The scum who collected $1000 a day to design CIA waterboarding procedure

Waterboarding, Interrogations: The CIA’s $1,000 a Day Specialists

New Focus on Two Retired Military Psychologists Called the ‘Architects’ of the CIA’s Techniques

4.30.09 / Brian Ross, Matthew Cole, Joseph Rhee / ABC News

As the secrets about the CIA’s interrogation techniques continue to come out, there’s new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.

According to current and former government officials, the CIA’s secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.

Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA’s interrogation program.

Click here to see Jessen refusing to talk to ABC News.

“It’s clear that these psychologists had an important role in developing what became the CIA’s torture program,” said Jameel Jaffer, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Click here to see Mitchell refusing to talk to ABC News.

Former U.S. officials say the two men were essentially the architects of the CIA’s 10-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding.

Associates say the two made good money doing it, boasting of being paid a $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques on top al Qaeda suspects at CIA secret sites.

“The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts,” according to Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator.

Both Mitchell and Jessen were previously involved in the U.S. military program to train pilots how to survive behind enemy lines and resist brutal tactics if captured.

Mitchell and Jessen Lacked Experience in Actual Interrogations

But it turns out neither Mitchell nor Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them.

“They went to two individuals who had no interrogation experience,” said Col. Kleinman. “They are not interrogators.”

The new documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists’ waterboarding “expertise” was probably “misrepresented” and thus, there was no reason to believe it was “medically safe” or effective. The waterboarding used on al Qaeda detainees was far more intense than the brief sessions used on U.S. military personnel in the training classes.

“The use of these tactics tends to increase resistance on the part of the detainee to cooperating with us. So they have the exact opposite effect of what you want,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich).

The new memos also show waterboarding was used “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” to even those in the CIA.

Abu Zubaydah was water boarded at least 83 times and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed at least 183 times.

Former CIA Officer John Kiriakou Says Waterboarding is Torture

That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.

He said then, based on top secret reports he had access to, that Zubaydah had only been water boarded once and then freely talked.

Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often Zubaydah was waterboarded, in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture.

“When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being waterboarded on one occasion,” said Kiriakou. “It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques.”

A federal judge in New York is currently considering whether or not to make public the written logs of the interrogation sessions.

The tapes were destroyed by the CIA, but the written logs still exist, although the CIA is fighting their release.

A CIA spokesperson declined to comment for this report, except to note that the agency’s terrorist interrogation program was guided by legal opinions from the Department of Justice.

A view of hen hell | The truly gruesome conditions inside one factory farm

The truth is, this is very close to what is planned for humans in the planned global dictatorship. This is what gives the encouragement for the Illuminati/New World Order to operate. If people will treat defenseless beings so coldly and cruelly as a matter of course, then it is seen as a sign of zero self respect on humanity’s part.

England’s largest egg farm raided; customers and distributors appalled

4.9.09 / Martha Rosenberg / Online Journal

It takes a lot to get state agriculture officials to raid an established farm in the company of state police. But that’s what the Maine Department of Agriculture did to Quality Egg of New England and Maine Contract Farming in Turner, Maine, on April 1 with a search warrant and in consultation with Androscoggin County prosecutors.

For eight hours law enforcement and agriculture officials entered the ammonia reeking barns on Plains Road where 3 million laying hens are stacked on top of each other over manure pits, gathering photos, shooting video and removing dead and living hens for evidence. The live hens had to be euthanized said state veterinarian, Don Hoenig.

Quality Egg of New England, registered to Mountain Hollow Farms, a division of Radlo Foods and the former infamous DeCoster Egg Farm, produces 21 million eggs a week. Yet to hear their customers tell it, not one of the eggs from the facility where live hens were kicked into manure pits and left to hang by their feet or suffocate in garbage cans went to their stores.

Eggs from the raided farm, stamped 1183 or 1203, were found at Shaw’s, Hannaford and Wal-Mart by the Sun Journal, yet Shaw’s, Hannaford’s and customer Stop & Shop denied doing business with Quality Eggs. Hello?

Even Eggland’s Best — which has three dedicated barns at one Turner facility site where it feeds hens vegetarian food, but the birds look no better than the others — whose truck can be seen during the raid, initially denied doing business with Quality Eggs. Later, it announced it was breaking its contract with Radlo Foods that, in turn, vowed to go cage free on the basis of the expose.

Take one look at the video and photos captured by Mercy For Animals (MFA), a national animal protection group, from December 2008 through February 2009, and you’ll see why the grocery stores want to disassociate themselves from the raided egg farm.

Barely live birds, their beaks oozing, limbs useless and unable to hold their heads up are kept alive to lay one more “incredible, edible” egg for Quality Egg factory farmers. Oblivious, $7.25-an-hour workers twist hens’ necks in incomplete “euthanasia,” casting them aside to flap on the floor in the death sequelae which is painful to watch.

Nor is the diary of the MFA investigator, upon whose evidence the Department of Agriculture’s raid was based, pretty.

