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Rumsfeld accused on abuse
US defense secretary ‘authorized tough intelligence program’

By Gary Younge and Luke Harding

May 17— The US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, personally authorized the expansion of a special program which ultimately led to the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison, the New Yorker magazine claims today.

The operation, which encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation to obtain intelligence, was known to President George W. Bush and fewer than 200 operatives. It was approved by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, according to the report. The program was governed by the rules: “Grab who you must. Do what you want,” a former intelligence officer told the magazine.

The article was written by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer-prize winning New Yorker reporter who exposed the abuse scandal in Abu Ghraib. It is sourced to unnamed former and current intelligence officials.

The Pentagon flatly denied his claims. “Assertions apparently being made in the latest New Yorker article on Abu Ghraib and the abuse of Iraqi detainees are outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture,” said a Pentagon spokesman, Larry DiRita.

The revelations came as the US military prepares to stage the first of a series of unprecedented public trials of the US guards allegedly involved in the Abu Ghraib abuse. On Wednesday, Specialist Jeremy Sivits will appear before an extraordinary court martial at Baghdad’s convention center. He is likely to plead guilty to the charge of abusing Iraqi detainees.

Crucially, though, Sivits is expected to testify that senior commanders at the jail had no idea that prisoners were being brutalized, a statement that appears to bolster Bush’s contention in a weekend radio address that the abuse was “the actions of a few.” Over the weekend, however, the six other defendants claimed they were merely obeying orders from higher up.

“Our defense says he was following orders and that he believed the orders were lawful,” Guy Womack, a lawyer for Charles Graner, the US guard pictured next to a pyramid of naked, hooded Iraqis, told the New York Times yesterday.

In return for testifying against his former comrades, Sivits is expected to get a lenient sentence of a year in jail or less.

The last two weeks have seen Rumsfeld fighting for his political career. Calls for his resignation prompted Bush to reaffirm his support for the beleagured defense secretary. Following testimony before Congress and a trip to Baghdad to rally morale last week, Rumsfeld appeared to have weathered the worst of the crisis.

But when asked about the congressional testimony of Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, his under secretary for intelligence, a senior CIA official told Hersh: “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

According to the article, Rumsfeld set up the secret access program, which is subject to the most stringent defense department security, a few months after 9/11. Known by several code names, including “Copper Green,” it sought to avoid legal barriers preventing intelligence agents from acting quickly in order to apprehend, interrogate or kill suspects. It emerged from frustration within the Pentagon that the hunt for terrorist suspects had been hampered by bureaucratic constraints.

The Pentagon regarded the program as one of its most successful strategies in the “war on terror” in Afghanistan. With the Iraqi resistance growing and intelligence gathering failing, Cambone decided to apply the program to Iraq.

“They weren’t getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq,” the former intelligence official told Hersh. “No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, ‘I’ve got to crack this thing and I’m tired of working through the normal chain of command. I’ve got this apparatus set up --- the special access program -- and I’m going in hot.’ So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it’s working. We’re getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing. But we’ve got more targets [prisoners in Iraqi jails] than people who can handle them.”

According to Hersh, Cambone then decided to bring military intelligence officers into the prison alongside the military police guards, many of whom have featured in the abuse photos.

A Pentagon consultant who spent much of his career involved with special-access programs told Hersh the blame goes beyond Cambone. “The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone. This is Cambone’s deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program.”

Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added: “But he’s responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we’ve changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

Cheney informed of ‘objectionable’ interrogation guides in 1992

Washington, DC, May 12 — CIA interrogation manuals written in the 1960s and 1980s described “coercive techniques” such as those used to mistreat detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to the declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive. The Archive also posted a secret 1992 report written for then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney warning that US Army intelligence manuals that incorporated the earlier work of the CIA for training Latin American military officers in interrogation and counterintelligence techniques contained “offensive and objectionable material” that “undermines US credibility, and could result in significant embarrassment.”

Recommendations on prisoner interrogation included the threat of violence and deprivation and noted that no threat should be made unless the questioner “has approval to carry out the threat.” The interrogator “is able to manipulate the subject’s environment,” the 1983 manual states, “to create unpleasant or intolerable situation, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.”

