilson's name appeared in my column July 14, 2003, but it was not
until Oct. 1 that I was contacted about it by Armitage, indirectly. Washington
lobbyist Kenneth Duberstein, Armitage's close friend and political adviser,
called me to say that the deputy secretary feared he had "inadvertently" (the
word Armitage used in last week's interviews) disclosed Mrs. Wilson's identity
to me in July and was considering resignation. (Duberstein's phone call was
disclosed in the Isikoff-Corn book, which used Duberstein as a source. They
reported that Duberstein was responsible for arranging my unexpected interview
with Armitage.)

Duberstein told me Armitage wanted to know whether he was my source. I did not
reply because I was sure that Armitage knew he was the source. I believed he
contacted me Oct. 1 because of news the weekend of Sept. 27-28 that the Justice
Department was investigating the leak. I cannot credit Armitage's current claim
that he realized he was the source only when my Oct. 1 column revealed that the
official who gave me the information was "no partisan gunslinger."

Armitage's silence for the next 2 1/2 years caused intense pain for his
colleagues in government and enabled partisan Democrats in Congress to falsely
accuse Rove of being my primary source. When Armitage now says he was mute
because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's request, that does not
explain his silent three months between his claimed first realization that he
was the source and Fitzgerald's appointment on Dec. 30, 2003. Armitage's tardy
self-disclosure is tainted because it is deceptive.

© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.

*


Washington Post --

September 11, 2006

WORRIED CIA OFFICERS BUY LEGAL INSURANCE
Plans Fund Defense In Anti-Terror Cases

By R. Jeffrey Smith

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/10/AR2006091001286_pf.html

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a
government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil
judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal
wrongdoing, according to current and former intelligence officials and others
with knowledge of the program.

The new enrollments reflect heightened anxiety at the CIA that officers may be
vulnerable to accusations they were involved in abuse, torture, human rights
violations and other misconduct, including wrongdoing related to the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks. They worry that they will not have Justice Department
representation in court or congressional inquiries, the officials said.

The anxieties stem partly from public controversy about a system of secret CIA
prisons in which detainees were subjected to harsh interrogation methods,
including temperature extremes and simulated drowning. The White House contends
the methods were legal, but some CIA officers have worried privately that they
may have violated international law or domestic criminal statutes.

Details of the rough interrogations could come to light if trials are held for
any of the approximately 100 detainees who were held in the prisons. President
Bush announced last week that he had transferred the last 14 detainees in the
facilities to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and had submitted a
proposal to Congress for the rules under which the administration would like the
suspects to be tried.

Terrorism suspects' defense attorneys are expected to argue that admissions made
by their clients were illegally coerced as the result of policies set in
Washington.

Justice Department political appointees have strongly backed the CIA
interrogations. But "there are a lot of people who think that subpoenas could be
coming" from Congress after the November elections or from federal prosecutors
if Democrats capture the White House in 2008, said a retired senior intelligence
officer who remains in contact with former colleagues in the agency's
Directorate of Operations, which ran the secret prisons.

"People are worried about a pendulum swing" that could lead to accusations of
wrongdoing, said another former CIA officer.

The insurance policies were bought from Arlington-based Wright and Co., a
subsidiary of the private Special Agents Mutual Benefit Association created by
former FBI officials. The CIA has encouraged many of its officers to take out
the insurance, current and former intelligence officials said, but no one
interviewed would reveal precisely how many have bought policies.

As part of the administration's efforts to protect intelligence officers from
liability, Bush last week called for Congress to approve legislation drafted by
the White House that would exempt CIA officers and other federal civilian
officials from prosecution for humiliating and degrading terrorism suspects in
U.S. custody. Its wording would keep prosecutors or courts from considering a
wider definition of actions that constitute torture.

Bush also asked Congress to bar federal courts from considering lawsuits by
detainees who were in CIA or military custody that allege violations of
international treaties and laws governing treatment of detainees.

The proposals have won mixed reviews in the Senate, where they are generally
opposed by Democrats and a group of dissident Republicans. The proposals were
deliberately omitted, for example, from competing legislation circulated last
week by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.), Sen.
John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Several former intelligence officials who said CIA officers do not need
insurance because they can rely on the government to defend their lawful actions
depicted the growing number of policies as a barometer of the uncertainty
officers have of the legality of their work.

A recently retired CIA officer who said he had not bought insurance contended
that "if an individual does get sued in the course of their official duties,
then you get the biggest law firm in the world to step in" -- the Justice
Department. Justice regulations allow defending federal workers if the conduct
is within the scope of an employee's job and doing so is in the government's
"interest."

The insurance, costing about $300 a year, would pay as much as $200,000 toward
legal expenses and $1 million in civil judgments. Since the late 1990s, the
CIA's senior managers have been eligible for reimbursement of half the insurance
premium.

In December 2001, with congressional authorization, the CIA expanded the
reimbursements to 100 percent for CIA counterterrorism officers. That was about
the time J. Cofer Black, then the CIA's counterterrorism chief, told Bush that
"the gloves come off" and promised "heads on spikes" in the counterterrorism
effort.

"Why would [CIA officers] take any risks in their professional duties if the
government was unwilling to cover the cost of their liability?" asked Rep. Rob
Simmons (R-Conn.), a former CIA officer, during congressional debate that year.

Although suing federal officials for their actions is not easy, it is possible;
the Supreme Court left the door ajar in two rulings. It ruled in 1971 that six
narcotics agents could be sued for monetary damages arising from a warrantless
search. Eleven years later, it held that government officials should be immune
from civil liability only if their conduct does not violate clear statutory or
constitutional rights that should be known by "a reasonable person."

William L. Bransford, a senior partner at the law firm that defends people who
take out the insurance, said he is unaware of any recent increase in claims. But
agency officials said that interest has been stoked over the years by the $2
million legal bill incurred by CIA officer Clair George before his 1992
conviction for lying to Congress about the Iran-contra arms sales; by the
Justice Department's lengthy investigation of CIA officers for allegedly lying
to Congress about the agency's role in shooting down a civilian aircraft in 2001
in Peru; and by other events.

One former intelligence official said CIA officers have recently expressed
concern that lawsuits will erupt if details of the agency's internal probe of
wrongdoing related to the September 2001 attacks become public.

In his report, CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson recommended that the
agency convene an accountability board to examine the actions of senior
officials. But last October, then-CIA director Porter J. Goss rejected the
advice and decided the report should remain secret.

CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Friday that "it's fair to say that more
employees have chosen to get this insurance, including those who work in
counterterrorism." He said the agency's office of general counsel "advises
employees to consider it" and called it a "prudent measure, in case of legal
claims." But he said more employees at other federal agencies are also
enrolling.

CIA employees outside the counterterrorism field who are eligible for
reimbursement include the agency's supervisors, attorneys, equal-opportunity-
employment counselors, auditors, polygraph examiners, security adjudicators,
grievance officers, inspectors general and internal investigators, he said. One
in 10 eligible employees sought reimbursement last year, Mansfield said, adding
that the fraction from previous years and a breakdown on those in the
counterterrorism field were not immediately available.

Brian Lewis, president of Wright and Co., confirmed that the number of new
policies "has gone up, especially in the last two years." But he said that the
company lumped CIA officers with Justice Department employees who also have the
insurance and that he did not have exact numbers for the CIA.

Robert M. McNamara Jr., the CIA's general counsel from 1997 to November 2001,
said he advised station chiefs to buy the insurance. "The problem is that we are
the victims of shifting winds here," McNamara said he told the officers. "I
can't sit here and tell you in all cases that I will be able to defend you."

However, McNamara's predecessor as CIA general counsel, Jeffrey H. Smith, said:
"I'm deeply troubled that CIA officers have to buy insurance. . . . There should
be clear rules about what the officers can and can't do. The fault here is with
more senior people who authorized interrogation techniques that amount to
torture" and should now be liable, instead of "the officers who carried it out."

*


The New Yorker --

September 11, 2006

JUNIOR

The clandestine life of America's top Al Qaeda source.

by JANE MAYER

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060911fa_fact

For nearly a decade, a former Al Qaeda operative named Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl has
been living in the United States government's witness-protection program, under
an assumed identity. A Sudanese citizen and a onetime confidant of Osama bin
Laden's, Fadl is expected to serve as a central witness in the prosecutions of
at least two suspected terrorists being held at the U.S. detention facility in
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Fadl, a dark-skinned man with close-cropped hair and a
mischievous smile, entered government custody in 1996, after walking into the
U.S. Embassy in Eritrea and confessing to membership in Al Qaeda. Since then, he
has lived in at least half a dozen American towns. (He spent the first eighteen
months in a Residence Inn in New Jersey, guarded by several armed F.B.I. agents;
subsequently, his wife and children joined him in America, and the family was
transferred to a series of undisclosed locations.) Fadl, who is now in his
forties, is arguably the United States' most valuable informant on Al Qaeda; he
has provided crucial intelligence about the group's operations and has made
positive identifications of suspected members. At the same time, Fadl -- an
incessant troublemaker who is known to a small group of F.B.I. agents simply as
Junior -- has tried the patience of the officials in whose care he resides.
"Junior's a problem child," Jack Cloonan, a former special agent for the F.B.I.,
who is now the president of a crisis-management firm, says.

Fadl's only public appearance to date as a state's witness occurred in Manhattan
in 2001, eight months before the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center. Fadl, who was identified only as "Confidential Source 1,"
spoke for several days, and his testimony proved critical in the conviction of
four Al Qaeda associates who were being tried for their roles in the 1998
bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed two hundred
and twenty-four people. Photographers and courtroom artists were forbidden to
depict his face, but reporters described him as testifying calmly in heavily
accented English and wearing a white skullcap, an open-collared shirt, and
jeans.

According to Fadl, he met bin Laden in Afghanistan, where he had gone in his
early twenties to fight against the Soviet Union. He testified that he was one
of the first people to join Al Qaeda, in 1989; soon afterward, he moved back to
Sudan, where he helped bin Laden acquire properties and front companies. At a
time when most Americans knew little about Al Qaeda, Fadl provided the jury with
a lengthy tutorial, describing the organization's cellular structure and its
training camps, where recruits learned how to handle weapons and were taught a
militant view of Islam. He characterized bin Laden as a man determined to attack
the United States -- even with nuclear weapons if he could. In the early
nineties, he testified, bin Laden issued a secret fatwa at a meeting in Sudan:
"It say, 'We cannot let the American army stay in the Gulf area and take our
oil, take our money, and we have to do something to take them out. We have to
fight them.' " (Fadl also admitted to a life style that was less than pious.
Under questioning, he confessed that, prior to joining Al Qaeda, he had nearly
been arrested for smoking marijuana with a friend, on a trip to Saudi Arabia;
the friend had gone to jail for two years, he said, adding, "I escaped to
Sudan.") In the end, the four Embassy-bombing suspects were convicted on three
hundred and two terrorism-related charges, and were given life sentences.

According to the F.B.I., Fadl has continued to provide assistance to government
officials working to understand and combat Al Qaeda. Dan Coleman, a senior
consultant at Harbinger Technologies Group, who was the F.B.I.'s top specialist
on Al Qaeda until 2004, when he retired, said of Fadl, "He's been very, very
important to us. When it comes to understanding Al Qaeda, he's the Rosetta
stone." Jessica Stern, a terrorism scholar at Harvard, says that Fadl's
testimony in the Embassy-bombing trials created an invaluable public record.
"Fadl explained the nature of the enemy to us when we knew very little," she
said. "He showed us that bin Laden was like any other C.E.O., and that Al Qaeda
was a real bureaucracy." (Fadl had explained, for example, that Al Qaeda's main
advisory council, the majlis al-shura, functioned much like a board of
directors.) Michael Anticev, an F.B.I. special agent on the New York-based Joint
Terrorism Task Force, told me that as soon as U.S. authorities started to
interrogate him "we realized we had struck gold." He went on, "He spoke to us in
great detail, and everything that he told us panned out." Anticev likened Fadl's
value to that of Joseph Valachi, the government informant on organized crime
who, in 1962, became the first member of the Mafia to acknowledge its existence
to law-enforcement officials.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks, Fadl proved
disappointingly unable to shed light on the plot. He had been out of Al Qaeda
for too long, and knew none of the hijackers. But, a few months later, when the
F.B.I. showed him photographs of prisoners who had been captured on the
battlefields of Afghanistan and transferred to Guantánamo, "he went right to
work," Anticev told me. Fadl was shown photographs of between sixty and seventy
detainees. F.B.I. sources say that he recognized two men as longtime Al Qaeda
figures. L'Houssaine Kherchtou, another former Al Qaeda member interviewed by
the agency -- and known to U.S. officials as Joe the Moroccan -- corroborated
Fadl's claims. Kherchtou, a Moroccan citizen who became an informant after the
Embassy bombings, is also in the U.S. witness-protection program. (American law-
enforcement officials declined to say how many former terrorists are in the
program, but the number is believed to be extremely small.)

Three F.B.I. agents flew to Guantánamo and tried to get both suspects to
confess. They succeeded with one of them; the other is still being investigated.
Information from Fadl eventually anchored one of only seven formal claims of
criminality that the U.S. government has so far been able to make against the
Guantánamo detainees, who still number more than four hundred. The prosecutions
have been stymied by protracted arguments about the constitutionality of the
Bush Administration's effort to try terrorist suspects not in courtrooms but
before military commissions. In June, the Supreme Court ruled, in Hamdan v.
Rumsfeld, that the commissions system was illegal.

The F.B.I. has declined to disclose the name of either Guantánamo suspect, for
fear of jeopardizing any eventual prosecution. But a close look at government
records reveals that Fadl's name appears as a co-conspirator in a document
enumerating the charges against a detainee named Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi
-- also known by the aliases Mohammed Salih Ahmed and Abu Khobaib al-Sudani.
According to the document, Qosi is charged with conspiring with Al Qaeda;
between 1992 and 1995, he allegedly served as a financial accountant and
treasurer for a Sudanese front company, run by bin Laden, which raised money and
procured weapons for terrorist operations. Qosi is also accused of serving as a
bodyguard, driver, and cook for bin Laden in Afghanistan. According to the
charges, Qosi was captured after helping other Al Qaeda members flee Kandahar in
the wake of the September 11th attacks.

Another indication that Fadl is an informant behind the charges is that the
document names Fadl's brother-in-law Mohammed Suliman al-Nalfi as an additional
co-conspirator. In 2000, four years after acknowledging his own role in Al
Qaeda, Fadl led U.S. officials to Nalfi, an Al Qaeda member in Kenya.
Authorities had hoped to recruit Nalfi, who was close to Al Qaeda's co-founder,
the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, as a double agent. But when he proved resistant
U.S. officials arrested him and brought him to America, where he eventually
pleaded guilty to terrorist-related activities; in 2003, he was sentenced to ten
years in prison.

Since September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration has often characterized
criminal law-enforcement approaches to fighting terrorism as inadequate and
obsolete, and assigned the principal responsibility for fighting Al Qaeda to the
military. But Fadl's role in convicting terrorists and bolstering indictments
suggests, to some experts, that the government needs to devote more resources to
law-enforcement efforts that yield solid eyewitness testimony. This is
especially true, they say, in the wake of the Hamdan decision, which will likely
result in Al Qaeda suspects being tried under more conventional rules, where the
evidentiary burden is high. Cloonan said, "If your intent is to prosecute
somebody, there are rules and regulations that you have to follow -- the federal
rules of criminal procedure." He acknowledged that the legal system wasn't
perfect: "I'm not going to tell you that this isn't cumbersome and slow and
plodding at points." Nevertheless, he said, his experience with Fadl and other
informants has taught him that the American legal system is "set up very well to
handle these kinds of cases."

At the 2001 Embassy-bombings trials, defense lawyers revealed that, since 1997,
Fadl had received nearly a million dollars from the U.S. government, in the form
of housing, food, medical care, and other subsidies. He has also required the
oversight of F.B.I. agents, who have lived with him in one safe house after
another. Mike Anticev, Fadl's designated handler, has spent the most time with
the former terrorist. Sitting at a small conference table earlier this month at
the F.B.I.'s headquarters in lower Manhattan, Anticev, a powerfully built man
with high cheekbones and brown eyes, said that keeping Fadl and taking care of
him have been "absolutely worth it for the government. Junior wrote the book on
Al Qaeda, and the well still isn't dry." He paused. "But for me? What a lot of
headaches! I have a very good relationship with him, but he's a full-time job.
I'm his big brother, his coach, his psychiatrist, and his marriage counsellor.
If he has trouble with his family, I'm almost like a parent -- I have to be the
bearer of bad news. At times, I spend hours a day on the phone. Weekends.
Nights. Whatever the problem of the day is, I have to deal with it."

Anticev's cell phone rang. He glanced at the phone's display and sighed. "That's
him," he said. He normally answers Fadl's calls immediately, but this time he
let him leave a message.

Dan Coleman, the former Al Qaeda specialist at the F.B.I., spent many hours
debriefing Fadl. "He's a lovable rogue," he said. "He's fixated on money. And he
loves women." U.S. officials allegedly exploited the latter enthusiasm during
Fadl's initial interrogations, in order to cement his loyalty. Fadl told two
counterterrorism officials that, while he was being debriefed by the C.I.A. in
Eritrea, the agency provided him with free housing, which he shared with a
"girlfriend." Later, one of the officials said, Fadl "used to carry a
photograph" of the woman, and cried about having left her behind. A former
C.I.A. official, who was involved with Fadl's case at the time, denied this,
saying, "There was no girlfriend I knew of in Eritrea."

At first, Fadl was reluctant to speak freely on various personal matters, in
particular his reasons for breaking with bin Laden. But he provided a
surprisingly full picture of Al Qaeda, depicting it as an international criminal
network intent on attacking the United States. Fadl said that he had handled
many of Al Qaeda's financial transactions after bin Laden left Afghanistan and
moved the hub of his operations to Khartoum, in 1992. In this role, Fadl had
access to bin Laden's payroll and knew the details of Al Qaeda's global banking
networks, its secret membership lists, and its paramilitary training camps in
Afghanistan, one of which he had attended, in the late eighties. Two years
before the Embassy bombings in East Africa, Fadl warned U.S. officials that bin
Laden's followers might try to attack U.S. embassies abroad or targets inside
America.

His story astounded U.S. officials. Anticev recalled, "In the beginning, it was
hard to get your arms around how big this conspiracy really was and how many
people were involved. There were all of these players, and a global organization
of all these different terrorist groups. He told us about all the different
committees, and about bin Laden himself." Fadl described bin Laden as soft-
spoken, and said that he had a good sense of humor. He noted that one Al Qaeda
member, Abu Rida al-Suri, was unusually witty and frequently made bin Laden
laugh -- a description that was borne out when Anticev had a chance to talk to
Suri, in Khartoum. Fadl displayed a firm command of Al Qaeda's financial
structure, and asserted that it resembled that of an international conglomerate.
Bin Laden's business decisions hadn't always pleased him, however. Among other
things, he said that jihadis from Egypt were often paid better and given more
responsibility than those from other countries. Fadl complained to bin Laden
bitterly about this, but his plea for equal pay and equal work was rejected.

Fadl told U.S. officials, and later testified in court, that he had been charged
with exploring the possibility of purchasing uranium -- Al Qaeda, he said, had
been interested in obtaining nuclear and chemical weapons. And he revealed
tradecraft secrets, explaining that Al Qaeda operatives were taught to disguise
their identities by appearing Western -- shaving beards, wearing cologne, and
carrying cigarettes -- and never discussing jihad in public.

C.I.A. officials debriefed Fadl for a month and a half. In the fall of 1996, the
C.I.A. flew him from Eritrea to a U.S. military base in Germany, where he
entered the custody of the F.B.I. The C.I.A. also handed over transcripts of its
interviews with Fadl. (The smooth coöperation between the two agencies in this
case contradicts the widespread notion that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. were
incapable of working together.) Dan Coleman interrogated Fadl at the base. At
first, Fadl claimed that his motives for talking were an interest in writing a
tell-all book and a love for the United States. (He had lived in America for two
years in the mid-eighties, primarily in Brooklyn and in Atlanta, learning
English and working in various delis and grocery stores.) After a week or so,
Coleman coaxed him into admitting that his real reason for breaking with Al
Qaeda was that he had skimmed a large sum of money from bin Laden's business
ventures. He had stolen more than a hundred thousand dollars, and he knew that
bin Laden wouldn't forgive him. Coleman said that, in his experience, the
hardest story to get from any suspect is a narrative in which he incriminates
himself. "We had to know everything, warts and all, if he was going to be a
witness," Coleman recalled. "It caused tears and gnashing of teeth. He thought
we'd think less of him. He was ashamed." At the same time, Coleman said, "he
likes to please. Most people do." Coleman said that he got Fadl to confess
through persistence and persuasion, not through threats or violence. (Cloonan,
the former special agent, said that the same was true for Kherchtou, the
Moroccan informant, who was persuaded to coöperate while enjoying three-course
meals at a large Moroccan estate.)

Coleman was surprised to learn that Fadl wasn't particularly religious. "I never
saw him pray once," he said. For Fadl, jihad was less a spiritual quest than "a
socially acceptable form of bad behavior." As Coleman put it, "You get to blow
stuff up and kill people, and your colleagues and peers think you're good. It's
fun, and you can be a hero." Coleman acknowledged that most Al Qaeda members
were deeply committed to Islam, but he said that it had been a breakthrough to
realize that some were more like ordinary criminals, and could be manipulated in
ways familiar to law-enforcement officials. (Kherchtou was a pilot who worked
for bin Laden for money, and he was angered when Al Qaeda refused to pay for his
wife's Cesarean-section operation.)

The F.B.I. used the information provided by Fadl to strengthen a criminal
indictment that was being drawn up against bin Laden by Mary Jo White, the U.S.
Attorney in New York. Before the government acquired Fadl as a witness,
prosecutors had worried that the legal case against bin Laden might be hard to
make. Cloonan recalled, "All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes this Junior. It
was something. He's telling you how they work, what they were planning, how they
recruit. . . . His life story becomes the spine of the prosecution -- a walking,
talking body who will sit up on the witness stand and look the jury in the eye.
This is powerful stuff!" In 1998, the indictment was completed. It charged bin
Laden with running a terrorist organization that, among other things, had played
a role in the 1993 attack on American troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, and had
bombed the U.S. Embassies in East Africa.

The Justice Department worked out a plea agreement with Fadl that would keep him
in its custody but out of jail, at least for the time being. Fadl pleaded guilty
to two terrorism-related charges, stemming from his help in smuggling weapons
for bin Laden. He faced up to fifteen years in prison, depending upon how
helpful he proved to be. Because he has continued to assist U.S. authorities, he
has yet to be sentenced, and may never be.

Soon after the F.B.I. took custody of Fadl, agents realized that his scheming,
which had once been bin Laden's problem, was now theirs. Cloonan says of Fadl,
"For one thing, he's a gambler." He recalled that Fadl once won a modest sum in
a New Jersey lottery, after persuading his overseers to let him play the
scratch-off cards at a 7-Eleven. (The guards confiscated his earnings.) At one
point, Fadl persuaded the government to give him a business loan, and he then
opened a deli. But financial problems ensued, and the business ran aground. Fadl
asked officials again and again for permission to write and publish his memoirs,
but they repeatedly turned him down. More recently, he tried unsuccessfully to
get permission to go to Sudan to claim his share of a family inheritance,
following the death of his father. Anticev said that it would be "far too
dangerous" for Fadl to return home, because he would likely be killed by former
comrades-in-arms.

Cloonan said that Fadl's pursuit of women had posed numerous perils. "The last
thing we wanted was for him to get involved with women," he said. "What would
the court think? It would blow his cover!" The F.B.I. agents recalled Fadl
flirting with female agents and young female lifeguards at the swimming pool of
the New Jersey hotel where he was staying before his wife's arrival. "He's a
very outgoing guy," Cloonan said. "He was like a heat-seeking missile." He went
on, "He didn't know how to swim, so we got him some noodles. We loved to just
watch Junior floating around the pool and making a fool of himself. He was,
like, the mayor of the motel." He discovered other pleasures of American life.
"Waffles!" Cloonan said. "Junior absolutely loved them. He ordered them for
breakfast every day. If you ate like him, you'd have gained fifty pounds."

Fadl loves sports, and, to keep him busy, the F.B.I. gave him money to buy a
Ping-Pong table. His favorite game, however, is soccer, and when he lived in New
Jersey he begged the agents to let him coach a local girls' team. Permission was
denied.

"It was to our advantage to let him blow off steam," Cloonan explained. "It made
him feel more like a human being than a prisoner. You have to worry about mood
swings. Sometimes he'd have trouble sleeping. At three in the morning on a
winter's night, you'd counsel him. 'I'm a traitor,' he'd say. 'I miss my wife.'
You're always concerned about someone's mental state." As time wore on, and Fadl
complained increasingly of loneliness, the F.B.I. helped find his wife, Nadia,
and their four children, in Khartoum, and brought them to the United States.
Cloonan witnessed the reunion, and was quietly disappointed. "We thought they'd
be running at each other," he recalled. "Instead, they just looked at each
other, and it was, like, 'Oh, hi. How are you?' "

Coleman said that the domestic tensions rapidly escalated. "Nadia would really
break Junior's chops, unmercifully," he said. "She basically did nothing but
complain from the time she arrived in the U.S." There were numerous cultural
conflicts. When the agents gave her lobsters as a Fourth of July treat, she
accused them of trying to poison her family with "water spiders." Once, she
cooked dinner for them, placing a pigeonlike bird directly over the burners of a
gas stove. "It was brutal," Cloonan said, but he added that he politely ate his
meal. When Nadia first arrived, Fadl asked to have her undergo a ritual
cleansing that involved covering her in mud and then placing her over warm
embers in a back-yard pit. "Suffice it to say that we did not allow Junior to
smoke Nadia in a pit," Cloonan said.

Although Nadia did not learn English or adapt to American culture as easily as
her husband, she happily returned from a trip to a department store -- sponsored
by the F.B.I., which wanted her to have more American-looking clothes -- with a
pair of pink-and-white L.A. Gear sneakers. She also proved to be a better
softball player than Fadl. (When he sulked after being humiliated in a game, she
shook her finger at him and said, "I'm in America now. I have rights!") At the
urging of several female agents, she even consented, despite her strict Muslim
background, to remove her veil and get her hair done at a salon, along with a
manicure and pedicure. When she showed off her new look, several agents
applauded while Cloonan announced on the P.A. system of his F.B.I. car, "Now,
for the first time in public, Mrs. Nadia al-Fadl!"

