'Blackwater troopers replacing Emirati forces in Yemen'
Thu Dec 10, 2015 10:15AM
A tank operated by Saudi-led forces fires at a position of Yemeni fighters in the Labanat area, between Yemen's northern provinces of al-Jawf and Marib on December 5, 2015. (Reuters photo)
A new report says mercenaries and military advisers from the infamous US security firm, formerly known as Blackwater, are replacing UAE troops in the Saudi war in Yemen.
The Beirut-based al-Akhbar newspaper said on Thursday UAE forces are being gradually replaced by recruits from the US-based private military contractor, which now goes by the name, Acamedi.
The move came after the UAE evacuated some of its military sites in Yemen following its failures in several operations, the Lebanese daily added.
According to al-Akhbar, UAE’s move to involve the private military contractor in the Yemen conflict has raised objections among some members of the Saudi-led coalition.
On Wednesday, Yemen’s Arabic-language al-Masirah news website said the commander-in-chief of Blackwater mercenaries in the country was killed in the al-Omari district of Ta'izz Province.
Read More Here
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Author and journalist, Jeremy Scahill, talks about the private contractor mercenary company, Blackwater, on the Portland stop of his book tour for the launch of the paperback edition of his book, BLACKWATER: THE RISE OF THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MERCENARY ARMY.
pdxjustice Media Productions
Producer: William Seaman
http://democracynow.org
- As Vice President Joe Biden warns it will take a "hell of a long
fight" for the United States to stop militants from the Islamic State in
Iraq and Syria, we speak to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, "Dirty
Wars: The World is a Battlefield." We talk about how the U.S. invasion
of Iraq in 2003 that helped create the threat now posed by the Islamic
State. We also discuss the role of Baathist forces in ISIS, Obama’s
targeting of journalists, and the trial of four former Blackwater
operatives involved in the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square.
The
commander-in-chief of Blackwater mercenaries in Yemen, a Mexican
national was killed in clashes with Houthi Ansarullah fighters and
allied forces in the Ta'izz Province on Wednesday. According to the
reports, the recent fatality has brought to 15 the number of foreign
forces with the Blackwater killed in clashes in Yemen since Tuesday. The
mercenaries are part of the UAE forces that help Saudi Arabia in its
intervention in Yemen.
Yemeni security officials say governor of
the embattled southern province of Aden has been assassinated after his
convoy came under a rocket-propelled grenade attack. The incident took
place when Jaafar Mohammed Saad was travelling with his entourage in the
Tawahi district of the port city on Sunday. They said several members
of his convoy also died in the act of terror.
Some 1,500
Moroccan soldiers will be dispatched to Yemen to participate in the
Saudi aggression against the Arab country. According to the reports, the
troopers will assist Saudi soldiers in ground operations against Yemen.
We remember, in October, about 6,000 Sudanese forces entered Yemens
southern port city of Aden to join Saudi soldiers. Emirati, Bahraini and
Qatari soldiers are also participating in the Saudi operations.
Warring
factions in Yemen are preparing to observe a week-long truce from
December 15 while UN-mediated peace talks take place in Switzerland. A
source in the cabinet of Saudi-backed President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi
said the truce would last seven days, as specified in a letter sent by
Hadi to the UN Security Council. Earlier attempts at ceasefires in the
conflict fell apart after the two sides accused each other of
violations.
In
a high-level meeting on religious persecution in Brussels, the
President of the European Parliament (EP) said that Europe cannot afford
to continue ignoring the fate of Christians, who are “clearly the most persecuted group” in the world.
In
Wednesday’s meeting, EP President Martin Schulz said that the
persecution of Christians is “undervalued” and does not receive enough
attention, which has also meant that it “hasn’t been properly
addressed.”
Schulz’s concerns were echoed by EP Vice President
Antonio Tajani, who warned that Europe sometimes “falls into the
temptation of thinking we can ignore this task,” referring to the
protection Christians throughout the world who suffer persecution.
Speakers
cited the work of Open Doors, a human rights organization that monitors
the persecution of Christians, noting that 150 million Christians
worldwide suffer torture, rape and arbitrary imprisonment. Christians in
Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Nigeria are among those
hardest hit.