“A hen’s head and wing were trapped under the cage’s front wall. One of her legs was stretched out and would not move or bend. She had a gash on her right side, leaving the skin split open and mostly yellow inside. A gash on her left side was red from fresh blood with a layer of dust partially covering the wound,” writes the investigator. “Another live hen, also trapped under her cage’s front wall, had the side of her face on a moving egg belt. I saw that the side of her face, including her eye, was encrusted in what appeared to be egg yolk and dust.”

Even point and click bloggers were turned off. “Seeing how awful these hens look. there hair [sic] falling out, and green stuff coming out of there eyes and nose. Are the eggs safe even to eat?” wrote Bob on the Sun Journal site. “I wouldnt think so.”

But even as state veterinarian Don Hoenig told a state agricultural committee workshop in Augusta that conditions were “deplorable, horrifying and upsetting,” — the search warrant has been turned over to Franklin County Assistant District Attorney Andrew Robinson as egg-laying hens are protected by Maine’s animal cruelty laws — Quality Eggs Compliance Manager Bob Leclerc said shucks it wasn’t that bad.

Not only was the situation “isolated incidents committed by a couple of employees,” said Leclerc, “none of these incidents were ever brought to the attention of management before.”

Au contraire. MFA video shows management briefed, repeatedly, about the ongoing animal mistreatmentv– they said to ignore it — including Jay DeCoster, the owner’s son. Oops.

Leclerc also noted that Quality Eggs adheres to United Egg Producer guidelines — which permit battery cages and other cruelty and are largely the reason California’s Proposition 2 passed by such a large margin — and promised the egg farm will conduct is own investigation.

Maybe they’ll discover they have 3 million hens packed together so tightly they can’t move and they have no veterinarian or humane care.

International Red Cross says doctors assisted CIA in tortures

Red Cross says doctors helped CIA “torture”

4.7.09 / Jane Sutton / Reuters

MIAMI (Reuters) – Health workers violated medical ethics when they helped interrogate terrorism suspects who were tortured at secret CIA prisons overseas, the International Committee of the Red Cross said.

The medical workers, thought to be doctors and psychologists, monitored prisoners while they were mistreated at CIA prisons and advised interrogators whether to continue, adjust or halt the abuse, the ICRC said in a report based on interviews with 14 prisoners in 2007.

One prisoner alleged that medical personnel monitored his blood oxygen levels while he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning designed to induce panic and widely considered to be torture, the ICRC said.

Other prisoners said that as they stood shackled with their arms chained above their heads, a doctor regularly measured the swelling in their legs and signaled when they should be allowed to sit down.

The ICRC interviewed 14 men who had been held in secret CIA prisons overseas before being sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006.

The 14 are considered by the United States to be “high-value” al Qaeda suspects who plotted or carried out mass murders, including the September 11 attacks and the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings. They had been held by the CIA, most for more than three years, in extreme isolation and had not been allowed contact with each other when the ICRC interviewed them at Guantanamo in November 2007.

The ICRC said their claims had credence because they gave similar accounts of their treatment, including the actions of medical monitors whose names they never learned.

The ICRC monitors compliance with the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war captives and keeps its reports secret, sharing them only with the detaining government.

The report, written in 2007, was posted on the New York Review of Books website on Monday night by journalist Mark Danner, who has not said publicly how he obtained it.

“VIOLATED ETHICAL DUTY”

He first published excerpts last month, including a portion in which the ICRC concluded the al Qaeda captives’ treatment in the CIA prisons “constituted torture” and violated international law.

The report alleges collars were placed around some prisoners’ necks and used to slam their heads against the walls, and that they were forced to stand with their arms shackled above them for two or three days and left to urinate or defecate on themselves.

The prisoners told the ICRC they were beaten and kicked, left naked for long periods, subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, cold temperatures, rape threats and forced shaving. Some said they were denied solid food unless they cooperated with interrogators and one said he was confined in a crouching position in a box too short to stand in.

A previously undisclosed portion of the report concluded that medical workers who monitored or took part in the interrogations had violated their ethical duty to do no harm, preserve dignity and act in patients’ best interest.

The ICRC said “any interrogation process that requires a health professional to either pronounce on the subject’s fitness to withstand such a procedure, or which requires a health professional to monitor the actual procedure, must have inherent health risks.”

“As such, the interrogation process is contrary to international law and the participation of health personnel in such a process is contrary to international standards of medical ethics,” the ICRC concluded.

The “high-value” captives quoted in the report are still at the Guantanamo prison, which President Barack Obama has ordered shut down by January 2010, and debate continues over what should be done with them.

A military judge released a statement last month in which some of them bragged that they were “terrorists to the bone”.

Bush administration officials have said the “enhanced interrogation” of those prisoners produced information that helped thwart attacks but have never provided specifics.

(Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Jackie Frank)

US abandons usage of enemy combatant term

US drops ‘enemy combatant’ term

3.13.09 / BBC

The US is abandoning its use of the term “enemy combatants” to describe terror suspects – ending a key policy of the Bush administration.