But the agents who took turns living with the couple said that Nadia was
overwhelmed by taking care of four children without help from relatives. "She
wanted her grandmother, her mother, her sisters, and her sisters' children,"
Coleman said. "She was used to a huge extended family. In Sudan, basically, what
people do from the moment they get up in the morning is talk. And she didn't
have anybody to talk to but him. And the kids were underfoot."

In the late nineties, the F.B.I. imported eight more relatives. Nadia wanted
them all to live in the same house, but the Marshals Service, which oversees the
protection of government witnesses, couldn't deal with the security issues.
Instead, the extended family was housed nearby. But soon, the agents said, some
relatives began to complain that it was haram -- forbidden by Islam -- for Fadl
to be coöperating as a witness with the U.S. government. The discontent spread,
and the relatives had to be sent back to Africa.

Fadl's older children spoke only Arabic, and they were provided with tutors for
their schooling. Soon they were playing American sports and begging for trips to
McDonald's and water parks. But the process of assimilation was bumpy. At one
point, when a supermarket-checkout person stared suspiciously at the agents and
the Fadl family, the agents explained that they were "missionaries" and that the
Fadls were converts. Cloonan recalled that the checkout person was overcome with
admiration, offering to do anything she could to help the family.

Fadl has occasionally had trouble keeping his identity and whereabouts a secret.
Once, after being stopped for speeding by a state trooper, he tried to get out
of the situation by announcing that he knew Osama bin Laden personally. Another
time, during a secure videoconference, Fadl mentioned that it was snowing
outside his window; the Marshals Service severely reprimanded him for the slip.

Nadia has chafed at the boundaries of life in the witness-protection program,
and has periodically threatened to return to Sudan. Two years ago, on a Sunday
night in the middle of the summer, Anticev received a call from Fadl. "He said
that Nadia was leaving, and that she'd taken the kids on a Greyhound bus to New
York. He was crying, and asking me, 'What do I do?' " Soon afterward, Anticev
received a call from Nadia, who was at the Port Authority. He met her and the
children at the F.B.I.'s headquarters in lower Manhattan, and persuaded her to
go back home.

A prime source of marital trouble, Anticev said, has been Fadl's desire for
other women. Not long ago, Anticev declined Fadl's request to marry a second
wife. Fadl argued that the American government had promised to support his
entire family. He reminded Anticev that, under his agreement with the
authorities, his family was defined as anyone he loved. He swore that he loved
this new woman. Back in the eighties, in America, Fadl had briefly married a
second wife, without telling her about Nadia; this time, Anticev said, "I told
him I was responsible for the well-being of his wife and kids, and I didn't see
another wife as in their interest."

Although the U.S. government draws the line at polygamy, the F.B.I. agents say
they are happy to publicize the fact that they have been giving the former Al
Qaeda operative considerable financial support for the past ten years. The
government even paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in hospital bills when one
of Fadl's children required heart surgery. "It's what you have to do," Anticev
said. "And it's a good story to put out. If you've got valuable information,
we'll do what we can to help."

Anticev, Cloonan, and Coleman -- three men who have spent countless hours
debriefing Al Qaeda operatives -- all take issue with the kinds of rough
interrogations that have characterized the Bush Administration's approach since
September 11th. Anticev says, "Just building a relationship with a person, and
knowing your subject matter, is what works."

Coleman, for his part, believes that "people don't do anything unless they're
rewarded." He says that if the F.B.I. had beaten a confession out of Fadl with
what he calls "all that alpha-male shit," it would never be able to talk to him
now. Brutality may yield a timely scrap of information, he conceded. But in the
longer fight against terrorism such an approach is "completely insufficient," he
says. "You need to talk to people for weeks. Years."

Cloonan, too, is a skeptic about the Bush Administration's commands to handle
terrorism suspects roughly. (In 2001, Vice-President Cheney declared that it was
time for the U.S. to enter "sort of the dark side.") Few suspects, he
acknowledged, are as eager to confess as Fadl was. Nevertheless, he suggested,
there is always the possibility that other people with useful information about
Al Qaeda will consider becoming informants. "You think all of this stuff about
torture is going to make people want to come to us?" Cloonan asked. "That's why
I get upset when I hear people talking about stress positions, loud music, and
dogs." Looking back, he said, "There's a lot of stuff Junior talked about in
casual, non-threatening moments." He smiled. "You could talk about everything
with Fadl. That's the beauty of it."

*


New York Times --

September 10, 2006
CHENEY'S POWER NO LONGER GOES UNQUESTIONED
By David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10cheney.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 -- From those first moments five years ago when Secret
Service agents burst into Vice President Dick Cheney's office on Sept. 11,
lifted him off his feet and propelled him to the underground Presidential
Emergency Operations Center, the man who had returned to Washington that year to
remake the powers of the presidency seemed unstoppable.

Within minutes, Mr. Cheney was directing the government's response to an attack
that was still under way. Within weeks, he was overseeing the surveillance
program that tracked suspected terrorist communications into and out of the
United States without warrants. Within months, he and his staff, guided by a
loyal aide, David S. Addington, were championing the reinterpretation of the
rules of war so that they could detain "enemy combatants" and interrogate them
at secret detention facilities run by the CIA around the world.

It was Mr. Cheney and his staff who helped shape the rules under which members
of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were denied some of the core rights of the Geneva
Conventions and would be tried by "military commissions" at Guantanamo Bay -- if
they faced trial at all.

"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world
we live in demands it," Mr. Cheney said in December on a flight from Pakistan to
Oman. "You know," he added, "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in
four years."

But as the nation observes the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, Mr. Cheney finds the powers he has asserted under attack and his
influence challenged. Congress and the Supreme Court have pushed back at his
claim that the president alone, as commander in chief, can set the rules for
detention, interrogation and domestic spying.

On Wednesday afternoon in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Cheney sat
silently as President Bush urged Congress to restore to him the powers, stripped
away by the Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 ruling in June, to create military
commissions and define the precise meaning of the Geneva Conventions when it
comes to interrogations.

There is little question that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney still share the goal of
expanding the power of the presidency: legislation they have sent to Congress
would essentially allow them to set the rules of evidence, define interrogation
techniques and intercept domestic communications as they have for the past five
years.

But they have been stymied in their effort to simply assert those powers and
carry them out with minimal oversight, as part of Mr. Cheney's declared goal to
restore to the presidency an authority that he believed was dangerously eroded
after Vietnam and Watergate.

On national security issues, Mr. Cheney, once the unchallenged adviser to a
president who came to office with little experience in foreign affairs, remains
a pivotal figure but now vies for influence with other officials like Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser.
Over the past 18 months, Mr. Cheney appears to have reluctantly given ground on
detention practices and, at least for now, on policy disputes involving Iran and
North Korea.

On Friday, the Senate Intelligence Committee -- controlled by Mr. Cheney's
Republican allies -- declared that there had been no basis for Mr. Cheney's
repeated claims that Saddam Hussein had harbored a Qaeda leader and had ties to
the group. But Mr. Cheney has never conceded that his statement was in error.

His prediction in 2002 that overthrowing Mr. Hussein would force radical
extremists "to rethink their strategy of jihad" proved wrong, as Mr. Bush
implicitly acknowledged last week when he described how the array of enemies
facing America has multiplied. Mr. Cheney's friends and former aides said they
were mystified about how the same man who as defense secretary in 1991 warned
that "for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside
Iraq would literally be a quagmire" managed, 15 years later, to find himself
facing that prospect.

A WANING INFLUENCE

Measuring the accumulation or the erosion of power is an imprecise art. But
interviews with more than 45 people over the past five months -- including
current and former White House aides, foreign diplomats, members of Congress and
confidants of Mr. Cheney -- painted a picture of a vice president who, while
still influential, has seen his power wane.

Most agreed to speak candidly only if their names were not used. Mr. Cheney
himself declined repeated requests for an interview. Instead, his office
encouraged Ms. Rice and Mr. Hadley to give interviews to dispute the view that
Mr. Cheney's power is in decline.

Mr. Hadley said the vice president "is often the first to insist that the
president hear a variety of views" and argued that reports of his powers in the
first term were always exaggerated. "It's the president who creates the foreign
policy around here," Mr. Hadley said, "not some hidden hand."

Ms. Rice disputed the view that she had supplanted Mr. Cheney, pointing out that
he still had one-on-one lunches with Mr. Bush where he could make his views
known "in his quiet way."

Mr. Cheney's defenders said that over the summer he was among the strongest
voices arguing within the White House that the United States had to give Israel
as much time as possible to strike a decisive blow against Hezbollah.

But those same insiders said that in retrospect Mr. Cheney's power was at its
peak in 2003 and 2004, before Iraq's insurgency flared, before the abuses at Abu
Ghraib were revealed, before the setbacks in Congress and at the Supreme Court.

Without the help of his closest adviser, I. Lewis Libby Jr., who resigned last
fall after his indictment in the Central Intelligence Agency leak case, Mr.
Cheney has lost the early warning radar that gave him and his staff such command
over the federal bureaucracy. Administration insiders said Mr. Cheney and his
aides were now having to fight to maintain positions that a few years ago he
would have won handily.

"During the first term, Cheney was considered one of the smartest guys in the
administration," said Representative Ray LaHood, Republican of Illinois. "But
his influence has been diminished because of the Scooter Libby thing and because
the war in Iraq has not gone well."

In his second term, Mr. Bush has grown less dependent on Mr. Cheney for
information, current and former officials said. When Joshua B. Bolten became the
White House chief of staff earlier this year, he told associates that he wanted
to make sure the president heard from more voices. "My impression is that there
are a lot more data points or gathering points now," said Senator John Thune,
Republican of South Dakota.

For instance, Mr. Bush has turned to another Washington insider, James A. Baker
III, who served Mr. Bush's father as secretary of state, for help as the co-
chairman of an outside group developing options for dealing with Iraq. One group
member said, "You get the sense that the president now realizes, perhaps a
little late, that he needs Baker to find him an exit door."

Mr. Cheney told NBC News in May that his influence with Mr. Bush was unchanged.
"I feel like he gives me the access that I need to be able to do my job," Mr.
Cheney said, adding later: "I give him the best advice I can. He doesn't always
agree. Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't."

CHALLENGES IN CONGRESS

Perhaps nowhere has Mr. Cheney's shifting influence been more visible than on
Capitol Hill, where the vice president's ability to win his way without
challenge -- a luxury he enjoyed through much of the first term -- has
evaporated.

In the first four years, Mr. Cheney often bypassed Congress on issues like
detention policy.

He and Mr. Addington began to pave the way for the reassertion of executive
power that they had long talked about. Mr. Cheney took control of crucial
intelligence-gathering programs, including the one that involved eavesdropping
on conversations between suspects in the United States and their overseas
counterparts without getting a warrant from a special court set up by Congress
for such cases.

"They have a view of executive authority that basically smothers the other two
branches," said Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who found
himself at odds with Mr. Cheney on detention and interrogation policy.

But in the second term, whether the issue was the treatment and prosecution of
terror suspects or Congressional oversight of domestic spying, Mr. Cheney has
been forced into an unhappy retreat.

The Supreme Court's recent ruling struck at the heart of Mr. Cheney's goal to
expand presidential powers. By mid-July, it prompted the White House to concede
that terror suspects had a right under international law to basic human and
legal protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Similarly, Mr. Bush's announcement on Wednesday amounted to an opening gambit in
negotiations with Congress over the rules of tribunals, in what could amount to
bargaining over the scope of Mr. Bush's powers.

Mr. Hadley said in an interview that in recent weeks Mr. Cheney had offered
advice to Mr. Bush about how to deal with the court's decision. But Mr. Hadley,
not Mr. Cheney, has been acting as negotiator with Congress, a decision that
administration officials said reflected the rockiness of the vice president's
relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Cheney discovered the depth of that opposition last summer, when Republicans
began to rebel against the White House after he tried to block a bill by Senator
John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that would bar cruel and inhumane treatment
of all prisoners in American custody.

In a tense, 30-minute meeting in July 2005, Mr. Cheney scolded three Republicans
-- Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and Senator John W. Warner of Virginia -- for
proposing legislation that he said interfered with the president's authority to
protect Americans against terrorist attacks.

But the senators did not budge despite the threat of a veto. "The three of us
were firmly of one view, he of another," Mr. Warner said.

After the Senate and the House voted overwhelmingly against Mr. Cheney's
position, the White House decided that the vice president had become so
radioactive that his interventions were losing votes, rather than winning them,
White House officials acknowledge. So Mr. Cheney stepped aside, and the less
ideological, more lawyerly Mr. Hadley was sent to deal with Mr. McCain. The
result was a deal that Mr. Cheney had previously rejected.

The White House also appeared to yield this summer when it agreed to allow a
secret intelligence court to rule on the constitutionality of the National
Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants. Civil rights groups
and lawmakers from both parties have since criticized the agreement and cast
doubt on whether it will be approved by Congress.

SHIFTING CONSTELLATIONS

At the height of his influence in the Bush White House two years ago, Mr. Cheney
stepped into the Oval Office early one evening and raised an alarm about an
agreement that American negotiators were about to sign in Beijing.

The negotiators, mostly from the State Department, were trying to entice North
Korea to sign a document outlining the steps for resolving the standoff over the
country's nuclear weapons. But it lacked the tough language on disarmament that
North Korea had rejected and that Mr. Cheney knew Mr. Bush wanted.

With Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, and his deputy, Richard L.
Armitage, at a black-tie dinner where they could not be easily reached on secure
telephones, Mr. Cheney "declared this thing a loser," said a former senior
official involved in the discussions that night.

Mr. Bush sent new instructions to the negotiators -- through the National
Security Council, rather than the State Department -- that essentially killed
the deal. "Powell and Armitage were not happy," one official said. "But it was
too late."

It would be hard to imagine a similar course of events today. Soon after the
start of the second term, Mr. Bush began signaling to foreign leaders visiting
him in the Oval Office that he knew much had gone wrong in his first term, and
that he empowered Ms. Rice to put a new emphasis on consultation and teamwork
with allies. Ms. Rice, aides said, asserted her authority early, sending her own
envoy to the North Korean nuclear talks last September, though the process has
so far proved fruitless.

This spring, Ms. Rice determined that the only way to hold together the
international coalition against Iran was to volunteer to join negotiations with
Tehran, but only if it first agreed to suspend its production of uranium. (So
far, the Iranians have refused.)

The proposal was notable because in the first term, Mr. Powell's top aides, led
by Richard N. Haass, the director of policy planning, had tried and failed to
promote direct engagement with the Iranians.

Ms. Rice said that when her proposal to engage Iran was presented to the
president this spring, Mr. Cheney agreed that it was worth a try and that
changed circumstances required a changed strategy.

"The constellations have shifted somewhat," said Dov S. Zakheim, who served as
an undersecretary of defense in Mr. Bush's first term, giving an image used by
others to suggest that Mr. Cheney has been partially eclipsed.

In particular, Mr. Cheney has fewer allies in crucial posts than he once did.
Those who have left the administration include Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J.
Feith, who quit as deputy defense secretary and undersecretary of defense last
year.

Mr. Cheney's associates said the departure of Mr. Libby was particularly severe.
As Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, Mr. Libby served as the vice president's eyes
and ears around Washington, working the bureaucratic machinery deftly and
choking off ideas Mr. Cheney opposed before they rose to the Oval Office.
"Scooter was a big loss," Mr. Feith said.

For his part, Mr. Cheney brushes off poll approval ratings now hovering around
20 percent.

"I suppose, sometimes, people look at my demeanor and say, well, he's the Darth
Vader of the administration," Mr. Cheney told CNN in June. "I'm not running for
anything. My career will end, politically, with this administration. I have the
freedom and the luxury, as does the president, of doing what we think is right
for the country."

Mr. Cheney still appears regularly in public, mainly in front of military crowds
or campaigning for Republicans. His stump speech denounces Democrats who have
called for withdrawal from Iraq and news organizations that have revealed secret
counterterrorism programs.

Mr. Cheney maintains that what matters now is convincing the country that it is
really at war and that defeat is not an option. And at 65, he seems willing to
wait for his vindication. As Mr. Cheney recently told NBC, "History will decide
how I did."

*


Washington Post --

September 10, 2006

FROM BALTIMORE SUBURBS TO A SECRET CIA PRISON

Family Learned Last Week That Man Was Among 'High-Value'
Terrorism Suspects Moved to Guantanamo

By Eric Rich and Dan Eggen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/09/AR2006090901024_3.html

BALTIMORE -- He was the studious one in Janis Sanford's social studies class at
Owings Mills High School, the teenager who stood apart from his suburban
Baltimore peers for his no-nonsense attitude. Majid Khan worked at the family
gas station after school and, in his free time, indulged his interest in
computers.

But something happened to the serious young man after he graduated in 1999, when
his life took a dramatic -- and much-disputed -- turn.

Khan, now 26, is one of the 14 "high-value" terrorism suspects transferred
Monday to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, men the
government considered so dangerous they had been held by the CIA at secret
foreign prisons for years. Khan is expected to stand trial on terrorism charges
after Congress approves a new set of rules for the special military courts that
will decide the fates of the 14 suspects.

This week's allegations stunned Sanford, who said the young man she taught in
her English-as-a-second-language class could not, as alleged, have plotted to
blow up gas stations or poison drinking water in U.S. reservoirs.

"It doesn't make any sense to me," said Sanford, who taught many of the school's
foreign students. "I can't imagine it.

"He wasn't one of these kinds of fool-around kids. He just seemed serious. . . .
He wasn't a light-hearted jokester."

In brief interviews Thursday and Friday, his father said the charges are false.
"He's a terrorist, my son? No!" Khan Ali said, speaking in the family's brick
duplex in Windsor Mill. "I don't accept this."

The father spoke only hours after the first official confirmation of what he and
others had long presumed: that his son had been held by the CIA since he
disappeared in Pakistan in 2003.

The family moved to the United States in 1996 and settled in the Baltimore area,
authorities said. After graduating, Khan married a woman in Pakistan and became
a father. Though the child is now 2, Ali said, his son has been in custody since
before her birth and has had no contact with her. Ali said his son had been in
Pakistan less than a year when, in 2003, he was arrested by Pakistani
authorities.

At one point, in seeming contradiction, he said of his son, "He has been
brainwashed." He also acknowledged that a relative is affiliated with al-Qaeda.
Authorities last week described that unidentified relative as an uncle, but Ali
said the relationship is more distant.

Before Khan was detained, he and his family lived in a modest home in
Catonsville. Some recalled that, for a time several years ago, the house
appeared to be under surveillance. Neighbor John Owen said another resident once
called him in the middle of the night to say that a person was sitting in a car
outside Owen's home. Owen said he went out and tapped on the window.

"This guy holds up a shield," Owen said, referring to a law enforcement badge,
"and said, 'I'm watching a house.' "

Khan's name has surfaced in other terrorism prosecutions. But until the
government's disclosure this week, details about his case were sketchy.

A single-page "biography" released by the office of John D. Negroponte, the
director of national intelligence, portrays Khan as a figure who had contact
with terrorist operatives from Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere. U.S. officials
also allege that Khan took orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the man accused of
orchestrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

According to the document, Khan became involved in a "local Islamic
organization" before returning to Pakistan in early 2002. The federal
accusations say his radicalization proceeded rapidly once he was back. A cousin
and the uncle, both of whom were al-Qaeda operatives, introduced Khan to
Mohammed, the document alleges.

Before long, Khan was training to make bomb components and discussing terrorist
attacks that could be conducted in the United States, according to the document
and government officials.

Mohammed allegedly asked Khan to research poisoning U.S. reservoirs and
considered him for an operation to assassinate the Pakistani president. The
document also alleges that Mohammed orchestrated a test that "showed that Khan
was committed to being a suicide operative."

Mohammed, the document says, "selected Khan as an operative for a possible
attack inside the United States . . . because of his excellent English and
extensive knowledge of the United States."

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at
California State University in San Bernardino, said al-Qaeda values recruits who
have lived in the United States. The government asserted that Khan's familiarity
with the gas station business might have given him insight into a vulnerability
that could be exploited.

"His familiarity with the Baltimore-Washington area, fluency in English, as well
as his study of fuel tank explosives and water reservoir vulnerabilities made
him a logical choice to be on KSM's [Khalid Sheik Mohammed's] list of
operatives," said Levin, who has no firsthand knowledge about Khan.

Khan also is accused of delivering money to an operative for Jemaah Islamiyah,
the Indonesian extremist group affiliated with al-Qaeda, to "support terrorist
attacks against Western targets," the government alleged.

Furthermore, according to the document, Khan received help from Aafia Siddiqui,
a scientist accused of helping al-Qaeda. According to the government, Khan also
recommended the recruitment of Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was
convicted of providing material support to terrorists in 2003 after allegedly
plotting to take down suspension bridges in New York.

Khan's wife, Rubia, is in Pakistan, according to family and friends. Khalid
Khawaja, a former member of the Pakistani intelligence service who is acting as
a spokesman for her, said information obtained through interrogations in the CIA
prison system is inherently unreliable.

"When you are in that kind of custody and the worst kind of human treatment, you
can get them to say any kind of statement," said Khawaja, who was reached by
telephone in Pakistan. "They don't have any evidence against Majid Khan as far
as I know. . . . We don't believe he has done anything. He is a victim of this
so-called war on terrorism by George Bush."

A central figure in Khan's case is another Pakistani national, Uzair Paracha,
who was sentenced in New York earlier this year to 30 years in prison for
providing material support to terrorists.

Authorities allege that Khan and Mohammed planned to use the Paracha family's
textile-importing business to smuggle explosives into the United States and blow
up underground gasoline storage tanks in Maryland. Paracha was accused of
attempting to help Khan reenter the United States from Pakistan illegally.

Paracha denied wrongdoing, saying that he was used by Khan and Mohammed and that
a confession to FBI agents was "what they wanted to hear." But he also admitted
that his father, Saifullah Paracha, had told him about Khan's terrorism ties.
The elder Paracha, who also had met with Osama bin Laden, is being held as an
enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay.

According to an interrogation summary filed in the case, Khan said that the
younger Paracha had no knowledge of the plan to blow up gas stations and was
merely "willing to help a fellow Muslim at his father's request." Khan said that
while he considered recruiting Paracha for al-Qaeda, he was probably unsuitable
because he "had no extremist views and was not really a practicing Muslim,"
according to the summary.

Edward D. Wilford, one of Paracha's attorneys, said the newly released
information about Khan -- and his transfer to Guantanamo Bay -- is an important
development for Paracha's case, which is currently on appeal in the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

Lack of access to Khan and Mohammed hurt Paracha's defense, Wilford said. "It's
interesting that everything we couldn't get is now part of the public record
because it serves the administration's purposes," he added.

[ Eggen reported from Washington. Staff researchers Julie Tate and Meg Smith
contributed to this report. ]

*


Washington Post --

September 8, 2006
DECISION TO MOVE DETAINEES RESOLVED TWO-YEAR DEBATE AMONG BUSH ADVISERS
By Dafna Linzer and Glenn Kessler

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701582.html

Shackled and hooded, 14 men in secret CIA custody were gathered one by one from
locations across the world last weekend and flown to a rallying point to await
one more flight. For some of the prisoners, it was their third or fourth journey
to yet another unknown destination since President Bush approved a covert plan
for them to disappear into CIA facilities hidden throughout Eastern Europe and
Asia.

On Sunday night, the men -- three Pakistanis, two Yemenis, two Saudis, two
Malaysians, a Palestinian, a Libyan, a Somali, an Indonesian and a Tanzanian --
were sedated and placed together onto a flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They
arrived Labor Day morning, an unusually quiet time at the Pentagon-run facility.

The arrival of the prisoners, witnessed by few beyond the CIA officers
accompanying them, marked the end of a five-year effort by the Bush
administration to conceal as many as 100 al-Qaeda suspects from the world and to
shield the agency's interrogation tactics and facilities from public scrutiny.
It was also the result of nearly two years of debate within the Bush White
House, touched off by a personal plea from British Prime Minister Tony Blair for
the release of British citizens in U.S. custody.

The debate divided the president's key advisers and kept open the CIA's "black
sites" until President Bush himself, under the advice of Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, ordered the facilities emptied for now, and possibly for good.

In a series of interviews, often on the condition of anonymity, key players from
throughout the administration agreed to discuss events that led to the
unraveling of one of the president's most controversial programs. Drawing on
recollections and portions of personal notes, officials said major factors that
pushed the president toward Wednesday's announcement were demands from allies to
close sites down, an increased urgency from the CIA to find a longer-term
solution to detentions and an appeal from Rice to Bush to consider the
administration's legacy.

FAVOR FOR A FRIEND

For much of 2004, British officials pushed their counterparts at the State
Department and the Pentagon to consider releasing the remaining four British men
held at Guantanamo Bay. Blair's government was under pressure at home to get the
men back and to denounce the Cuban facility on humanitarian grounds.

Senior lawyers representing the Office of the Vice President, the State
Department, the Justice Department, the CIA and the Pentagon argued over the
request. They had agreed earlier that year to release five suspects, but they
couldn't agree on the remaining four.

The issue crystallized growing differences of opinion among Bush's top advisers,
with Rice and Vice President Cheney increasingly at odds over the
administration's detainee policies.

As debate dragged on, no consensus was ever sent to Bush for a decision.
Finally, Blair raised the issue with the president during a trip to Washington
that November. Officials briefed on their discussions said the president agreed
immediately. "Blair said he really needed these guys, and the president was
happy to help him," said one senior official who was involved in the
deliberations.

Two months later, in January 2005, the four men were sent home to Britain and
immediately freed. But as Cheney's lawyer David Addington had predicted, the
decision opened up the floodgates of Guantanamo Bay. Over the coming months,
every European prisoner was sent home and a total of 100 detainees were
released.

Policymakers including Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales who were
heavily invested in the detainee program were losing ground.

Meanwhile, State Department legal adviser John Bellinger III and counselor
Philip D. Zelikow pushed for a major overhaul of detainee practices. Zelikow had
been executive director of the 9/11 commission, which had recommended
overhauling the detention policy to make it consistent with international norms.
Hamdan Goes to Court

A turning point in the debate, senior administration officials said, came 10
months later, when The Washington Post reported the existence of the secret CIA
prisons in November 2005. At the time the White House refused to confirm or deny
the program but said the report had harmed national security. European leaders
publicly demanded explanations and privately sought an end to both the CIA
program and to incarcerations without trial at Guantanamo Bay.

The detainee issue dominated Rice's winter trip to Europe and became a prime
subject between Bush and his European counterparts. After meeting with German
Chancellor Angela Merkel in January of this year, Bush complained about the
public "misperceptions" about Guantanamo. But by June, Bush bluntly asserted at
a news conference, "I'd like to close Guantanamo." He said that the facility had
become an excuse for "some of our friends" to say the United States was not
upholding its values.