The Open Doors report
for 2015 found that “Islamic extremism is by far the most significant
persecution engine” of Christians in the world today and that “40 of the
50 countries on the World Watch List are affected by this kind of
persecution.”
http://www.democracynow.org
- As the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence feuds with the CIA
over the declassification of its 6,000-page report on the agency's
secret detention and interrogation programs, we host a debate between
former CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo and human rights attorney
Scott Horton. This comes as the United Nations Human Rights Committee
has criticized the Obama administration for closing its investigations
into the CIA's actions after September 11. A U.N. report issued Thursday
stated, "The Committee notes with concern that all reported
investigations into enforced disappearances, torture and other cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment that had been committed in the context of
the CIA secret rendition, interrogation and detention programmes were
closed in 2012 leading only to a meager number of criminal charges
brought against low-level operatives." Rizzo served as acting general
counsel during much of the George W. Bush administration and was a key
legal architect of the U.S. interrogation and detention program after
the Sept. 11 attacks. He recently published a book titled, "Company Man:
Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA." Attorney Scott
Horton is contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and author of the
forthcoming book, "The Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and
America's Stealth Foreign Policy."
Mohammed al-Qahtani was twice charged by the Pentagon in 2008 with war crimes related to 9/11. Photograph: motesjj
America’s professional association of psychologists has quietly
declined to rebuke one of its members, a retired US army reserve
officer, for his role in one of the most brutal interrogations known to
have to taken place at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian has learned.
The decision not to pursue any disciplinary measure against John
Leso, a former army reserve major, is the latest case in which someone
involved in the post-9/11 torture of detainees has faced no legal or
even professional consequences.
In a 31 December letter obtained by the Guardian,
the American Psychological Association said it had “determined that we
cannot proceed with formal charges in this matter. Consequently the
complaint against Dr Leso has been closed.”
But the APA did not deny Leso took part in the brutal interrogation
of the suspected 20th 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, whose
treatment the Pentagon official overseeing his military commission
ultimately called “torture”.
Leso was identified as “MAJ L” in a leaked log, published by Time magazine
in 2005, of Qahtani’s marathon interrogation in November 2002. With
Leso recorded as present for at least some of the session, Qahtani was
forcibly hydrated through intravenous drips and prevented from using the
bathroom until he urinated on himself, subjected to loud music, and
repeatedly kept awake while being “told he can go to sleep when he tells
the truth”.
At one point, Qahtani was instructed to bark like a dog.
“Dog tricks continued and detainee stated he should be treated like a
man,” the log records. “Detainee was told he would have to learn who to
defend and who to attack.”
During an interrogation on 27 November 2002, the log records a direct
intervention by Leso: “Control puts detainee in swivel chair at MAJ L’s
suggestion to keep him awake and stop him from fixing his eyes on one
spot in booth.”
The APA’s move concludes a years-long effort within the organization
to get the association to condemn members who took part in torture.
Those who argued for censuring Leso said that the organization has
opened the door to future wartime violations of its central do-no-harm
ethos.
“With Leso, the evidence of his participation is so explicit and so
incontrovertible, the APA had to go to great lengths to dismiss it,”
said Steven Reisner, a New York clinical psychologist who unsuccessfully
ran for the APA presidency last year. “The precedent is that APA is not
going to hold any psychologist accountable in any circumstance.”
Trudy Bond, an Ohio psychologist who filed the complaint against Leso, cited APA’s policy on interrogations and torture as
she said the organization had sent the message that “psychologists are
free to violate our ethical code, perhaps, in certain situations”.
The APA’s communications chief, Rhea Farberman, told the Guardian
that a seven-year ethics investigation could not meet the burden of
finding “direct unethical conduct” by Leso, and said it was “utterly
unfounded” to fear the organization has condoned professional impunity.
“A thorough review of these public materials and our standing
policies will clearly demonstrate that APA will not tolerate
psychologist participation in torture,” Farberman said.
Documents that emerged from a Senate armed services committee torture
inquiry detailed Leso’s involvement in an early “Behavioral Science
Consultation Team” at Guantánamo, which was instrumental in crafting
torture techniques out of measures taught to US troops to withstand
brutal treatment.
Leso, whose name is redacted in a lengthy report produced by the
committee in 2008, helped write a memorandum in October 2002,
“Counter-Resistance Strategies”, for Guantánamo staff who were under
pressure from the chain of command to produce intelligence from the
detainee population.
The memorandum detailed the use of abusive conditions and techniques
on the detainees, including isolation, “stress positions”, sensory and
sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and exposure to extreme cold.
Those techniques migrated through the Pentagon bureaucracy and were
ultimately used at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.
“Counter-Resistance Strategies” also recommended manipulating the
living conditions of detainees outside the interrogation chambers, such
as limiting “resistant” detainees to four hours of sleep daily,
depriving them of “comfort items” like sheets and mattresses and
controlling access to their Qur’ans.