After Congress began investigating reports of Central American atrocities in the mid 1980s, particularly in Honduras, the CIA’s “Human Resource Exploitation” manual was hand edited to alter passages that appeared to advocate coercion and stress techniques to be used on prisoners, making it clear that authorities were well aware these abusive practices were illegal and immoral, even as they continued then and now.

Indeed, similar material had already been incorporated into seven Spanish-language training guides. More than a thousand copies of these manuals were distributed for use in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador and Peru, and at the School of the Americas between 1987 and 1991. An inquiry was triggered in mid 1991 when the Southern Command evaluated the manuals for use in expanding military support programs in Colombia.

Source: National Security Archive

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American Indians take charge of healing

By Marty Logan

United Nations, May 12 (IPS) — The policy was to “kill the Indian and keep the man.”

The aim of a boarding school system established by US officials in the 19th century was to assimilate American Indian children into the dominant white society, speakers told a panel discussion at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues on May 12.

That meant forbidding their languages, clothing, hair styles — their culture, in fact — using as much violence as was needed, they said.

And now American Indians are demanding restitution — on their own terms.

“Under international human rights law... the US is still accountable for any continuing effects,” which include the loss of indigenous languages and the violence that today permeates many Indian communities, said Andrea Smith from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

She and other women have started the Boarding School Healing Project (BSHP), which has four main goals: heal the schools’ victims; educate people about the attempted genocide of the American Indian; document how that process worked; and build a movement that will demand compensation from the US government.

The residential school system began with president Ulysses Grant’s 1869 “Peace Policy” and continued well into the 20th century, taking 100,000 American Indian children from their homes to live and study in Christian boarding schools.

Students, as young as two years of age, were placed in the schools until the age of 18, many returning home speaking a different language (English) than when they left. Many were also physically and sexually abused.

“Some of my peers committed suicide, some drank themselves to death, some died violent deaths... They don’t know how many were abused [but] one thing we know: the oppressed became the oppressors” when they returned home, said one former student quoted in a short film about a similar school system established in Canada on the US model.

Among its impacts, the boarding school system — in both countries — implanted forms of violence in native communities that still exact a high cost today, said speakers May 12.

“Sometimes I have to say I’m sorry to my children because I have behaved in the way the missionaries, the education [of the residential schools] made us,” said Eulynda Benalli of the Crownpoint Institute of Technology on the Navajo Nation in the US state of New Mexico.

A “second generation survivor” of the residential school system, Benalli explained how her father used to tell stories of his days at the school, always adding “wasn’t that terrible?”

Those stories, she added, left her “believing that was the way it was to be Indian.”

Among their impacts the boarding schools replaced traditional practices performed by women with patrilineal systems, which led to the “devaluing of native women in our communities,” said Smith.

The chairman of the Permanent Forum told the May 10 opening session of the annual meeting that indigenous men worldwide must do more to stem domestic violence and ensure gender equality in their communities.

“Indigenous cultures rely on gender complementarily, a symbiosis that values both women’s and men’s business... that affirms both with respect and balance,” added Ole Henrik Magga.

The Permanent Forum, the only full-time UN body devoted to indigenous issues, meets until May 21, and focuses this year on indigenous women.

During the two-week session its 16 members will hear dozens of submissions on human rights, environment, education, culture, economic and social development and health from some 1,500 delegates who have assembled at UN headquarters from around the globe.

Discussions on culture began May 12.

An advisory body only, the Forum’s recommendations will go to the UN Economic and Social Council, which will decide which will be forwarded to September’s General Assembly of all UN member states.

While the Boarding School Healing Project is just starting, a group of indigenous people on Canada’s west coast have nearly finished an eight-year process to help heal their communities.

The native people of Haida Gwaii, officially known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, have repatriated the remains of more than 400 of their ancestors who were stolen from their graves for study in the 19th and 20th centuries and then stored in museums throughout North America and beyond.

The Haida, who number about 4,000 people on their islands 100 km off the coast of British Columbia, taught students to make blankets and “bentwood” boxes from the cedar trees of their temperate rainforests for each set of remains, which were then buried in a special ceremony, the most recent on May 8.