At the same time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden had taken over as CIA director and
suggested in a speech to the agency staff that he was going to review the
viability of the CIA's secret program.

That review all but collapsed later in June when the Supreme Court ruled, in
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , that detainees must be put under the protections of the
Geneva Conventions, in effect declaring the CIA's program illegal.

Even though comments from the justices at oral argument had suggested that they
might rule against the administration's detainee policies, the White House
counsel had made no contingency plans for a loss and was stunned by the
decision.

"The court's decision was much more sweeping than we expected," a senior White
House official said yesterday.

Most senior Justice Department lawyers believed the ruling would force the
government to close the CIA's "black sites." Other lawyers disagreed.

In a series of emergency meetings with top government lawyers after the Hamdan
ruling, the CIA's legal adviser, John Rizzo, told his colleagues that the
program was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain anyway. Since its
disclosure in press reports, several countries had asked the CIA to close
prisons on their soil and other countries had refused requests to host new ones.
Other lawyers noted that it had simply damaged the ability of U.S. intelligence
agencies to work with important allies on almost anything.

The lawyers ended up agreeing that the CIA could not hold the suspects
indefinitely. "There had to be an end game," said one official close to the
deliberations.

As a compromise, they agreed that in principle the Hamdan decision did not mean
that the sites could not exist; it just meant that the CIA could no longer
handle suspects outside the boundaries of the Geneva Conventions.

Hamdan "forced our hand," said White House counselor Dan Bartlett, the only
administration official who agreed to speak on the record. "We knew there was
going to have to be some acknowledgment that they were in our hands." Also, he
said, the intelligence value of interrogations had diminished to the point where
the administration thought "we could bring them to justice."

THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS

After nearly two dozen meetings of senior policymakers on the detainee issue,
Bush convened his principal advisers at the end of August to make a final
decision. Several had moved far away from the impassioned defenses of secret
prisons that they had mounted a year earlier.

Rice had had a series of conversations with Bush on the detainee issue, but at
that National Security Council meeting she made her final pitch for a change in
policy. In front of her colleagues, according to several who attended, she said
that it was important for the United States to bring the issue to closure, both
on foreign policy grounds and moral grounds. She noted that the secret sites
were having a corrosive effect on the nation's ability to win cooperation on a
range of intelligence issues. Rice urged the president to resolve the issue
rather than hand it off to his successor.

The president agreed.

"This is a paradigm shift for the administration," said one senior official who
was involved.

The core of Rice's argument appeared in the penultimate paragraph of the
president's speech.

"America is a nation of law," Bush said, adding that he had heard the concerns
of other world leaders about the administration's detention policies. "I'll
continue to work with the international community to construct a common
foundation to defend our nations and protect our freedoms."

Other advisers, including Cheney, who had essentially lost out on a program he
had fought to preserve, were rewarded in the speech, namely with the president's
assurance, if only in theory, that the black sites program could be used again.

"It's true the program could continue, but it will never occur in the same
manner that it operated before," said one influential official.

[ Staff writers Charles Lane, Michael Abramowitz and Dan Eggen and staff
researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. ]

*


New York Times --

September 8, 2006

QUESTIONS RAISED ABOUT BUSH'S PRIMARY CLAIMS
IN DEFENSE OF SECRET DETENTION SYSTEM

By Mark Mazzetti

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08intel.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 -- In defending the Central Intelligence Agency's secret
network of prisons on Wednesday, President Bush said the detention system had
used lawful interrogation techniques, was fully described to select members of
Congress and led directly to the capture of a string of terrorists over the past
four years.

A review of public documents and interviews with American officials raises
questions about Mr. Bush's claims on all three fronts.

Mr. Bush described the interrogation techniques used on the CIA prisoners as
having been "safe, lawful and effective," and he asserted that torture had not
been used. But the Bush administration has yet to make public the legal papers
prepared by government lawyers that served as the basis for its determination
that those procedures did not violate American or international law.

The president said the Department of Justice approved a set of aggressive
interrogation practices for CIA detainees in 2002 after milder ones proved
ineffective on Abu Zubaydah, the first of the Qaeda leaders taken into custody.

Current and former government officials said that specific interrogation methods
were addressed in a series of documents, including an August 2002 memorandum by
the Justice Department that authorized the CIA's use of 20 interrogation
practices.

The August 2002 document, which was leaked to reporters in 2004, said
interrogation methods just short of those that might cause pain comparable to
"organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death" could be allowable
without being considered torture.

The memorandum was repudiated in another Justice Department document at the end
of 2004, and Congressional officials said on Thursday that they had not received
documents from the administration explaining the legal underpinnings of the
program.

One prisoner is known to have died in Afghanistan after interrogation by a
CIA contract employee, but the agency has distanced itself from that episode,
and the former employee was convicted on assault charges last month in federal
court in North Carolina.

Some lawmakers questioned Mr. Bush's claims that his administration fully
briefed some members of Congress on details of the secret detention program.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the
Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Wednesday that the Bush administration
had "withheld details of the CIA detention and interrogation program from the
Congressional intelligence committees."

Congressional officials said on Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee
was briefed about the existence of the CIA detention program but was not
informed about the locations of the secret prisons.

Public documents show that some of the information that led to the arrests of
senior terrorism plotters like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh was
known before the CIA detained its first prisoner, Mr. Zubaydah, in the spring
of 2002.

Mr. Bush said it was Mr. Zubaydah who disclosed to CIA interrogators that Mr.
Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and often used the alias
Mukhtar, sometimes spelled Muktar.

"This was a vital piece of intelligence that helped our intelligence community
pursue K.S.M.," Mr. Bush said, referring to the terror suspect by his initials.

The report of the Sept. 11 commission said that the CIA knew of the moniker
for Mr. Mohammed months before the capture of Mr. Zubaydah.

According to the report, the CIA unit given the task of tracking Osama bin
Laden had intercepted a cable on Aug. 28, 2001, that revealed the alias of Mr.
Mohammed.

Mr. Bush also said it was the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah that identified Mr.
bin al-Shibh as an accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.

American officials had identified Mr. bin al-Shibh's role in the attacks months
before Mr. Zubaydah's capture. A December 2001 federal grand jury indictment of
Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, said that Mr. Moussaoui had
received money from Mr. bin al-Shibh and that Mr. bin al-Shibh had shared an
apartment with Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot.

A CIA spokesman said Thursday that the agency had vetted the president's
speech and stood by its accuracy.

"Abu Zubaydah was the authoritative source who identified Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
as the mastermind of 9/11 and the man behind the nickname Muktar," the
spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said in a statement. "His position in Al Qaeda --
his access to terrorist secrets -- gave his reporting exceptional weight and it
gave CIA insights that were truly unique and vital. Abu Zubaydah not only
identified Ramzi Bin al-Shibh as a 9/11 accomplice -- something that had been
done before -- he provided information that helped lead to his capture."

Besides the 14 prisoners identified on Wednesday, some officials and human
rights advocates questioned the fate of dozens of others believed to have moved
through the CIA prison network over the past four years.

Human Rights Watch, in response to a request from The New York Times, provided a
list of 14 men who the organization believes have been secretly detained since
the Sept. 11 attacks and whose whereabouts are still unknown.

One of the men, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, is believed to have given false
information about links between Iraq and Al Qaeda after CIA officials
transferred him to Egyptian custody in 2002. Mr. al-Libi's statements were used
by the Bush administration as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained
Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

It emerged later that Mr. al-Libi had fabricated these stories while in
captivity to avoid harsh treatment by his Egyptian captors.

Human Rights Watch has also identified 20 other men it said were at the military
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who the group believes were once in CIA
custody

*


Los Angeles Times --

September 8, 2006

CIA CAN STILL GET TOUGH ON DETAINEES

New interrogation rules will apply only to the military.
The harsh tactics remain secret.

By Julian E. Barnes

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/
la-na-methods8sep08,0,7792324.story

WASHINGTON -- New U.S. policies on the treatment and interrogation of terrorism
suspects outlined this week by the Bush administration mean that the military no
longer will resort to harsh or extreme methods to obtain information -- but that
the CIA could.

The new administration approach, first presented by President Bush in a speech
Wednesday and detailed later by administration and military officials, followed
an internal administration debate over the question of how best to extract
intelligence from the most notorious suspects apprehended in the war on
terrorism.

But by assigning the CIA to use tough, undefined methods on some detainees, the
policy outlined by Bush may raise new questions about U.S. procedures and invite
more criticism from human rights advocates and allies.

For the five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration's top leaders
and senior policymakers have supported the use of harsh methods to obtain
information that could head off future attacks and save lives. But military
officers have insisted that such interrogation tactics are unproductive -- and
inevitably lead to abuse.

On Wednesday, after years of internal debates, the administration outlined a
compromise meant to reconcile the position of hard-liners and military
traditionalists.

The Army, morally and culturally averse to using unorthodox interrogation
methods, will get out of the business of using tough tactics against detainees
under the compromise. The new Army field manual authorizes only 19 interrogation
techniques and bans the most controversial tactics that critics said amounted to
torture -- hooding prisoners, conducting mock executions, and strapping
detainees to boards and using water to simulate drowning.

But the CIA will reserve the right to use the tougher tactics. Bush said such
methods had been effective in getting some of the 14 top Al Qaeda suspects held
by the agency to talk. Administration officials said the CIA tactics would be
legal and fall well short of torture and abuse. But the president and others
have pointedly refused to say what those tougher methods might be.

The compromise may satisfy the military, which can now say its soldiers will
always comply with international treaties and steer well clear of torture. But
it is not certain whether the new policy will satisfy those who have raised
questions about American interrogation practices, including human rights
advocates and members of Congress.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers and aides have expressed frustration that they have
not been told what the CIA techniques were and whether the agency would adhere
to the ban on torture.

"We don't know what the methods are; that is where the difficulty lies," said a
congressional aide who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of
the debate. "Although the Department of Defense techniques, bar none, are
articulated openly, with the CIA there is no way to judge whether those
techniques satisfy the ban on cruel and degrading treatment."

Human rights advocates applauded the military's embrace of Geneva Convention
protections and the Army's decision to make public its interrogation tactics.
But they worried that congressional approval of a CIA detention program that was
secret and allowed a broad range of harsh techniques would be a step backward.

"They have decided to take the military out of the torture business and leave
that to the CIA, and that is extremely problematic," said Jumana Musa, an
advocacy director for Amnesty International.

Administration officials said the new policy ensured that the toughest
techniques were reserved only for the most experienced interrogators and used
only on the most notorious suspects.

"The president made clear this is a small program targeting a certain category
of high-level Al Qaeda members," said a senior administration official speaking
on condition of anonymity because of the deliberations involved.

Senior Pentagon officials suggested that creating separate rules for the CIA and
the military represented a logical division of labor.

"Each of us has our task to do," Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of
Defense for Intelligence, said in an interview Thursday.

For the uniformed military, disclosing interrogation tactics and outlining
protections detainees will be afforded was vital to assuring the public that the
military was doing all it could to ensure there would be no repeat of the Abu
Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

"The military really felt it has been tarnished by events at Abu Ghraib and
other detainee abuses," said an administration official. "They want to restore a
certain image, and so for them there is a greater interest in being able to
speak with a great deal of transparency."

Military leaders argued this week that they did not believe abusive tactics
worked in extracting information.

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history
tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard
years, tell us that," said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of
staff for intelligence.

Information extracted by abusive tactics was of questionable credibility,
Kimmons said. Moreover, any good that came from the information would be
undercut by the damage to America's reputation once the abuse became known.

"And we can't afford to go there," he said.

Kimmons' comments reflect a common refrain among instructors at the Army
intelligence academy at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz. Nevertheless, many interrogators
privately acknowledge that coercive methods that stop short of torture have
proven effective in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In Afghanistan, for instance, interrogators who questioned prisoners early in
the war complained that they had little success with straightforward approaches,
and only began to get meaningful information from prisoners after embracing
harsher methods, including short-term deprivation of sleep.

Over time, those harsher techniques came to include putting prisoners in "stress
positions" and placing hoods on their heads -- all explicitly banned by the new
Army field manual.

The new manual allows 19 interrogation methods. Cambone said officers were asked
if they needed more than the 19 approved techniques. They said they did not.

"They are of the view that the manual gives them what they need to do the job,"
Cambone said.

Most of the Army's methods are traditional approaches that were included in the
old manual -- techniques called "ego-up," where detainees with low self-esteem
are flattered into revealing information; or "fear-up," where interrogators try
to play off a pre-existing fear or anxiety of a detainee and suggest that the
soldier could help the detainee.

New techniques include one called "Mutt and Jeff" -- essentially a good cop, bad
cop routine -- and "false flag," in which an interrogator pretends not to be a
U.S. citizen.

The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-
called unlawful combatants -- such as Al Qaeda suspects -- not traditional
prisoners of war.

That technique, called "separation," involves segregating a detainee from other
prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary
confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.

A four-star general would need to approve the use of the separation tactic to
ensure it was not abused, Kimmons added.

Disclosing the Army's techniques was controversial within the Pentagon, and
Kimmons acknowledged that the military had wrestled with the idea of keeping
some of them secret. But he said the reality was that the interrogation
techniques were not the kind of secret that could be kept forever.

"Even classified techniques, once you use them on the battlefield over time,
become increasingly known to your enemies, some of whom are going to be released
in due course," Kimmons said Wednesday.

For the CIA, immersed in a culture of secrecy, the sort of disclosure the Army
made this week is anathema.

Agency officials believe that talking about what methods are allowed or not
allowed undercuts their ability to question terrorists.

Administration officials acknowledged Thursday that as long as the CIA did not
follow the Pentagon lead and disclose its methods, questions would persist.

"The fact that they are not disclosing means there is going to be skepticism,"
said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of government
rules.

Nonetheless, the CIA is better equipped to seek intelligence from difficult
suspects, others said.

"With the CIA, you are only talking about a narrow group," the senior
administration official said. "You don't have a problem of techniques falling in
the hands of an interrogator who doesn't have a lot of training."

But Musa, the Amnesty lawyer, said several CIA contractors had been accused of
beating detainees to death, and there was little evidence that the agency's
interrogators could be trusted with tougher tactics.

"Anytime anyone has danced up to the line," she said, "they have crossed over
it."

[ julian.barnes@latimes.com

Times staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report from Washington. ]

*


Washington Post --

September 8, 2006

ARMITAGE SAYS HE WAS SOURCE OF CIA LEAK
He Says He Did Not Know Covert Status

By R. Jeffrey Smith

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/07/AR2006090701781.html

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said yesterday that he
believes he was the initial source for a 2003 newspaper column by Robert D.
Novak that disclosed the CIA's previously secret employment of Valerie Plame,
the wife of a prominent critic of the U.S. war in Iraq.

Armitage said that he learned about Plame's employment from a State Department
memo that did not mention her covert status, and that he had no knowledge of it
at the time. In 40 years of reading classified materials, Armitage said in a
telephone interview, "I have never seen in a memo . . . a covert agent's name."

Novak's disclosure of Plame's CIA employment ultimately led to the appointment
of a special counsel to investigate the leak. In October of last year, a grand
jury indicted vice presidential chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on
charges of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters about
Plame, forcing his resignation and embarrassing the White House.

But Armitage, who said he testified about his actions to a grand jury three
times, was not charged for making the disclosure, a circumstance he attributes
to his candor in speaking with investigators about his action. He turned over
his computers and never even hired an attorney, Armitage said, because "I did
not need an attorney to tell me to tell the truth."

The confirmation of Armitage's role has provoked criticism of both him and the
special counsel, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who learned of it shortly after his
appointment in 2003. Some have questioned why Armitage waited so long to speak
up about it, and why Fitzgerald spent two years appearing to chase a question
that had already been answered.

Armitage said yesterday that he did not disclose his role before now because
Fitzgerald had asked him not to. But word of his role eventually began to
circulate, and on Tuesday, Armitage said, he asked Fitzgerald to be freed of
that promise. Fitzgerald agreed.

Armitage said that he was asked, during the course of the investigation, whether
he had discussed the leak in advance with other senior administration officials,
and that he replied: "Hell, no."

Instead, he said, he divulged Plame's name in an offhand way at the end of his
conversation with Novak, whom he had not previously met. Novak had asked him why
former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV -- Plame's husband -- had been tasked to
probe Iraq's alleged interest in acquiring nuclear materials.

"Novak asked me, 'Hey, why did the CIA send Mr. Wilson to Niger?' I said, 'I
don't know, but I think his wife worked out there,' " Armitage said.

Novak asked because Wilson at the time was accusing the White House of
deliberately distorting the intelligence it had received on Iraq's nuclear
program to justify its invasion of the country, an allegation that infuriated
Vice President Cheney and other top officials.

But Armitage said he did not realize that he was a source for Novak's subsequent
column naming Plame until October 2003, when Novak identified one of his sources
as someone who was not a "partisan gunslinger." That mention provoked Armitage
to tell then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who told the State Department's
top lawyer, who in turn arranged for Armitage to speak with the Justice
Department.

Armitage also acknowledged making a similar offhand remark about Plame earlier
in 2003 to Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, who was
researching a book about the decision to invade Iraq. Armitage said he deeply
regrets embarrassing Powell, the State Department, his friends and family, and
the Wilsons.

*

Salon --

September 7, 2006

"WE TORTURED AN INSANE MAN"

The author of "The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind, talks about what the US
really got out of Abu Zubaydah and why waterboarding doesn't make America safer.

By Alex Koppelman

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/07/suskind/

Harsh interrogation works -- that's the argument President Bush made on
Wednesday even as he announced that al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah and 13 other
alleged al-Qaida operatives will be transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face
trial. Acknowledging for the first time the existence of secret CIA prisons
where the 14 men had been held, Bush claimed that the extreme interrogation
techniques used on Zubaydah, whom he called "a senior terrorist leader," and
others in the "war on terror," were justified. Bush said that Zubaydah, under
the pressure of what Bush referred to as the CIA's "alternative set of
procedures," had given up information that proved vital to the United States.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind paints a more complicated picture
of Zubaydah. In one of the most hotly discussed sections of his book "The One-
Percent Doctrine," Suskind reveals that at least one top FBI analyst considered
Zubaydah an "insane, certifiable, split personality" and that he was mainly
responsible only for logistics like travel arrangements. According to Suskind's
reporting, the interrogation methods used on Zubaydah -- waterboarding and sleep
deprivation, among others -- only yielded information about plots that did not
exist.

Salon spoke with Suskind about how the Bush administration has tended to
oversell Zubaydah's significance and why sophisticated "soft" interrogation
techniques have been the most effective.

What did you think of the president's speech?

Well, I don't think that the president contradicted anything that's in the book.
I say in the book that we did get some things of value from Abu Zubaydah. We
found out that "Muktar" -- the brain, that's what it means in Arabic -- was
Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That was valuable for a short period of time for us. We
were then able to go through the SIGINT [signal intelligence], the electronic
dispatches over the years, and say, "OK, that's who 'Muktar' is." Zubaydah, of
course, is showing up on signal intelligence as Zubaydah.

Also, we essentially said, "You've got to give us a body, somebody we can go
get," and he gave us [Jose] Padilla. Padilla turned out to not be nearly as
valuable as advertised at the start, though, and I think that's been shown in
the ensuing years. So that's what we got from Zubaydah.

At the same time, I think we oversold [Zubaydah's] value -- the administration
did -- to the American public. That's indisputable. As well, what folks inside
the CIA and FBI were realizing, even as the president and others inside the
administration were emphasizing the profound malevolence and value strategically
to the capture of Zubaydah, is that Zubaydah is psychologically imbalanced, he
has multiple personalities. And he was not involved in various events that we
thought he was involved in. During various bombings in the late '90s, he was not
where we thought he would be. That's shown in the diaries, where he goes through
long lists of quotidian, nonsensical details about various people and what
they're doing, folks that he's moving around, getting plane tickets for and
serving tea to, all in the voices of three different characters; page after page
of his diary, filled, including on dates where, I'm trying to think, it was
either the Khobar Towers or the Cole, where we thought he was involved in the
bombing and he clearly wasn't.

So that's the real story of Zubaydah, more complicated than the administration
would like, and maybe more complicated than the president at this point feels
comfortable saying in an election season. It's one of the many instances where
you could shine a light through this prism and see an awful lot about some of
the dilemmas of the war on terror.

In the case of Zubaydah, when it comes to some of the harsh interrogation
tactics he was put through, what occurred then was that he started to talk. He
said, as people will, anything to make the pain stop. And we essentially
followed every word and various uniformed public servants of the United States
went running all over the country to various places that Zubaydah said were
targets, and were not.

Ultimately, we tortured an insane man and ran screaming at every word he
uttered.

And what do you think of the interrogation procedures the president described?

The fact is that the history of interrogation shows that you do not do
particularly well when you confirm expectations, when everybody plays their
preordained role. In this case, al-Qaida operatives are trained to believe that
the United States, and representatives of the U.S., are bloodthirsty mobsters
who will dismember and disembowel. The fact is, when we use harsh techniques we
essentially say, "We are going to confirm your expectations."

What has largely worked in all the interrogations, what we got -- and in many
cases it's not very much -- but whatever we got, for the most part occurred
because we were, let's just say, a little more clever than that. Instead of
going medieval, which is the tactic our enemies here embrace, we essentially
find a way to confuse their expectations. In many cases, just by treating them
as human beings we have created an environment where we get what we so
desperately need, which is information that might help save American lives.

That's the key. The key is to not give in to anger, but to do whatever works
best. There's clearly been a learning curve on that; some of the harsh
techniques used early on have been I think largely abandoned because they didn't
work.

That's what we're finding today, in terms of these competing press conferences.
The president vs. the Pentagon; the Pentagon folks are listing out two dozen or
so techniques that we'll use, which are fairly tame. Going forward, the
president is saying, well, we got some valuable things from using these harsh
interrogation techniques. Ultimately, one is message, the other is reality. This
is the way the White House does a very careful bit of calibration to say that we
thought at the beginning it wasn't quite right in terms of using harsh or extra-
legal methods, many of them qualifying as torture, on the folks who've been
captured.

What techniques have they dropped?

Death threats, waterboarding, profound deprivation issues, heat, cold, denial of
medical attention -- those are now abandoned.

One of the dark moments in the so-called war on terror, as I disclosed in the
book, along with all the other stuff, is that we threatened Khalid Sheik
Mohammed's children to get him to talk. According to those involved in that
incident, he pretty much looked them straight in the eye and said, "Fine,
they'll be in a better place with Allah." Once you threaten someone's children
there's pretty much nowhere else to go in terms of building the kind of
relationship where they at some point tell you things that you really need to
hear.

The president said today that Zubaydah was a "senior terrorist leader" and a
"trusted associate of bin Laden," and that the "intelligence community believes
he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers
trained, and that he helped smuggle al-Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan after
coalition forces arrived." What do you think of that characterization?

Zubaydah was not involved in key operational planning for al-Qaida. He was
involved largely in logistics.

So you think describing him as a "senior terrorist leader" and a "trusted
associate of bin Laden" is an overstatement?

I think, again, that the president is overstating a little less than the
overstatements when Zubaydah was first captured, but nevertheless, still a bit
of an overstatement.

The president also talked about Zubaydah giving away "what he thought was
nominal information -- and then stopp[ing] all cooperation," and then they used
these harsher tactics and he gave up what the president said was "information on
key al-Qaida operatives, including information that helped us find and capture
more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th. For example,
Zubaydah identified one of KSM's [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] accomplices in the 9/11
attacks -- a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah
provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two
terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the
operation that captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed."

Zubaydah gave us the information he gave us because, in using softer techniques,
we convinced him that his religious belief in predetermination was such that he
believed that he wasn't killed, but captured, when other people died, obviously,
that he was wounded and captured for a reason, and the reason was to give us
some information. That was why he gave us some information, that was the
rationale he used. That was what one would consider more sophisticated, "soft"
interrogation techniques, where we got the stuff of value.

So the stuff about bin al Shibh, that came through softer interrogation tactics?

Bin al Shibh, no. I'm not talking about the bin al Shibh stuff or the KSM stuff.
Ultimately, we ended up getting the key breaks on those guys, KSM and bin al
Shibh, from the Emir of Qatar, who informed us as to their whereabouts a few
months before we captured bin al Shibh. That was the key break in getting those
guys. KSM slipped away; in June of 2002, the Emir of Qatar passed along
information to the CIA as to something that an Al Jazeera reporter had
discovered as to the safehouse where KSM and bin al Shibh were hiding in Karachi
slums. He passed that on to the CIA, and that was the key break. Whether
Zubaydah provided some supporting information is not clear, but the key to
capturing those guys was the help of the Emir.

So considering the parts of the speech we've just discussed, how do you feel
about it generally now?

The president is trying to stick to message here, and it's not easy, because the
facts are more complex, and in some cases contradict the claims of the U.S.
government. This is the White House trying to do a bit of a recalibration as to
the views and strategies in terms of interrogation and the handling of prisoners
without having to admit that it made mistakes early on and maybe even learned
something along the way.

*


Washington Post --

September 7, 2006

OFFICIALS RELIEVED SECRET IS SHARED

By Dana Priest

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/06/AR2006090602055.html

Employees at CIA headquarters stood transfixed at television sets yesterday in a
moment one senior official called "electric" as President Bush told the nation
about the agency's covert prison system -- a program once considered so secret
that even Bush did not know the details.

"I know it's going to make a lot of people sleep well at night," one
counterterrorism officer said of the disclosure. The feeling of relief by the
very people carrying out the program was a striking indication of how deeply
attitudes have changed within the government about the administration's
unorthodox counterterrorism tactics and the need to shroud them in secrecy.

"Finally the burden of this program will not rest only on the shoulders of the
CIA," said James Pavitt, who headed CIA covert operations when the program was
put in place, with White House approval, after Sept. 11, 2001. "This was a tough
world and we were asked to do some tough things," he said, adding that such
efforts were always within the law.

Although it was a recent Supreme Court ruling that forced the program into legal
limbo and probably pushed the president into going public, the administration
had begun debating whether to suspend the CIA's so-called black sites at least a
year ago. European allies as well as senior officials at the State and Justice
departments and the CIA, along with a handful of lawmakers, lobbied to abandon
the program for something more transparent and with more legal protections of
detainees.

In the past year, the CIA has studied more closely the effectiveness of harsh
interrogation techniques that it and other agencies have used and concluded that
some of those were worth discarding. CIA officials have eliminated some of those
techniques and, within the past two months, have begun to consult for the first
time with the full Senate and House intelligence committees about creating a new
list of techniques.

