This is Torture, This Cannot be Tolerated

by

This is why there shouldn’t be ghost prisoners that interrogators think they can do anything they want with. 

SAN DIEGO – An Iraqi whose corpse was photographed with grinning U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib died under CIA (news – web sites) interrogation while in a position condemned by human rights groups as torture — suspended by his wrists, with his hands cuffed behind his back, according to reports reviewed by The Associated Press

The death of the prisoner, Manadel al-Jamadi, became known last year when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke. The U.S. military said back then that the death had been ruled a homicide. But the exact circumstances under which the man died were not disclosed at the time.

The prisoner died in a position known as "Palestinian hanging," the documents reviewed by The AP show. It is unclear whether that position was approved by the Bush administration for use in CIA interrogations.

The spy agency, which faces congressional scrutiny over its detention and interrogation of terror suspects at the Baghdad prison and elsewhere, declined to comment for this story, as did the Justice Department (news – web sites).

Al-Jamadi was one of the CIA’s "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib — prisoners being held secretly by the agency.

His death in November 2003 became public with the release of photos of Abu Ghraib guards giving a thumbs-up over his bruised and puffy-faced corpse, which had been packed in ice. One of those guards was Pvt. Charles Graner, who last month received 10 years in a military prison for abusing detainees.

Al-Jamadi died in a prison shower room during about a half-hour of questioning, before interrogators could extract any information, according to the documents, which consist of statements from Army prison guards to investigators with the military and the CIA’s Inspector General’s office.

One Army guard, Sgt. Jeffery Frost, said the prisoner’s arms were stretched behind him in a way he had never before seen. Frost told investigators he was surprised al-Jamadi’s arms "didn’t pop out of their sockets," according to a summary of his interview.

Frost and other guards had been summoned to reposition al-Jamadi, who an interrogator said was not cooperating. As the guards released the shackles and lowered al-Jamadi, blood gushed from his mouth "as if a faucet had been turned on," according to the interview summary.

The military pathologist who ruled the case a homicide found several broken ribs and concluded al-Jamadi died from pressure to the chest and difficulty breathing.

Dr. Michael Baden, a distinguished civilian pathologist who reviewed the autopsy for a defense attorney in the case, agreed in an interview that the position in which al-Jamadi was suspended could have contributed to his death.

Dr. Vincent Iacopino, director of research for Physicians for Human Rights, called the hyper-extension of the arms behind the back "clear and simple torture." The European Court of Human Rights found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in a case of Palestinian hanging — a technique Iacopino said is used worldwide but named for its alleged use by Israel in the Palestinian territories.

The Washington Post reported last year that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the CIA suspended the use of its "enhanced interrogation techniques," including stress positions, because of fears that the agency could be accused of unsanctioned and illegal activity. The newspaper said the White House had approved the tactics.

Navy SEALs apprehended al-Jamadi as a suspect in the Oct. 27, 2003, bombing of Red Cross offices in Baghdad that killed 12 people. His alleged role in the bombing is unclear. According to court documents and testimony, the SEALs punched, kicked and struck al-Jamadi with their rifles before handing him over to the CIA early on Nov. 4. By 7 a.m., al-Jamadi was dead.

Navy prosecutors in San Diego have charged nine SEALs and one sailor with abusing al-Jamadi and others. All but two lieutenants have received nonjudicial punishment; one lieutenant is scheduled for court-martial in March, the other is awaiting a hearing before the Navy’s top SEAL.

The statements from five of Abu Ghraib’s Army guards were shown to The AP by an attorney for one of the SEALs, who said they offered a more balanced picture of what happened. The lawyer asked not to be identified, saying he feared repercussions for his client.

According to the statements:

Al-Jamadi was brought naked below the waist to the prison with a CIA interrogator and translator. A green plastic bag covered his head, and plastic cuffs tightly bound his wrists. Guards dressed al-Jamadi in an orange jumpsuit, slapped on metal handcuffs and escorted him to the shower room, a common CIA interrogation spot.

There, the interrogator instructed guards to attach shackles from the prisoner’s handcuffs to a barred window. That would let al-Jamadi stand without pain, but if he tried to lower himself, his arms would be stretched above and behind him.

The documents do not make clear what happened after guards left. After about a half-hour, the interrogator called for the guards to reposition the prisoner, who was slouching with his arms stretched behind him.

The interrogator told guards that al-Jamadi was "playing possum" — faking it — and then watched as guards struggled to get him on his feet. But the guards realized it was useless.

"After we found out he was dead, they were nervous," Spc. Dennis E. Stevanus said of the CIA interrogator and translator. "They didn’t know what the hell to do."

I have question.  If he was prisoner he was under the control of some specific person.  If ruled a homicide, who is being charged? 