“When we first started we had a lot of fear, superstition, about what we were doing. That was there for a few years. As we got further down the line, people began to understand this was a way for us to reclaim our past,” Andy Wilson of the Haida Repatriation Committee said in an interview.

After contact with white settlers, many Haida were sent to residential schools, while their land — sometimes called the “Canadian Galapagos” for its unique flora and fauna — was logged and mined without their permission.

“Germ warfare” nearly wiped out a population that may have reached 30,000 at one point in the past, says Wilson. The 1915 census counted just 588 Haida.

Repatriation “was a way to say, ‘we’re not taking this any more and anything that you took from us, we’re here to take back.’ Someone said May 8 [at the burial ceremony], talking about the repatriation committee, [that] all the respect and honor they showed the ancestors helped start the healing.”

Smith said the BSHP would discuss how to take the United States to account for the continuing damage to indigenous communities caused by the boarding schools. The options include approaching the school system as a violation of international human rights or as a legal wrong, to be put right in a US court.

Unlike in Canada though, the group will not recommend that individuals receive compensation from the government. “We want to approach this from a sovereignty framework... because what has happened has happened to us as a whole people,” Smith said.

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United States of America vs. Greenpeace, Inc. case dismissed

By Liz Allen

Asheville, North Carolina, May 19 (AGR) — Federal Judge Adalberto Jordanon dismissed on May 19 the charges of “sailor mongering” brought against international environmental organization, Greenpeace USA, by General John Ashcroft. Shortly after the Justice Department rested its case, Greenpeace filed a second motion for acquittal, which the judge granted. The trial began on May 17.

“America’s tradition of free speech won a victory today but our liberties are still not safe,” said Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando. “The Bush administration and its allies seem bent on stifling our tradition of civil protest, a tradition that has made this country stronger throughout its history.”

If the organization had been convicted, the organization could have been fined $20,000 and placed on probation. The probation, if violated through an act of civil disobedience on the part of Greenpeace USA activists, would result in people holding official positions within the group being jailed and having their assets seized, effectively halting Greenpeace USA operations.

The case resulted from an incident where Greenpeace members boarded and dropped a banner reading “President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging” off the Jade, a cargo ship entering the port of Miami in April 2002. The vessel was carrying a shipment of mahogany illegally cut from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. The activists were arrested, spent a weekend in jail, and were sentenced to time served.

The mahogany was not found by the inspectors. However, two days later, 70 tons of the wood was unloaded from the ship in Charleston, SC.

Brazilian mahogany is demarcated as a species at risk by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Many countries, including Brazil itself, whose government’s environmental protection agency works closely with the Greenpeace Brazil office, have thanked Greenpeace for its efforts to stop the illegal logging and trade of the wood. Greenpeace criticizes the practice of illegally logging mahogany because of the destruction it causes to the rainforest and the harm caused to those living in and working to protect the forest.

As of press date, over 80,000 had joined Greenpeace online in calling on the US Justice Department to prosecute illegal loggers, not Greenpeace. The campaign to dismiss the charges became Greenpeace’s largest ever.

What is unique about the trial was that for the first time an entire organizational body was put on trial for the actions of a few of its members. Greenpeace and other advocacy groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), have expressed concern that the prosecution is based on the content of Greenpeace’s speech and actions.

“Selective prosecution violates the First Amendment and equal protection rights of Greenpeace; it also threatens every advocacy group whose message may offend the government of the moment,” stated the ACLU of Florida and People for the American Way Foundation in an jointly filed amicus brief in the United States of America vs. Greenpeace.

According to the mission statement, “Greenpeace is an independent, campaigning organization that uses non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems and force solutions for a green and peaceful future.” The tactics the activists employ include diplomacy, lobbying, research, publicity, and civil disobedience. The only violence at a Greenpeace protest ever reported was in 1985 when an activist was killed by French Secret Service divers who blew up a nuclear test monitoring ship in New Zealand.

The “sailor mongering” law, passed in 1872 and only used twice in court, applies to a “lawless person in the interest or employ of what may be called ‘sailor mongers,’ [who] get on board vessels bound for Portland as soon as they get in the Columbia river, and by the help of intoxicants, and the use of other means, often savoring of violence, get the crews ashore, and leave the vessel without help to manage or care for her.”