\u00a0<\/font>Remous au FDTL? Le Dr. Mustapha Ben Ja\u00e2far r\u00e9agit aux accusations de Jalel Un coup de tonnerre dans un ciel serein<\/font><\/p>\n

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Le bureau politique du Forum D\u00e9mocratique pour le Travail et les Libert\u00e9s (FDTL) s’est r\u00e9uni dimanche 22 mars sous la pr\u00e9sidence du secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral du parti, le docteur Mustapha Ben Ja\u00e2far. Une r\u00e9union consacr\u00e9e aux agissements de Jalel Lahbib, membre du bureau politique et r\u00e9dacteur en chef de \u00ab\u00a0Mouatinoun\u00a0\u00bb, l’organe de presse du parti\u00a0\u00bb, a soulign\u00e9 le secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral. En effet, M. Lahbib a publi\u00e9 le 18 mars un communiqu\u00e9 dans lequel il \u00ab\u00a0condamne l’attitude de M. Mustapha Ben Ja\u00e2far qui a tenu une conf\u00e9rence de presse \u00e0 Gen\u00e8ve et a eu des rencontres avec des parties du Parlement Europ\u00e9en et de l’Internationale Socialiste, sans consulter ni informer le bureau politique, ce qui constitue un d\u00e9ni flagrant de la pratique d\u00e9mocratique au sein du parti\u00a0\u00bb. Dans le communiqu\u00e9, l’auteur exprime \u00ab\u00a0son \u00e9tonnement face \u00e0 l’acharnement \u00e9hont\u00e9 et persistant, de certaines figures de la sc\u00e8ne dont il sou-entends le Dr Ben Ja\u00e2far \u00e0 qu\u00e9mander des soutiens ext\u00e9rieurs et des directives \u00e9trang\u00e8res qui ont fait de certaines figures de notre opposition des simples ex\u00e9cutants de projets dict\u00e9s en fonction d’agendas ext\u00e9rieurs\u00a0\u00bb. Conf\u00e9rence Le Dr Ben Ja\u00e2far r\u00e9agit en ces termes, \u00ab\u00a0Nous sommes surpris par le communiqu\u00e9 de M. Jalel Lahbib qui n’a, \u00e0 aucun moment, exprim\u00e9 des critiques ou des r\u00e9serves concernant les positions et les d\u00e9marches du parti. Nous consid\u00e9rons que sa r\u00e9action est un coup de tonnerre dans un ciel serein. Ce qui porte \u00e0 croire qu’il n’agit pas de sa propre volont\u00e9. Pour nous, les termes du communiqu\u00e9 sont irrecevables parce qu’ils mettent en cause une r\u00e8gle \u00e9l\u00e9mentaire du fonctionnement de tout parti affili\u00e9e \u00e0 une organisation internationale comme l’Internationale Socialiste (IS) et qui est appel\u00e9 \u00e0 d\u00e9velopper et \u00e0 consolider ses relations avec tous les partis affili\u00e9s \u00e0 cette organisation (le RCD est membre de l’IS)\u00a0\u00bb. A noter que M. Lahbib a tenu hier une conf\u00e9rence de presse. Rappelons \u00e0 cet effet que le bureau politique du FDTL a consid\u00e9r\u00e9 qu’il s’est mis lui-m\u00eame d\u00e9finitivement en dehors du parti.<\/div>\n

N\u00e9jib SASSI (Source : \u00ab Le Temps \u00bb (Quotidien \u2013 Tunis), le 24 mars 2009)<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Les avocats et la t\u00e9l\u00e9vision Le d\u00e9bat continue<\/font><\/h2>\n
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La pol\u00e9mique entre les avocats et la cha\u00eene de t\u00e9l\u00e9vision Tunisie 7 d’une part et celle au sein m\u00eame de la profession concernant les rapports de l’avocat avec les m\u00e9dias et sa participation aux \u00e9missions t\u00e9l\u00e9vis\u00e9es et \u00e0 sa collaboration dans les journaux, d’autre part, continue de plus belle. Une pol\u00e9mique soulev\u00e9e par l’\u00e9mission \u00ab Al Hak M\u00e2ak \u00bb diffus\u00e9e le 12 mars dernier et qui a trait\u00e9 du cas d’un avocat soup\u00e7onn\u00e9 d’avoir gard\u00e9 les fonds de dommages et int\u00e9r\u00eats revenant \u00e0 sa cliente. La r\u00e9action des avocats, du Conseil de l’Ordre et du B\u00e2tonnier en particulier a \u00e9t\u00e9 tr\u00e8s vive. Ils ont jug\u00e9 que l’\u00e9mission en question a port\u00e9 atteinte \u00e0 l’avocatie. Mais de son c\u00f4t\u00e9, l’animateur de l’\u00e9mission Moez Ben Gharbia (voir Le Temps du 20 mars) a rejet\u00e9 cette accusation affirmant que cette \u00e9mission pratique l’investigation, une forme moderne du journalisme. Pour en savoir plus nous avons invit\u00e9 deux avocats qui ont assum\u00e9 des responsabilit\u00e9s au sein des structures de l’avocatie et qui ont \u00e9t\u00e9 confront\u00e9s \u00e0 des affaires semblables. Me Brahim Bouderbala ex-pr\u00e9sident de la section de Tunis du Conseil de l’Ordre et Me Mohamed Jemour ex-secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral du Conseil de l’Ordre. Interviews. \u00a0*** Me Brahim Bouderbala<\/font><\/strong> <\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0 Le principe de la pr\u00e9somption d’innocence a \u00e9t\u00e9 totalement bafou\u00e9 \u00bb<\/font><\/h3>\n
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\u00a0Le Temps : Quels sont les pr\u00e9judices subis par la profession puisque les animateurs de l’\u00e9mission, selon certains observateurs, ont fait ce qu’on appelle un travail d’investigation. Ils ont cherch\u00e9 \u00e0 donner la parole \u00e0 toutes les parties mais l’avocat s’est d\u00e9rob\u00e9 ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Me Brahim Bouderbala : Cette \u00e9mission a viol\u00e9 le code de la presse. Elle a contrevenu \u00e0 la loi r\u00e9glementant la profession d’avocat. Elle a ignor\u00e9 qu’il y a une justice dans notre pays et que toutes les voies de droit n’ont pas \u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e9puis\u00e9es, les fait reproch\u00e9s \u00e0 l’avocat mis en cause au cours de l’\u00e9mission n’ayant fait l’objet d’aucune proc\u00e9dure judiciaire. Il s’agit d’une affaire dans laquelle un avocat est accus\u00e9 d’avoir commis une tr\u00e8s grave infraction \u00e0 la d\u00e9ontologie\u00a0 ainsi que d’un abus de confiance. Il faut rappeler que le principe de base en mati\u00e8re disciplinaire ou en droit p\u00e9nal est celui de la pr\u00e9somption d’innocence de toute personne poursuivie. Il ne revient donc pas \u00e0 des animateurs d’\u00e9missions de t\u00e9l\u00e9-r\u00e9alit\u00e9 de se transformer en magistrats instructeurs ou de s’\u00e9riger en conseil de l’Ordre des avocats, se permettant d’instruire ou de juger une \u00e9ventuelle infraction \u00e0 la d\u00e9ontologie ou un abus de confiance sur la base de la plainte d’un justiciable quelle que soit la gravit\u00e9 ou la vraisemblance ou l’invraisemblance des faits all\u00e9gu\u00e9s.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Mais o\u00f9 s’arr\u00eate l’investigation journalistique ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
A mon avis, toute investigation journalistique se doit de respecter scrupuleusement le principe de la garantie \u00e9l\u00e9mentaire des droits du citoyen quels que soient les faits qui peuvent lui \u00eatre reproch\u00e9s. Malheureusement, lors de l’\u00e9mission t\u00e9l\u00e9vis\u00e9e en cause, le principe \u00e9l\u00e9mentaire de la pr\u00e9somption d’innocence a \u00e9t\u00e9 totalement bafou\u00e9. Le droit \u00e0 \u00eatre jug\u00e9 \u00e9quitablement a \u00e9t\u00e9 ignor\u00e9. Pire, la famille de l’avocat mis en cause et qui n’avait rien \u00e0 voir avec cette affaire a \u00e9t\u00e9 montr\u00e9e du doigt dans une mise en sc\u00e8ne qui lui a port\u00e9 un pr\u00e9judice certain.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Le b\u00e2tonnier a appel\u00e9 le pr\u00e9sident de la section de Tunis de traduire les avocats qui ont particip\u00e9 aux \u00e9missions t\u00e9l\u00e9vis\u00e9es devant le Conseil de discipline. Qu’en pensez-vous ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Il est du droit du b\u00e2tonnier d’ouvrir un dossier disciplinaire pour toute infraction commise par un avocat. Le Conseil de l’ordre des avocats a parfaitement le droit de proc\u00e9der \u00e0 une enqu\u00eate contre tout avocat qui commet un manquement \u00e0 ses devoirs ou \u00e0 ses obligations ; d’ailleurs, le pr\u00e9sident de section comp\u00e9tent pour d\u00e9clencher les enqu\u00eates est lui-m\u00eame membre es-qualit\u00e9 du conseil de l’ordre. Et, de ce fait, il a une obligation de solidarit\u00e9 avec les d\u00e9cisions du conseil de l’ordre, organe hi\u00e9rarchiquement sup\u00e9rieur aux sections r\u00e9gionales. Je pense qu’il n’y a aucun inconv\u00e9nient \u00e0 ce que des avocats participent \u00e0 des \u00e9missions \u00e0 la radio ou \u00e0 la t\u00e9l\u00e9vision afin de donner leur point de vue sur des questions juridiques ou sur des faits d’actualit\u00e9 sans, toutefois, que cela ne se transforme en moyen de se faire de la publicit\u00e9, ce qui est strictement interdit par la loi ou un moyen de faire pression sur la justice en \u00e9voquant leurs propres affaires. En revanche, il est inacceptable que des avocats participent \u00e0 ce genre d’\u00e9mission du genre t\u00e9l\u00e9-r\u00e9alit\u00e9 o\u00f9 ils prennent parti et o\u00f9 ils s’instituent membres d’une juridiction t\u00e9l\u00e9visuelle qui n’a aucune l\u00e9gitimit\u00e9 pour instruire ce type d’affaire.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Certains disent que la r\u00e9action des avocats est exag\u00e9r\u00e9e \u00e9tant donn\u00e9 que la participation des avocats aux \u00e9missions t\u00e9l\u00e9vis\u00e9es ne date pas d’aujourd’hui. Mais, quand l’\u00e9mission du 12 mars a trait\u00e9 du cas d’un avocat, c’est le toll\u00e9. Qu’en dites-vous ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Cette \u00e9mission a, effectivement, provoqu\u00e9 un toll\u00e9 de la part du corps des avocats pour des raisons tr\u00e8s simples, l’exercice de la profession d’avocat est bas\u00e9e sur une relation de confiance entre le client et l’avocat. Des centaines de milliers de dossiers sont, chaque ann\u00e9e, confi\u00e9s aux six mille avocats que compte la Tunisie de Bizerte \u00e0 Tataouine. Il est, bien s\u00fbr ind\u00e9niable que certains avocats commettent parfois des infractions. Celles-ci sont examin\u00e9es par les instances ordinales et aboutissent \u00e0 des sanctions qui vont du bl\u00e2me jusqu’\u00e0 la radiation d\u00e9finitive. Mais, cela ne doit pas jeter le discr\u00e9dit sur l’ensemble de la profession dont, malheureusement, une image caricaturale a \u00e9t\u00e9 pr\u00e9sent\u00e9e lors de cette \u00e9mission. Quant au refus de l’avocat mis en cause de r\u00e9pondre \u00e0 cette mascarade, il est tout \u00e0 fait l\u00e9gitime et il ne doit pas \u00eatre interpr\u00e9t\u00e9 comme une preuve certaine et d\u00e9finitive de culpabilit\u00e9 justifiant une condamnation sans appel. Interview r\u00e9alis\u00e9e par N\u00e9jib SASSI<\/font><\/strong> \u00a0*** Me Mohamed Jemour ex-secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral du Conseil de l’ordre des avocats<\/font><\/strong> <\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0Faute de r\u00e8gles normatives l’affaire pourrait \u00eatre utilis\u00e9e \u00e0 des fins \u00e9lectorales\u00a0\u00bb<\/font><\/h3>\n