But the rules for a new CIA prison system are still unsettled.

"Although there is no one in CIA custody today, it's our intent that the CIA
detention program continue," said a senior intelligence official. "It's simply
been too valuable in the war on terrorism to not allow it to move forward."

The idea, said several administration officials, is to get Congress's political
buy-in to a program that is fraught with some of the most difficult questions
facing the government: how a country steeped in the rule of law should treat
suspected terrorists it believes have valuable information.

When it set up the program, the CIA -- at the urging of Vice President Cheney
and a White House general counsel's office with an unconventional view of what
constituted torture -- asserted that it needed to hide prisoners in secret
locations around the world and to harshly interrogate them to extract time-
sensitive information about possible terrorists attacks.

Government professionals worried about the program's effectiveness and legality.
As controversy spread within Congress and around the world through media
reports, some argued that the program was becoming counterproductive.

Some CIA employees refused to sit in meetings where the prisons or interrogation
methods were being discussed. Others consulted lawyers.

"This program has been the subject of so much controversy and suspicion and
resentment against the U.S. that on balance, it is probably desirable" to
disclose and discontinue it "and get it behind us," said Paul Pillar, a former
CIA officer and now a Georgetown University professor.

Administration officials said yesterday that the need for secret CIA prisons
continues, but that they will seek legislation immunizing CIA employees from
prosecution for anything they may have been asked to do that might now be
considered illegal. At the same time, the administration will ask the
intelligence committees to give it guidance to draw up a separate, shorter list
of harsh techniques it might still employee under certain circumstances.

The point, said one senior official, "is to make the program more durable" and
not "subject to the pendulum swings" of Congress or the president. Several
officials interviewed requested anonymity because they were not authorized to
speak about the program. Others were permitted by the administration to talk to
reporters but not to disclose their identities.

Part of the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War,
the prison system grew to include eight countries, including several in Eastern
European democracies, according to current and former intelligence officials. A
senior intelligence official said yesterday that the system held nearly 100
people over the life of the program, but no more than a couple of dozen at any
one time.

The prisons were made legal under U.S. law with a presidential finding allowing
the agency to set them up. But they were illegal in the democratic countries in
which they operated. Only a small handful of foreign intelligence officials --
and usually one or two top political leaders -- ever knew of their existence.
Only CIA personnel were allowed on the sites, one of which was located on a
Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. Others were once located in Thailand and
Afghanistan.

A written defense of the program issued by the administration yesterday said it
would be "practically impossible" to act quickly on "information from one
detainee in the questioning of another" if they were all in the custody of
different foreign governments. But the statement did not explain why that
couldn't also have been accomplished if the detainees had been held together at
Guantanamo Bay.

Prisoners were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques including feigned
drowning, extreme isolation, slapping, sleep deprivation, reduced food intake,
and light and sound bombardment -- sometimes in combination with each other.
Human rights groups and many international legal experts have said these
techniques amount to torture. The administration insists, as Bush did again
yesterday, that it has never authorized or used torture.

Secret prisons became a particularly sensitive issue in Europe after The
Washington Post reported on their existence in Eastern Europe in November. The
European Parliament and Council of Europe both have ongoing investigations, and
virtually all governments there have been forced to address the matter. Some
have made thorough attempts to make sure their intelligence services never
engaged in such cooperation; others have not.

European cooperation on counterterrorism is among the most productive
relationships the CIA has and has resulted in the detainment of many top
terrorists. European officials, too, though, have expressed deep concern that a
system dependent upon such secrecy was not sustainable.

"We obviously welcome the news that they'll be closed," said one British
official. "We welcome any news that ensures detainees are treated under the
Geneva Conventions."

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who favored the administration's stance and
pushed for a revision of existing policy, alerted employees about Bush's White
House statement moments before it aired. Hayden advised that they watch and
assured them he was working to protect the employees who handled terrorists.

"The mood? It's good," offered one intelligence officer.

[ Staff writers Karen DeYoung and Dafna Linzer and staff researcher Julie Tate
contributed to this report. ]

*


Washington Post --

September 7, 2006

BUSH SAYS DETAINEES WILL BE TRIED
He Confirms Existence of CIA Prisons

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Michael Fletcher

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/06/AR2006090600417.html

President Bush yesterday announced the transfer of the last 14 suspected
terrorists held by the CIA at secret foreign prisons to the military detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said he wants to try them before U.S.
military panels under proposed new rules he simultaneously sent to Congress.

Bush's statement during an impassioned East Room speech represented the first
time he has confirmed the existence of the CIA program under which Khalid Sheik
Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and
others have been secretly held and subjected to irregular interrogation methods.

The president's dramatic speech committed Washington to putting senior al-Qaeda
members -- including some believed to be the architects of the attacks -- on
trial in proceedings that may be at least partly open. Only one person, Zacarias
Moussaoui, has been convicted of conspiring in the attacks, and he had little to
do with the actual plot.

Standing before an audience that included family members of attack victims, Bush
delivered remarks timed to stake out a new policy position before the November
elections -- and also to pressure lawmakers to approve quickly the
administration's version of legislation on detainee matters that have been hotly
debated for years.

Bush largely defended his administration's controversial detainee policies. But
he spoke on the same day that the Defense Department, under pressure from
Congress and the Supreme Court, separately ruled out the military's future use
of interrogation methods that officials have said were practiced on the CIA's
detainees -- including the use of temperature extremes and waterboarding, which
simulates drowning.

Together with the emptying of the secret CIA sites, the imposition of the new
interrogation rules amounted to a policy shift for the White House. The
administration has come under substantial foreign and judicial criticism for
insisting on the right to hold detainees at will and to subject them to
interrogations that international experts have repeatedly called abusive and
illegal.

But Bush also said he wants the CIA in the future to have the authority to
question terrorists under a program separate from the military's that would not
be subject to the interrogation rules the administration put forward yesterday.
Several human rights groups criticized this proposed exemption, even as they
hailed the new rules.

Retired Brig. Gen. Stephen N. Xenakis, an adviser to Physicians for Human
Rights, said he is "proud to see the U.S. military adopt standards by which we
would want our own soldiers to be treated, but it is profoundly disappointing
that the President continues to insist on a parallel, clandestine interrogation
system in absolute conflict with our laws and values."

Other aspects of the new administration policy provoked immediate controversy.
The 86-page draft law on the new military courts, called "commissions," that
Bush sent to Capitol Hill would allow defendants to be prosecuted with evidence
they are not permitted to see, as well as evidence obtained through coercive
interrogations that fall short of torture.

Human rights experts and uniformed military lawyers have criticized both
provisions, arguing that they set a dangerous precedent for foreign trials of
captured U.S. military personnel. Three influential Republican senators -- John
W. Warner (Va.), John McCain (Ariz.), and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) -- have
drafted competing legislation that gives defendants access to the evidence
against them and provides other rights that Bush opposes.

But Bush's push yesterday produced political gains among other Republicans.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who earlier said he was considering
bringing the bill drafted by his colleagues to the floor next week, shifted
ground yesterday and said he will instead soon bring the administration's
version to the floor.

In his speech, Bush endorsed controversial legislation that would exempt U.S.
officials and CIA officers from prosecution for some past detainee abuse. He
called "unacceptable" provisions in a 10-year-old U.S. law on war crimes that
subjects officials to possible prosecution for humiliating or degrading
detainees.

In some cases, Bush said, "it has been necessary to move . . . individuals to an
environment where they can be held secretly, questioned by experts and when
appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts." He did not say where the secret
prisons were located, but said they were "outside the United States."

The Washington Post has withheld the names of several Eastern Europe countries
involved in the effort since it first reported last November that secret prisons
were established in eight nations, a disclosure that was heavily criticized at
the time by Republican lawmakers.

Bush confirmed that among those held at these sites were Abu Zubaida, an
associate of Osama bin Laden who allegedly helped train the Sept. 11 hijackers;
Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the attacks; and an alleged high-level
accomplice, Ramzi Binalshibh.

Bush said the CIA had used an "alternative set of procedures" to question the
men because they were trained to resist interrogations, and that these
procedures -- which he did not detail -- had borne fruit.

About 100 detainees have been held at the secret prisons at various times, many
of whom were transferred months ago to Guantanamo Bay or their native countries,
a senior U.S. official said yesterday. Bush said none remains after the "current
transfers."

Sources have said that besides waterboarding and temperature extremes, the
techniques included the repeated use of sleep deprivation and restricted diets
beyond what is authorized under military rules. They also have said that --
contrary to international agreements governing prisoners in wartime -- the CIA's
detainees were not allowed contact with representatives of the International
Committee of the Red Cross.

At Guantanamo Bay, officials said, the 14 suspects will be allowed regular
visits from the Red Cross, provided lawyers when they are charged and receive
the same medical care afforded the U.S. military personnel guarding them.

Bush said that "by giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get
anywhere else, this program has saved lives."

But an hour before Bush spoke, two senior military officers gave a different
account of the efficacy of using such rough interrogation methods. Lt. Gen. John
F. Kimmons, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said in briefing
reporters at the Pentagon on the military's new interrogation rules that "no
good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think the empirical
evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that."

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles "Cully" Stimson said interrogators
"tell you that the intelligence they get from detainees is best derived through
a period of rapport-building, long-term."

Administration officials did not acknowledge any political calculation in
yesterday's surprising announcement, saying that it was prompted by the need to
bring the terrorism suspects to justice and by the reality that they have lost
value as sources because they have been detained for so long. They also said
Supreme Court's June decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which put the detainees
under the protections of the Geneva Conventions, forced their hand.

"There are two reasons why I'm making these limited disclosures today," Bush
said. "First, we have largely completed our questioning of the men -- and to
start the process for bringing them to trial, we must bring them into the open.
Second, the Supreme Court's recent decision has impaired our ability to
prosecute terrorists through military commissions, and has put in question the
future of the CIA program."

A senior administration official said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
recognizing pressure from European allies, was among those pushing for the
administration to acknowledge the CIA program and to put it on sustainable legal
footing.

"The program was extremely beneficial. But as time passed, the costs became more
and more apparent," the official said on the condition of anonymity because of
sensitivities about internal deliberations. "We concluded that the program needs
to continue, but in a different way that was sustainable."

The year-long effort often pitted Rice and two of her closest aides -- legal
adviser John B. Bellinger III and counselor Philip D. Zelikow, against Vice
President Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, according to officials
close to the process.

Bush, who was hearing complaints from foreign leaders, pressed for options that
would allow him to make a decision. The CIA supported the effort because its
officials have worried about being accused of making detainees permanently
disappear.

Leading Democrats reacted cautiously to Bush's speech, saying that they have
always been in favor of trying terrorism suspects. Senate Minority Leader Harry
M. Reid (D-Nev.) called the decision to prosecute the alleged masterminds of the
Sept. 11 attacks "long overdue" and said he backs an effort by Senate lawmakers
to write the rules for the trials.

[ Staff writer Glenn Kessler and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this
report. ]

*


New York Times --

September 2, 2006

NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT INQUIRY IN CIA LEAK

By David Johnston

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/washington/02leak.html

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 -- An enduring mystery of the CIA leak case has been
solved in recent days, but with a new twist: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the
prosecutor, knew the identity of the leaker from his very first day in the
special counsel's chair, but kept the inquiry open for nearly two more years
before indicting I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief
of staff, on obstruction charges.

Now, the question of whether Mr. Fitzgerald properly exercised his prosecutorial
discretion in continuing to pursue possible wrongdoing in the case has become
the subject of rich debate on editorial pages and in legal and political
circles.

Richard L. Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, first told the
authorities in October 2003 that he had been the primary source for the July 14,
2003, column by Robert D. Novak that identified Valerie Wilson as a CIA
operative and set off the leak investigation.

Mr. Fitzgerald's decision to prolong the inquiry once he took over as special
prosecutor in December 2003 had significant political and legal consequences.
The inquiry seriously embarrassed and distracted the Bush White House for nearly
two years and resulted in five felony charges against Mr. Libby, even as Mr.
Fitzgerald decided not to charge Mr. Armitage or anyone else with crimes related
to the leak itself.

Moreover, Mr. Fitzgerald's effort to find out who besides Mr. Armitage had
spoken to reporters provoked a fierce battle over whether reporters could
withhold the identities of their sources from prosecutors and resulted in one
reporter, Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, spending 85 days in jail
before agreeing to testify to a grand jury.

Since this week's disclosures about Mr. Armitage's role, Bush administration
officials have argued that because the original leak came from a State
Department official, it was clear there had been no concerted White House effort
to disclose Ms. Wilson's identity.

But Mr. Fitzgerald's defenders point out that the revelation about Mr. Armitage
did not rule out a White House effort because officials like Mr. Libby and Karl
Rove, the senior white House adviser, had spoken about Ms. Wilson with other
journalists. Even so, the Fitzgerald critics say, the prosecutor behaved much as
did the independent counsels of the 1980's and 1990's who often failed to bring
down their quarry on official misconduct charges but pursued highly nuanced
accusations of a cover-up.

Mr. Armitage cooperated voluntarily in the case, never hired a lawyer and
testified several times to the grand jury, according to people who are familiar
with his role and actions in the case. He turned over his calendars, datebooks
and even his wife's computer in the course of the inquiry, those associates
said. But Mr. Armitage kept his actions secret, not even telling President Bush
because the prosecutor asked him not to divulge it, the people said.

Mr. Armitage has not publicly commented on the matter. The people who spoke
about Mr. Armitage's thoughts and action did so seeking anonymity on the grounds
that the criminal case was still open and that their remarks were not authorized
by the prosecutor. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined to comment.

Mr. Fitzgerald, who has spoken infrequently in public, came close to providing a
defense for his actions at a news conference in October 2005, when Mr. Libby was
indicted. Mr. Fitzgerald said that apart from the issue of whether any crime had
been committed, the justice system depended on the ability of prosecutors to
obtain truthful information from witnesses during any investigation.

The information about Mr. Armitage's role may help Mr. Libby convince a jury
that his actions were relatively inconsequential, because even Mr. Armitage, not
regarded as an ally of Mr. Cheney, was talking to journalists about Ms. Wilson's
role.

But the trial, scheduled for early next year, may be focused on the narrow
questions of whether Mr. Libby's accounts to the grand jury and the F.B.I. were
true. Judge Reggie M. Walton of Federal District Court, who is presiding, has
resisted efforts by Mr. Libby's lawyers to give the case a wider political
scope.

Mr. Fitzgerald may also point out that Mr. Armitage knew about Ms. Wilson's
CIA role only because of a memorandum that Mr. Libby had commissioned as part
of an effort to rebut criticism of the White House by her husband, Joseph C.
Wilson IV.

Mr. Fitzgerald was named as a special counsel to investigate whether the leaking
of Ms. Wilson's identity as a CIA officer was part of an administration
effort to violate the law prohibiting the willful disclosure of undercover
employees.

Some administration critics asserted that her identity had been disclosed in the
Novak column as part of a campaign to undermine her husband. Mr. Wilson was sent
by the CIA in 2002 to Africa to investigate whether the Iraqi government had
obtained uranium ore for its nuclear weapons program.

On July 6, 2003, a week before the Novak column, Mr. Wilson wrote a commentary
in The New York Times saying his investigation in Africa had led him to believe
that it was highly doubtful that any uranium deal had ever taken place and that
the Bush administration had twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war.

Mr. Armitage spoke with Mr. Novak on July 8, 2003, those familiar with Mr.
Armitage's actions said. Mr. Armitage did not know Mr. Novak, but agreed to meet
with the columnist as a favor for a mutual friend, Kenneth M. Duberstein, a
White House chief of staff during Ronald Reagan's administration. At the
conclusion of a general foreign policy discussion, Mr. Armitage said in reply to
a question that Ms. Wilson might have had a role in arranging her husband's trip
to Niger.

At the time of the offhand conversation about the Niger trip, Mr. Armitage was
not aware of Ms. Wilson's undercover status, those familiar with his actions
said. The mention of Ms. Wilson was brief. Mr. Armitage did not believe he used
her name, those aware of his actions said.

On Oct. 1, 2003, Mr. Armitage was up at 4 a.m. for a predawn workout when he
read a second article by Mr. Novak in which he described his primary source for
his earlier column about Ms. Wilson as "no partisan gunslinger." Mr. Armitage
realized with alarm that that could only be a reference to him, according to
people familiar with his role. He waited until Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell, an old friend, was awake, then telephoned him. They discussed the matter
with the top State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV.

Mr. Armitage had prepared a resignation letter, his associates said. But he
stayed on the job because State Department officials advised that his sudden
departure could lead to the disclosure of his role in the leak, the people aware
of his actions said.

Later, Mr. Taft spoke with the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, now the
attorney general, and advised him that Mr. Armitage was going to speak with
lawyers at the Justice Department about the matter, the people familiar with Mr.
Armitage's actions said. Mr. Taft asked Mr. Gonzales whether he wanted to be
told the details and was told that he did not want to know.

One day later, Justice Department investigators interviewed Mr. Armitage at his
office. He resigned in November 2004, but remained a subject of the inquiry
until this February when the prosecutor advised him in a letter that he would
not be charged.

But Mr. Fitzgerald did obtain the indictment of Mr. Libby on charges that he had
untruthfully testified to a grand jury and federal agents when he said he
learned about Ms. Wilson's role at the CIA from reporters rather than from
several officials, including Mr. Cheney.

Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty to all the charges and his lawyers have
signaled he will mount a defense based on the notion that he did not willfully
lie.

[ Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting from Washington for this article. ]

*


Washington Post --

September 2, 2006

PUT MY SON ON TRIAL - OR FREE HIM

By Khalid Al-Odah

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/09/01/AR2006090101535.html

KUWAIT CITY -- The United States recently responded to pressure from the German
government and released detainee Murat Kurnaz from Guantanamo Bay. Although he
spent four years in the U.S. prison there, Kurnaz was never charged with a
crime, and there are no indications that he was involved in any terrorist-
related activity. Had he been afforded his constitutional right to due process
upon detention, it is highly likely that this innocent man would not have wasted
four years of his life in prison.

Two years ago the Supreme Court mandated due process for men held at Guantanamo.
More recently, in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , the court declared that
military tribunals are not an appropriate method for these trials. Even so, the
Bush administration maintains that the Hamdan ruling directly applies only to
the 10 detainees who have been formally labeled "enemy combatants." What happens
to the other 450 or so detainees who have not been charged with any crimes and
who, like Murat Kurnaz, are likely to be innocent?

As hundreds of innocent men sit in prison, why is the Bush administration still
fighting the idea that American values embrace the right to a fair trial and
that a jerry-built military commission represents no such thing?

For me, as the father of a Kuwaiti prisoner held at the camp, this news of weeks
past has been a part of my everyday life for 4 1/2 years. My son, Fawzi, was a
schoolteacher in a region near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border before he was
captured by bounty hunters. I'm told that he now lives alone in a cell at
Guantanamo; our only contact with him consists of outdated letters with whole
sections blacked out. The anguish is endless for families that have been kept in
the dark for over four years while their husbands, sons and brothers suffer in a
secret world.

I hope that people understand that the efforts we've undertaken for our Kuwaiti
family members in U.S. courts of law, and in global courts of public opinion,
have never been predicated simply on a demand to release the detainees. Our
demand has been to charge and try them, or to release them. Give the prisoners
due process so their guilt or innocence can be determined fairly. In a country
that presumes innocence, it is categorically unjust to imprison so many who are
probably innocent to punish so few who may be guilty.

My son is not a terrorist. He was, in fact, a great admirer of American
political values and legal principles before he was kidnapped and sent to
Guantanamo. Our family is nonetheless willing to undergo the ordeal of trial and
judgment, if only the U.S. government would allow it to happen.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in the Hamdan case, we'll see if a
reaffirmation of due process by the court will have any more effect than it did
two years ago.

Yet it is also a woeful irony that the Bush administration may now see closing
the Guantanamo prison as a positive and even favorable option, short-term
political fallout notwithstanding. For with the detainees out of sight and out
of mind, the administration could still avoid the larger issues and continue its
unlawful policies without restriction. Guantanamo, a symbol of national fear and
indecisiveness, would be conveniently shuttered. World opinion as well as U.S.
opinion might then be tragically diluted.

How many more deaths and years of injustice will it take before the United
States ends this violation of both human rights and U.S. law, and either
formally charges the detainees with crimes or sets them free? If the Bush
administration truly wants to close Guantanamo, it should first work to apply a
fair legal process to separate the guilty from the innocent.

[ The writer founded the Kuwaiti Family Committee four years ago to secure the
legal rights of foreign nationals imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. ]

* * *


Washington Post --

August 29, 2006

EX-COLLEAGUE SAYS ARMITAGE WAS SOURCE OF CIA LEAK

By R. Jeffrey Smith

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/08/28/AR2006082801278.html

The leak of information about an undercover CIA employee that provoked a special
prosecutor's investigation of senior White House officials came from then-Deputy
Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, according to a former Armitage colleague
at the department.

Armitage told newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak in the summer of 2003 that
Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent critic of the Iraq war, worked for the
CIA, the colleague said. In October of that year, Armitage admitted to senior
State Department officials that he had made the remark, which was based on a
classified report he had read.

Novak collected what he considered to be a confirming comment from White House
political strategist Karl Rove, then wrote a column in July 2003 that cited
Plame's CIA employment as a reason to question the credentials of the critic,
former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.

In 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to Niger to determine whether Iraq was seeking
nuclear material there. He subsequently accused the White House of distorting
intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Novak's column set off a chain of events that culminated in the appointment of
special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald and a grand jury's indictment of Vice
President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for lying to
investigators about his own conversations with reporters regarding Plame.

Fitzgerald has never commented on Armitage's role and has not brought charges
against him.

Armitage's role in the case -- which he confirmed to the FBI in 2003 and later
described to Fitzgerald and to the grand jury, his colleague said yesterday --
raises questions about when the White House became aware of the origins of
Novak's story. President Bush said as late as 2005 that he was eager to learn
all the facts behind the leak.

The case's origin in a conversation between Novak and Armitage is one of
Washington's worst-kept secrets. Neither Novak nor Armitage has confirmed it,
however, leaving a measure of uncertainty until now. A story this weekend by
Newsweek magazine was the first to cite confirming statements by former Armitage
associates.

Armitage did not return a phone call to his office yesterday, but his former
colleague, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Armitage had described
disclosing Plame's employment to Novak in an offhand manner, virtually as
gossip, at the end of a conversation in Armitage's office. Armitage did not know
at the time that Plame's identity was considered secret information and senior
State Department officials concluded he did "not do anything wrong" when they
learned about it months later, the former colleague said.

Armitage and two officials he later briefed on his role -- State Department
legal adviser William Howard Taft IV and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell --
each discussed the matter with the FBI and testified before the grand jury, the
former colleague said. But Fitzgerald told Armitage in February that he would
not be charged with a crime, he said.

Three weeks before Armitage spoke to Novak, he made a similar, offhand
disclosure of Plame's employment to Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor
Bob Woodward, the former colleague added. Armitage disclosed the conversation to
Fitzgerald after Woodward reminded him of it in October 2005, and Woodward
subsequently gave a deposition about the conversation.

"Of course, I have nothing to say about sources," Woodward said yesterday.

Armitage's involvement in the matter does not fit neatly into the assertions of
Bush administration critics that Plame's employment was disclosed as part of a
White House conspiracy to besmirch Wilson by suggesting his Niger trip stemmed
from nepotism at the CIA. Wilson and Plame have sued top administration
officials, alleging that the leak was meant as retaliation.

But Armitage, the source Novak had described obliquely as someone who is "not a
political gunslinger," was by all accounts hardly a tool of White House
political operatives. As the No. 2 official at the State Department from March
2001 to February 2005, Armitage was a prominent Republican appointee. But he
also privately disagreed with the tone and style of White House policymaking on
Iraq and other matters.

"Just because Armitage did this on his own, earlier, doesn't mean that there
wasn't a White House conspiracy to 'out' Valerie [Plame] Wilson. We don't think
it affects the case," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the group pressing the lawsuit.

[ Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. ]

*


Washington Post --

August 28, 2006

HOMICIDE CHARGES RARE IN IRAQ WAR
Few Troops Tried For Killing Civilians

By Josh White, Charles Lane and Julie Tate

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700770.html

The majority of U.S. service members charged in the unlawful deaths of Iraqi
civilians have been acquitted, found guilty of relatively minor offenses or
given administrative punishments without trials, according to a Washington Post
review of concluded military cases. Charges against some of the troops were
dropped completely.

Though experts estimate that thousands of Iraqi civilians have died at the hands
of U.S. forces, only 39 service members were formally accused in connection with
the deaths of 20 Iraqis from 2003 to early this year. Twenty-six of the 39
troops were initially charged with murder, negligent homicide or manslaughter;
12 of them ultimately served prison time for any offense.

Some military officials and analysts say the small numbers reflect the caution
and professionalism exercised by U.S. forces on an urban battlefield where it is
often difficult to distinguish combatants from civilians. Others argue the
statistics illustrate commanders' reluctance to investigate and hold troops
accountable when they take the lives of civilians.

"I think there are a number of cases that never make it to the reporting stage,
and in some that do make it to the reporting stage, there has been a reluctance
to pursue them vigorously," said Gary D. Solis, a law professor at Georgetown
University and a former Marine prosecutor. "There have been fewer prosecutions
in Iraq than one might expect."

"But we should not forget that so many of our soldiers and Marines are
performing not only honorably, but heroically, in very difficult circumstances,"
he added. "Their contributions should not be tarnished by the acts of a very,
very few."

Top military officers, military lawyers, experts and troops say the number of
homicide cases prosecuted probably represents only a small portion of the
incidents in which Iraqi citizens were killed under questionable circumstances.
Officials also say privately that some cases have not been investigated
thoroughly because there has been a tendency to consider Iraqi civilian deaths
an unintended consequence of combat operations.

"I think there were many other engagements that should have been investigated,
definitely," said an Army major who served in Iraq in 2004, speaking anonymously
because he fears retribution. "But no one wanted to look at them or report them
higher.... It was just the way things worked."

Others contend, however, that civilian deaths are inevitable in war and that the
close combat environment in Iraq frequently puts civilians in the line of U.S.
and insurgent fire.

The cases highlight the sometimes fine line between a criminal allegation and
the bloodshed that is a part of war. Spec. Nathan Lynn, a Pennsylvania National
Guardsman, shot and killed a man in the darkness of a Ramadi neighborhood in
February. Lynn said he considered the man a threat and believes he did nothing
wrong.