APA member John Leso dodges professional consequences for brutal interrogation of detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani
- Common Dreams staff
Guantánamo Bay's Camp Delta. (Photo: Bob Strong/Reuters)The
American Psychological Association is protecting one of its members
from formal rebuke for his role in torturing a Guantanamo Bay inmate.
The esteemed professional association stated in a December 31 confidential letter, obtained by Guardian reporters and released publicly on Wednesday, that it is declining to rebuke member John Leso.
"[W]e have determined that we cannot proceed in this matter," write
APA officials in response to a complaint. "Consequently, the complaint
against Dr. Leso has been closed."
Leso, a former Army reserve major, participated in the brutal
interrogation of detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani that even a Pentagon
official acknowledged amounts to torture, reports Spencer Ackerman for The Guardian.
Ackerman continues:
Leso was identified as “MAJ L” in a leaked log, published by Time magazine
in 2005, of Qahtani’s marathon interrogation in November 2002. With
Leso recorded as present for at least some of the session, Qahtani was
forcibly hydrated through intravenous drips and prevented from using the
bathroom until he urinated on himself, subjected to loud music, and
repeatedly kept awake while being “told he can go to sleep when he tells
the truth”.
In the letter, the APA officials do not deny Leso's participation in the torture.
_____________________
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Andrew Tyrie, Conservative MP: 'It is deeply shocking that Britain facilitated kidnap and torture'. Photograph: Felix Clay
Former government ministers and intelligence chiefs face a
series of disturbing questions over the UK's involvement in the
abduction and torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11, an official
inquiry has concluded.
In a damning report that swept aside years of denials, the Gibson inquiry concluded that the British government and its intelligence agencies had been involved in so-called rendition
operations, in which detainees were kidnapped and flown around the
globe, and had interrogated detainees who they knew were being
mistreated. MI6
officers were informed that they were under no obligation to report
breaches of the Geneva conventions; intelligence officers appear to have
taken advantage of the abuse of detainees; and Jack Straw, as foreign secretary, had suggested that the law might be amended to allow suspects to be rendered to the UK.
After
examining about 20,000 documents which outlined allegations involving
around 200 detainees, the chair of the inquiry, Sir Peter Gibson, and
his team raised 27 questions that they said would need to be answered if
the full truth about the way in which Britain waged its so-called war
on terror was to be established – and the heads of MI5 and MI6 were told they have a month to respond.
The questions include:
•
Did UK intelligence officers turn a blind eye to "specific,
inappropriate techniques or threats" used by others and use this to
their advantage in interrogations?
• If so, was there "a deliberate or agreed policy" between UK officers and overseas intelligence officers?
• Did the government and its agencies become "inappropriately involved in some renditions"?
•
Was there a willingness, "at least at some levels within the agencies,
to condone, encourage or take advantage of a rendition operation"?
The
report also questions whether MI5 and MI6 provided the intelligence and
security committee (ISC) with accurate, complete information about the
mistreatment of detainees in the past, "or sometimes whether they were
notified at all".
However, the answers will be provided not to Gibson, but to the ISC,
the secretive Westminster cross-party body that is supposed to provide
oversight of the agencies. After promising for more than three years
that an independent judge-led inquiry would examine the many allegations
that the intelligence agencies face, the government announced on
Thursday that it was handing the investigation over to the ISC.
That
decision was immediately condemned by human rights groups who said that
instead of drawing a line under the episode, the government was
exposing itself to the allegation that it was engaging in a cover-up.
As
a result of the decision to hand over to the ISC, it remains unclear
whether any of the answers to Gibson's 27 questions will ever be made
public. The committee's hearings are almost always behind closed doors,
and its reports are censored before publication, in consultation with
the agencies upon which it reports.
"It is deeply shocking that
Britain facilitated kidnap and torture," Andrew Tyrie, a Tory
backbencher and chairman of the Treasury select committee, told MPs.
"The decision to abandon this judge-led inquiry will come to be seen as a
mistake."
Tyrie said that an investigation by the ISC will never
command public confidence, a criticism that was echoed by human rights
groups. Amnesty International said: "Handing the investigation over to
the ISC raises the prospect that much of the truth may remain buried."
Human Rights Watch said: "The ISC has neither the independence nor the
transparency to carry out such an important task."
Cabinet
minister Kenneth Clarke told MPs that the inquiry's report paints a
picture of government and intelligence agencies struggling to adapt to
the new realities faced in the wake of 9/11 and said it was a matter of
"sincere regret" if "mistakes and failures were made".
"It
is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not
prepared for the extreme demands suddenly placed upon them," he said.