<\/strong> \u00a0Le Temps : La r\u00e9action des avocats et du Conseil de l’ordre suite \u00e0 l’\u00e9mission d'\u00a0\u00bbEl hak Ma\u00e2k\u00a0\u00bb n’est elle pas un peu exag\u00e9r\u00e9e ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Me Mohamed Jemour : Non l’\u00e9mission a port\u00e9 atteinte \u00e0 la profession et aux avocats. En ce sens qu’elle a condamn\u00e9 un avocat soup\u00e7onn\u00e9 d’avoir gard\u00e9 les fonds revenant \u00e0 sa cliente avant que la proc\u00e9dure disciplinaire soit achev\u00e9e et avant m\u00eame son audition par le juge d’instruction. Cette \u00e9mission a enfreint au principe de la pr\u00e9somption d’innocence dont b\u00e9n\u00e9ficie tout citoyen et puis je consid\u00e8re que l’\u00e9mission a fait de la traque \u00e0 un avocat, \u00e0 sa famille et \u00e0 son clerc. La responsabilit\u00e9 est donc personnelle car nous sommes encore au stade de la proc\u00e9dure et de l’investigation. Au jour de l’\u00e9mission le pr\u00e9sident de la section de Tunis du conseil de l’ordre n’a pas encore d\u00e9f\u00e9r\u00e9 l’avocat devant le conseil de discipline. M\u00eame s’il l’avait fait c’est le conseil de l’ordre si\u00e9geant en conseil de discipline qui d\u00e9cide de la responsabilit\u00e9 de l’avocat.<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u2022 Mais dans l’\u00e9mission l’avocat a b\u00e9n\u00e9fici\u00e9 de la d\u00e9fense de ses confr\u00e8res pr\u00e9sents ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Je reproche aux confr\u00e8res pr\u00e9sents de n’avoir pas mis en exergue ces principes \u00e9l\u00e9mentaires. Le code de la presse interdit de publier tout acte relatif aux proc\u00e9dures p\u00e9nales avant sa lecture dans une audience publique. L’\u00e9mission aurait d\u00fb traiter d’une mani\u00e8re g\u00e9n\u00e9rale la question de d\u00e9tournement de fonds revenant aux clients par leurs avocats et des sanctions disciplinaires p\u00e9nales et administratives qui en d\u00e9coulent. Les structures de la profession pourraient participer \u00e0 ces d\u00e9bats pour parler de la jurisprudence du conseil de l’ordre en cette mati\u00e8re. On ne peut pas parler d’un dossier pour lequel on n’a pas encore tranch\u00e9. Le motif invoqu\u00e9 par les autorit\u00e9s concernant la saisie d’un num\u00e9ro \u00ab\u00a0d’Attariq El Jedid\u00a0\u00bb organe de presse du Mouvement Ettajdid rentre dans cet ordre. A savoir que l’interrogatoire de l’un des inculp\u00e9s dans l’affaire du bassin minier n’a pas encore \u00e9t\u00e9 lu en une audience publique. En plus le conseil de l’ordre a puni s\u00e9v\u00e8rement en les radiant d\u00e9finitivement du tableau les avocats ayant commis des d\u00e9tournements de fonds. Une fois leurs culpabilit\u00e9s ont \u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e9tablies. Dans l’affaire de l’\u00e9mission, la culpabilit\u00e9 de l’avocat n’a pas encore \u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e9tablie.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Mais quelles sont les actions \u00e0 entreprendre afin que ce genre d’affaire ne se reproduise plus ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Le Conseil de l’ordre doit se pencher sur la question du rapport des avocats avec les m\u00e9dias. Il a un pouvoir r\u00e9glementaire il doit par cons\u00e9quent \u00e9tablir des r\u00e8gles qui s’appliquent \u00e0 tous les confr\u00e8res d’une mani\u00e8re \u00e9galitaire. Tant que le conseil de l’ordre n’a pas fait ce travail dans le cadre d’un r\u00e8glement int\u00e9rieur il y aura toujours des probl\u00e8mes, des glissements et des comportements fautifs qui donneront lieu \u00e0 des traitements diff\u00e9rents selon la t\u00eate du client. Il est imp\u00e9rieux que le Conseil de l’ordre mette de l’ordre dans cette question que nous tra\u00eenons depuis longtemps. Je doute que faute de r\u00e8gles normatives que le dossier qui a soulev\u00e9 cette temp\u00eate ne soit utilis\u00e9 \u00e0 des fins \u00e9lectorales par les uns et par les autres.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Que conseillez-vous aux avocats qui ont des rapports avec les m\u00e9dias ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Chaque confr\u00e8re qui a une relation actuelle avec les m\u00e9dias doit \u00eatre loyal et informer le conseil de l’ordre de son statut. S’il est r\u00e9mun\u00e9r\u00e9 ou non en contrepartie de sa participation dans les m\u00e9dias.<\/div>\n
\u2022 Mais s’il refuse ?<\/strong><\/div>\n
Les structures de la profession ont le droit de demander aux institutions de t\u00e9l\u00e9vision ou de la presse \u00e9crite la nature de leurs relations avec les avocats et j’esp\u00e8re que ces institutions collaboreront loyalement pour le respect de la loi. Faute d’une collaboration loyale des parties concern\u00e9es la situation va empirer et il y aura une tension entre les m\u00e9dias d’une part, les avocats et leurs structures repr\u00e9sentatives d’autre part et la question ne peut \u00eatre tranch\u00e9e par des prises de position h\u00e2tives et irr\u00e9fl\u00e9chies.<\/div>\n
Interview r\u00e9alis\u00e9e par N\u00e9jib SASSI (Source : \u00ab Le Temps \u00bb (Quotidien \u2013 Tunis), le 24 mars 2009)<\/strong><\/font><\/div>\n
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Rabat hausse le ton contre des \u00ab\u00a0atteintes\u00a0\u00bb \u00e0 la religion et \u00e0 la morale<\/font><\/h3>\n
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AFP, le 24 mars 2009 \u00e0 10h44 Par Herv\u00e9 GUILBAUD RABAT, 24 mars 2009 (AFP) – Les autorit\u00e9s marocaines ont, par une s\u00e9rie de d\u00e9cisions r\u00e9centes, s\u00e9rieusement hauss\u00e9 le ton contre ce qu’elles estiment \u00eatre des \u00ab\u00a0atteintes\u00a0\u00bb \u00e0 l’ordre moral et religieux du royaume, avec en particulier une offensive contre tout pros\u00e9lytisme chiite. \u00ab\u00a0L’enjeu, c’est l’image de l’Etat\u00a0\u00bb, explique dans un entretien \u00e0 l’AFP Mohamed Darif, un expert des mouvements islamistes au Maroc. \u00ab\u00a0Les autorit\u00e9s cherchent \u00e0 prouver qu’elles sont toujours les garantes des valeurs religieuses et des valeurs morales\u00a0\u00bb du pays. Derni\u00e8re mesure en date, la fermeture samedi de l’\u00e9cole irakienne de Bagdad, dont, selon un communiqu\u00e9 du minist\u00e8re de l’Education nationale, \u00ab\u00a0le syst\u00e8me p\u00e9dagogique (…) est contraire aux dispositions de l’enseignement priv\u00e9\u00a0\u00bb du Maroc. \u00ab\u00a0Cette d\u00e9cision, est-il pr\u00e9cis\u00e9, fait suite \u00e0 une plainte d\u00e9pos\u00e9e par un ressortissant irakien (…) contre la directrice\u00a0\u00bb de cette \u00e9cole, accus\u00e9e d’avoir renvoy\u00e9 trois enfants \u00ab\u00a0pour motif confessionnel\u00a0\u00bb et de propager \u00ab\u00a0un rite religieux d\u00e9termin\u00e9\u00a0\u00bb. En clair, l’islam chiite. Selon le quotidien (ind\u00e9pendant) en langue arabe Al Jarida Al Aoula, des dizaines de personnes soup\u00e7onn\u00e9es de sympathie avec le chiisme ont \u00e9t\u00e9 interpell\u00e9es depuis vendredi \u00e0 Tanger (nord), Essaouira (sud) et Ouazzane (120 km au nord de Rabat). Ce n’est pas la premi\u00e8re fois que l’activisme chiite est vis\u00e9, dans un pays dont la quasi-totalit\u00e9 de la population observe le rite mal\u00e9kite, l’\u00e9cole sunnite mod\u00e9r\u00e9e de l’islam. Dans une r\u00e9cente interview \u00e0 l’AFP, le ministre des Affaires \u00e9trang\u00e8res Tae\u00efb Fassi Fihri avait fustig\u00e9 l’activisme d’associations marocaines \u0153uvrant \u00e0 d\u00e9velopper le chiisme avec l’appui de T\u00e9h\u00e9ran. \u00ab\u00a0Le Maroc ne peut pas accepter qu’on m\u00e8ne des actions de ce genre, directement ou indirectement, ou via de soi-disant ONG\u00a0\u00bb, avait-il estim\u00e9, critiquant une \u00ab\u00a0atteinte aux fondamentaux\u00a0\u00bb du royaume ch\u00e9rifien et au \u00ab\u00a0ciment\u00a0\u00bb du mal\u00e9kisme. Mais le tour de vis des autorit\u00e9s marocaines ne touche pas qu’\u00e0 la religion. Samedi, le minist\u00e8re de l’Int\u00e9rieur a exprim\u00e9 sa \u00ab\u00a0d\u00e9termination \u00e0 faire face, avec fermet\u00e9 et dans le cadre des lois en vigueur, \u00e0 tous les agissements, \u00e9crits et livres visant \u00e0 porter atteinte aux valeurs religieuses et morales de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 marocaine\u00a0\u00bb. Selon une source proche du gouvernement, le texte vise la multiplication d’articles de presse pr\u00f4nant une plus grande tol\u00e9rance \u00e0 l’\u00e9gard de l’homosexualit\u00e9, que les autorit\u00e9s jugent contraire aux valeurs de la soci\u00e9t\u00e9 marocaine et de la religion musulmane. Les islamistes, notamment ceux du Parti Justice et D\u00e9veloppement (PJD), ont d’ailleurs appel\u00e9 l’Etat \u00e0 agir avec fermet\u00e9. Selon la presse, une vingtaine d’homosexuels marocains auraient r\u00e9cemment \u00e9t\u00e9 interpell\u00e9s dans la r\u00e9gion de Mekn\u00e8s (centre). Autre exemple de \u00ab\u00a0recadrage\u00a0\u00bb, le refus des autorit\u00e9s d’accorder une autorisation \u00e0 l’organisation f\u00e9ministe fran\u00e7aise \u00ab\u00a0Ni putes ni soumises\u00a0\u00bb (NPNS) pour ouvrir une antenne au Maroc. \u00ab\u00a0En conformit\u00e9 avec la loi, les autorit\u00e9s (marocaines) ne donneront pas suite \u00e0 la cr\u00e9ation d’un tel bureau si la demande venait \u00e0 \u00eatre faite\u00a0\u00bb, ce qui n’est pas le cas, avait indiqu\u00e9 le inist\u00e8re de l’Int\u00e9rieur dans un communiqu\u00e9, le 21 f\u00e9vrier. Pendant encore quelques semaines, les \u00ab\u00a0valeurs morales\u00a0\u00bb pourraient \u00eatre observ\u00e9es de pr\u00e8s. Une militante des droits de la femme, Fouzia Assouli, en est convaincue: des \u00e9lections locales ont lieu en juin au Maroc, rel\u00e8ve-t-elle, et le gouvernement ne veut pas donner aux islamistes de motifs de mobilisation. AFP<\/font> <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Hausse de 12% des demandes d’asile dans le monde, selon le HCR<\/strong><\/font><\/h3>\n