The man was not armed, and Lynn was charged with voluntary manslaughter. But a
military investigator agreed that Lynn acted properly in a difficult situation,
and the charges were dropped.

"I was extremely surprised when I was charged because it was clear the shooting
fell within the guidelines of my rules of engagement," Lynn said. "This is a
war. It's not a police action."

A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

The Post undertook the review after allegations surfaced in recent months that
U.S. forces had killed significant numbers of civilians in places such as
Haditha, Hamdaniya and Mahmudiyah, with many of the victims women and children.
The review included the military justice system's disposition of incidents that
occurred from June 2003 to February 2006. It did not include cases from
Afghanistan.

Also excluded was the killing of 24 civilians by Marines in Haditha in November
2005, which is under investigation.

There is no accurate count of the number of Iraqi civilians killed by U.S.
forces. Iraq Body Count, an independent group that advocates more extensive
investigation of civilian deaths, estimates that 40,000 to 45,000 civilians have
been killed by insurgents, terrorists and U.S. personnel.

Military officials say they do not track overall civilian casualties. But
recently, the military said that an average of one Iraqi civilian was killed by
U.S. troops each day in 2005 in "escalation of force" incidents alone. These
include, for example, shootings of drivers who did not heed instructions at
checkpoints and appeared to be threats.

The harshest penalty, meted out to two soldiers in separate murder cases in
2004, was 25 years in prison -- one of the convicted shot an Iraqi soldier, and
the other shot an Iraqi man in his house. Two others convicted in what was
called a mercy killing of an Iraqi each received one year in jail.

Solis, who has studied civilian homicides from the Vietnam War, said there were
27 Marines and 95 Army soldiers convicted of murder and manslaughter in that
conflict, which lasted much longer and produced many more casualties than the
Iraq war has so far.

According to The Post's review of publicly reported cases from Iraq, 39 U.S.
service members were charged with crimes in connection with the deaths of Iraqi
civilians or for allegedly covering them up, from the start of the war in March
2003 through early 2006.

Twenty-four Army personnel were charged in connection with civilian deaths.
Twelve were convicted of crimes and received jail sentences that ranged from 45
days to 25 years. Four others were tried at courts-martial, resulting in one
acquittal and three convictions with no confinement.

Charges against two others were dropped. Six received administrative
punishments, including four who cooperated with government prosecutions of their
superiors. In administrative cases, no trial is held and the charges and
penalties are not made public.

"Each case was evaluated independently, and appropriate action was taken in each
case," Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said Friday after officials examined The
Post's data. "Conviction and confinement is not always the measure of a correct
result."

Five Marines were involved in homicide cases. One officer was convicted of
dereliction of duty and maltreatment for strangling an Iraqi prisoner in 2003
and was dismissed from the Corps; one was acquitted; and charges against three
others were dropped.

One naval officer was charged and acquitted in a case related to the death of a
detainee at Abu Ghraib prison, and eight Navy SEALS and one sailor received
administrative punishments in the same case.

Army and Marine officials confirmed that The Post's compilation of criminal
homicide cases is comprehensive. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which
handles Navy and Marine cases, did not respond to requests for comments on the
data.

Since March, an additional 17 U.S. troops have been charged with murder in three
separate incidents. The increase in the rate of charges is in part because Lt.
Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of Multinational Corps-Iraq, ordered officers
in April to look at every escalation-of-force incident that led to civilian
casualties. That effort began after the killings in Haditha came to light and it
was alleged that officers in the chain of command ignored the case or covered it
up.

"Part of our mission success depends on not creating additional enemies because
of our actions," said Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, a spokeswoman for
Chiarelli.

The number of civilians killed has declined from an average of seven per week
last year and four per week in January to about one per week in August, she
said.

No homicide prosecutions have arisen from shootings at U.S.-manned checkpoints,
where troops sometimes kill approaching drivers if they appear to be suicide
bombers or insurgents. But officials have been focusing on eliminating such
deaths.

Standardized signs warning that U.S. troops can use deadly force are displayed,
and Chiarelli is trying to buy green warning lasers to use to get drivers'
attention without firing warning shots.

TOO FEW CONVICTIONS?

The homicide data have caused concern among some human rights advocates and
experts on military law, who say the low conviction rate and seemingly lenient
punishments may be sending the wrong signal, both to U.S. troops and to the
Iraqi people.

"We are indeed having trouble getting convictions and accountability, and so are
other countries," said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of
Military Justice. "It has struck me that the sentences are kind of modest."

But several experts on military justice said that the convictions and penalties
so far are a reasonable outcome for a system designed to give soldiers fair
trials in which the special circumstances of the battlefield are taken into
account.

"Military justice is a two-edged sword," said Michael A. Newton, a former Army
lawyer who teaches at Vanderbilt University law school and advises the judges
supervising Saddam Hussein's trial. "It is a tool for discipline and military
efficiency, but it is also a tool for preserving fairness and the rights of
soldiers."

Some incidents clearly took place outside of combat and without provocation.

Army Pvt. Federico Daniel Merida, for example, killed an Iraqi soldier in May
2004 by shooting him 11 times after the two had sex. He was later sentenced to
25 years in prison and given a dishonorable discharge. In October 2004, Army
Sgt. 1st Class Jorge Diaz shot a detainee in the face after searching a
suspected insurgent's house. He was sentenced to seven years and given a
dishonorable discharge.

A series of incidents involving the 1st Battalion, 41st Infantry Regiment in
August 2004 highlighted the stresses of battle in the heavily contested Sadr
City section of Baghdad and led to four soldiers serving sentences in the deaths
of three Iraqi civilians. One of the civilians was shot to death after soldiers
attacked a trash truck they believed was dropping roadside bombs. Two soldiers
told authorities that the man was in such bad shape, they shot him to put him
out of his misery.

In the days that followed, two different soldiers from the same unit, Sgt.
Michael P. Williams and Spec. Brent May of the 3rd Platoon, went into two houses
in Sadr City during a routine security sweep and shot two unarmed men, later
arguing that they felt threatened. Williams and May were investigated for murder
only after Lt. Erick Anderson, their platoon leader, forced the battalion's
officers to start a probe.

Shortly after filing a report, Anderson was charged with murder.

"In the very beginning, no one wanted to do anything about it," said Anderson,
27, who has left active duty and is living in Kansas. "I think the officers
didn't want to have the possibility of having themselves brought into it. They
didn't want to go through the whole process."

Charges against Anderson ultimately were dropped, and he was promoted.

He said that during his tour there were many cases of slain Iraqi civilians that
never drew scrutiny. "I think once people started seeing the reality of what can
happen, when something did happen, they wanted to bury it," he said.

Williams pleaded guilty and was initially sentenced to life in prison, a
sentence later reduced to 25 years. May was sentenced to five years.

Retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in
northern Iraq, said he always sought to address crimes as quickly as possible in
order to maintain the trust of Iraqis.

"We created more enemies in Iraq than there were insurgents, and that's a
geometric equation," Batiste said.

HOW MILITARY COURTS WORK

To win a murder conviction, military prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable
doubt that the accused killed "without justification or excuse." But that is not
always easy in a war zone.

The Uniform Code of Military Justice was enacted by Congress in 1950 partly to
help make military trials more like civilian trials, with more procedural
protections for the accused.

But there are key differences between a military criminal case and a civilian
one. One of the most fundamental is that the initial decision to start a
criminal investigation ultimately rests with the commander of the service member
in question, who can order administrative or non-judicial punishments instead of
courts-martial.

Critics of the military's processes in Iraq say the performance so far shows a
need to change the decentralized decision-making structure. They argue that it
creates the potential for improper "command influence" in favor of defendants by
officers who don't want the embarrassment of criminal investigations of their
subordinates.

Hina Shamsi, senior counsel at Human Rights First, a New York-based nonprofit
organization that monitors the military justice system, is a supporter of such
changes. Nevertheless, she said: "The system is adequate. When properly
followed, it works extremely well."

When criminal proceedings are authorized, there is no grand jury to hear
testimony from witnesses called by a prosecutor. Instead, a proceeding called an
Article 32 hearing takes place before a single officer. The defense is allowed
to present evidence and cross-examine prosecution witnesses. Charges sometimes
fail at this stage.

That happened in the case of Marine 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, who was charged with
murder in the deaths of two Iraqis he had detained at a roadblock in April 2004.
He shot the men 60 times and left a sign on their bodies warning insurgents not
to risk similar treatment. But he said he fired only after they made threatening
moves in his direction.

The Article 32 hearing officer agreed and dropped the charges, partly because
forensic evidence showed that the men were shot in the chest, supporting
Pantano's story that they were moving toward him when he fired.

Court-martial juries are made up exclusively of fellow service members, all of
whom must outrank the accused, though enlisted personnel are entitled to a jury
composed of at least one-third enlisted troops. Service members now frequently
face juries that include members with battlefield experience in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

Frequently, soldiers say they fired because they perceived a threat, or because
they believed that their actions were authorized by the rules of engagement or
other orders.

"It's not an easy call to make. It requires getting into the head of a
serviceman," said retired Rear Adm. John D. Hutson, a former Navy judge advocate
general who is now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H. "Rape
is pretty clear, but death of civilians can be a part of the fog of war, or it
can be the result of inexperience or misjudgment."

When Abed Hamed Mowhoush, a captured former general in Hussein's army, died in
November 2003 after interrogation by U.S. intelligence officers, Iraqi agents
and U.S. soldiers, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis E. Welshofer Jr., a military
interrogator, was found guilty of negligent homicide, not murder.

Welshofer had stuffed the general headfirst into a sleeping bag and straddled
his chest while questioning him. The jury that convicted him rejected the
prosecution's claims that Welshofer intended to kill. Welshofer had sought
approval for the sleeping bag method at a time when U.S. policy on
interrogations of resistant Iraqi insurgents was, at best, unclear.

The jury gave him a formal reprimand, fined him $6,000 and said he should be
confined to his home, office and church for 60 days.

Welshofer defended his actions in a February 2004 letter to the commander of the
82nd Airborne Division, citing his "moral obligation to do everything I can to
protect the lives of my fellow soldiers."

*


The Age (Melbourne) --

August 27, 2006

HICKS CAST OUT AFTER DAY AS BRITISH CITIZEN

By Annabel Crabb

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/08/26/1156012790201.html

London - DAVID HICKS was secretly made a British citizen in his Guantanamo Bay
cell last month, but spent only hours as an Englishman before his status was
stripped from him.

The Sunday Age has learned that in an extraordinary train of events, Hicks was
told in his cell on July 6 that the British Government had finally complied with
a High Court order to register him as an Englishman.

But on the following day, the first anniversary of the attacks on London's
Underground, he was informed that British Home Secretary John Reid had stripped
him of the privilege.

Hicks, whose mother was born in Britain, was given no opportunity to seek legal
advice.

The manoeuvre was made possible by amendments in a new British law, which appear
to have been drafted specifically in response to the Hicks case.

The amendments give the Home Secretary discretion to strip an individual of
British citizenship.

In recent weeks, the Home Office has declined to make any comment on Hicks'
welfare or on the progress of his citizenship application. A spokesman told The
Sunday Age that it was now Home Office policy not to discuss the Hicks case in
any detail; he did not disclose that the question of the Australian's dual
citizenship had been resolved.

Hicks' US lawyer, Major Michael Mori, said his client had the citizenship for a
matter of hours. "David is the only detainee who has ever received a fax in
Guantanamo Bay. He had his citizenship for five hours. The next fax for him came
saying, 'We are going to take citizenship away'."

"The British Government did not want to embarrass the Australian Government," he
said.

Hicks' British lawyer, Stephen Grosz, who has never met him but has steered him
through several victories before the High Court, was advised of the developments
after they occurred.

The High Court ordered the speedy registration of Hicks as a British citizen in
December last year, but the Home Office did not comply with that until July.

"We were right, and he got his citizenship, but they waited until they were
ready," Mr Grosz said.

"I think it was completely wrong of them to have sat on his application until
they were ready to grant citizenship and deprive him of it immediately.

"I think it was an abuse of power."

The amendments, which constitute a significant broadening of the powers vested
in the Home Secretary, passed through the British Parliament earlier this year,
buried deep within an immigration bill. The act came into effect in June, just
weeks before Hicks was contacted.

It is understood the Home Office had waived the usual formality of an oath of
allegiance.

Under section 56 of the new act, the British Home Secretary "may by order
deprive a person of a citizenship status if (he) is satisfied that deprivation
is conducive to the public good".

The powers, which apply to anybody with dual citizenship, replace laws dictating
that a person could be stripped of British citizenship only if they were proved
to have undertaken actions "seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the
United Kingdom".

· Victorian Attorney-General Rob Hulls plans to write to US congressional
committee members this week requesting a fair trial for Guantanamo Bay
detainees. Mr Hulls said he was appalled by flaws and lack of due process under
the previous military commissions.

*


Newark Star-Ledger --

August 27, 2006

ALITO: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A JUSTICE IN THE MAKING

By Kate Coscarelli

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-8/1156652821172750.xml&coll=1

Samuel A. Alito Jr. vividly remembers the first few hours of his new job.

The Senate had just approved his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court and he had
been whisked into the high court for his swearing-in. There was lunch with his
new colleagues, then he was shown around his new chambers, formerly occupied by
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

He was exhausted after a partisan three-month battle over his confirmation, but
the weight of it all was just beginning to lift. He was thinking vacation.

Then a law clerk came looking for him.

Michael Taylor, a Missouri man convicted of killing a 15-year-old girl, was
scheduled to die at midnight the next day, the clerk said. Alito had to be ready
to cast a vote on a stay of execution. And the bench was expected to divide
sharply. So the new justice went straight to work reading memos and briefs in
the case.

"It was not really what I wanted to do on my first half-day," said Alito. "At
the beginning I was sort of numb for the whole process. It was like being in a
car, like shifting gears. ... The months before were unlike anything I had ever
experienced. I wasn't really a judge for most of that time. So I had to say,
'Okay, now you're a judge again. Shift back into that gear.' So that's what I
did and just tried to grapple with it as best as I could."

The next day, Feb. 1, Alito split from his fellow conservatives in a 6-3 vote
that stopped the execution.

With the court in summer recess, Sam Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, agreed
earlier this month to their first interviews since he was confirmed. They talked
about the Senate hearings, about her tearful breakdown during a now famous
session. He also spoke about the inner workings of one of the most closely
watched courts in the nation's history.

"I never really thought it would happen," Alito said. "I have only had a chance
to think about it over the summer. During the course of the year, everything
happened so fast that I was just going from day to day and doing what I had to
do each day. I'm not sure that it all has completely sunk in."

The junior justice talked while clearing out the Newark office where he kept his
chambers during 15 years on the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals. Members of
his new staff moved about, helping him figure out what to pack.

Old case files were unceremoniously dumped into trash bins. Rolls of tape were
everywhere. And cardboard boxes marked "sc office" sat open and waiting, ready
to be loaded. Some things were the obvious judicial stuff, while others held a
significance not immediately apparent: a pair of plastic pink flamingos that
once sat in the hallway and a poster of slain rapper Tupac Shakur, whose songs
were involved in a case Alito handled years ago.

"I'm nostalgic, I really am. I loved being here. I liked the office. I liked
being in Newark," Alito said.

President Bush chose Alito on Oct. 31 to succeed O'Connor. The nomination came
after the previous nominee, White House counsel Harriet Miers, ran into such
strong opposition from conservatives that she withdrew from consideration.
Alito's nomination set off yet another uproar and a long period of scrutiny
entirely new to the Alitos.

He had encountered little questioning before winning approval from the Senate
Judiciary Committee as a 3rd Circuit judge in 1990. The White House staffers and
aides who helped him prepare for the Supreme Court hearings in January warned
Alito, his wife and their children, Philip and Laura, to ignore the media
coverage.

Stories focused on everything from the church he attended to the clothes he wore
and what he and his wife purchased at the grocery store.

One newspaper was working on a story about his family's entry to the United
States from Italy. In response, the staff working on his nomination hired its
own professional genealogist to study the family's roots. Alito soon learned his
father and grandmother came into the country through Philadelphia on a ship
later sunk by an Austrian U-boat.

That revelation was entertaining, he said. But most of the scrutiny, he'd just
as soon forget.

"Some of it was silly. Some of it was maddening," Alito said. "I read
practically nothing, that is what I was advised to do. That worked much better
for me. If I had read everything every day, I think I might have gone crazy."

GOD AND FAMILY

His wife, a former librarian, said she also tried to focus on family, and
especially her daughter's senior year of high school. Keeping cool was the Alito
mantra.

"For the most part, we all recognize that everyone has the right to say as they
wish. The most amazing part is, why do people care about our life?" said Martha-
Ann Alito. "I have friends who have serious family and health issues, so for us
this was something that had to be endured. It was not a big issue for us, it was
going to happen positively or negatively. Those were the only two choices. God
consoled us and supported us and provided us love. That was a really important
part of what got us through. God and our family -- we are a very small, close
family."

Even now the statements some senators made about her husband, especially those
questioning his record on civil rights, make her blood boil.

"The way the world is these days, Sam is by far not even close to being an
imminent threat to civil liberties," she said.

For the Alitos, the days leading up to the hearings seemed endless. Samuel Alito
met individually with 83 senators while preparing for so-called "murder boards,"
in which panels of lawyers and politicians rehearse the candidate on possible
questions the Judiciary Committee may ask.

Self-doubt, he said, was a constant companion. Asked if he ever questioned
himself and his pursuit of the high court seat during that period, he replied:
"Like every day."

A daily respite came when he walked into the Federal District Court in
Washington, D.C. He was granted the use of a vacant judicial chamber to study
and finish his lingering 3rd Circuit work. Being able to focus on legal issues
helped motivate him.

"It was a relief. It was a tremendous relief," he said.

The hearings began Jan. 9. The Judiciary Committee grilled Alito for four days,
peppering him with more than 700 questions.

The third day proved too much for his wife. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina -- in an apparent attempt to mock the often harsh questioning --
asked the nominee if he was a "closet bigot." And then he apologized that Alito
and his family "has had to sit here and listen to this."

Martha-Ann Alito recalled the sympathetic remark as an unexpected kindness. She
said the surprise was too much. She burst into tears and hurried out of the
room. Her tearful departure was one of the most talked-about moments in the
hearings.

"It was very spontaneous. And it was simply that one can endure blows, but when
tenderness comes into the mix, your reserves are pretty much shot, at least for
me," she said, adding that her husband didn't know she was crying until the
hearings went into a break.

AN 'INNOVATIVE' POSITION

Serving as a judge on the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals was good training
for the high court, Alito said.

"In some ways it seems like another version of what I have been doing for 15 1/2
years," he said.

But in many ways the new position is something else entirely. The intellectual
work before the high court is "innovative," he said. There are nine jurists,
which makes it harder to build consensus than with the three-judge panels he is
accustomed to. On the circuit court, arguments are often made about multiple
legal issues and how the law is applied to the circumstances of the case. The
high court spends more of its energy on big ideas. All of the cases involve
tough legal questions.

"The difference is that in court of appeals the typical case would involve
usually a number of issues, maybe three, four, five or 10 issues," he said.
"When a case comes to us on the Supreme Court and we take it, we take it to
resolve usually one legal issue -- sometimes there are two. But most of them
involve a single legal issue so everything is focused on that."

In his time as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey between 1987 and 1990, Alito was not
known for seeking public attention. And as a 3rd Circuit judge he developed a
reputation for a monastic work ethic. So the public demands on a justice's time
have also taken some getting used to.

He gets a staggering number of requests to make speeches and talk to school
groups -- something he likes to do, but finds difficult to balance with the
court's caseload.

"I feel that I should do it, and I enjoy it, but it's hard. I've found it a bit
harder to find the time that I need to really think systematically about what I
am doing," he said.

From the time of his nomination until the court's summer recess, Alito stayed
mostly in Washington, D.C. His family stayed mostly in New Jersey. On weekends
he would often drive north to their West Caldwell home, which they plan to keep
for now.

With his family in New Jersey, Alito devoted himself to the court.

"I ended up working until 11 o'clock, midnight most nights. I had a little
apartment just a couple blocks from the court so I would go home and come back.
I really had nothing else to do," he said. He has rented a larger apartment for
the upcoming term, which begins in October.

Writing opinions, he said, demanded a new level of concentration.

"You really are the final step, and what you write will be interpreted and
interpreted. And so you have to make a special effort to be very precise," Alito
said.

Forging an opinion can require a lot of horse-trading among the nine justices,
he said. The prevailing belief is that it is good to maximize the amount of
agreement, but Alito said it can be difficult to figure out how much to
compromise for the sake of the opinion.

"If everybody said, 'I want it in exactly my words,' you are not going to have a
majority opinion. Sometimes it's harder to get to that point," Alito said. "In
individual cases, sometimes it's hard to figure out how much to bend and how
much would be too much."

When divisions come up, the discussions are friendly and civilized, Alito said.
The justices discuss cases at conferences but much of the debate happens not
through personal lobbying, but via memos delivered around the building by
staffers. In fact, when the judges gather for lunches on days they hold
arguments or have conferences, talk is typically about family and other casual
topics.

In at least once case involving a workplace discrimination issue, Alito voted
with the 9-0 majority but disagreed so strongly with the reasoning the majority
used that he felt he had to write his own opinion.

"The decision whether to write separately is a tough decision," he said. "There
are times when I feel that to be true to what I really think, I need to write
separately, so that is what I do."

While he finds the work enjoyable, and in some ways almost like being a
professor, there are also times he doesn't relish his duties. The Jan. 31
surprise was an example.

"One of the unpleasant parts of this job is that on a typical week there is at
least one execution someplace," he said.

THE NEW JUNIOR JUSTICE

Learning the rituals in a court steeped in them takes time. At least, he said,
his new colleagues have been helpful and forgiving of his rookie ignorance.

The first weeks were hard, he says -- especially since he kept getting lost.

"The Supreme Court building is one of the most confusing buildings I have ever
been in. ... I didn't know where anything was, how to get in or how to get out,"
he said.

And just asking a question has proved to be its own adventure. To question
lawyers during arguments, the justices must flick a switch to activate their
microphone.

"You have to be very quick on the draw," said Alito. "I like to let a lawyer at
least finish a sentence. So I'm waiting for a period to ask a question, but if
you do that, there's more of a chance that everybody else is going to come in."

As the junior justice, Alito is also expected to record how the justices vote
during conferences on whether to hear a case. Then he must report the vote
tallies to the clerk's office. During a typical conference the justices might
talk about dozens of cases, and Alito has to keep up.

"When we have a conference on that, we will generally discuss maybe 30 or so, so
the votes can go kind of fast. So I have to make sure I've got the outcome
correct because at the end of the conference everybody else leaves and the
clerk's office contingent comes in and I go through them case by case," he said.

It is also the job of the newest member of the court to take the seat in the
conference room nearest the door. During sessions it is the new guy's job to
answer the door when someone knocks.

At his first conference, Alito was slow to move and Justice Stephen Breyer --
the junior justice for 11 years prior to Alito's arrival -- started to rise. But
Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Breyer to stay put.

"I've got that down now," Alito said. "I answer the door."

Alito was no stranger to the Supreme Court, having argued many cases before the
court when he worked for the U.S. Department of Justice. But the view from the
bench is entirely different, he said. He sat for the first time in early
February.

"It was unreal. It was sort of surreal. I've had many times during those periods
where I've had to pinch myself to say, 'Yeah, you're really here. You're on the
Supreme Court. This is really happening,'" Alito said. In his rush to leave the
chamber on his first day, he committed a small faux pas when he left the room
out of order of seniority, bumping ahead of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

SAME MAN IN OLD ROBES

The justice said in his day-to-day work at the court, he gives little thought to
the ideological divide among the justices. It is only to be expected, he said,
that the court will have disagreements, since the cases it decides are the most
controversial in the land.

"I just work on each case, and that's basically it. Obviously, there are certain
cases where you see a division ... but very often that is not the case," he
said.

"You get used to the fact that you're not always going to agree on things and
sometimes it's frustrating -- particularly if it is something where you feel
you're right and you can't understand why anyone would disagree with you," he
said. "I don't think it's personal. We just don't always see things the same
way."

With all of the public focus on the ideology of the court, it is easy to lose
sight of the fact that attention focuses on only a few of the cases the justices
decide, he said.

"We decide maybe 80, 90 cases a term, and the public focuses generally at the
end of the term on maybe 10 cases. The others generally don't have that sort of
division," Alito said.

Alito's image among friends and associates has been that of a rumpled legal
scholar who is far from the world's best dresser and a little out of touch with
pop culture. Early indications are that he has not changed.

During one of the court's most closely watched, though not necessarily more
important, cases in February, former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith appeared in
a matter involving her share of her late billionaire husband's estate. Alito
said he tried to spot her in the audience.

"I'm not sure to this day that I actually saw her. She looked different. I had
seen pictures of her before she went to that diet," he said.

And Alito hasn't bought any new robes to wear on the high court. He's been
wearing the same old robe since he joined the circuit court. On one of his first
days, Justice Antonin Scalia joked with him about a purple swatch on the back.
Defending her new colleague, Ginsburg piped up that Alito could wear whatever he
wanted.

No clothes horse, Alito said he was at first confused by Scalia's comment.

"There actually is a purple band or something. I don't know what you would call
it. I never noticed it. Fifteen years of wearing it, I never noticed it," he
said.

For the term beginning in October, the court has already agreed to handle a host
of cases on controversial topics, including racial diversity in schools and
partial-birth abortion.

Looking forward, Alito said: "I'm feeling my way through. I can't really say how
it will come out."

His wife is more certain about the future. She's felt that way since the day he
took the oath.

"It was all very, not dream-like, it just seemed the right thing was happening
to me," she said.

[ Kate Coscarelli covers the business of law. She may be reached at
kcoscarelli@starledger.com or (973) 392-4147. ]

*


Wall Street Journal --

August 22, 2006

THE CONSTITUTION VS. COUNTERTERRORISM

By Richard A. Posner

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/article_print/
SB115620738001741724-lMyQjAxMDE2NTI2MjIyMDI3Wj.html

Last week a federal district judge in Detroit ruled that the National Security
Agency's conduct of electronic surveillance outside the boundaries of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is illegal. As a judge I cannot comment on
the correctness of her decision. But I can remark on the strangeness of
confiding so momentous an issue of national security to a randomly selected
member of the federal judiciary's corps of almost 700 district judges, subject
to review by appellate and Supreme Court judges also not chosen for their
knowledge of national security.