Published time: November 04, 2013 14:32 Edited time: November 04, 2013 21:23
An
independent report has charged that medical personnel, working under the
direction of the Department of Defense and CIA in military defense
facilities, violated medical ethics by participating in the torture of
detainees.
The services provided by American doctors and psychologists included “designing, participating in, and enabling torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” of detainees, according to the report.
The 19-member task force concluded
that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA
ordered medical professionals to assist in intelligence gathering, as
well as forced-feeding of hunger strikers, in a way that inflicted “severe harm” on detainees in US custody.
The authors of the 269-page report, entitled “Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the ‘War on Terror’” is based on information from unclassified, publicly available information.
The task force revealed that a “theory of interrogation” emerged in US detention facilities, including Guantanamo Bay detention camp, that was based on “personality disintegration” as a means of breaking down the resistance of the detainees in an effort to extract confessions and information.
Over
time, new interrogation methods were developed by interrogators and
psychologists from techniques used in the pre-9/11 Survival, Evasion,
Resistance, Escape (SERE) program that was designed for training US
troops to withstand interrogation and mistreatment techniques in the
event they were captured.
The interrogators and medical
professionals transformed torture-resistant tactics into abusive methods
of interrogation, which they employed on detainees. This included
so-called ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, such as waterboarding,
which involves covering a restrained detainee’s face with a towel and
then soaking it with water. The technique is said to induce a feeling of
drowning and complete helplessness.
The detainees are not permitted to receive treatment for the mental anguish caused by their torture.
The
report also gave special mention to the Bush administration, which
declared that the legal safeguards regarding the treatment of prisoners
of war set down in the Geneva Convention did not apply to the “unlawful combatants” (i.e. terrorists) in the War on Terror. Read More here
..........
CIA made doctors torture suspected terrorists after 9/11, taskforce finds
Doctors were asked to torture detainees for intelligence gathering, and unethical practices continue, review concludes
An al-Qaida detainee
at Guantanamo Bay in 2002: the DoD has taken steps to address concerns
over practices at the prison in recent years. Photograph: Shane T
Mccoy/PA
Doctors
and psychologists working for the US military violated the ethical
codes of their profession under instruction from the defence department
and the CIA to become involved in the torture and degrading treatment of suspected terrorists, an investigation has concluded.
The
report of the Taskforce on Preserving Medical Professionalism in
National Security Detention Centres concludes that after 9/11, health
professionals working with the military and intelligence services
"designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment
and torture of detainees".
Medical professionals were in effect
told that their ethical mantra "first do no harm" did not apply, because
they were not treating people who were ill.
The report lays blame
primarily on the defence department (DoD) and the CIA, which required
their healthcare staff to put aside any scruples in the interests of
intelligence gathering and security practices that caused severe harm to
detainees, from waterboarding to sleep deprivation and force-feeding.
The two-year review by the 19-member taskforce, Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, supported by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP)
and the Open Society Foundations, says that the DoD termed those
involved in interrogation "safety officers" rather than doctors. Doctors
and nurses were required to participate in the force-feeding of
prisoners on hunger strike, against the rules of the World Medical
Association and the American Medical Association. Doctors and
psychologists working for the DoD were required to breach patient
confidentiality and share what they knew of the prisoner's physical and
psychological condition with interrogators and were used as
interrogators themselves. They also failed to comply with
recommendations from the army surgeon general on reporting abuse of
detainees.
The CIA's office of medical services played a critical
role in advising the justice department that "enhanced interrogation"
methods, such as extended sleep deprivation and waterboarding, which are
recognised as forms of torture, were medically acceptable. CIA medical
personnel were present when waterboarding was taking place, the
taskforce says.
Poland asks European court to hide CIA secret torture prison case from public
Published time: October 30, 2013 22:50 Edited time: November 01, 2013 11:16
Poland
has asked the European Court of Human Rights to bar media and public
presence during an upcoming hearing on Poland’s complicity with the
CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program that delivered terror suspects
to secret prisons around the world.
The public hearing in Strasbourg, France, scheduled for Dec. 3, will be the first arguments testing allegations that the Polish government allowed the CIA to operate a jail for supposed Al-Qaeda fighters in Poland.
The request for a private hearing “will be examined by the court shortly,” a court spokesperson told Reuters.
Poland
cited national security concerns as to why it wants the hearing to
remain confidential. The Polish government would not comment on the
story.
A Polish human rights group criticized the request for
privacy, saying the public deserves to know whether Poland allowed the
CIA to hide prisoners from the American court system. "We should have the right to review this case in public," said Adam Bodnar, vice president of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. "I do not see a reason for confidentiality of proceedings."
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