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ATS, le 24 mars 2009 \u00e0 11h30 Gen\u00e8ve (ats) Le nombre des demandeurs d’asile dans les pays industrialis\u00e9s a augment\u00e9 l’an dernier pour la deuxi\u00e8me ann\u00e9e cons\u00e9cutive, a affirm\u00e9 mardi le HCR. La hausse a atteint 12% d’une ann\u00e9e sur l’autre. Le Haut Commissariat de l’ONU pour les r\u00e9fugi\u00e9s (HCR) attribue cette augmentation \u00e0 la persistance de conflits arm\u00e9s. La hausse est due notamment \u00e0 un nombre plus important de demandes d’asiles d\u00e9pos\u00e9es par des citoyens afghans, somaliens ou originaires d’autres pays en proie \u00e0 des conflits ou \u00e0 des troubles, comme l’Irak et le Sri Lanka. Quelque 383000 demandes d’asile ont \u00e9t\u00e9 d\u00e9pos\u00e9es l’an dernier dans 51 pays industrialis\u00e9s. Il s’agit d’une augmentation de 12% par rapport \u00e0 2007. C’est la seconde hausse cons\u00e9cutive annuelle du nombre de demandeurs d’asile: l’ann\u00e9e 2006 avait enregistr\u00e9 le plus faible nombre de demandes d’asile depuis 20 ans (307000). Irakiens en t\u00eate Les Irakiens (40500 demandes) sont \u00e0 nouveau arriv\u00e9s en t\u00eate des demandeurs d’asile dans les pays industrialis\u00e9s. Toutefois, le nombre des demandeurs d’asile irakiens a baiss\u00e9 de 10% en 2008. Les Somaliens (21800) occupent le deuxi\u00e8me rang, avec une hausse annuelle de 71%, devant les Russes (20500), les Afghans (18500, en hausse de 85%) et les Chinois (17400). Les demandes en provenance du Zimbabwe ont augment\u00e9 de 82%, celles du Nig\u00e9ria de 71% et celles du Sri Lanka de 24%. En 2008, les Etats-Unis sont rest\u00e9s le principal pays de destination des demandeurs d’asile (49000 demandes), soit 13% de l’ensemble des demandes dans les pays industrialis\u00e9s. Suivent le Canada (36900), la France (35200), l’Italie (31200) et le Royaume- Uni (30500). Avec 16.606 demandes d\u00e9pos\u00e9es l’an dernier, la Suisse a connu une hausse de 53,1% par rapport \u00e0 2007, avec en t\u00eate de liste des Erythr\u00e9ens, Somaliens et Irakiens, selon l’Office f\u00e9d\u00e9ral des migrations (ODM). (Source : www.rsr.ch (Suisse), le 24 mars 2009)<\/font><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Paris d\u00e9bloque 10 millions EUR pour les victimes de ses essais nucl\u00e9aires<\/font><\/h3>\n
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AFP, le 24 mars 2009 \u00e0 14h03 PARIS, 24 mars 2009 (AFP) – La France a annonc\u00e9 mardi l’octroi, un demi-si\u00e8cle apr\u00e8s ses premiers essais nucl\u00e9aires dans le Sahara, d’une premi\u00e8re enveloppe d’indemnisation de 10 millions d’euros aux centaines de victimes civiles et militaires, dont le pr\u00e9judice a longtemps \u00e9t\u00e9 ni\u00e9. \u00ab\u00a0Treize ans apr\u00e8s la fin des essais dans le Pacifique et la ratification par la France du trait\u00e9 d’interdiction des essais, il \u00e9tait temps que notre pays soit en paix avec lui m\u00eame\u00a0\u00bb, a d\u00e9clar\u00e9 le ministre de la D\u00e9fense Herv\u00e9 Morin, pr\u00e9sentant lors d’une conf\u00e9rence de presse un projet de loi d’indemnisation. L’indemnisation pourrait concerner \u00ab\u00a0quelques centaines de personnes\u00a0\u00bb sur les 150.000 travailleurs civils et militaires qui y avaient particip\u00e9 de 1960 \u00e0 1996 dans le Sahara puis en Polyn\u00e9sie, a-t-il indiqu\u00e9. Il s’agira d’anciens militaires ou d’anciens employ\u00e9s civils comme ceux du Commissariat \u00e0 l’\u00e9nergie atomique (CEA), mais aussi d’Alg\u00e9riens ou de Polyn\u00e9siens qui vivaient \u00e0 proximit\u00e9 des zones d’essai, a-t-on indiqu\u00e9 au minist\u00e8re de la D\u00e9fense. Pour toutes les victimes, qui relevaient jusqu’\u00e0 pr\u00e9sent de r\u00e9gimes divers, les d\u00e9crets d’application fixeront une liste de 18 maladies (leuc\u00e9mie, cancers du sein, de la thyro\u00efde…). La liste sera calqu\u00e9e sur celle \u00e9tablie par un organisme de l’ONU, le Comit\u00e9 scientifique des Nations Unies pour l’\u00e9tude des effets des rayonnements ionisants (UNSCAER). Elle pourra toutefois \u00eatre \u00e9tendue au gr\u00e9 de l’\u00e9volution des connaissances m\u00e9dicales. Le minist\u00e8re de la D\u00e9fense reconna\u00eet plusieurs incidents dont quatre lors d’essais conduits dans des galeries au Sahara qui n’ont pas \u00e9t\u00e9 totalement confin\u00e9es, en particulier le 1er mai 1962 lorsque des retomb\u00e9es radioactives importantes avaient \u00e9t\u00e9 relev\u00e9es dans une bande de plus de 150 km. En Polyn\u00e9sie, selon la m\u00eame source, sur les 41 essais a\u00e9riens, une dizaines de retomb\u00e9es radioactives ont \u00e9t\u00e9 not\u00e9es sur les atolls environnants dont six ont eu un impact radiologique. <\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n
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Turquie\/Otan: un dirigeant du parti au pouvoir oppos\u00e9 \u00e0 la candidature de Rasmussen<\/font><\/h3>\n
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AFP, le 24 mars 2009 \u00e0 16h09 ANKARA, 24 mars 2009 (AFP) – Un dirigeant du parti au pouvoir en Turquie, pays membre de l’Otan, a exprim\u00e9 mardi son hostilit\u00e9 \u00e0 une d\u00e9signation du Premier ministre danois Anders Fogh Rasmussen \u00e0 la t\u00eate de l’Otan en raison notamment du contentieux sur les caricatures de Mahomet. \u00ab\u00a0Il est pas tr\u00e8s acceptable pour nous d’avoir \u00e0 la t\u00eate de l’Otan une personne qui manque cr\u00fbment de respect pour nos croyances religieuses et nos valeurs sacr\u00e9es\u00a0\u00bb, a d\u00e9clar\u00e9 Suat Kiniklioglu, vice-pr\u00e9sident du Parti de la justice et du d\u00e9veloppement (AKP, issu de la mouvance islamiste) \u00e0 l’agence de presse Anatolie. M. Rasmussen est \u00ab\u00a0un personnage probl\u00e9matique\u00a0\u00bb pour la Turquie, a affirm\u00e9 M. Kiniklioglu, qui est d\u00e9put\u00e9 et charg\u00e9 des affaires \u00e9trang\u00e8res au sein de sa formation. M. Kiniklioglu a notamment cit\u00e9 l’affaire des caricatures du proph\u00e8te Mahomet dont la publication par un journal danois avait suscit\u00e9 un toll\u00e9 dans le monde musulman. M. Rasmussen avait d\u00e9fendu ces dessins satiriques au nom de la libert\u00e9 d’expression. En outre, a ajout\u00e9 le responsable politique turc, M. Rasmussen s’est illustr\u00e9 par son opposition \u00e0 une adh\u00e9sion de la Turquie \u00e0 l’Union europ\u00e9enne et son refus d’interdire \u00e0 une cha\u00eene de t\u00e9l\u00e9vision pro-kurde d’\u00e9mettre depuis son pays. La Turquie ainsi que les Etats-Unis demandent de longue date \u00e0 Copenhague d’interdire Roj TV, instrumentalis\u00e9 selon Ankara par les s\u00e9paratistes du Parti des travailleurs du Kurdistan (PKK, interdit). Le Premier ministre danois semble pourtant avoir toutes les chances d’\u00eatre le prochain secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l’Otan, les Etats-Unis ayant d\u00e9cid\u00e9 de soutenir sa candidature, selon les d\u00e9clarations samedi d’un diplomate de l’Otan \u00e0 l’AFP. Le gouvernement turc du Premier ministre Recep Tayyip Erdogan n’a pas encore fait conna\u00eetre sa position officielle au sujet de la succession au poste de secr\u00e9taire g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de l’Otan pour remplacer le N\u00e9erlandais Jaap de Hoop Scheffer en juillet prochain.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ex-Turkish army chief may testify in coup plot-reports<\/strong><\/font><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Reuters,24 March 2009 13:55:46 GMT\u00a0 \u00a0ISTANBUL, March 24 (Reuters) – A former commander of Turkey’s armed forces may be asked to testify in the investigation of an alleged plot to topple Turkey’s Islamist-rooted government, Turkish media said on Tuesday. Retired General Hilmi Ozkok would be the highest-ranking officer to testify in the widening probe into the so-called Ergenekon network, a right-wing group accused of using violence that prosecutors say was aimed at destabilising Turkey, a member of NATO and a candidate for European Union membership. The military has denied any links to Ergenekon. Ozkok and his successor, retired General Yasar Buyukanit, both told Milliyet newspaper last week they were prepared to testify in the Ergenekon case if asked to by prosecutors. \u00ab\u00a0The Ergenekon prosecutor, Zekeriya Oz, has said that Ozkok’s statement may be taken in connection with the Ergenekon case,\u00a0\u00bb Hurriyet newspaper reported on its Web site, without saying how it got the information. Similar reports were carried by broadcasters NTV and CNN Turk. No one was immediately available at the Istanbul prosecutor’s office to comment on the reports. The investigation has rattled financial markets and increased tensions between the government and secularists. More than 140 people, including retired senior officers, face charges they were part of a conspiracy aimed at overthrowing Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government after it took power in 2002. Turkey’s military has overthrown three elected governments in the predominantly Muslim country in outright coups and pressured the first Islamist-led government to step down in 1997. The army has denied any links to Ergenekon. Ozkok served as chief of the General Staff from 2002 to 2006. An indictment filed by prosecutors earlier this month includes evidence from diaries allegedly belonging to Ozkok’s naval commander that outline a plot to overthrow Erdogan’s government, according to Turkish newspapers. Ozkok was the lone general to have opposed the coup plot, according to transcripts of the diaries published in the Turkish press. The former naval commander denies the diaries belonged to him. REUTERS<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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DOCUMENT EXCEPTIONNEL<\/font><\/strong>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
LE RAPPORT SECRET DU CICR (COMITE INTERNATIONAL DE LA CROIX ROUGE) SUR LA TORTURE PRATIQUEE PAR LES ETATS UNIS SUR 14 PRISONNIERS MUSULMANS A GUANTANAMO<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n
US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites<\/font><\/span><\/i><\/h4>\n
The April 9, 2009, issue of The New York Review offers first view of American torture inside secret<\/font><\/span><\/h6>\n
prisons. The United States tortured prisoners, according to a secret report on \u201cThe Black Sites\u201d by the<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC], excerpted in great detail in the new issue of The New <\/span>York Review of Books. The report, whose findings are made public here for the first time, details in specific and explicit terms the various methods and \u201cenhanced techniques\u201d the CIA used to interrogate prisoners in a secret \u201cglobal internment system\u201d set up at the direction of President George W. Bush less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The report is summarized and analyzed in a lengthy and definitive article, \u201cUS Torture: Voices from the Black Sites,\u201d by Mark Danner, a longtime contributor to The New York Review and author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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This \u201calternative set of procedures,\u201d as President Bush characterized them in a White House speech, including extended \u201csleep deprivation,\u201d prolonged forced nudity, bombarding detainees<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
with noise and light, repeated immersion in cold water, prolonged<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