39 thoughts on “This is Torture, This Cannot be Tolerated”

  1. Isn’t that the scary thing about ghost prisoners — the normal records establishing whose responsibility he was may not have been kept.

  2. SH: if Prof. Yoo is correct, no one will be charged.
    It’ll be interesting to see if the DOJ tries to prosecute the CIA agents. I imagine that the defense would raise a series of immunity and jurisdictional arguments.
    francis

  3. So should we look for this at RedState as well? Or this view unwelcome at a venue where contributors get all goosefleshy about the idea that John “What Death Squads?” Negroponte might get to “clarify the boundaries” of the CinC’s newly discovered constitutional right to set aside rule of law when national security demands it?
    Sigh… Sorry. And a belated Bravo both for this post and the other. Also my sincere thanks for turning me on to that C.S. Lewis speech.

  6. I agree that it ought not be tolerated…but it will, because those responsible feel vindicated by the election, and that’s the end of the questioning. I’m disgusted and saddened and terrified, but I have trouble being outraged, because there’s no surprise in this at all, and no prospect I can see for changing it.

  8. If ruled a homicide, who is being charged? 
    At most, some low-level SEAL’s or soldiers or CIA personnel. The higher-ups responsible are in no danger of prosecution.

  9. Weeell — this one has a little more potential than the earlier prosecutions, because it appears to have been in the context of a genuine interrogation. If they prosecute the CIA interrogator, he may be able to finger superiors as having provided him with training or authorization to use ghastly techniques like this.
    (And thanks for posting this.)

  10. LizardBreath,
    I hope you’re right.
    Really the only way to stop this is to see that all the guilty are suitably punished.
    So far, we’re not close.

  13. In addition to a homicide charge, who is going to pay for the policy of ghost prisoners? Can’t blame that on a few bad apples.

  14. The lawyer-y types here might be able to clue me in on what the defense strategy in leaking these statements was.
    The defendant, one of the SEALS, is not going to be tried by a jury, so there’s no real possibility of influencing public opinion.
    The lawyer is claiming to fear repercussions to his client for the leak. Leaking military documents would probably redound on the lawyer’s head personally, or do I have the implications of the Stewart case wrong?
    We already knew about the death; we didn’t know how the man died. Is the lawyer hoping that the leak will kick-start a public inquiry into torture practices that will provide a “following-orders” defense? Trying to shake loose information from the CIA (agents of which these statements implicate for the worst acts)?
    Unless we assume that the lawyer was acting out of civic-mindedness–always possible and of course commendable–this leak was aimed at achieving some goal. What?

  17. “if he was prisoner, he was under control of some specific person.”
    Well, let us think. Let’s gather everyone, including the butler and the maids, into the drawing room and begin the enumeration of the evidence and commence the interrrogation.
    It wasn’t Sebastian. Not me, way too obvious. Hilzoy? Ummm … no. Katherine? Counterintuitive .. but what a twist that would be. Donald Rumsfeld .. nope, rehired. Condeleeza … no … rehired, too. Porter Goss .. could be? Let us think… who could it be? Surely not the estimable Rilkefan or the earnest Timmy the Wonderous.
    My mom? No, she’s too busy performing dialysis four times a day on my sister on a Medicare budget which comes up next for murderous budget cuts.
    Could it be the smirking filth in the White House? Where the buck stops? No, there is no responsibilty.
    Except with some low-level individual in uniform who though it would be funny to carry out whatever he or she thought were the orders.

  18. Hilzoy: No, but worth repeating every now and again.
    True: even if Sebastian supports the principle that people can be presumed guilty before their trial if the acts of which they are accused are sufficiently heinous (see this thread) I respect the fact that he doesn’t support torturing those people to death.
    And I live in hope that he’ll realise that the principle that some people can be assumed to be guilty without going through all that messy due process is the very road that leads to the presumption that it’s okay to torture some people to death.

  19. Jes
    I don’t know if it is fair to hit Sebastian with that. The George Soros thread rests on the presumption that no one can believe that Stewart is innocent and therefore any support of her is treasonous, and that Sebastian has acknowledged (albeit weakly) that the questions involved are still open. If the hivemind feels that a post about the Stewart case is advised, we can hash out what principles all of us are willing to hold, but the linking of Soros to the Stewart case shouldn’t be connected with Sebastian, IMO.

  20. Reading about the cause of the death gave me some weird deja-vue. A picture from a history book came to my mind which was used to teach the new generation on what happened in this country mere 40 years ago (meanwhile it’s 60).
    Thanks to Google, I found it. Have look at this if you think you can handle it.