A further strangeness is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (which hears appeals from
FISC) have been bypassed, with regard to adjudicating the legality of the NSA
program, in favor of the federal district court in Detroit. The reason is that
the jurisdiction of those courts is limited to foreign intelligence surveillance
warrants, and the NSA program under attack involves warrantless surveillance.

In June, the Supreme Court in the Hamdan decision invalidated the military
commissions that the Defense Department had established to try captive
terrorists -- commissions that had never succeeded in conducting any trials. And
the pending Senate bill to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
contemplates the submission of NSA programs to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court for an opinion on their legality -- a problematic procedure
because federal courts are not permitted to render advisory opinions. A court
might even hold that a surveillance "program," as distinct from the surveillance
of specific individuals, was a "general warrant," which the Fourth Amendment
forbids.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the institutional structure of U.S.
counterterrorism is in disarray. The Department of Homeland Security remains a
work in progress -- slow and painful progress -- and likewise for the
restructuring of the intelligence community decreed by Congress in the
Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. And now, in the wake
of Hamdan and the Detroit case, we learn that we do not have a coherent judicial
dimension to our efforts to combat terrorism. (One reason may be that there is
no official with overall responsibility for counterterrorism policy.) Other than
the judges assigned to the two foreign intelligence courts, federal judges do
not have security clearances and, more to the point, have no expertise in
national security matters. Moreover, the criminal justice system is designed for
dealing with ordinary crimes, not today's global terrorism, as is shown by the
rules, for example, that entitle a person who is arrested to a prompt probable-
cause hearing before a judge and require that criminal trials be open to the
public.
* * *

Other countries have greater flexibility in tailoring their judicial procedures
to the special problems posed by terrorism. We are boxed in by our revered 18th-
century Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court. The Hamdan decision
suggests that a majority, albeit a bare majority, of the court is unsympathetic
to arguments that our understanding of certain provisions of the Constitution
needs to be revised to meet contemporary needs. The court that resisted
Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s eventually bowed, and so may the court in the
current era, but we cannot wait for that to happen.

The dilemma of defeating terrorism while respecting essential civil liberties
can perhaps be resolved by a change of focus from the adjudicative process to
executive and congressional oversight. This would mean less effort at trying to
prevent terrorism by means of criminal prosecutions, whether in regular courts
or in ad hoc military tribunals, and less use of devices, such as the warrant,
that are used mainly in criminal-law enforcement. It is telling that no one was
ever tried by the military commissions set up in the wake of 9/11, and that
criminal prosecutions of terrorists have been few and have seemed to have had
little impact on the terrorist menace.

Terrorists are difficult to deter and locking them up has only a limited
preventive effect because the supply of terrorists is virtually unlimited.
Fortunately, if a terrorist plot is detected it will usually be possible to
neutralize the plotters without prosecuting them. Some can be deported, some
held in administrative detention, some "turned" to work for us, some discredited
in the eyes of their accomplices, some sent off on wild-goose chases by
carefully planted disinformation, and some carefully monitored in the hope that
they will lead us to their accomplices.

Monitoring, even when it takes the form of wiretapping or other electronic
interceptions, need not be conducted under a warrant. The Fourth Amendment
restricts warrants, as I have said, but warrantless searches are permissible as
long as they are reasonable. The potential abuses of warrantless surveillance
can be minimized, without judicial intervention, by rules limiting the use of
intercepted communications to national security, requiring that the names of
persons whose communications are intercepted (and the reasons for and results of
the interception) be turned over to executive and congressional watchdog
committees, and imposing draconian penalties on officials who violate civil
liberties in conducting surveillance.

[ Mr. Posner, a federal circuit judge and a senior lecturer at the University of
Chicago Law School, is the author of "Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence
System in the Throes of Reform" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006). ]

*


Washington Post --

August 21, 2006

AT GUANTANAMO, CAUGHT IN A LEGAL TRAP

6 Algerians Languish Despite Foreign Rulings, Dropped Charges

By Craig Whitlock

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/08/20/AR2006082000660.html

SARAJEVO, Bosnia -- On Jan. 18, 2002, six men suspected of plotting to attack
the U.S. Embassy were seized here by U.S. troops and flown to Cuba, where they
became some of the first arrivals at the Pentagon's new prison at Guantanamo
Bay.

The seizure was ordered by senior U.S. officials in defiance of rulings by top
courts in Bosnia that the men were entitled to their freedom and could not be
deported. Today, more than four years later, the six remain locked up at
Guantanamo, even though the original allegations about the embassy attack have
been discredited and dropped, records show.

In 2004, Bosnian prosecutors and police formally exonerated the six men after a
lengthy criminal investigation. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked the
Bush administration to release them, calling the case a miscarriage of justice.

The men came from Algeria to Bosnia during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Most were
former Muslim fighters who became humanitarian aid workers after the war. They
remain imprisoned because the U.S. military still classifies them as "enemy
combatants" in the fight against terrorism. A review of thousands of pages of
military and civilian court documents, however, shows that many reasons given
for the designation are based on flawed or dubious evidence.

The case illustrates how difficult it will be to meet President Bush's stated
goal to close Guantanamo as quickly as possible. About 450 detainees remain.
While some face military commissions that could sentence them to long prison
terms, most are expected to be released to their home countries.

Senior Bosnian officials said they have been told by U.S. diplomats that the six
Algerians will never be allowed to return to Bosnia, which had granted dual
citizenship to most of the men before their seizure. Instead, U.S. officials
have pressed Algeria to take back the prisoners on the condition that they be
confined or kept under surveillance there. So far, the Algerian government has
balked.

The detainees and their lawyers say they are caught in a trap. They contend that
the Pentagon knows the men are not guilty but is unwilling to let them go free
because that would be an acknowledgment of a grave error.

"The Americans did not want to return me to Bosnia. Why? Because the Americans
claimed to have evidence against me. I can't be returned and found innocent,"
Mustafa Ait Idr, one of the six Algerians, told a military tribunal at
Guantanamo in October 2004, according to a transcript of the hearing.

"So now I am sitting here in Cuba and I do not know why. I do not know what is
happening outside; I do not know. But what I do know is that this is a game."

A POST-SEPTEMBER 11 ROUNDUP

In early October 2001, the United States was still reeling from the shock of the
Sept. 11 attacks. U.S. intelligence agents around the globe worked frantically
to chase down leads about Islamic radicals who might pose a threat.

Bosnia was seen as a potential haven. Large numbers of Muslim volunteer fighters
had remained in the country, marrying Bosnian women, after the war. Some worked
for Islamic charities, which U.S. investigators believed were often fronts for
money-laundering rackets by terrorist groups.

One foreign fighter whom intelligence operatives wanted to find was an Algerian
known only by the nickname Abu Maali. A veteran of conflicts in Algeria,
Afghanistan and the Balkans, he was thought to be close to al-Qaeda.

On Oct. 8, 2001, Bosnian police detained an Algerian, Belkacem Bensayah, who
they believed might be Abu Maali. While searching his home, they found a piece
of notepaper that listed, in a handwritten scrawl, what appeared to be a phone
number in Pakistan and the name "Abu Zubeida."

The scrap of paper was considered a vital piece of evidence. It seemed to match
the name of one of al-Qaeda's top leaders, a Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah, who
had fought in the Balkans and was at the time serving alongside Osama bin Laden
in Afghanistan.

Bensayah told police he had never before seen the note, which was found inside a
borrowed library book, "The Tragedy of Immorality." Bosnian and U.S.
investigators didn't believe him.

Later, U.S. investigators asserted they had phone records indicating Bensayah
had called Afghanistan 70 times after Sept. 11 and accused him of being "the top
al Qaeda facilitator" in Bosnia, court documents show. The phone records have
not been publicly disclosed.

Police turned their attention to an acquaintance of their lead suspect, another
Algerian, Saber Lahmar. A worker for a Saudi aid agency in Bosnia, the Saudi
High Committee for Relief, Lahmar had another intriguing connection: His father-
in-law had recently been hired as a janitor at the U.S. Embassy.

On Oct. 16, U.S. intelligence officers listened in on a wiretap they had placed
on Lahmar's phone. According to court records, they heard him speaking "in code"
about what they thought was a plan to attack the U.S. and British embassies in
Sarajevo.

The next day, U.S. diplomats and officials from the CIA and FBI met with their
Bosnian counterparts. The Americans told the Bosnians that they had closed the
embassy for security reasons and made clear they wanted more arrests, according
to Bosnian officials present at the meeting.

Over the next week, Bosnian police arrested Lahmar and four other Algerians: Ait
Idr, Hadj Boudella, Mohamed Nechle and Lahkdar Boumediene. Most of the men have
said they were friends who had met through their charity work.

Srdjan Dizdarevic, president of the Bosnian chapter of the Helsinki Committee
for Human Rights, said U.S. officials exerted heavy pressure to round up
suspects, threatening to withdraw U.S. peacekeeping troops if Bosnian officials
didn't act.

"There was not a single piece of credible evidence against the Algerians,"
Dizdarevic recalled. "The Bosnian authorities couldn't find anything, and the
Americans didn't turn over anything to back up their claims. But the threats
from the Americans were enormous. There was a hysteria in their behavior."

Vijay Padmanabhan, a lawyer in the State Department's legal office for political
and military affairs, confirmed that U.S. officials met with the Bosnians to
discuss the embassy closing.

"We didn't threaten or intimidate the Bosnians into arresting these men," he
said. "We provided the Bosnian government with intelligence information, and
they took what they felt was the appropriate action based on that information."
He declined to provide further details.

COURT ORDERS IGNORED

After finding the note in the library book, investigators had trouble finding
evidence that would stand up in court.

Phone records revealed no calls from Bensayah's home to the phone number
attributed to Abu Zubaydah, according to Bosnian judicial documents. U.S.
officials declined to provide Bosnian investigators with transcripts of their
own wiretaps, saying that could compromise spying methods.

On Jan. 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ordered the release of the six
Algerians, ruling that there was not enough evidence to warrant their detention.
The same day, the Bosnian Human Rights Chamber issued a separate decision that
the men had the right to remain in Bosnia and could not be deported.

By then, rumors had swirled for days that U.S. peacekeeping troops would seize
the Algerians anyway.

As dusk fell, an angry crowd of more than 150 people surrounded the prison in
Sarajevo. A Muslim radio station urged listeners to turn out to protect the men.
Scuffles broke out with police, who dispersed the crowd.

Shortly before dawn on Jan. 18, the Algerians were officially released from
Bosnian custody. But instead of gaining their freedom, they were handed over by
Bosnian police to U.S. military personnel.

"The only way out was to deliver them" to the Americans, said Alija Behmen,
Bosnia's prime minister at the time, in an interview. "We were not interested in
introducing a new period of instability in Bosnia."

Other officials said the decision caused lasting harm to efforts to solidify the
rule of law in a fragile nation trying to recover from civil war.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said it was especially
disturbing that the Bosnian and U.S. governments ignored the order of the
Bosnian Human Rights Chamber. Nowak noted that the United States had played an
instrumental role in creating the human rights court as part of the
international effort to rebuild Bosnia.

"There was a clear order not to deport them from Bosnia. The U.S. government
totally ignored it," Nowak said. "It's implausible to say they are enemy
combatants. They were fighters during the Bosnian war, but that ended in 1995.
They may be radical Islamists, but they have definitely not committed any
crime."

SHIFTING ALLEGATIONS

At Guantanamo, the Algerians entered a military justice system where the rules
allow hearsay and other uncorroborated evidence to be used as justification for
keeping an inmate imprisoned.

The men waited more than 2 1/2 years before they got judicial hearings. In
October 2004, a U.S. military tribunal held a hearing to examine the evidence
against Hadj Boudella and decide whether he should be classified as an enemy
combatant.

Prosecutors accused him of being "associated with al Qaeda" and having
connections to other Islamic radical groups, including the Armed Islamic Group
of Algeria, known by its initials in French, GIA. It was also noted that
Boudella had been arrested on suspicion of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy
in Sarajevo, although there was no mention that Bosnian officials had exonerated
him of that claim.

The basis for the new accusations, some of which were classified, was not
disclosed at the hearing. Tribunal members acknowledged they were just as
confused as the detainees about the origin of some of the allegations.

"At this point, we don't know why you are being accused of being a member of the
Armed Islamic Group," one military officer, whose name was redacted from the
tribunal transcript, told Boudella. "Do you have any idea why you are being
connected with this group?"

"I don't know," Boudella replied. "I've been here for three years and these
accusations were just told to me."

In his defense, Boudella asked if the military tribunal could submit as evidence
the Bosnian Supreme Court ruling that ordered his release from the Sarajevo
jail, as well as a subsequent Bosnian human rights court decision awarding him
$6,000 in damages on grounds that the Bosnian government had illegally deported
him to Guantanamo. The documents, he said, would prove his innocence.

U.S. military officers said they had searched for the documents but that they
were "unable to be located." At the time, however, the documents were readily
available both on the Internet and in U.S. District Court files in Washington,
according to the American defense lawyers representing the Algerians.

At the conclusion of the tribunal in October 2004, Boudella -- like the five
other Algerians who were in separate hearings that month -- was declared an
enemy combatant.

Since then, the military has conducted annual reviews of the six men's status.

Each time, court officers have upheld the original decision.

Records from tribunal sessions in December 2005 show the U.S. military is no
longer accusing the Algerians of conspiring to attack the U.S. Embassy in
Sarajevo. No explanation for the change is given.

The military has listed other factors in its decision to label the men a
security threat.

One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had
taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also
classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers.

Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the
Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.

Boudella was accused by the U.S. military of joining bin Laden and Taliban
fighters at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the mountain hideout where the al-Qaeda
leadership escaped from U.S. forces in December 2001. In fact, at the time,
Boudella was locked up thousands of miles away in Sarajevo, after his arrest in
the later-discredited embassy plot.

One fresh allegation filed against Boudella last year was that he wore a ring
"similar to those that identified the Red Rose Group members of Hamas," the
radical Palestinian movement, according to tribunal records.

Boudella's wife, Nadja Dizdarevic, responded in an interview that the ring is a
common anniversary band worn by thousands of Bosnian Muslims. She said she
obtained an affidavit from the jeweler in Sarajevo where he bought the ring and
submitted it to the U.S. military in hopes that they will drop the charge at his
next hearing.

"If it is a mark of belonging to Hamas, then 98 percent of the Bosnian Muslims
belong to Hamas," she said. "For every claim they make against him, I have proof
to show them they are wrong, so they have to invent something new."

The Defense Department declined to answer specific questions about the case,
saying that some evidence against the men remains classified.

But a Pentagon spokesman defended the decision to apprehend the six Algerians.

"There was no mistake in originally detaining these individuals as enemy
combatants," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. J.D. Gordon. "Their detention was directly
related to their combat activities as determined by an appropriate Defense
Department official before they were ever transferred to Guantanamo."

STATE DEPT. RESPONDS

On Feb. 2, 2005, Bosnian Prime Minister Adnan Terzic wrote a letter to U.S.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking that the Algerians be returned to
Bosnia.

"I took it for granted that it was the responsibility of this government to try
to bring these people back," Terzic said in an interview.

Rice responded on March 17 that it was not possible to free the six Algerians
because "they still possess important intelligence data" and pose a threat to
the security of the United States.

Three months later, the State Department offered a somewhat different
explanation. In a letter to U.S. Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), Matthew A.
Reynolds, acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs, explained that the
Algerians could not be released in part because the Bosnian government "has not
indicated that it is prepared or willing to accept responsibility for them upon
transfer."

Bosnian officials said they received no such offer. They express frustration
over the lack of action.

Justice Minister Slobodan Kovac said there would be no legal basis to place the
men under arrest or surveillance if they were returned to Bosnia because they
have already been exonerated there. "There is no case against them here in
Bosnia, no criminal case," he said.

[ News researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report. ]

*


Los Angeles Times --

August 20, 2006

A Tortured Past

Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were
discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse.

By Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/
la-na-vietnam20aug20,0,4709695.story

In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news
from the service's chief of criminal investigations.

An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that
members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.

But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog
of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public
accounts of his war experiences.

"This package ... provides sufficient material to impeach this man's
credibility; should this need arise, I volunteer for the task," wrote Col. Henry
H. Tufts, commander of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.

Now, declassified records show that while the Army was working energetically to
discredit Herbert, military investigators were uncovering torture and
mistreatment that went well beyond what he had described.

The abuses were not made public, and few of the wrongdoers were punished.

Tufts' agents found that military interrogators in the 173rd Airborne repeatedly
beat prisoners, tortured them with electric shocks and forced water down their
throats to simulate the sensation of drowning, the records show.

Soldiers in one unit told investigators that their captain approved of such
methods and was sometimes present during torture sessions.

In one case, a detainee who had been beaten by interrogators suffered
convulsions, lost consciousness and later died in his confinement cage.

Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in
confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three
were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None
served any prison time.

The accounts of torture and the Army's effort to discredit Herbert emerged from
a review of a once-secret Pentagon archive.

The collection -- about 9,000 pages -- was compiled in the early 1970s by an
Army task force that monitored war crimes investigations. The files, examined
recently by the Los Angeles Times, include memos, case summaries, investigative
reports and sworn witness statements.

Those and related records detail 141 instances of detainee and prisoner abuse in
Vietnam, including 127 involving the 173rd Airborne.

The Army task force, created after journalist Seymour Hersh exposed the 1968 My
Lai massacre, served to give military brass and the White House early warning
about potentially damaging revelations.

The war crimes records were declassified in 1994 and moved to the National
Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed.

The Times examined most of the files before officials removed them from the
public shelves, saying they contained personal information that was exempt from
the Freedom of Information Act.

Other records were taken by Tufts in the 1970s and donated after his death to
the University of Michigan.

The two collections do not provide a complete accounting of prisoner abuse
during the Vietnam War. They contain only cases reported to military authorities
and flagged for special attention by the Army chief of staff's office or taken
home by Tufts. But they represent the largest pool of such records to surface to
date.

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task
force, said the files provided important lessons for dealing with the prisoner
abuse scandal in Iraq.

"If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing
with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem," said
Johns, 78.

A SUPERSOLDIER'S CHARGES

A coal miner's son, Anthony Herbert was one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers
of the Korean War. He went on to become an Army Ranger and a Ranger instructor.

In 1968, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, and in early 1969 was awarded
command of a battalion in the 173rd Airborne.

The brigade was based in Binh Dinh province in the central coastal region when
Herbert arrived. Over the next two months, his unit reported more enemy contacts
than any other battalion in the 173rd Airborne.

Then on April 4, 1969, Herbert was relieved of his command for allegedly
unsatisfactory performance. He later told investigators from the Criminal
Investigation Division that, before his removal, he had informed his superior of
war crimes that he had witnessed.

Herbert recounted a series of atrocities.

He said South Vietnamese troops had executed detainees in the presence of an
American military advisor in February 1969. One of the victims had her throat
slit as her child clung to her pant leg, Herbert said. (Investigators later
concluded that about eight detainees had been slain.)

The following month, U.S. and Vietnamese interrogators tortured a teenager or
young woman by electric shock and subjected a male detainee to water torture,
Herbert said. He said he also saw interrogators beat two Vietnamese women held
in metal storage containers.

Herbert told the investigators that he had reported these incidents to Col. J.
Ross Franklin. On learning of the allegations, then-Army Chief of Staff Gen.
William C. Westmoreland ordered Tufts to create a task force to conduct the
investigation.

Before it was finished, Herbert took matters into his own hands and brought
charges against Franklin and his superior, Maj. Gen. John W. Barnes, in March
1971, saying they failed to investigate reports of war crimes.

As Army officials feared, the case received widespread coverage because of
Herbert's distinguished combat career and Barnes' rank, and because Franklin had
served on the commission investigating the My Lai massacre.

Herbert achieved celebrity status as the case played out in the media. He
appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show," was interviewed by Playboy magazine and was
featured in a New York Times Sunday magazine article titled: "How a Supersoldier
Was Fired From His Command."

Barnes and Franklin denied that Herbert had reported war crimes to them.
According to news reports at the time, Barnes told an investigator he removed
Herbert as battalion commander because he was "a keg of dynamite" who was
"completely oriented to killing mercilessly."

The Army dismissed the charges against Barnes and Franklin, and removed
Herbert's negative performance review.

Nevertheless, Herbert continued to accuse military leaders of a coverup. The
Army responded by releasing "fact sheets" that said the investigation had
substantiated only seven of 21 allegations by Herbert and had found no evidence
that his superiors knew about them or retaliated against him.

In February 1972, Army magazine said that Herbert's "eminence is undeserved" and
devoted six pages to the fact sheets.

Herbert retired from the Army, citing harassment and strain on his family.

In January 1973, his memoir, "Soldier," hit the bookstores, and the Army's
public information office scoured its pages for inconsistencies, records show.

Around the same time, the Army leaked internal reports on Herbert to CBS News,
according to an Army memorandum. The TV news magazine "60 Minutes" aired a
segment on Feb. 4, 1973, that attacked Herbert's claims of coverup and
retaliation.

Unknown to the public, Army investigators probing Herbert's charges had learned
that abuse of detainees by soldiers of the 173rd Airborne was much more
extensive than he had alleged.

When contacted recently at his home in Colorado, Herbert declined to be quoted
about the Army investigation, except to say: "If they'd really taken action
about the bad apples and been honest about it ... then they wouldn't be arguing
about Abu Ghraib and different places today."

EARLIER REPORTS

The problem centered on the brigade's 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment,
known as the 172nd MI.

Reports that interrogators in the unit were torturing prisoners had begun to
surface several years before Herbert first made his allegations.

Among the first to speak out was Peter N. Martinsen, an interrogator from
another unit who had worked with members of the 172nd MI. Testifying at the
International War Crimes Tribunal, an unofficial forum in Stockholm, in 1967,
Martinsen said he had taken part in beatings, and witnessed the use of field
telephones to shock prisoners.

Army investigators interviewed him in November 1968. He requested immunity, but
the Army's office of the judge advocate general rejected the request, citing
"the general nature of the allegation, Mr. Martinsen's attitude and his record,"
documents show.

Martinsen refused to give a statement. Efforts to reach him for comment for this
article were unsuccessful.

Investigators marked his allegations "unsubstantiated" and closed their inquiry.

At the time of Martinsen's interview, Robert Stemme Jr. was serving in the 172nd
MI's counterintelligence section. His job was to gather information about the
enemy from friendly local sources, such as hamlet officials.

He did not conduct interrogations, he said in a recent interview, but he heard
and saw them. Interrogations were conducted around the clock in a building about
10 yards from the tent where he slept, he said.

"My bed was maybe 30 feet from where all this stuff was going on. So I could
hear this ... all night long," Stemme told The Times. "It was pretty standard
practice that people got slapped around or hit with things, or guns pointed at
them, or whatever. Field telephones -- all those things -- were tools of the
trade."

The telephones had hand cranks that could be turned to generate electricity and
two wires that could be attached to sensitive parts of a prisoner's body. The
shock could be intensified by wetting detainees and placing them in contact with
metal objects.

In the spring of 1969, about a dozen members of the 172nd MI organized a letter-
writing campaign to complain to higher-ups about the abuse, Stemme said.

"Next thing we know, we have this major coming up from IG's office who is
Miranda-izing us and asks us if we're admitting to committing war crimes,"
Stemme said, referring to the inspector general. "It was all about us, when this
was de facto command policy. It was really scary."

They decided as a group not to give any statements, he said.

Stemme returned to the United States in June 1969, and left the service in 1970.
In April of that year, he spoke out about prisoner abuse at a news conference at
the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Martinsen and Frederick Brown, another
former interrogator with the 172nd MI, joined him.

Army investigators contacted Stemme and Brown that summer. Brown told them that
he and others "participated in water-rag and field telephone interrogations of
detainees," according to an investigator's summary. Brown, who lives in Orange
County, declined to be interviewed for this article.

Stemme met with Army agents in San Francisco. According to an agent's statement,
Stemme described abuse of detainees by 11 members of his unit over 12 months
beginning in June 1968.

Under oath, Stemme said he saw interrogators punch and kick prisoners, beat them
with sticks, administer electrical shocks and urinate on them.

Records show that Stemme detailed specific instances of maltreatment, offering
names and approximate dates. Yet a case summary produced by the Army chief of
staff's office reported that investigators closed the investigation because
Stemme "declined to provide any specific information concerning his
allegations."

"I spent hours with these guys," said Stemme, now 63 and retired from his job as
an investigator for the San Francisco public defender's office. "There was no
reason for me to be reticent."

INTERROGATION METHODS

Stemme identified former Staff Sgt. David Carmon as one of the interrogators who
had tortured detainees.

Herbert also accused Carmon of subjecting a detainee to water torture. Herbert
said he found Carmon involved in the torture of a Vietnamese man, pouring water
onto a rag placed over the captive's nose and mouth.

This technique, called the "water rag," causes a drowning sensation and is
banned under international law. Bush administration officials have come under
pressure in recent years to explicitly denounce a similar method known as
"water-boarding" as an interrogation technique. In May, a Pentagon official told
the United Nations Committee Against Torture that the revised Army Field Manual
now specifically prohibited water-boarding. On Friday, a spokesman said the U.S.
Army did not permit water-boarding -- in past wars or as part of today's
intelligence-gathering procedures.

When investigators questioned Carmon in December 1970, he admitted using the
water rag on a detainee, records show.

"I held the suspect down, placed a cloth over his face and then poured water
over the cloth, thus forcing water into his mouth. The suspect, after becoming
choked on the water, confessed that he was a VC and stated he was a propaganda
man," Carmon said, according to his sworn statement.

He admitted using electrical shock on detainees, the investigators' summary
states.

Carmon also told investigators that in the fall of 1968, he took part in
interrogating a captive who died soon afterward.

The man had been "beat and kicked," lost consciousness and suffered convulsions,
according to summaries of statements given by members of the 172nd MI. A doctor
was brought in to examine the detainee, identified as Nguyen Cong, and said
there was nothing wrong with him, the records say.

Carmon said he and another member of the military intelligence team "slapped the
Vietnamese and poured water on his face from a five-gallon can," according to
the investigators' summary

Nguyen passed out "and was carried to the confinement cage where he was later
found dead," according to a May 1971 Army report. The investigators' summary
said the cause of death was listed in a hospital log as a ruptured spleen,
probably due to malaria.

In a 1973 memo to Army Chief of Staff Abrams, Tufts said "maltreatment was not
established as the cause of death."

Reached by e-mail in Ohio, Carmon told The Times that abuse of prisoners was
widespread in Vietnam and was encouraged by officers.

"Nothing was sanctioned," he wrote, "but nothing was off-limits short of
seriously injuring a prisoner."