standing, sometimes for many days, beatings of various kinds, and<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
\u201cwaterboarding\u201d\u2014or, as the report\u2019s authors phrase it, \u201csuffocation<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
by water.\u201d These interrogations are described in chilling first-person<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
accounts gathered confidentially by ICRC investigators and made<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
public here for the first time.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
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According to the authors of the ICRC report, \u201cin many cases, the<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
program…constituted torture.\u201d The ICRC, which is the appointed<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and the body appointed<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
to supervise the treatment of prisoners of war, speaks in this matter with the force of law. The report<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
continues: \u201cIn addition, many other elements of the illtreatment, either singly or in combination,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.\u201d Both torture and \u201ccruel, inhuman and degrading<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
treatment\u201d are forbidden by many treaties to which the United States is signatory, including the<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
The accounts of the detainees themselves, including the most prominent captured in the War on Terror, describe their detention from the time they were secretly brought to \u201cthe black sites\u201d\u2014secret prisons around the world, including in Thailand, Afghanistan, and Poland, through the interrogations using \u201cwaterboarding.\u201d beatings, and other techniques. Fourteen \u201chigh-value detainees\u201d were interviewed over many days for the report, including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and Walid bin Attash. The fourteen remain imprisoned in Guant\u00e1namo.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
These personal accounts are excerpted in great and disturbing detail in \u201cUS Torture: Voices from the<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
Black Sites.\u201d They describe daily life in the secret prisons for the first time in a publicly available<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
account. Danner, who has covered the torture story in The New York Review since 2004, reporting<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
extensively on Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War, analyzes the current debate over torture, the harm it has<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
done and continues to do to the country, and the possibility of meaningful Congressional investigations, <\/span>bipartisan \u201ctruth commissions,\u201d and perhaps prosecution of those who have tortured.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites<\/h3>\n
By Mark Danner<\/span><\/p>\n
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ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen \u00ab\u00a0High Value Detainees\u00a0\u00bb in CIA Custody<\/font><\/h3>\n<\/h3>\n
by the International Committee of the Red Cross<\/span><\/p>\n
43 pp., February 2007<\/span><\/p>\n
We need to get to the bottom of what happened\u2014and why\u2014so we make sure it never happens again.[1]<\/span><\/p>\n
\u2014Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee<\/span><\/p>\n
1.<\/span><\/p>\n
We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase \u00ab\u00a0War on Terror\u00a0\u00bb\u2014the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was \u00ab\u00a0a wartime president\u00a0\u00bb\u2014has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001\u2014decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation\u2014lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.<\/span><\/p>\n
How should we begin to talk about this? Perhaps with a story. Stories come to us newborn, announcing their intent: Once upon a time… In the beginning… From such signs we learn how to listen to what will come. Consider:<\/span><\/p>\n
I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4m x 4m [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed….<\/span><\/p>\n
A man, unnamed, naked, strapped to a bed, and for the rest, the elemental facts of space and of time, nothing but whiteness.<\/span><\/p>\n
The storyteller is very much a man of our time. Early on in the \u00ab\u00a0War on Terror,\u00a0\u00bb in the spring of 2002, he entered the dark realm of \u00ab\u00a0the disappeared\u00a0\u00bb\u2014and only four and a half years later, when he and thirteen other \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb arrived at Guant\u00e1namo and told their stories in interviews with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (reported in the confidential document listed above) did he emerge partly into the light. Indeed, he is a famous man, though his fame has followed a certain path, peculiar to our modern age: jihadist, outlaw, terrorist, \u00ab\u00a0disappeared.\u00a0\u00bb An international celebrity whose name, one of them anyway, is instantly recognizable. How many people have their lives described by the president of the United States in a nationally televised speech?<\/span><\/p>\n
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden…. Zubaydah was severely wounded during the firefight that brought him into custody\u2014and he survived only because of the medical care arranged by the CIA.^{[2]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n}
A dramatic story: big news. Wounded in a firefight in Faisalabad, Pakistan, shot in the stomach, groin, and thigh after jumping from a roof in a desperate attempt to escape. Massive bleeding. Rushed to a military hospital in Lahore. A trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins awakened by a late-night telephone call from the director of central intelligence and flown in great secrecy to the other side of the world. The wounded man barely escapes death, slowly stabilizes, is shipped secretly to a military base in Thailand. Thence to another base in Afghanistan. Or was it Afghanistan?<\/span><\/p>\n
We don’t know, not definitively. For from the moment of his dramatic capture, on March 28, 2002, the man known as Abu Zubaydah slipped from one clandestine world, that of al-Qaeda officials gone to ground in the days after September 11, into another, a \u00ab\u00a0hidden global internment network\u00a0\u00bb intended for secret detention and interrogation and set up by the Central Intelligence Agency under authority granted directly by President George W. Bush in a \u00ab\u00a0memorandum of understanding\u00a0\u00bb signed on September 17, 2001.<\/span><\/p>\n
This secret system included prisons on military bases around the world, from Thailand and Afghanistan to Morocco, Poland, and Romania\u2014\u00a0\u00bbat various times,\u00a0\u00bb reportedly, \u00ab\u00a0sites in eight countries\u00a0\u00bb\u2014into which, at one time or another, more than one hundred prisoners…disappeared.[3]<\/a><\/sup> The secret internment network of \u00ab\u00a0black sites\u00a0\u00bb had its own air force and its own distinctive \u00ab\u00a0transfer procedures,\u00a0\u00bb which were, according to the writers of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report, \u00ab\u00a0fairly standardised in most cases\u00a0\u00bb:<\/span><\/p>\n
The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees), was also administered at that moment.<\/span><\/p>\n
The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and goggles being applied….<\/span><\/p>\n
The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times…ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.<\/span><\/p>\n
One works the imagination trying to picture what it was like in this otherworldly place: blackness in place of vision. Silence\u2014or \u00ab\u00a0sometimes\u00a0\u00bb loud music\u2014in place of sounds of life. Shackles, together sometimes with gloves, in place of the chance to reach, touch, feel. One senses metal on wrist and ankle, cotton against eyes, cloth across face, shit and piss against skin. On \u00ab\u00a0some occasions detainees were transported lying flat on the floor of the plane…with their hands cuffed behind their backs,\u00a0\u00bb causing them \u00ab\u00a0severe pain and discomfort,\u00a0\u00bb as they were moved from one unknown location to another.<\/span><\/p>\n
For his part, Abu Zubaydah\u2014thirty-one years old, born Zein al-Abedeen Mohammad Hassan, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, though coming of Palestinian stock, from the Gaza Strip\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n
alleged that during one transfer operation the blindfold was tied very tightly resulting in wounds to his nose and ears. He does not know how long the transfer took but, prior to the transfer, he reported being told by his detaining authorities that he would be going on a journey that would last twenty-four to thirty hours.<\/span><\/p>\n
A long trip then: perhaps to Guant\u00e1namo? Or Morocco? Then back, apparently, to Thailand. Or was it Afghanistan? He thinks the latter but can’t be sure….<\/span><\/p>\n
2.<\/span><\/h3>\n
All classified, compartmentalized, deeply, deeply secret. And yet what is \u00ab\u00a0secret\u00a0\u00bb exactly? In our recent politics, \u00ab\u00a0secret\u00a0\u00bb has become an oddly complex word. From whom was \u00ab\u00a0the secret bombing of Cambodia\u00a0\u00bb secret? Not from the Cambodians, surely. From whom was the existence of these \u00ab\u00a0secret overseas facilities\u00a0\u00bb secret? Not from the terrorists, surely. From Americans, presumably. On the other hand, as early as 2002, anyone interested could read on the front page of one of the country’s leading newspapers:<\/span><\/p>\n
US Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations: \u00ab\u00a0Stress and Duress\u00a0\u00bb Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities<\/span><\/p>\n
Deep inside the forbidden zone at the US-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism\u2014captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders….<\/span><\/p>\n
\u00ab\u00a0If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job,\u00a0\u00bb said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. \u00ab\u00a0I don’t think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA….\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