  21. Sebastian also stated that he didn’t think the Soros contribution was wrong at the time.
    Personally I feel that it is very very sad that we compliment Katherine on her hard work (not her attitude) and Sebastian on the fact that he openly states how against torture he is. Just as I think it is sad that Sebastian feels “emotionally drained” (my interpretation of his comments) by defending his posts on this and his position on this in conservative circles.
    It seems torture is becoming a partisan issue and that is a sad thing for the United States of America IMHO.

  22. LJ: I don’t know if it is fair to hit Sebastian with that.
    Um. I don’t know. The impression I got from the Soros thread was that Sebastian was saying that some people didn’t have the right to be presumed innocent – that was certainly his assertion at the beginning of the thread. (I apologize if he changed his mind by the end of it: I saw no point in arguing with Bird Dog, but I did want to correct Paul Cella’s distortion of Socrates.)
    And I do think that the road to torture begins with the denial of due process. This doesn’t mean that denial of due process is morally equivalent to torture: what I am saying is that it’s not enough to be opposed to torture on moral grounds. It is necessary to act to prevent torture, and one of the safeguards against torturing prisoners*, is to ensure that all prisoners receive the legal safeguards they are entitled to, regardless of what crime they have been accused of.
    *Providing torture is not straightforwardly legalized and made an official penalty for some crimes. This may yet happen, under Gonzales and Bush, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  25. Mad props and all mod cons to Sebastian for this. It’s to his credit that he’s willing to write on this subject at all. But this is what happens. When you put a class of people beyond the law, this is what follows, sooner or later, inevitably.
    The ghastly game that all this is to the Redstaters is what disgusts and angers me. They’re ordinary people. Probably most of them wouldn’t support torture if it smacked them in the face, but they’re happy to titter over it in front of a computer screen. That depresses me more than I can say.
    If ruled a homicide, who is being charged?
    I don’t have any confidence that anyone will be charged. As Jane Mayer points out, many of the rendition cases can’t be tried because evidence or witness testimony has been classified. If this was a CIA job, I doubt it will ever come to trial. If it was military, a “bad apple” may be punished. Either way, I doubt that will slow things down.

  26. LJ: I don’t know if it is fair to hit Sebastian with that.
    Um. I don’t know. The impression I got from the Soros thread was that Sebastian was saying that some people didn’t have the right to be presumed innocent
    Maybe Seb can correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t think he did that. His first post at 11:57 suggests that there is a difference between supporting Stewart if one thinks she was guilty or whether she was not, which is basically phatic, in that one generally doesn’t donate to a defense fund if they think the person is guilty. At 12:17, he wrote that Soros contribution dated 2002 was ‘not an awful thing to do’ and his point that attorney-client privilege should not be a ‘diplomatic pouch’ is one that I can see as a general question. In fact, this NRO piece is a lot easier to swallow (though I still think that no ‘material’ aid was given, and I believe that the SAM was set up to create a situation that would entrap Stewart, especially since the first set of charges was ruled unconstitutional, see this link) and I would appreciate a calm discussion of the issues.
    But turning to the matter at hand, I don’t read anything that Seb wrote as supporting a denial of due process.

  27. Lib, looking back at the thread, I think Sebastian’s comments could certainly be interpreted as you suggest, and it seems only fair to do so in another thread on a different topic. Apologies all round.

  28. otmar
    Thanks to Google, I found it. Have look at this if you think you can handle it.
    Actually, it is older than that. The strappado was done to Machiavelli by the Medicis. This article shows that the ideas for torture, sadly, have a long history

  29. LJ, yes, the technique is old. The posing for photographs with the victims is another similarity to the current events.

  30. I’m surprised I have to clarify. The presumption of innocence and the very high burden of proof for guilt are legal artifacts, not moral ones. In a court of law, and before the law, the burden of proof should be high and presumption of innocence should operate. That, however is only a small amount of one’s social understanding of guilt. By way of example I would have had no trouble noticing that mafioso John Gotti was a very bad man, almost certainly guilty of many murders and other awful dealings, long before he was actually convicted in court. Should he be put in jail without being convicted? Of course not. Should people of good conscience send money to help his defense? Also of course not. This case above is an excellent example. No one has been convicted of anything so far. But unless the medical examiner found that the man died by happenstance while being tortured (he had already been poisoned and would have died anyway or some other highly unlikely scenario) I am confident that the interrogator was guilty of manslaughter at the very least.