In another e-mail, he described the electric shock technique:

"What I saw were leads hooked to the legs of a metal folding chair. It was
primarily used with the mountain/country detainees that weren't familiar with
electricity. They would [tell] them it would make them sterile or something to
that nature. When you turned the phone crank, a light tickle of electricity
would generally scare them into talking."

He added: "I am not ashamed of anything I did, and I would most likely conduct
myself in the same manner if placed in a Vietnam-type situation again."

PART OF A PATTERN

Investigators contacted 31 members of the 172nd MI before submitting a report to
headquarters that detailed a pattern of "cruelty and maltreatment" from March
1968 to October 1969.

The report said the evidence warranted formal charges against 22 interrogators,
some on active duty at the time. It concluded not only that interrogators
repeatedly abused prisoners, but that the unit's executive officer, Capt. Norman
L. Bowers, had been present during some of the torture incidents.

Yet none of the interrogators nor Bowers was punished, records show. The three
soldiers who were disciplined for mistreating detainees served in other units of
the 173rd Airborne.

In an interview with The Times, Bowers said he had not witnessed or approved
abuse of prisoners, contrary to what his subordinates said.

"It could likely happen, and I wasn't told about it," he said. "Mistreatment of
prisoners is a very serious issue, and it's not something someone's going to
bring to my attention."

Bowers, now 67 and living in Missouri, said the men may have falsely accused him
in hopes of getting him removed because they were working long hours.

"There was a lot of stress on people," he said.

J. Ross Franklin, one of the two superiors whom Herbert accused of covering up
war crimes, was deputy commander of the 173rd Airborne from December 1968 to
June 1969.

In a recent interview, he said that he was not aware of the investigators'
findings, and that no one had ever reported prisoner abuse to him.

"I didn't even know what water-boarding was," said Franklin, now 78 and living
in Florida.

He said he did not recall the letter-writing campaign or the nighttime beatings
that Stemme described. He said he was housed in an officers' area, in a
structure with air-conditioning. "I really wouldn't hear much of anything, other
than friendly 'arty' shooting once in a while," he said, referring to artillery.

He added: "Interrogators obviously are under pressure and encouraged to get
information, and some of these guys are sadistic at heart. I wouldn't bet my
soul that it didn't happen in the 173rd.... If the Army found it, I'd say it
probably happened."

[ Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report. ]

[ About this report

Deborah Nelson, who wrote these articles, is a former staff writer and
Washington investigative editor for The Times. Nick Turse is a freelance
journalist living in New Jersey.

This report is based in part on records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group,
on file at the National Archives in College Park, Md. The collection includes
241 case summaries that chronicle more than 300 substantiated atrocities by U.S.
forces and 500 unconfirmed allegations.

Turse came across the collection in 2002 while researching his doctoral
dissertation for the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at
Columbia University.

Turse and Nelson also reviewed Army inspector general records in the National
Archives; FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division records; documents shared
by military veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts
Archive at the University of Michigan.

The reporters and Times photographer Damon Winter traveled to Vietnam in the
spring to visit the sites of incidents described in Army records and to
interview victims' relatives. Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to the
report.

A selection of documents used in preparing this report, and previous articles on
this topic, can be found at latimes.com/vietnam. Nelson's e-mail address is:
<dnelson@jmail.umd.edu> ]

*


Washington Post --

August 20, 2006

A COVERT CHAPTER OPENS FOR FORT HUNT VETERANS

As files on Nazi POWs are declassified,
their interrogators break their silence.

By Petula Dvorak

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/08/19/AR2006081900856.html

For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside and
lived quiet lives as account executives, college professors, business
consultants and the like.

The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no homecoming parades, no VFW reunions,
no embroidered ball caps and no regaling of wartime stories to grandchildren
sitting on their knees.

Almost no one, not even their wives, in many cases, knew the place in history
held by the men of Fort Hunt, alluded to during World War II only by a mailing
address that was its code name.

But the declassification of thousands of military documents and the dogged
persistence of Brandon Bies, a bookish park ranger determined to record this
furtive piece of history, is bringing the men of P.O. Box 1142 out of the
shadows.

One by one, some of the surviving 100 or so military intelligence interrogators
who questioned Third Reich scientists, submariners and soldiers at one of the
United States's most secretive prisoner camps are, in the twilight of their
lives, spilling tales they had dared not whisper before.

"It's good. Very good to talk about all this, at last," Fred Michel said last
week, steadying himself on his cane as he looked over the rolling, green land
along the Potomac River in Fairfax County that once was home to prison cells and
interrogation rooms embedded with hidden microphones.

Michel, 85, slowly lowered himself onto a picnic table bench next to his old
friend, H. George Mandel, 82. Although they have lived just a few miles apart
for most of six decades, they had not spoken since their discharge Dec. 13,
1945. So hush-hush was their work for P.O. Box 1142 that the men recruited for
it were ordered to never mention it. To this day, some have refused to speak to
the park ranger gathering their oral histories, believing that the oath they
took more than 60 years ago can never be broken.

For others, the taboo has eroded as documents have been declassified in waves,
starting in 1977 and continuing into the 1990s. Nevertheless, many of the
activities of P.O. Box 1142 remain shrouded in mystery.

According to a history cobbled together by the National Park Service, the unit
was conceived as an Army/Navy installation to gather information from prisoners
who had been captured or surrendered and were brought to the United States for
questioning. Germany had superior technology, particularly in rocketry and
submarines, and the information that was gleaned from interrogations gave the
United States an advantage going into the Cold War and the space age.

In the beginning, the prisoners were mostly U-boat crew members who had survived
the sinking of their submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. As the war progressed,
P.O. Box 1142 shifted its attention to some of the most prominent scientists in
Germany, many of whom surrendered and gave up information willingly, hoping to
be allowed to stay in the United States.

The prisoners stayed at Fort Hunt for as little as two or three weeks and as
long as nine months. They were held incommunicado; when they had told everything
they knew, they were transferred to regular POW camps elsewhere in the United
States, and the Red Cross was then notified of their capture. After the war,
some returned to Germany, and some stayed in the United States, slipping into
the fabric of American life.

Michel and Mandel were German Jews who had immigrated to the United States
before the war and were recruited to the unit. They and other interrogators said
they obtained information about discoveries in microwaves, atomic and molecular
studies, jets used in German planes and submarine technology, including a
snorkel that allowed U-boats to stay underwater for long stretches. All they
learned was put into top-secret reports that went straight to the Pentagon.

But at night, Michel and Mandel maintained an air of mystery with the dance-card
girls, snapping back the reply of "P.O. Box 1142, ma'am" when asked where they
were stationed, they recalled.

Further explanation was forbidden. The more than 3,400 prisoners who stayed
there were off the books, too, partly because operations at Fort Hunt were "not
exactly legal" according to the Geneva Conventions, the National Park Service
said.

When it all ended, Michel and Mandel went their separate ways, kept apart by the
code of silence. They raised families and had long careers, Mandel as a chemist
in Bethesda, Michel as a mechanical engineer in Alexandria.

They met again last week at a Fort Hunt they barely recognized. A family reunion
was underway nearby, and a moonbounce wiggled under the weight of children as
Beach Boy tunes wafted in the air. It was a far cry from their recollections of
roaring Jeeps, the German prisoners and high-ranking officers storming by.

They revisited the place of cloaked memories because Bies had found them.

Bies, 27, is a cultural resource specialist with the National Park Service,
schooled in archaeology and obsessed with military history. The wide-brimmed
Smokey Bear hat and crisp uniform of the park service suit him all right, but he
is more comfortable in piles of documents in a National Archives research room
than in the hills of Virginia.

He was working on a series of signs that the park service was planning to place
throughout Fort Hunt. They would detail the fort's transformation from a picnic
area in 1942 into a major military installation with more than 100 buildings,
guard towers and a tangle of electric fences.

Bies hopes to create a full archive of oral histories recorded from the
interrogators. He envisions a visitors center that would display the stories,
declassified reports and photos he has found. He even imagines installing World
War II-era speakers like the ones that were planted in prison cells, piping in
German conversations that intelligence officers translated and picked apart.

Then, early this year, a woman on a guided tour of Fort Hunt told a park ranger
she thought that her neighbor used to work at Fort Hunt, which today is a park
managed by the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The ranger passed Michel's
name on to Bies, jump-starting a race against time and old age to find the
veterans and record their histories.

"A lot them, unfortunately, have passed away," Bies said. "They're very frail,
and this is really the last chance that many of them get to tell their stories.
One of them even died since we interviewed him."

He and other Park Service rangers have sifted through reams of documents in the
National Archives and have come up with a few names. Almost all of the
interrogators were Jewish immigrants from Germany; some lost entire families in
the Holocaust. They were recruited to P.O. Box 1142 for their language skills
and, in the cases of Michel and Mandel, their scientific background. But the
full rosters were kept secret, and many of the declassified documents are
missing.

Bies tracked down Michel in Kentucky, where he had moved from Alexandria to be
near his family because of his failing health. The former interrogator, who had
immigrated from Landau, Germany, before the war, was overjoyed to talk about his
time at P.O. Box 1142.

They spent hours talking about Nazi scientists who told Michel about microwave
technology, U-boat engineering and other marvels that the young mechanical
engineer coaxed out of them.

Michel also told Bies about his bunkmate, Mandel. One quick Google search turned
up Mandel's smiling face. "He was right there, near us all along, teaching at
George Washington University," Bies said of Mandel, who had immigrated from
Berlin in 1937.

Mandel had kept his own family in the dark about his wartime exploits.

"I know my family wondered where the hell I was," he said. "I told them I was
speaking to scientists, or something like that. They didn't know I was
interrogating Nazis."

His past revisited him once, at a scientific conference in Paris. In passing, he
locked eyes with another scientist, a man he had interrogated in a cramped cell
years ago.

"He looked at me, and I heard him say to someone in German: 'That was my prison
warden,' " Mandel said. The two men shook hands. The exchange was respectful and
friendly, he said.

Not everyone at Fort Hunt was an interrogator. Some, such as Wayne Spivey, 86,
of Marietta, Ga., were brought in to manage the massive flow of information that
interrogators such as Michel and Mandel were getting.

"My mouth was always dropping open when we heard them talking and when we saw
the information they got and the sketches of atoms and molecules and whatnot,"
Spivey said. "I was just one of three Southern boys there, walking around
hearing German and Russian and Japanese."

So far, Bies has contacted about 15 veterans, and he tries to rush to their
sides to capture their fading memories.

Bies hopes to stage a large reunion next year, with all of the veterans he can
find. Then they can stand on the green fields of Fort Hunt, shake hands and
embrace, as Michel and Mandel did last week and, at long last, talk.

*

New York Times --

August 15, 2006
Freed From Guantanamo but Stranded Far From Home
By Neil A. Lewis

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/washington/15gitmo.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 -- Early on May 5, five Asian men who had been detained at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for years as dangerous terrorists boarded a military
transport plane at the United States naval base there.

The men had just exchanged their prison garb for jeans, T-shirts and slip-on
sneakers but were still in handcuffs as they boarded the plane, where they were
shackled to bolts in the floor and surrounded by more than 20 armed soldiers.
About 14 hours later, the plane landed in Albania, a poor Balkan nation eager to
please Washington.

Interviews with lawyers and several officials in the United States and abroad
showed that the flight, to a freedom of sorts for the five men, involved intense
behind-the-scenes diplomatic activity in Washington; Ottawa; Tirana, Albania;
Beijing; and elsewhere.

It also held implications for a United States Appeals Court, the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and the relations of several European countries with China.
And it underlined the Bush administration's difficulties in reducing the
population at the Guantanamo prison camp as international calls for it to be
closed increased.

The five men were Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) captured in Afghanistan after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. They had traveled there from their homeland
in the Xinjiang province of China, where the Uighur people, most of whom are
Muslims, have fought a low-level insurgency against Beijing's rule for years.

For the Uighurs, the transfer to Albania meant exchanging a military prison camp
on the southeastern tip of Cuba for a bleak and unpromising future in one of
Europe's poorest countries, where no one spoke their language. One of them, Abu
Bakker Qassim, said in an interview, "I would rather be in a society where I can
be with some of my countrymen, but where we are is better than Guantanamo."

For the Bush administration, one of the immediate results of the transfer was an
opportunity to sidestep yet another court challenge to its detention policies.

Shortly after the five men landed in Tirana, Albania's capital and largest city,
and only minutes before the close of business in Washington on a Friday, the
Justice Department filed a brief with a federal appeals court there. The brief
asked the court to cancel a hearing the next Monday on the Uighurs' challenge to
their continued detention at Guantanamo. They had been held there for more than
a year after the military's special tribunal system had determined they were not
"enemy combatants," the ostensible reason for their imprisonment.

A federal judge had ruled that the Uighurs' continued detention at Guantanamo
was illegal and disgraceful, but he said he could not order them admitted to the
United States, as their lawyers had requested. The appeals court was considering
that issue. The Bush administration has opposed allowing Guantanamo detainees
into the United States.

Upon learning the Uighurs were no longer at Guantanamo, the appeals court
canceled the hearing.

A senior State Department official said in an interview that more than 100
countries had been approached about accepting the Uighurs but that only Albania
had agreed to do so. Even though they were innocent, the official said, the five
Uighurs could not be repatriated to China because Beijing regarded them as
terrorists, and the law prohibited sending prisoners to places where they might
be persecuted.

The countries that declined, including Washington's best European allies, did
not want to antagonize China, officials and analysts said.

The State Department official said the timing of the Uighurs' departure and the
scheduled court argument was a coincidence. But a senior Justice Department
official said there had been an intense push to avoid a situation in which the
appeals court could order the Uighurs admitted into the United States. Both
officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of diplomatic
relations.

For Albania, the willingness to accept the Uighurs solidified that nation's
standing with the United States and brought it a confrontation with China, which
had been its patron during Albania's split from the Soviet Union in the Cold
War.

On the weekend of the Uighurs' arrival in Tirana, the Chinese ambassador there
protested to the Albanian prime minister, insisting they be returned to China.
The ambassador repeated the demand on Monday.

But the following day, May 7, Vice President Dick Cheney publicly endorsed
Albania's much-hoped-for bid to join NATO. Charles Gati, an authority on Eastern
Europe and a professor of European studies at the Nitze School of Advanced
International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, said that Albania had courted
Washington in recent years.

"They're very eager to get into NATO, and to do this they have offered their
services in a variety of ways," Professor Gati said. "This is clearly what
happened here."

Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who was at Mr. Cheney's side when he
announced the United States' support for Albania's NATO bid, along with the bids
of Croatia and Macedonia, said in a statement later that week that he trusted
Washington's assurances that the men were not terrorists and that he was proud
to provide a humanitarian favor to Washington.

China remained unappeased and seemingly went beyond diplomatic pronouncements.
In the first week of June, a Chinese delegation arrived unannounced at the
barbed-wire-enclosed refugee camp on the outskirts of Tirana and demanded access
to the Uighurs. The delegation's intentions were unclear, but Albanian officials
denied them entry.

Early this month, the Albanian government granted asylum to the Uighurs. The
Albanian ambassador to Washington, Aleksander Sallabanda, said in a statement,
"Our government is proud of its cooperation with the United States in the war on
terror."

For the five Uighurs, the consequences of the move were more prosaic and
dispiriting. At the time of their transfer, their lawyers had been making
progress in negotiating with the Canadian government for them to settle there.
Canada has a thriving Uighur community, largely in Toronto.

But that possibility stalled when they were sent to Albania, their lawyers said.

More than 100 prisoners at Guantanamo were initially found to be enemy
combatants and then ruled eligible to be freed but were not because it was
impracticable to return them to their home countries, and no other country would
accept them.

That group includes other Uighur prisoners who have not been transferred to
Albania because, their lawyers say, they have no scheduled court argument that
the administration hopes to avoid.

The freed Uighurs now spend most of their days in the refugee camp in a poor
slum of Tirana, according to Sabin Willett, a lawyer in Boston who represents
two of the men. Mr. Willett said he had learned of the transfer only after it
happened, and he went to Tirana that Monday.

Michael Sternhell, a New York lawyer who represents the other three Uighurs,
said the men "are still effectively behind bars." Mr. Sternhell says they have
difficulty even traveling to the center of Tirana, and they use most of their
monthly allowance of 40 euros to call their families in China. The Albanian
government provides room and meals at the center, for which it is reimbursed by
the United States.

Although the Uighurs feel marooned in Albania, they are grateful to the
government there. "Given that no other country is taking us, we're all right
with this," said Mr. Qassim, a 37-year-old father of four who acts as the
group's spokesman. Speaking by telephone from the refugee center through a
translator retained by The New York Times, Mr. Qassim said the problems had
begun when he and several other Uighurs had left their home to find a place to
study the Koran, a practice he said was forbidden in China.

They went to Pakistan and then to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, he said. After the
Sept. 11 attacks, a group of 17 Uighurs returned to Pakistan, where local
tribesmen welcomed them warmly. After a lamb feast, the villagers betrayed them.
They were taken to a mosque ostensibly to worship, but instead, Mr. Qassim and
his lawyers said, they were sold to United States forces.

According to the transcripts of tribunals held at Guantanamo, the Uighurs were
accused of engaging in guerrilla training, but officials would not tell them on
what basis they had made the accusations because the information was classified.
Mr. Qassim said they had indeed learned to use rifles while in Jalalabad, but he
said weapons training was common there, and he had never heard of Osama bin
Laden or Al Qaeda.

Mr. Qassim and the four other men who would wind up in Albania were deemed not
to have been enemy combatants. The 12 others in their group, however, were ruled
as such.

"It's a mystery as to why we were released and the others are still languishing
behind bars," he said. He said the United States had made a "mistake" in
believing the Uighurs were radical Islamists. Mr. Qassim said his people had
always admired the United States and had hoped that one day America would rally
to the Uighurs' cause for freedom.

"We still believe the U.S. is a good country with good people," he said. "But
the government has made a mistake and is still making it."

*


Rolling Stone --

August 10, 2006

THE UNENDING TORTURE OF OMAR KHADR

He was a child of jihad, a teenage soldier in bin Laden's army. Captured on the
battlefield when he was only fifteen, he has been held at Guantanamo Bay for the
past four years -- subjected to unspeakable abuse sanctioned by the president
himself

by Jeff Tietz

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11128331/
follow_omar_khadr_from_an_al_qaeda_childhood_to_a_gitmo_cell

In July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan received
intelligence that a group of Al Qaeda fighters was operating out of a mud-brick
compound in Ab Khail, a small hill town near the Pakistani border. The Taliban
regime had fallen seven months earlier, but the rough border regions had not yet
been secured. When the soldiers arrived at the compound, they looked through a
crack in the door and saw five men armed with assault rifles sitting inside. The
soldiers called for the men to surrender. The men refused. The soldiers sent
Pashto translators into the compound to negotiate. The men promptly slaughtered
the translators. The American soldiers called in air support and laid siege to
the compound, bombing and strafing it until it was flat and silent. They walked
into the ruins. They had not gotten far when a wounded fighter, concealed behind
a broken wall, threw a grenade, killing Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer.
The soldiers immediately shot the fighter three times in the chest, and he
collapsed.

When the soldiers got close, they saw that he was just a boy. Fifteen years old
and slightly built, he could have passed for thirteen. He was bleeding heavily
from his wounds, but he was -- unbelievably -- alive. The soldiers stood over
him.

"Kill me," he murmured, in fluent English. "Please, just kill me."

His name was Omar Khadr. Born into a fundamentalist Muslim family in Toronto, he
had been prepared for jihad since he was a small boy. His parents, who were
Egyptian and Palestinian, had raised him to believe that religious martyrdom was
the highest achievement he could aspire to. In the Khadr family, suicide bombers
were spoken of with great respect. According to U.S intelligence, Omar's father
used charities as front groups to raise and launder money for Al Qaeda. Omar's
formal military training -- bombmaking, assault-rifle marksmanship, combat
tactics -- before he turned twelve. For nearly a year before the Ab Khail siege,
according to the U.S. government, Omar and his father and brothers had fought
with the Taliban against American and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan.
Before that, they had been living in Jalalabad, with Osama bin Laden. Omar spent
much of his adolescence in Al Qaeda compounds.

At Ab Khail, a sergeant later said, every U.S. soldier who walked by Omar longed
to put a bullet in his head. But an American medic, working near the corpse of
Sgt. Speer, saved Omar's life, and he was taken to a hospital at Bagram Air Base
with a bullet-split chest and serious shrapnel wounds to the head and eye. U.S.
intelligence officers began interrogating him as soon as he regained
consciousness. At that moment, Omar entered the extralegal archipelago of
torture chambers and detention cells that the Bush administration has erected to
prosecute its War on Terror. He has remained there ever since.

At Bagram, he was repeatedly brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in
great pain. Pain medication was withheld, apparently to induce cooperation. He
was ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still
wet. When he could walk again, he was forced to stand for hours at a time with
his hands tied above a door frame. Interrogators put a bag over his head and
held him still while attack dogs leapt at his chest. Sometimes he was kept
chained in an interrogation room for so long he urinated on himself.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, President Bush decided, in violation of the
Geneva Convention, that any adolescent apprehended by U.S. forces could be
treated as an adult at age sixteen. The problem with treating teenage prisoners
as adults, whatever their crimes, is that teenagers are especially Before
boarding a C-130 transport to Guantanamo, Omar was dressed in an orange jumpsuit
and hog-chained: shackled hand and foot, a waist chain cinching his hands to his
stomach, another chain connecting the shackles on his hands to those on his
feet. At both wrist and ankle, the shackles bit. The cuffs permanently scarred
many prisoners on the flight, causing them to lose feeling in their limbs for
several days or weeks afterward. Hooded and kneeling on the tarmac with the
other prisoners, Omar waited for many hours. His knees sent intensifying pain up
into his body and then went numb.

Just before he got on the plane, Omar was forced into sensory-deprivation gear
that the military uses to disorient prisoners prior to interrogation. The guards
pulled black thermal mittens onto Omar's hands and taped them hard at the
wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones
over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted
him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn't already lost
sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the
flight, which took fifteen hours. "There was points I wished to God that one of
these MPs would go crazy and then shoot me," recalled one of the hundreds of
detainees who have made the trip. "It was the only time in my life that I really
wished for a bullet."

At Guantanamo, Omar was led, his senses still blocked, onto a bus that took the
prisoners to a ferry dock. Some of the buses didn't have seats, and the
prisoners usually sat cross-legged on the floor. Guards often lifted the
prisoners' earphones, told them not to move, and when they moved -- helplessly,
with the motion of the bus, like bowling pins -- started kicking them. The
repeated blows often left detainees unable to walk for weeks.

After the ferry ride, Omar was evaluated at a base hospital. "Welcome to
Israel," someone told him. Then he was locked in a steel cage eight feet long
and six feet wide. Because the cage had a sink and squat-toilet and the bed was
welded to the floor, the open floor space was comparable to that of a small
walk-in closet. The cages had been hurriedly constructed from steel mesh and
transoceanic shipping containers. Giant banana rats ran freely through the cells
and across the roofs and shit everywhere: on beds, on sinks, on Korans.
Prisoners were allowed only one five-minute shower each week; the cellblocks
stood in a perpetual stench.

Omar's arrival at Guantanamo in October 2002 coincided with a fundamental turn
in the administration's War on Terror. Within weeks of his arrival, at the
authorization of President Bush, interrogators at the detention facility began
using starkly inhumane techniques. Before Omar Khadr had even started to
assimilate the wondrous horrors of Guantanamo Bay, his captors began to torture
him.

Ahmed said Khadr, Omar's father, always said he did not want to die in bed. He
wanted to be killed. When his children were very young, he told them, "If you
love me, pray that I will get martyred." Three times he asked Omar's older
brother Abdurahman to become a suicide bomber. It would bring honor to the
family, he said. Abdurahman declined. Later, when Ahmed sensed that Abdurahman's
faith was weakening, he told him, "If you ever betray Islam, I will be the one
to kill you."

Omar and his brothers attended madrassahs and Islamic schools. His mother and
two older sisters covered their bodies and completely veiled their faces. At
home, the Khadr children were warned that the purity of Islam was being
compromised, from within and without. The quest to repurify it diminished to
insignificance everything else in life. Purity was the simple measure by which
good and evil were distinguished, and the means of destroying evil were equally
simple. The Khadr children were raised to serve a purpose. Their fealty was
sounded every day.

In 1988, when Omar was two, the Khadrs left Toronto for Peshawar, Pakistan, so
Ahmed could take a job with a charity called Human Concern International. In
those days, Peshawar was an operational base for Islamist insurgents fighting
the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden had gone there to recruit, fund and
train mujahedeen. Intelligence sources claim that many of the orphans and
refugees aided by Khadr later became fundamentalist guerrillas under the
guidance of bin Laden.

In 1992, not long after Omar had begun his studies at a madrassah in Peshawar,
Ahmed nearly died after stepping on a land mine in Logar Province, Afghanistan.
(Intelligence sources say he had gone there to fight with predecessors of the
Taliban in the Afghan civil war.) Ahmed was evacuated to a hospital in Toronto,
and the rest of the family returned to Canada with him. It would take him two
years to recover.

Of the Khadr children, Omar was the closest to his father. He was seven when
Ahmed got hurt. It was hard to keep him away from his father's bedside. In
Toronto, he proved to be one of those unusual children who take it upon
themselves to care for their families -- he seemed to want to hold his father's
place until Ahmed recovered. "He was always there for us," his sister Zaynab
recalled later. When someone wasn't feeling well, Omar would always bring them
the comfort food they liked best. He was hypersensitive to tension in the family
and instinctively dispelled it: He often did an impersonation of Captain
Haddock, the spluttering character from the Belgian comic-book series Tintin,
which Omar loved: "Buh-buh-billions of bl-bl-blistering bl-bl-blue barnacles!"
he would say, or "Ten thousand thuh-thuh-thundering typhoons!" It always broke
everybody up.

Donations collected at the Khadrs' mosque paid the rent while Ahmed was in the
hospital. The Isna Islamic School waived tuition for the Khadr children. At
school, Omar did well in everything. He began memorizing the Koran, in Arabic,
at age seven. He seemed to know that his successes could counterbalance the
underachievements of his brothers. On Abdurahman's report card, his Islamic-
studies teacher wrote, "May Allah help him." Omar's teachers made it clear that
they were grateful to have him in their classes. "He was very smart, very eager
and very polite," one recalled.