This lengthy article, by Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, appeared in The Washington Post<\/i> on December 26, 2002, only months after the capture of Abu Zubaydah. A similarly lengthy report followed a few months later on the front page of The New York Times<\/i> (\u00ab\u00a0Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World\u00a0\u00bb). The blithe, aggressive tone of the officials quoted\u2014\u00a0\u00bbWe don’t kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them\u00a0\u00bb\u2014bespeaks a very different political temper, one in which a prominent writer in a national newsmagazine could headline his weekly column \u00ab\u00a0Time to Think About Torture,\u00a0\u00bb noting in his subtitle that in this \u00ab\u00a0new world…survival might well require old techniques that seemed out of the question.\u00a0\u00bb[4]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
So there are secrets and secrets. And when, on a bright sunny day two years ago, just before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the President of the United States strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the high officials, dignitaries, and specially invited September 11 survivor families gathered in rows before him that the United States government had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists\u2014or, in the President’s words, \u00ab\u00a0an environment where they can be held secretly [and] questioned by experts\u00a0\u00bb\u2014he was not telling a secret but instead converting a known and well-reported fact into an officially confirmed truth:<\/span><\/p>\n
In addition to the terrorists held at Guant\u00e1namo, a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency…. Many specifics of this program, including where these detainees have been held and the details of their confinement, cannot be divulged….<\/span><\/p>\n
We knew that Abu Zubaydah had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking…. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used\u2014I think you understand why….<\/span><\/p>\n
I was watching the live broadcast that day and I remember the uncanny feeling that came over me as, having heard the President explain the virtues of this \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures,\u00a0\u00bb I watched him stare straight into the camera and with fierce concentration and exaggerated emphasis intone once more: \u00ab\u00a0The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it\u2014and I will not authorize it.\u00a0\u00bb He had convinced himself, I thought, of the truth of what he said.<\/span><\/p>\n
This speech, though not much noticed at the time, will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only \u00ab\u00a0historic\u00a0\u00bb speech he ever gave. In telling his version of Abu Zubaydah’s story, and versions of the stories of Khaled Shaik Mohammed and others, the President took hold of many things that were already known but not acknowledged and, by means of the alchemical power of the leader’s voice, transformed them into acknowledged facts. He also, in his fervent defense of his government’s \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb and his equally fervent denials that they constituted \u00ab\u00a0torture,\u00a0\u00bb set out before the country and the world the dark moral epic of the Bush administration, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still. Later that month, Congress, facing the midterm elections, duly passed the President’s Military Commissions Act of 2006, which, among other things, sought to shelter from prosecution those who had applied the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb and had done so, said the President, \u00ab\u00a0in a thorough and professional way.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, President Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb were performed eventually to speak. Even as the President set out before the country his version of what had happened to Abu Zubaydah and the others and argued for its necessity, he announced that he would bring him and thirteen of his fellow \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb out of the dark world of the disappeared and into the light. Or, rather, into the twilight: the fourteen would be transferred to Guant\u00e1namo, the main acknowledged offshore prison, where\u2014\u00a0\u00bbas soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed\u00a0\u00bb\u2014they \u00ab\u00a0can face justice.\u00a0\u00bb In the meantime, though, the fourteen would be \u00ab\u00a0held in a high-security facility at Guant\u00e1namo\u00a0\u00bb and the International Committee of the Red Cross would be \u00ab\u00a0advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
A few weeks later, from October 6 to 11 and then from December 4 to 14, 2006, officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross\u2014among whose official and legally recognized duties is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war\u2014traveled to Guant\u00e1namo and began interviewing \u00ab\u00a0each of these persons in private\u00a0\u00bb in order to produce a report that would \u00ab\u00a0provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the fourteen during the period they were held in the CIA detention program,\u00a0\u00bb periods ranging \u00ab\u00a0from 16 months to almost four and a half years.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
As the ICRC interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, \u00ab\u00a0to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,\u00a0\u00bb to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them\u2014in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on February 14, 2007. Indeed, though almost all of the information in the report has names attached, and though annexes contain extended narratives drawn from interviews with three of the detainees, whose names are used, we do find a number of times in the document variations of this formula: \u00ab\u00a0One of the detainees who did not wish his name to be transmitted to the authorities alleged…\u00a0\u00bb\u2014suggesting that at least one and perhaps more than one of the fourteen, who are, after all, still \u00ab\u00a0held in a high-security facility at Guant\u00e1namo,\u00a0\u00bb worried about repercussions that might come from what he had said.<\/span><\/p>\n
In virtually all such cases, the allegations made are echoed by other, named detainees; indeed, since the detainees were kept \u00ab\u00a0in continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention\u00a0\u00bb throughout their time in \u00ab\u00a0the black sites,\u00a0\u00bb and were kept strictly separated as well when they reached Guant\u00e1namo, the striking similarity in their stories, even down to small details, would seem to make fabrication extremely unlikely, if not impossible. \u00ab\u00a0The ICRC wishes to underscore,\u00a0\u00bb as the writers tell us in the introduction, \u00ab\u00a0that the consistency of the detailed allegations provided separately by each of the fourteen adds particular weight to the information provided below.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
The result is a document\u2014labeled \u00ab\u00a0confidential\u00a0\u00bb and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials to whom the CIA’s Mr. Rizzo would show it\u2014that tells a certain kind of story, a narrative of what happened at \u00ab\u00a0the black sites\u00a0\u00bb and a detailed description, by those on whom they were practiced, of what the President of the United States described to Americans as an \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures.\u00a0\u00bb It is a document for its time, literally \u00ab\u00a0impossible to put down,\u00a0\u00bb from its opening page\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n
Contents Introduction 1. Main Elements of the CIA Detention Program 1.1 Arrest and Transfer 1.2 Continuous Solitary Confinement and Incommunicado Detention 1.3 Other Methods of Ill-treatment 1.3.1 Suffocation by water 1.3.2 Prolonged Stress Standing 1.3.3 Beatings by use of a collar 1.3.4 Beating and kicking 1.3.5 Confinement in a box 1.3.6 Prolonged nudity 1.3.7 Sleep deprivation and use of loud music 1.3.8 Exposure to cold temperature\/cold water 1.3.9 Prolonged use of handcuffs and shackles 1.3.10 Threats 1.3.11 Forced shaving 1.3.12 Deprivation\/restricted provision of solid food 1.4 Further elements of the detention regime….<\/span><\/p>\n
\u2014to its stark and unmistakable conclusion:<\/span><\/p>\n
The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.<\/span><\/p>\n
Such unflinching clarity, from the body legally charged with overseeing compliance with the Geneva Conventions\u2014in which the terms \u00ab\u00a0torture\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment\u00a0\u00bb are accorded a strictly defined legal meaning\u2014couldn’t be more significant, or indeed more welcome after years in which the President of the United States relied on the power of his office either to redefine or to obfuscate what are relatively simple words. \u00ab\u00a0This debate is occurring,\u00a0\u00bb as President Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden the week after he delivered his East Room speech,<\/span><\/p>\n
because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s like\u2014it’s very vague. What does that mean, \u00ab\u00a0outrages upon human dignity\u00a0\u00bb?[5]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
In allowing Abu Zubaydah and the other thirteen \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb to tell their own stories, this report manages to answer, with great power and authority, the President’s question.<\/span><\/p>\n
3.<\/span><\/h4>\n
We return to a man, Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian who, in his thirty-one years, has lived a life shaped by conflicts on the edge of the American consciousness: the Gaza Strip, where his parents were born; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he apparently first saw the light of day; Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, where he took part in the jihad against the Russians, perhaps with the help, directly or indirectly, of American dollars; then, post-Soviet Afghanistan, where he ran al-Qaeda logistics and recruitment, directing aspiring jihadists to the various training camps, placing them in cells after they’d been trained. The man has been captured now: traced to a safe house in Faisalabad, gravely wounded by three shots from an AK-47. He is rushed to the Faisalabad hospital, then to the military hospital at Lahore. When he opens his eyes he finds at his bedside an American, John Kiriakou of the CIA:<\/span><\/p>\n
I asked him in Arabic what his name was. And he shook his head. And I asked him again in Arabic. And then he answered me in English. And he said that he would not speak to me in God’s language. And then I said, \u00ab\u00a0That’s okay. We know who you are.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