It is the latest shift on Guantanamo Bay by President Barack Obama, who has announced the camp is to be closed.

The decision to drop the term is deeply symbolic, correspondents say.

President George W Bush argued that his status as commander-in-chief allowed him to hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely and without trial.

Announcing the end of the term’s use, the Justice Department said suspects would in future be held according to legal standards set by the international laws of war.

Under the new definition, only those who provided “substantial” support to al-Qaeda or the Taleban will be considered detainable, officials said.

‘Values’

By using the term “enemy combatants”, the Bush administration argued that they were not prisoners of war, the BBC’s Jonathan Beale in Washington says. International laws – like the Geneva Conventions – therefore did not automatically apply.

The Obama administration will, by contrast, hold prisoners under the authority granted by Congress, when it approved the Authorisation for the Use of Military Force “against nations, organizations, or persons the president determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the September 11 attacks, or harboured such organizations or persons” in September 2001.

“The government’s new standard relies on the international laws of war to inform the scope of the president’s authority under this statute,” according to the Justice Department.

“As we work towards developing a new policy to govern detainees, it is essential that we operate in a manner that strengthens our national security, is consistent with our values, and is governed by law,” said US Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement.

Around 250 detainees are still being held in Guantanamo, our correspondent says.

The Obama administration is currently reviewing each case before making a decision as to who should stand trial, he adds.

Harsh techniques

The detention centre was set up in January 2002 by the Bush administration to hold men captured in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taleban after the 2001 attacks on the US.

It later became notorious because of the harsh interrogation techniques used there, which many said amounted to torture, and because the detainees there were being held without trial and without many of the protections of international law.

During the presidential election, Mr Obama pledged to close the camp if elected, and in his first week in the White House, he issued the order to do so.

Some of the detainees are expected to stand trial in US courts, while others will be returned to their home countries.

But the Obama administration is likely to face difficulties prosecuting some inmates, because evidence against them may have been obtained using inadmissible techniques.

Other prisoners cannot be sent back to their home countries because they may face torture or execution if they return.

Mr Obama this week appointed diplomat Dan Fried to serve as a special envoy to persuade third countries to accept detainees who cannot be extradited to their home countries.

Obama Justice Department in solidarity with torture memo architect John Yoo

Obama lawyers argue to drop Yoo torture suit

3.7.09 / Bob Egelko / San Francisco Chronicle

(03-06) 18:08 PST SAN FRANCISCO — President Obama’s Justice Department defended former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo in a San Francisco federal court Friday, arguing that a prisoner formerly held as an enemy combatant had no right to sue Yoo for writing legal memos that allegedly led to his detention and torture.

“We’re not saying we condone torture,” department attorney Mary Mason said at a hearing on the government’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by Jose Padilla. But any recourse against a government lawyer “is for the executive to decide, in the first instance, and for Congress to decide,” not the courts, she said.

“You’re not saying that if high public officials commit clearly illegal acts, a citizen subject to those acts has no remedy in this court?” asked U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White.

Not unless Congress has expressly authorized a lawsuit, Mason replied. She cited the argument the Justice Department made in Yoo’s case last year, with President George W. Bush still in office, that courts should not interfere in executive decision-making, especially in wartime.

White did not indicate how or when he would rule.

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor now on leave to teach at Chapman University in Orange County, wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers as an attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003.

The best-known memo, written to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2002, said rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” It also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

Yoo also advised the Bush administration that the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of captives did not apply to terrorist suspects classified as enemy combatants.

A 2001 Yoo memo, made public recently by the Obama administration, said U.S. military forces could use “any means necessary” to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States, without constitutional restrictions.

Yoo’s memos “left our client in a legal no-man’s land,” said Hope Metcalfe, a Yale Law School teacher who represents Padilla. His suit alleges that Yoo, as a member of Bush’s War Council, helped to devise detention and interrogation policies and knowingly breached constitutional standards in his memos to provide legal cover for those policies.

Padilla, a U.S. citizen and Muslim convert, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused by the Bush administration of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb.”

Declared an enemy combatant, Padilla was held in a brig for 3 1/2 years before being charged with taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups. He was convicted and sentenced to 17 years in federal prison. He has appealed.

Padilla’s lawsuit covers his time in the brig. His lawyers say he was illegally held as an enemy combatant, kept in isolation, confined in painful stress positions for prolonged periods, subjected to sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation, and threatened with harm to his family and with transfer to a nation where he would be tortured.

Obama prohibited most of those methods shortly after taking office.

Padilla claims Yoo was partly responsible for his treatment. Although government lawyers normally cannot be sued for legal advice, his suit accuses Yoo of stepping outside a lawyer’s proper role and giving advice he knew was unconstitutional.

Mason, the Justice Department lawyer, said Yoo had no authority over Padilla and merely “gave very general advice about very general problems” for Bush to decide. Any court scrutiny of Yoo’s actions “requires inquiry into the highest levels of the United States government,” she said.

Padilla has a similar suit pending in South Carolina, where he was held, against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former Attorney General John Ashcroft and other administration officials.