  31. This is disgusting.
    Manadel al-Jamadi helped killed twelve people in the October 27, 2003 bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad. The attack was part of a coordinated attack that killed 33 people that day and wounded scores of others. Fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. They were all blown to pieces that day for trying to work for a living helping others. Thirty three of them never went home.
    Mr. al-Jamadi consciously planned to murder those people. Then, when U.S. forces caught up with the coward about a week later, he tried to run, yet the soldiers STILL exercised mercy with the sack of shit and used what they considered to be less than lethal force to capture a mass-murdering terrorist. They hit him in the head, and he suffered a concussion that was not diagnosed until after his death.
    This loathsome man died from wounds suffered while trying to escape justice for wanton mass-murder.
    AND EVERY SINGLE PERSON HERE IS SO BLINDED BY THEIR HATRED OF THEIR COUNTRYMEN THAT THEY HAVE TAKEN THIS DISGUSTING, MASS-MURDERING TERRORIST AS THEIR MARTYR.
    Like I said, I’m disgusted.

  32. AND EVERY SINGLE PERSON HERE IS SO BLINDED BY THEIR HATRED OF THEIR COUNTRYMEN THAT THEY HAVE TAKEN THIS DISGUSTING, MASS-MURDERING TERRORIST AS THEIR MARTYR.
    You haven’t actually read this thread, have you?

  33. Dear Disgusted: please do not confuse love of the principles on which our country was founded, and of its ideals, with hatred of our countrymen.

  34. I’m surprised I have to clarify.
    Seb,
    This is just an observation, so please don’t take it as an attack, but I get the impression from your comment that you started to answer things before you read everything that has been written in a thread. I assume the post above is in response to Jes‘ 4:53 post. Perhaps I didn’t defend you with enough vigor, but Jes apologized at 9:29.
    I point this out because I think some fights get needlessly prolonged by not reading to the end of the thread and I found this to be the case for myself on email lists, that the latency of the communication is at fault. My apologies if you did read and thought that my defense was inadequate or Jes’ apology was insincere. While I can’t objectively speak about the former, I feel positive that the latter was sincere.

  35. Sebastian, thank you. Your post is the first instance in my seven years of blog reading in which a right-leaning blogger is first to post a story of this kind.
    I plead with everyone whose conscience is shocked by this to take to heart Jesurgislac’s point above:
    It is necessary to act to prevent torture, and one of the safeguards against torturing prisoners … is to ensure that all prisoners receive the legal safeguards they are entitled to, regardless of what crime they have been accused of.
    At this point, the Secretary of Defense condones and even encourages torture, oversees a camp preparing to imprison suspects forever, and runs his own private ‘cutout’ intel-army. The CIA snatches people all over the world and sends them to our global gulag or to torture states. The Homeland Security chief was responsible for rounding up thousands of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians in this country in 2001-2. The Attorney General laid the legal groundwork for torture and endless, off-the-record detention, and insists the President has the power to order any and all of these things.
    Now the nominee for Director of National Intelligence is a man who lied to cover up the disappearing, torture, and murder of Central Americans and U.S. citizens. Negroponte denies these things happened to this day, although testimony and written documents contradict him.
    The signal being sent is unmistakable. What will you do to object to it being sent in your name?

  36. “Manadel al-Jamadi helped killed twelve people in the October 27, 2003 bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad.”
    No. He was accused not tried.

  37. Manadel al-Jamadi helped killed twelve people in the October 27, 2003 bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad.
    Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in the April 19, 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City. He was arrested and charged, and a trial was held at which he was allowed to defend himself and challenge the evidence against him. He was convicted and executed.
    Seems to me there are some important differences here.

  38. Is it just me, or do the actual mechanics of what happened to this man seem awfully similar to crucifixion?
    If he slumped down exhausted and his arms were twisted round, he’d asphyxiate. Given our cultural fascination with Crucifixion, this seems obscene.

  39. Sebastian: The presumption of innocence and the very high burden of proof for guilt are legal artifacts, not moral ones.
    The presumption of innocence, and the right to due process regardless of how heinous the crime of which a person is accused, become moral points when you are trying to oppose torture.
    Without that moral position to stand on, opposition to torture is a bluesky proposition: there is no solid base from which to oppose torture. It does say something very solid about your character that when supporting the torture of accused terrorists has turned into a party-political position, you are willing to take a position in opposition to your party and your “side” in American politics. And I appreciate that.
    But it won’t do much to end the practices that you abhor. Bush has taken the 51% support he got to be a complete endorsement of his policies, which include torture, and which also include extraordinary rendition, the illegal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, the prison at Bagram Airbase to which the Red Cross are not allowed full access, and the prisons in Iraq in which torture is committed and “ghost prisoners” exist.
    Failure to give an accused person due process: failure to give a detainee the rights he is entitled to under the Geneva Convention: these things are wrong, but not as wrong as torture. But they are the first step on the road to torture, and it’s safer not to take even that first step.
    Refusing to take that first step on the road to torture, and opposing it actively when others take that step, is a moral stance, and not merely a “legal artifact”.

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