And then he asked me to smother him with a pillow. And I said, \u00ab\u00a0No, no. We have plans for you.\u00a0\u00bb [6]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
Kiriakou and the \u00ab\u00a0small group of CIA and FBI people who just kept 24\/7 eyes on him\u00a0\u00bb knew that in Abu Zubaydah they had \u00ab\u00a0the biggest fish that we had caught. We knew he was full of information…and we wanted to get it.\u00a0\u00bb According to Kiriakou, on a table in the house where they found him \u00ab\u00a0Abu Zubaydah and two other men were building a bomb. The soldering [iron] was still hot. And they had plans for a school on the table….\u00a0\u00bb The plans, Kiriakou told ABC News correspondent Brian Ross, were for the British school in Lahore. Their prisoner, they knew, was \u00ab\u00a0very current. On top of the current threat information.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
With the help of the American trauma surgeon, Abu Zubaydah’s captors nursed him back to health. He was moved at least twice, first, reportedly, to Thailand; then, he believes, to Afghanistan, probably Bagram. In a safe house in Thailand the interrogation began:<\/span><\/p>\n
I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by [the] hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go [to] the toilet, which consisted of a bucket. Water for cleaning myself was provided in a plastic bottle.<\/span><\/p>\n
I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.<\/span><\/p>\n
The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.<\/span><\/p>\n
The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.<\/span><\/p>\n
During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face.<\/span><\/p>\n
A naked man chained in a small, very cold, very white room is for several days strapped to a bed, then for several weeks shackled to a chair, bathed unceasingly in white light, bombarded constantly with loud sound, deprived of food; and whenever, despite cold, light, noise, hunger, the hours and days force his eyelids down, cold water is sprayed in his face to force them up.<\/span><\/p>\n
One can translate these procedures into terms of art: \u00ab\u00a0Change of Scenery Down.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Removal of Clothing.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Use of Stress Positions.\u00a0\u00bb <\/span>\u00ab\u00a0Dietary Manipulation.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Environmental Manipulation.\u00a0\u00bb <\/span>\u00ab\u00a0Sleep Adjustment.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Isolation.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Sleep Deprivation.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0Use of Noise to Induce Stress.\u00a0\u00bb All these terms and many others can be found, for example, in documents associated with the debate about interrogation and \u00ab\u00a0counter-resistance\u00a0\u00bb carried on by Pentagon and Justice Department officials beginning in 2002. Here, however, we find a different standard: the Working Group says, for example, that \u00ab\u00a0Sleep Deprivation\u00a0\u00bb is \u00ab\u00a0not to exceed 4 days in succession,\u00a0\u00bb that \u00ab\u00a0Dietary Manipulation\u00a0\u00bb should include \u00ab\u00a0no intended deprivation of food or water,\u00a0\u00bb that \u00ab\u00a0removal of clothing,\u00a0\u00bb while \u00ab\u00a0creating a feeling of helplessness and dependence,\u00a0\u00bb must be \u00ab\u00a0monitored to ensure the environmental conditions are such that this technique does not injure the detainee.\u00a0\u00bb [7]<\/a><\/sup> Here we are in a different place.<\/span><\/p>\n
But what place? Abu Zubaydah was not only the \u00ab\u00a0biggest fish that we had caught\u00a0\u00bb but the first big fish. According to Kiriakou, Zubaydah, as he recovered, had \u00ab\u00a0wanted to talk about current events. He told us a couple of times that he had nothing personal against the United States…. He said that 9\/11 was necessary. That although he didn’t think that there would be such a massive loss of life, his view was that 9\/11 was supposed to be a wake-up call to the United States.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
In those initial weeks of healing, before the white room and the chair and the light, Zubaydah seems to have talked freely with his captors, and during this time, according to news reports, FBI agents began to question him using \u00ab\u00a0standard interview techniques,\u00a0\u00bb ensuring that he was bathed and his bandages changed, urging improved medical care, and trying to \u00ab\u00a0convince him they knew details of his activities.\u00a0\u00bb (They showed him, for example, a \u00ab\u00a0box of blank audiotapes which they said contained recordings of his phone conversations, but were actually empty.\u00a0\u00bb) According to this account, Abu Zubaydah, in the initial days before the white room, \u00ab\u00a0began to provide intelligence insights into Al Qaeda.\u00a0\u00bb [8]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
Or did he? \u00ab\u00a0How Good Is Abu Zubaydah’s Information?\u00a0\u00bb asked a Newsweek<\/i> \u00ab\u00a0Web exclusive\u00a0\u00bb on April 27, 2002, less than a month after his capture. The extreme secrecy and isolation in which Abu Zubaydah was being held, at a location unknown to him and to all but a tiny handful of government officials, did not prevent his \u00ab\u00a0information\u00a0\u00bb being leaked from that unknown place directly into the American press\u2014in the cause, apparently, of a bureaucratic struggle between the FBI and the CIA. Even Americans who were not following closely the battling leaks from Zubaydah’s interrogation would have found their lives affected, whether they knew it or not, by what was happening in that faraway white room; for about the same time the Bush administration saw fit to issue two \u00ab\u00a0domestic terrorism warnings,\u00a0\u00bb derived from Abu Zubaydah’s \u00ab\u00a0tips\u00a0\u00bb\u2014about \u00ab\u00a0possible attacks on banks or financial institutions in the Northeastern United States\u00a0\u00bb and possible \u00ab\u00a0attacks on US supermarkets and shopping malls.\u00a0\u00bb AsNewsweek<\/i> learned from a \u00ab\u00a0senior US official,\u00a0\u00bb presumably from the FBI\u2014whose \u00ab\u00a0standard interview techniques\u00a0\u00bb had produced that information and the \u00ab\u00a0domestic terrorism warnings\u00a0\u00bb based on it\u2014the prisoner was \u00ab\u00a0providing detailed information for the ‘fight against terrorism.'\u00a0\u00bb At the same time, however, \u00ab\u00a0US intelligence sources\u00a0\u00bb\u2014presumably CIA\u2014\u00a0\u00bbwonder whether he’s trying to mislead investigators or frighten the American public.\u00a0\u00bb[9]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
For his part, John Kiriakou, the CIA man, told ABC News that in those early weeks Zubaydah was \u00ab\u00a0willing to talk about philosophy, [but] he was unwilling to give us any actionable intelligence.\u00a0\u00bb The CIA officers had the \u00ab\u00a0sweeping classified directive signed by Mr. Bush,\u00a0\u00bb giving them authority to \u00ab\u00a0capture, detain and interrogate terrorism suspects,\u00a0\u00bb and Zubaydah was \u00ab\u00a0a test case for an evolving new role,…in which the agency was to act as jailer and interrogator of terrorism suspects.\u00a0\u00bb Eventually a team from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center was \u00ab\u00a0sent in from Langley\u00a0\u00bb and the FBI interrogators were withdrawn.<\/span><\/p>\n
We had these trained interrogators who were sent to his location to use the enhanced techniques as necessary to get him to open up, and to report some threat information…. These enhanced techniques included everything from what was called an attention shake, where you grab the person by their lapels and shake them, all the way up to the other end, which is waterboarding.<\/span><\/p>\n
They began, apparently, by shackling him to the chair, and applying light, noise, and water to keep him awake. After two or three weeks of this Abu Zubaydah, still naked and shackled, was allowed to lie on the bare floor and to \u00ab\u00a0sleep a little.\u00a0\u00bb He was also given solid food\u2014rice\u2014for the first time. Eventually a doctor, a woman, came and examined him, and \u00ab\u00a0asked why I was still naked.\u00a0\u00bb The next day he was \u00ab\u00a0provided with orange clothes to wear.\u00a0\u00bb The following day, however, \u00ab\u00a0guards came into my cell. They told me to stand up and raise my arms above my head. They then cut the clothes off of me so that I was again naked and put me back on the chair for several days. I tried to sleep on the chair, but was again kept awake by the guards spraying water in my face.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
What follows is a confusing period, in which harsh treatment alternated with more lenient. Zubaydah was mostly naked and cold, \u00ab\u00a0sometimes with the air conditioning adjusted so that, one official said, Mr. Zubayah seemed to turn blue.\u00a0\u00bb [10]<\/a><\/sup> Sometimes clothing would be brought, then removed the next day. \u00ab\u00a0When my interrogators had the impression that I was cooperating and providing the information they required, the clothes were given back to me. When they felt I was being less cooperative the clothes were again removed and I was again put back on the chair.\u00a0\u00bb At one point he was supplied with a mattress, at another he was \u00ab\u00a0allowed some tissue paper to use when going to toilet on the bucket.\u00a0\u00bb A month passed with no questioning. \u00ab\u00a0My cell was still very cold and the loud music no longer played but there was a constant loud hissing or crackling noise, which played twenty-four hours a day. I tried to block out the noise by putting tissue in my ears.\u00a0\u00bb Then, \u00ab\u00a0about two and half or three months after I arrived in this place, the interrogation began again, but with more intensity than before.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
It is difficult to know whether these alterations in attitude and procedure were intended, meant to keep the detainee off-guard, or resulted from disputes about strategy among the interrogators, who were relying on a hastily assembled \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb that had been improvised from various sources, including scientists and psychiatrists within the intelligence community, experts from other, \u00ab\u00a0friendly\u00a0\u00bb governments, and consultants who had worked with the US military and now \u00ab\u00a0reverse-engineered\u00a0\u00bb the resistance training taught to American elite forces to help them withstand interrogation after capture. The forerunners of some of the theories being applied in these interrogations, involving sensory deprivation, disorientation, guilt and shame, so-called \u00ab\u00a0learned helplessness,\u00a0\u00bb and the need to induce \u00ab\u00a0the debility-dependence-dread state,\u00a0\u00bb can be found in CIA documents dating back nearly a half-century, such as this from a notorious \u00ab\u00a0counterintelligence interrogation\u00a0\u00bb manual of the early 1960s:<\/span><\/p>\n
The circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring, and of being plunged into the strange…. Control of the source’s environment permits the interrogator to determine his diet, sleep pattern and other fundamentals. Manipulating these into irregularities, so that the subject becomes disorientated, is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness.[11]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
A later version of the same manual emphasizes the importance of guilt: \u00ab\u00a0If the ‘questioner’ can intensify these guilt feelings, it will increase the subject’s anxiety and his urge to cooperate as a means of escape.\u00a0\u00bb Isolation and sensory deprivation will \u00ab\u00a0induce regression\u00a0\u00bb and the \u00ab\u00a0loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man,\u00a0\u00bb while the imposition of \u00ab\u00a0stress positions\u00a0\u00bb that in effect force the subject \u00ab\u00a0to harm himself\u00a0\u00bb will produce a guilt leading to an irresistible desire to cooperate with his interrogators.<\/span><\/p>\n
4.<\/span><\/h4>\n
Two and a half months after Abu Zubaydah woke up strapped to a bed in the white room, the interrogation resumed \u00ab\u00a0with more intensity than before\u00a0\u00bb:<\/span><\/p>\n
Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area [3 1\/2 by 2 1\/2 feet by 6 1\/2 feet high]. The other was shorter, perhaps only [3 1\/2 feet] in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face….<\/span><\/p>\n
I was then put into the tall black box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…. They put a cloth or cover over the outside of the box to cut out the light and restrict my air supply. It was difficult to breathe. When I was let out of the box I saw that one of the walls of the room had been covered with plywood sheeting. From now on it was against this wall that I was then smashed with the towel around my neck. I think that the plywood was put there to provide some absorption of the impact of my body. The interrogators realized that smashing me against the hard wall would probably quickly result in physical injury.<\/span><\/p>\n
One is reminded here that Abu Zubaydah was not alone with his interrogators, that everyone in that white room\u2014guards, interrogators, doctor\u2014was in fact linked directly, and almost constantly, to senior intelligence officials on the other side of the world. \u00ab\u00a0It wasn’t up to individual interrogators to decide, ‘Well, I’m gonna slap him. Or I’m going to shake him. Or I’m gonna make him stay up for 48 hours,\u00a0\u00bb said John Kiriakou.<\/span><\/p>\n
Each one of these steps…had to have the approval of the Deputy Director for Operations. So before you laid a hand on him, you had to send in the cable saying, \u00ab\u00a0He’s uncooperative. Request permission to do X.\u00a0\u00bb And that permission would come…. The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific. And the bottom line was these were very unusual authorities that the agency got after 9\/11. No one wanted to mess them up. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard.\u2026 No one wanted to be the guy who accidentally did lasting damage to a prisoner.<\/span><\/p>\n
Smashing against hard walls before Zubaydah enters the tall black coffin-like box; sudden appearance of plywood sheeting affixed to the wall for him to be smashed against when he emerges. Perhaps the deputy director of operations, pondering the matter in his Langley, Virginia, office, suggested the plywood?<\/span><\/p>\n
Or perhaps it was someone higher up? Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers \u00ab\u00a0briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee,\u00a0\u00bb including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who \u00ab\u00a0then signed off on the [interrogation] plan.\u00a0\u00bb At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a \u00ab\u00a0golden shield\u00a0\u00bb from the Justice Department\u2014the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous \u00ab\u00a0torture memorandum,\u00a0\u00bb written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002, which claimed that for an \u00ab\u00a0alternative procedure\u00a0\u00bb to be considered torture, and thus illegal, it would have to cause pain of the sort \u00ab\u00a0that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body function will likely result.\u00a0\u00bb The \u00ab\u00a0golden shield\u00a0\u00bb presumably would protect CIA officers from prosecution. Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees\u2014\u00a0\u00bbwhether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning\u00a0\u00bb\u2014in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that \u00ab\u00a0some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.\u00a0\u00bb At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, \u00ab\u00a0Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.\u00a0\u00bb [12]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
We do not know if the plywood appeared in Zubaydah’s white room thanks to orders from his interrogators, from their bosses at Langley, or perhaps from their superiors in the White House. We don’t know the precise parts played by those responsible for \u00ab\u00a0choreographing\u00a0\u00bb the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures.\u00a0\u00bb We do know from several reports that at a White House meeting in July 2002 top administration lawyers gave the CIA \u00ab\u00a0the green light\u00a0\u00bb to move to the \u00ab\u00a0more aggressive techniques\u00a0\u00bb that were applied to him, separately and in combination, during the following days:<\/span><\/p>\n
After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds. The stress on my legs held in this position meant my wounds both in the leg and stomach became very painful. I think this occurred about 3 months after my last operation. It was always cold in the room, but when the cover was placed over the box it made it hot and sweaty inside. The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.<\/span><\/p>\n
I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited. The bed was then again lowered to horizontal position and the same torture carried out again with the black cloth over my face and water poured on from a bottle. On this occasion my head was in a more backward, downwards position and the water was poured on for a longer time. I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.<\/span><\/p>\n
I was then placed again in the tall box. While I was inside the box loud music was played again and somebody kept banging repeatedly on the box from the outside. I tried to sit down on the floor, but because of the small space the bucket with urine tipped over and spilt over me…. I was then taken out and again a towel was wrapped around my neck and I was smashed into the wall with the plywood covering and repeatedly slapped in the face by the same two interrogators as before.<\/span><\/p>\n
I was then made to sit on the floor with a black hood over my head until the next session of torture began. The room was always kept very cold.<\/span><\/p>\n
This went on for approximately one week. During this time the whole procedure was repeated five times. On each occasion, apart from one, I was suffocated once or twice and was put in the vertical position on the bed in between. On one occasion the suffocation was repeated three times. I vomited each time I was put in the vertical position between the suffocation.<\/span><\/p>\n
During that week I was not given any solid food. I was only given Ensure to drink. My head and beard were shaved everyday.<\/span><\/p>\n
I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.<\/span><\/p>\n
I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.<\/span><\/p>\n
5.<\/span><\/h4>\n
All evidence from the ICRC report suggests that Abu Zubaydah’s informant was telling him the truth: he was the first, and, as such, a guinea pig. Some techniques are discarded. The coffin-like black boxes, for example, barely large enough to contain a man, one six feet tall and the other scarcely more than three feet, which seem to recall the sensory-deprivation tanks used in early CIA-sponsored experiments, do not reappear. Neither does the \u00ab\u00a0long-time sitting\u00a0\u00bb\u2014the weeks shackled to a chair\u2014that Abu Zubaydah endured in his first few months.<\/span><\/p>\n
Nudity, on the other hand, is a constant in the ICRC report, as are permanent shackling, the \u00ab\u00a0cold cell,\u00a0\u00bb and the unceasing loud music or noise. Sometimes there is twenty-four-hour light, sometimes constant darkness. Beatings, also, and smashing against the walls seem to be favored procedures; often, the interrogators wear gloves.<\/span><\/p>\n
In later interrogations new techniques emerge, of which \u00ab\u00a0long-time standing\u00a0\u00bb and the use of cold water are notable. Walid Bin Attash, a Yemeni national involved with planning the attacks on the US embassies in Africa in 1998 and on the USS Cole<\/i> in 2000, was captured in Karachi on April 29, 2003:<\/span><\/p>\n
On arrival at the place of detention in Afghanistan I was stripped naked. I remained naked for the next two weeks. I was put in a cell measuring approximately [3 1\/2 by 6 1\/2 feet]. I was kept in a standing position, feet flat on the floor, but with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal bar running across the width of the cell. The cell was dark with no light, artificial or natural.<\/span><\/p>\n
During the first two weeks I did not receive any food. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. A guard would come and hold the bottle for me while I drank…. The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell…. I was not allowed to clean myself after using the bucket. Loud music was playing twenty-four hours each day throughout the three weeks I was there.<\/span><\/p>\n
This \u00ab\u00a0forced standing,\u00a0\u00bb with arms shackled above the head, a favorite Soviet technique ( stoika<\/i> ) that seems to have become standard procedure after Abu Zubaydah, proved especially painful for Bin Attash, who had lost a leg fighting in Afghanistan:<\/span><\/p>\n