As soon as Ahmed was well enough to walk with a four-pointed cane, he moved the
family back to Peshawar and resumed working for Human Concern International. Not
long after they arrived, when Omar was nine, terrorists led by Ayman al-Zawahiri
suicide-bombed the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad. According to Pakistani
intelligence, much of al-Zawahiri's operational funding had passed through Human
Concern International. One of the vehicles used in the attack had been purchased
by a Sudanese man living with the Khadrs. The entire Khadr family was detained,
their compound was raided, and Ahmed was imprisoned and tortured.

When the family was finally allowed to visit Ahmed in prison, they found a
crippled old man primitively confined alongside murderers and armed robbers.
Omar seemed unable to recover from this sight. Ahmed, maintaining his innocence,
went on a hunger strike and was hospitalized. Omar spent every night at the
hospital, curled up on the concrete floor beneath his father's bed.

Omar had not reached the age of reason; his nine-year-old imagination could not
yet accommodate the world's layers. But he had been trained, with special care,
to divide the universe into the province of righteous work and the forces
arrayed against it. Twice now he had watched his father nearly die in the
service of righteousness. The forces Omar Khadr had been warned against must
have seemed, from beneath his father's second hospital bed, very real:
omnipresent and irrational, destroying the sacred for its very sanctity. If
Omar's kind disposition seemed to dissent from the hardness of his family's
beliefs, then witnessing his father's suffering ended it. Ahmed's identity
subsumed Omar's own; the son accepted the price and necessity of the father's
cause. Omar did not lose his uncommon altruistic compassion, but he acquired,
unavoidably, a fixed fervency he seemed ready to act on. The Toronto imam who
had known him when he was seven said Omar's experience in Pakistan left him
"radicalized."

After four months in prison, Ahmed Said Khadr was released at the request of the
Canadian government. He moved his family to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to live with
Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden and his many wives and children occupied a large
dirt-wattle compound surrounded by military training camps. The Khadr family
denies being part of Al Qaeda, but the U.S. government says that Omar was soon
sent to join his older brothers, Abdullah and Abdurahman, at a military camp
outside the town of Khalden. The camp provided instructional units on handguns,
sniper tactics and marksmanship, assault rifles, bombmaking and combat tactics.

Life in the Jalalabad compound was spare. Bin Laden forbade ice and electricity.
He wanted people to know how to live with nothing. Abdurahman later described
him as a regular guy who liked volleyball and horse racing. "He had financial
issues, issues with his kids," Abdurahman said. "'The kids aren't listening. The
kids aren't doing this and that.'" Bin Laden's children drank Coke whenever they
could, despite his ban on American products. To get them to memorize the Koran,
bin Laden promised to buy them horses.

In 1998, when Al Qaeda members suicide-bombed the American embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania, killing 220 people and wounding 4,000, everyone in the Jalalabad
compound celebrated. A lot of free juice was handed out. People joked that they
should carry out more operations -- they'd get free juice all the time. The
celebration ended when the Americans retaliated with cruise missiles, destroying
buildings and killing and wounding a dozen people. For Omar, the attack
reinforced, as nothing else had, his belief that the enemy was real. Omar was
fourteen on September 11th. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon created an uproar of rejoicing in the camps, but everyone knew that
serious American reprisals were imminent, and the compounds were abandoned.
Abdurahman, who had become deeply disillusioned with Al Qaeda's killing of
civilians, defected to Kabul, where he was taken prisoner by the Northern
Alliance and handed over to the CIA. According to the U.S. government, Omar
followed his father into the mountains, where they soon began fighting for Al
Qaeda.

Whatever his indoctrination at that moment, Omar would still have been
recognizable to the people who had known him as a boy in Toronto. "Omar is our
mother and our father, our sister and our brother," Ahmed wrote in a letter to
Zaynab. "He does everything for us. He cooks our meals and does our laundry.
Sometimes, I ask your mother: Are you sure he's ours? He's too good to be ours."

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo Bay, he was awakened by a
guard around midnight. "Get up," the guard said. "You have a reservation."
"Reservation" is the commonly used term at Gitmo for interrogation.

In the interrogation room, Omar's interviewer grew displeased with his level of
cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Omar tightly to an eye bolt in
the center of the floor. Omar's hands and feet were shackled together; the eye
bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he
was left alone for half an hour.

Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar's arms, pulled them behind his back and
recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the
junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone.
The degree of pain a human body experiences in this particular "stress position"
can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that
happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists
and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his
torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his
cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into
the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of his chains and
pushed him over on his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a
figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from
his cell. He urinated on himself and on the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him
for a while and then poured pine-oil solvent all over his body. Without altering
his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and
pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The
MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face.
The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they'd successfully
pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him
back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

The design of Omar Khadr's life at Guantanamo Bay apparently began as a theory
in the minds of Air Force researchers. After the Korean War, the Air Force
created a program called SERE -- Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape -- to
help captured pilots resist interrogation. SERE's founders wanted to know what
kind of torture was most destructive to the human psyche so that they could
train pilots to withstand it. In experiments, they held subjects in dummy POW
camps and had them starved, stripped naked and partially drowned. Administrators
carefully noted the subjects' reactions, often measuring the levels of stress
hormones in their blood.

The most effective form of torture turned out to have two components. The first
is pain and harm delivered in unpredictable, sometimes illusory environments --
an absolute denial of physical comfort and spatial-temporal orientation. The
second is a removal of the inner comfort of identity -- achieved by artfully
humiliating people and coercing them to commit offenses against their own
religion, dignity and morality, until they become unrecognizable to and ashamed
of themselves.

SERE scientists came up with a variety of stress-torture techniques: sleep
deprivation, sexual mortification, religious desecration, hooding,
waterboarding. In SERE theory, the techniques are be used in concert and
continuously -- coercive interrogation should become a life experience. This is
Guantanamo Bay: To be held there is, per se, to be tortured. Behavioral
scientists reportedly manage every aspect of detainees' lives. In one case, a
psychologist told guards to limit a detainee to seven squares of toilet paper a
day.

While he was at Guantanamo, Omar was beaten in the head, nearly suffocated,
threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely and, as at Bagram, lunged
at by attack dogs while wearing a bag over his head. "Your life is in my hands,"
an intelligence officer told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003.
During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. He
spat in Omar's face, tore out some of his hair and threatened to send him to
Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria -- places where they tortured people without
constraints: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the
interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa -- Soldier Number
Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who
specialized in raping prisoners.

Omar's chair was removed. Because his hands and ankles were shackled, he fell to
the floor. His interrogator told him to get up. Standing up was hard, because he
could not use his hands. When he did, his interrogator told him to sit down
again. When he sat, the interrogator told him to stand again. He refused. The
interrogator called two guards into the room, who grabbed Omar by the neck and
arms, lifted him into the air and dropped him onto the floor. The interrogator
told them to do it again -- and again and again and again. Then he said he was
locking Omar's case file in a safe: Omar would spend the rest of his life in a
cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Several weeks later, a man who claimed to be Afghan interrogated Omar. He wore
an American flag on his uniform pants. He said his name was Izmarai -- "lion" --
and he spoke in Farsi and occasionally in Pashto and English. Izmarai said a new
prison was under construction in Afghanistan for uncooperative Guantanamo
detainees. "In Afghanistan," Izmarai said, "they like small boys." He pulled out
a photograph of Omar and wrote on it, in Pashto, "This detainee must be
transferred to Bagram."

Omar was taken from his chair and short-shackled to an eye bolt in the floor,
his hands behind his knees. He was left that way for six hours. On March 31st,
2003, Omar's security level was downgraded to "Level Four, with isolation."
Everything in his cell was taken, and he spent a month without human contact in
a windowless box kept at the approximate temperature of a refrigerator.

When he was not being tortured or held in isolation, Omar spent virtually every
waking minute of his captivity at Guantanamo alone in his cell, first in a
facility called Camp Delta and then in one called Camp V. His left eye, the one
injured at Ab Khail, had gone blind and was immobile. Except for a Koran, there
was nothing in Omar's cells to occupy his mind. During his first year and a half
at Guantanamo, he was permitted to exercise only twice a week for fifteen
minutes, in a cage slightly larger than his own. Conversation between cells was
possible, but prisoners had become so unstable and fearful of one another that
they tended not to say much; there were no friendships. Omar tried to talk to
his guards, about anything, but they were unresponsive. They often covered their
nameplates with tape before entering detention facilities.

As Guantanamo was imposing heavy stagnation on Omar, it was also instilling in
him an abiding sense of vulnerability and disequilibrium. The call to prayer was
usually played five times a day, but sometimes it changed, or stopped. Exercise
could come at any time of the day or night. If the guards woke you at 3:30 a.m.
and you didn't present yourself quickly enough to please them, you didn't get to
exercise. The timing and character of interrogations followed no pattern.
Sometimes prisoners were woken up and moved from cell to cell for half the night
for no apparent reason. This tactic was so common it became known among guards
as "the frequent-flier program."

Meal portions were usually small enough to keep the prisoners in a state of low-
grade hunger. Several times Omar found powder or partially dissolved tablets in
the plastic glass he got with his food. The drugs produced dizziness, sleepiness
or hyperalertness. Tasteless and invisible, they were not detectable beforehand.
Omar was never told what they were or why he had been drugged. Once, when he was
being transferred, Omar learned that his brother Abdurahman was in an adjacent
prison yard. Abdurahman, forced by the CIA to choose between life imprisonment
and cooperation, had chosen the latter. Omar had no idea that his brother was in
Guantanamo to spy on detainees.

"How are you? How are you?" Abdurahman yelled in Arabic.

According to Abdurahman, Omar told him to stick to the story the family had
agreed upon -- the Khadrs did charity work and knew nothing of Al Qaeda.

"But how is your health?" Abdurahman yelled.

"It's OK," Omar yelled back. "I'm just losing my left eye and all. They don't
want to operate on it."

It was the only time they encountered one another. Guards and interrogators
continually reminded Omar that no one in the world knew where he was. No one
would know if they decided to kill him. He heard gunshots. He heard the sounds
other prisoners made when they were dragged back from interrogation rooms.
Around the time of Omar's arrival, detainees watched as guards rushed into the
cell of a prisoner named Jumah Al-Dousari and began kicking him in the stomach
and bashing his head against the floor. "When they took him out," one detainee
later reported, "they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood." It
was the kind of beating Omar witnessed repeatedly.

In July 2004, when Omar was seventeen, he was moved to Camp V. In his new cell
the fluorescent ceiling lights stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he
went for weeks without seeing daylight. His cell was kept cold; Omar spent a lot
of his time trying to stay warm: balling himself up, covering his extremities to
the extent it was possible, making the best use of his blanket and mattress pad
when they hadn't been confiscated. His metal cot was a problem: It briskly gave
away his body heat.

After a day in his Camp V cell, Omar had nothing more to see, touch, taste, hear
or smell. He was accompanied only by his own disordered thoughts. He tried to
sleep the time away, but the cold was inimical to sleep, and the incessant
lighting had divested him of his feel for night and day. Over the course of any
given month, Omar did not know whether he would get to see the sun, have a
conversation with another human being or be allowed to wear clothes. For the
past four years, Guantanamo has held him dead-still in the vacuum of his cell
without ever allowing him to come to rest. The institution has made it clear to
him that this will remain, for untold years, the form of his life.

One of the chief mental defenses against harsh imprisonment is durable
perspective; sanity requires a steady identity. But identity in adolescence is
precarious by nature: Teenagers change their identities and beliefs all the
time, and they cannot develop a secure perspective in the isolation of
captivity. To figure out the world, teenagers have to be in it. For adolescents
like Omar Khadr, who have already experienced radical trauma, the characteristic
symptoms of months or years of harsh imprisonment -- paranoid delusions,
suicidal tendencies, hallucinatory psychoses -- can become irreversible.

Soon after Omar arrived at Guantanamo, he began exhibiting the kinds of
disassociative symptoms most adolescent psychiatrists would have expected. He
was startled to the point of disorientation by small changes in his
surroundings. He had fainting spells. He cried frequently. When he heard
gunshots at Camp Delta, he had a vision of helicopter gunships descending on
him, and these kinds of enclosing flashbacks came repeatedly, as did nightmares
about the Ab Khail firefight, in which he felt, with phenomenal verisimilitude,
bullets piercing his chest. His appetite diminished; he took on the appearance
of the permanently malnourished. He entered what clinicians call a state of
hypervigilance: He started thinking he might be attacked at any time -- without
reason, his heart rate would jump, and he would sweat and hyperventilate. He
began hearing sounds -- screams, bombs, things he could not identify -- when the
cellblock was silent. Every week or so, a self-generated rage possessed him --
an experience wholly foreign to his character. For long periods he felt no
emotion at all. He started blaming himself for the things that had happened to
him; he became deeply ashamed of what he had suffered. He developed a pronounced
twitch on the left side of his face, of which he remained unaware.

As with every other detainee at Guantanamo, Omar's future became a vacancy upon
arrival, and his imagination quickly lost the ability to fill it. There were no
conditions for release: The Bush administration had suspended all rules of
judicial review and due process. The human mind has tools for dealing with
extreme physical and emotional stress, but it is not equipped to manage
purgatorial limbo. In every POW camp in history there has been an easily
imagined endpoint: the end of the war. In the Soviet gulag, there were charges
and trials and sentences, however fraudulent. The machinery was visible. If you
weren't worked to death, you got out. At Guantanamo, what detainee after
detainee has said -- what study after study has shown -- is that insanity and
suicidal impulses inevitably accompany the kind of futurelessness Gitmo imposes
on its inmates. In June, three detainees hung themselves in their cells, and
more than forty others have attempted suicide since 2003. The quantity of such
self-destruction, in circumstances so carefully designed to prevent it,
indicates a suffusing despair unimaginable outside the gates of the base. Even
if all the detainees were released today and received immediate psychological
treatment, a great majority would be psychologically impaired for the rest of
their lives.

Omar thought earnestly about killing himself. In January 2003, four months after
he arrived, his guards were sufficiently worried about his suicidal disposition
to confiscate his possessions. Psychosis was all around him. During the fall of
2004, Omar watched an Arab orthopedist named Ayman go insane. Over a period of
months, Dr. Ayman became entirely mute, except for an occasional scream and a
single question, asked of no one in particular: "Who is a woman here?"

Several medical experts have reviewed the results of two mental-status exams
administered to Omar. All concurred in their interpretations. Dr. Eric Trupin,
who has written extensively on the effects of incarceration on adolescents,
concluded that Omar has been traumatized and tortured to a degree that is, in
Trupin's considerable experience, remarkable.

"The impact of these harsh interrogation techniques on an adolescent such as
O.K., who also has been isolated for almost three years, is potentially
catastrophic to his future development," Trupin stated in his report. "Long-term
consequences of harsh interrogation techniques are both more pronounced for
adolescents and more difficult to remediate or treat even after such
interrogations are discontinued, particularly if the victim is uncertain as to
whether they will resume. It is my opinion, to a reasonable scientific
certainty, that O.K.'s continued subjection to the threat of physical and mental
abuse places him at significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration, which
may include irreversible psychiatric symptoms and disorders, such as a psychosis
with treatment-resistant hallucinations, paranoid delusions and persistent self-
harming attempts."

To see their client Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Muneer Ahmad and Rick Wilson
have to take a chartered single-prop plane from Miami to the base. It takes four
hours to circumnavigate Cuban airspace. The bay itself is uncommonly beautiful.
It is horseshoe-shaped, with the camps on one side and military and civilian
housing on the other. Nothing ever moves quickly; multiday waits, for
unexplained security reasons, are standard. Ahmad and Wilson sometimes have to
wait a week to see Omar for a few hours. To protect the Cuban iguana, in
accordance with the Endangered Species Act, the speed limit on the base is set
at twenty-five miles an hour -- a good metaphor, Ahmad says, for the studied
stalling techniques of the base's administrators. The camps are on a level piece
of ground close to the sea. They come into view when the visitors' bus rounds
the final curve. From that distance, in the beauty of the setting, the prison
complex appears to be a resort.

Ahmad and Wilson are professors of law at American University, where they run
the International Human Rights Law Clinic. Ahmad is slender and pensive; Wilson
is a sizable guy whose default attitude is geniality. They began representing
Omar Khadr after the U.S. Supreme Court granted due-process rights to Guantanamo
prisoners in 2004. They took the case on legal principle but also, as Ahmad
says, "to remind the world that this kid is there, that he is alive, that his
life has value and meaning and that he's been thrown in a hole. It's our
collective responsibility to treat him with the dignity that he deserves."

When Ahmad saw Omar for the first time, in October 2004 -- after the convoluted
flight and the numberless delays and checkpoints and searches and phalanxes of
armed soldiers, and after being told so many times how evil the detainees were
-- his first thought was "He's just a little kid." Omar was gaunt and pale, in a
state of everlasting exhaustion, his senses starved by solitude. He had large
gunshot-wound scars on his back and chest, and smaller scars over most of his
body, several parts of which still held shrapnel.

"You feel a general protectiveness toward these folks just because they're kept
without access to anyone," Ahmad says. "And because of Omar's age and lack of
world experience, you feel that much more protective. You're conscious of not
infantilizing him, but when someone is that young, you would be wrong not to
recognize this. Our contention is that children are deserving of special
protection -- that's been our legal approach, and it's also been our ethos in
our relationship with him."

It took Omar a while to accept that his lawyers were not part of the
interrogation system at Guantanamo. Their initial visits, Wilson says, were
spent trying to get him to believe in them -- legal strategy was secondary.
Gradually, Omar revealed himself to be very shy and curious and, in most ways,
still a child, with a child's sweetness and credulous charm. Despite the rate at
which his bones were lengthening, isolation and trauma seemed to have preserved
him in emotional time. When he learned a new word -- his experiences had left
odd gaps in his knowledge -- he tried to use it right away, and as often as
possible. When Wilson and Ahmad offered to get him something to read, he asked
for coloring books and car magazines and books with photographs of big animals.
When they asked him what kind of juice he wanted them to bring back after a
break during one meeting, he said, "Just something weird."

Whenever Wilson or Ahmad left a pen on the interview table, Omar would pick it
up and start taking it apart and putting it back together again. He always asked
to play with Ahmad's digital watch, which had a stopwatch function; he never
tired of using it to test his reflexes. He wanted to know all about his lawyers:
their ages, their hometowns, their family backgrounds, why they had chosen to
become lawyers. The few short letters he was able to write are the work of a
child:

To my dear family:- i miss you very much and i hope i can see you in the nearast
time . . . don't forgat me from you pray'urs and don't forget to writ me and if
ther any problem writ me. your [heart] son:- omar [heart] khadr

When he discussed the government's case against him, Omar did not mention
ideology or God. He was still devout, but he did not always manage to pray five
times a day. He seemed to have drifted from the absolutism of his family.

Omar grasped legal concepts surprisingly quick. When Wilson and Ahmad half-
seriously told him he should study law, he showed something close to delight.
Then he laughed darkly: He was unable to contemplate a future so far removed
from Guantanamo, a future in which an "enemy combatant" was acquitted and became
a lawyer. On the advice of Wilson and Ahmad, he wrote a note to the presiding
officer at his first military hearing in April, refusing to participate in the
proceedings until he was removed from solitary confinement: "With my respect to
you, i'm boycotting thes persedures untel i be treated humainly and fair." ,p>
Once Omar allowed himself to believe that he had acquired committed advocates,
his life bent itself around his meetings with them. They had brought him back
into the forward-moving world and reminded him who he was. His accounts of
mistreatment emerged slowly. At the end of his first meeting with his lawyers,
he mentioned, embarrassed, that he had been threatened with rape. He was
convinced that Ahmad and Wilson would never return, and it suddenly occurred to
him, during the interview's final moments, that this might be his last chance to
speak to the world. It was easier to reveal something shameful to confessors he
would never see again.

It took several more meetings for the facts to emerge. Although the U.S.
government denies mistreating Omar, neither Wilson nor Ahmad ever doubted the
truth of what he told them. They had read hundreds of pages of detainee accounts
of torture that independently corroborated one another. A Swedish detainee
described being held for a dozen hours at extremely cold temperatures and
senselessly moved from cell to cell throughout the night. An Australian detainee
described the use of frigid and stifling temperatures, short shackles and random
beatings. A Pentagon inquiry confirmed detainee accounts of torture by sexual
humiliation. A former Guantanamo interrogator described detainees being
"shackled for hours and left to soil themselves while exposed to blaring music
or the insistent meowing of a cat-food commercial." In an internal memo, an FBI
agent described finding a detainee unconscious on the floor of a room "well over
a hundred degrees . . . with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been
literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." The U.S. Army's own
interrogation logs documented the treatment of a Saudi detainee who was
interrogated in eighteen-hour sessions for forty-eight days, put on a leash and
forced to bark like a dog, given intravenous fluids and locked in a room with no
toilet, stripped and straddled and sexually derided by female guards, and
subjected to a staged kidnapping that involved being tranquilized, blindfolded
and flown to a fake destination.

There is no scientific evidence that such coercion is better than any other kind
of interrogation; it is probably worse. SERE techniques were not designed to be
used in the real world; they were designed to test the psychic endurance of Air
Force pilots. When the FBI sent some of its best counterterrorism agents to
Guantanamo soon after the camps opened, the agents chose to use what is known as
rapport-based interrogation, which apparently worked. The FBI agents found the
coercive tactics used by military intelligence both disgusting and stupid: The
abusive treatment instantly destabilized detainees, making the information they
provided unreliable as intelligence and useless in court.

By the time Omar's lawyers took his case, it was clear that the torture methods
used at Guantanamo had been directly authorized by President Bush. In January
2002, the president's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, working for the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel, advised the president that nearly all
forms of torture were legal. Physical abuse was not torture unless it generated
the intensity of pain associated with "organ failure, impairment of bodily
function or even death." Psychological methods were illegal only if they
inflicted harm that endured for "months, or even years." Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld approved a new interrogation paradigm, and Gen. Geoffrey Miller
instituted the same SERE techniques at Guantanamo that he would later bring to
Abu Ghraib.

Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad have a lot of experience representing prisoners,
mostly immigrant detainees and death-row inmates. "Nothing we've seen comes
close to the experience of Guantanamo," says Ahmad. "Not just the treatment of
detainees but the brute force of state power."

During the course of their research, the attorneys were struck by the
overwhelming evidence that most of the detainees at Guantanamo are innocent. The
CIA had pulled Abdurahman Khadr out of the camps not just because the detainees
around him had become mentally unstable and uncommunicative, but because so few
of them knew anything about Al Qaeda or the Taliban. During his debriefing, one
of the first things Abdurahman told his CIA handlers was how utterly the United
States had failed, in its military sweeps after the fall of the Taliban, to
distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. In Afghanistan, the U.S.
offered cash rewards for suspected Al Qaeda members that were sometimes
equivalent to several years of local wages. The American military thus made
every Arab-looking person in Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunists. Warlords
rounded up people and brought them en masse to American authorities. Others were
turned in to settle grudges, or because they had once associated with someone
from Al Qaeda. U.S. intelligence apparently took criminals and mercenaries and
underpaid soldiers at their word.

In his debriefing, Abdurahman Khadr told the CIA that only ten percent of the
detainees at Guantanamo "are really dangerous." The rest, he said, "are people
that don't have anything to do with it, don't even . . . understand what they're
doing here." One innocent man, Abdurahman said, was given up by his own son for
$5,000. Another detainee was nothing more than a drug user: Every time the MPs
came around, he begged them for hashish: "He doesn't even know what he's doing
here," Abdurahman said. "Truly a drug addict, not Al Qaeda at all."

One military-intelligence officer, speaking anonymously, told a reporter that
more than seventy-five percent of the detainees at Guantanamo are innocent. When
the government recently prepared Summaries of Evidence for its 517 detainees in
an attempt to justify its "enemy combatant" designation, only eight percent were
"definitively identified" as Al Qaeda fighters. Sixty-six percent have no
definitive connection to Al Qaeda at all. The detention camps of Guantanamo Bay
are filled with shepherds, taxi drivers, farmers, small businessmen, drug
addicts, homeless people and children.

For Rick Wilson and Muneer Ahmad, this nasty truth led to an unnerving
conclusion: After the invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration
effectively kidnapped hundreds of innocent people because they looked like Arabs
and shipped them to a detention facility designed to torture them nonstop and in
perpetuity. If the president were tried in the Hague, the prosecution would have
an easy case.

Before the Supreme Court extended the protection of the Geneva Convention to
Guantanamo detainees, the government charged Omar Khadr with murder, attempted
murder, conspiracy and aiding the enemy. The allegations were odd: Khadr was a
soldier fighting in support of a national army. The Geneva Convention sensibly
prohibits any government from charging enemy soldiers with murder for acting
like soldiers. It is hard to say how the government will now reformulate its
charges; it is hard to say how long Congress and the administration will spend
designing tribunals that satisfy the Supreme Court. For the moment, however,
Omar Khadr remains an enemy combatant and, therefore, subject to unlimited
solitary confinement.

Ahmad and Wilson have filed motions in federal court seeking to enjoin the
continuing torture and inhumane confinement of their client. Thus far, none has
been granted. Except for a brief hiatus, Omar Khadr has been alone in a cell at
Guantanamo Bay for close to four years. Four years is nearly a quarter of his
life. Since he was caught, he has grown eight inches. It is nearly impossible
for him to believe that he will ever be released, and his daily life remains
filled with menace: He is so conditioned to abuse in captivity that he is
incapable of believing he will ever be free of it.

A year and a half ago, Dr. Eric Trupin predicted that Omar Khadr would suffer
serious permanent damage unless he was immediately moved into a humane detention
facility, convinced that he was safe from all injury and provided with acute
psychological care. Such a course of treatment, if ever administered, will come
several years too late. It is possible that Omar's mental life will
progressively fracture into suicide attempts, hallucinations and paranoia.
Having lived out the final years of his adolescence in Guantanamo Bay, he has
learned nothing about the conventions of adult life, but he has as deep an
understanding of powerlessness as any person can.

In the summer of 2005, Omar joined 200 other detainees in a hunger strike. They
were protesting their unlimited detention without due process. Within a few
weeks, guards began to beat them and force-feed them through the nose with thick
tubes. From the diary of Omar Deghayes, a detainee who participated in the
strike: Omar Khadr is very sick in our block. He is throwing [up] blood. They
gave him cyrum [serum] when they found him on the floor in his cell. Omar was
carried to the hospital. As he was being moved back to his cell, he collapsed.
The guards beat him.

The resolve of the strikers deteriorated, and the strike ended. No concessions
were made.

[ Note: The author would like to express his gratitude to the following sources,
whose excellent reporting he drew on for this article: Canada's National Post,
for information on Omar Khadr's childhood; The New Yorker, for information on
the SERE program; and PBS's Frontline, for information on the Khadr family. ]

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