After some time being held in this position my stump began to hurt so I removed my artificial leg to relieve the pain. Of course my good leg then began to ache and soon started to give way so that I was left hanging with all my weight on my wrists. I shouted for help but at first nobody came. Finally, after about one hour a guard came and my artificial leg was given back to me and I was again placed in the standing position with my hands above my head. After that the interrogators sometimes deliberately removed my artificial leg in order to add extra stress to the position….<\/span><\/p>\n
By his account, Bin Attash was kept in this position for two weeks\u2014\u00a0\u00bbapart [from] two or three times when I was allowed to lie down.\u00a0\u00bb Though \u00ab\u00a0the methods used were specifically designed not to leave marks,\u00a0\u00bb the cuffs eventually \u00ab\u00a0cut into my wrists and made wounds. When this happened the doctor would be called.\u00a0\u00bb At a second location, where Bin Attash was again stripped naked and placed \u00ab\u00a0in a standing position with my arms above my head and fixed with handcuffs and a chain to a metal ring in the ceiling,\u00a0\u00bb a doctor examined his lower leg every day\u2014\u00a0\u00bbusing a tape measure for signs of swelling.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
I do not remember for exactly how many days I was kept standing, but I think it was about ten days…. During the standing I was made to wear a diaper. However, on some occasions the diaper was not replaced and so I had to urinate and defecate over myself. I was washed down with cold water everyday.<\/span><\/p>\n
Cold water was used on Bin Attash in combination with beatings and the use of a plastic collar, which seems to have been a refinement of the towel that had been looped around Abu Zubaydah’s neck:<\/span><\/p>\n
Every day for the first two weeks I was subjected to slaps to my face and punches to my body during interrogation. This was done by one interrogator wearing gloves….<\/span><\/p>\n
Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room. It was also placed around my neck when being taken out of my cell for interrogation and was used to lead me along the corridor. It was also used to slam me against the walls of the corridor during such movements.<\/span><\/p>\n
Also on a daily basis during the first two weeks I was made to lie on a plastic sheet placed on the floor which would then be lifted at the edges. Cold water was then poured onto my body with buckets…. I would be kept wrapped inside the sheet with the cold water for several minutes. I would then be taken for interrogation….<\/span><\/p>\n
Bin Attash notes that in the \u00ab\u00a0second place of detention\u00a0\u00bb\u2014where he was put in the diaper\u2014\u00a0\u00bbthey were rather more sophisticated than in Afghanistan because they had a hose-pipe with which to pour the water over me.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
6.<\/span><\/h4>\n
A clear method emerges from these accounts, based on forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of sleep and food, and repeated beatings and \u00ab\u00a0smashings\u00a0\u00bb\u2014though from this basic model one can see the method evolve, from forced sitting to forced standing, for example, and acquire new elements, like immersion in cold water.<\/span><\/p>\n
Khaled Shaik Mohammed, the key planner of the September 11 attacks who was captured in Rawalpindi on March 1, 2003\u2014nine of the fourteen \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb were apprehended in Pakistan\u2014and, after a two-day detention in Pakistan during which he alleges that a \u00ab\u00a0CIA agent…punched him several times in the stomach, chest and face [and]…threw him on the floor and trod on his face,\u00a0\u00bb was sent to Afghanistan using the standard \u00ab\u00a0transfer procedures.\u00a0\u00bb (\u00ab\u00a0My eyes were covered with a cloth tied around my head and with a cloth bag pulled over it. A suppository was inserted into my rectum. I was not told what the suppository was for.\u00a0\u00bb) In Afghanistan, he was stripped and placed in a small cell, where he \u00ab\u00a0was kept in a standing position with my hands cuffed and chained to a bar above my head. My feet were flat on the floor.\u00a0\u00bb After about an hour,<\/span><\/p>\n
I was taken to another room where I was made to stand on tiptoes for about two hours during questioning. Approximately thirteen persons were in the room. These included the head interrogator (a man) and two female interrogators, plus about ten muscle guys wearing masks. I think they were all Americans. From time to time one of the muscle guys would punch me in the chest and stomach.<\/span><\/p>\n
These \u00ab\u00a0full-dress\u00a0\u00bb interrogations\u2014where the detainee stands naked, on tiptoe, amid a crowd of thirteen people, including \u00ab\u00a0ten muscle guys wearing masks\u00a0\u00bb\u2014were periodically interrupted by the detainee’s removal to a separate room for additional procedures:<\/span><\/p>\n
Here cold water from buckets was thrown onto me for about forty minutes. Not constantly as it took time to refill the buckets. After which I would be taken back to the interrogation room.<\/span><\/p>\n
On one occasion during the interrogation I was offered water to drink, when I refused I was again taken to another room where I was made to lie [on] the floor with three persons holding me down. A tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside. Afterwards I wanted to go to the toilet as I had a feeling as if I had diarrhoea. No toilet access was provided until four hours later when I was given a bucket to use.<\/span><\/p>\n
Whenever I was returned to my cell I was always kept in the standing position with my hands cuffed and chained to a bar above my head.<\/span><\/p>\n
After three days in what he believes was Afghanistan, Mohammed was again dressed in a tracksuit, blindfold, hood, and headphones, and shackled and placed aboard a plane \u00ab\u00a0sitting, leaning back, with my hands and ankles shackled in a high chair.\u00a0\u00bb He quickly fell asleep\u2014\u00a0\u00bbthe first proper sleep in over five days\u00a0\u00bb\u2014and remains unsure of how long the journey took. On arrival, however, he realized he had come a long way:<\/span><\/p>\n
I could see at one point there was snow on the ground. Everybody was wearing black, with masks and army boots, like Planet-X people. I think the country was Poland. I think this because on one occasion a water bottle was brought to me without the label removed. It had [an] e-mail address ending in \u00ab\u00a0.pl.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
He was stripped and put in a small cell \u00ab\u00a0with cameras where I was later informed by an interrogator that I was monitored 24 hours a day by a doctor, psychologist and interrogator.\u00a0\u00bb He believes the cell was underground because one had to descend steps to reach it. Its walls were of wood and it measured about ten by thirteen feet.<\/span><\/p>\n
It was in this place, according to Mohammed, that \u00ab\u00a0the most intense interrogation occurred, led by three experienced CIA interrogators, all over 65 years old and all strong and well trained.\u00a0\u00bb They informed him that they had received the \u00ab\u00a0green light from Washington\u00a0\u00bb to give him \u00a0\u00bb a hard time<\/i>.\u00a0\u00bb \u00ab\u00a0They never used the word ‘torture’ and never referred to ‘physical pressure,’ only to ‘ a hard time.<\/i> ‘ I was never threatened with death, in fact I was told that they would not allow me to die, but that I would be brought to the ‘ verge of death and back again<\/i>.'\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
I was kept for one month in the cell in a standing position with my hands cuffed and shackled above my head and my feet cuffed and shackled to a point in the floor. Of course during this month I fell asleep on some occasions while still being held in this position. This resulted in all my weight being applied to the handcuffs around my wrist resulting in open and bleeding wounds. [Scars consistent with this allegation were visible on both wrists as well as on both ankles.] Both my feet became very swollen after one month of almost continual standing.[13]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
For interrogation, Mohammed was taken to a different room. The sessions last for as long as eight hours and as short as four.<\/span><\/p>\n
The number of people present varied greatly from one day to another. Other interrogators, including women, were also sometimes present…. A doctor was usually also present. If I was perceived not to be cooperating I would be put against a wall and punched and slapped in the body, head and face. A thick flexible plastic collar would also be placed around my neck so that it could then be held at the two ends by a guard who would use it to slam me repeatedly against the wall. The beatings were combined with the use of cold water, which was poured over me using a hose-pipe. The beatings and use of cold water occurred on a daily basis during the first month.<\/span><\/p>\n
Like Abu Zubaydah; like Abdelrahim Hussein Abdul Nashiri, a Saudi who was captured in Dubai in October 2002, Mohammed was also subjected to waterboarding, by his account on five occasions:<\/span><\/p>\n
I would be strapped to a special bed, which could be rotated into a vertical position. A cloth would be placed over my face. Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe…. The cloth was then removed and the bed was put into a vertical position. The whole process was then repeated during about one hour. Injuries to my ankles and wrists also occurred during the water-boarding as I struggled in the panic of not being able to breath. Female interrogators were also present…and a doctor was always present, standing out of sight behind the head of [the] bed, but I saw him when he came to fix a clip to my finger which was connected to a machine. I think it was to measure my pulse and oxygen content in my blood. So they could take me to [the] breaking point.<\/span><\/p>\n
As with Zubaydah, the harshest sessions of interrogation involved the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb used in sequence and in combination, one technique intensifying the effects of the others:<\/span><\/p>\n
The beatings became worse and I had cold water directed at me from a hose-pipe by guards while I was still in my cell. The worst day was when I was beaten for about half an hour by one of the interrogators. My head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed. Cold water was poured over my head. This was then repeated with other interrogators. Finally I was taken for a session of water boarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor. I was allowed to sleep for about one hour and then put back in my cell standing with my hands shackled above my head.<\/span><\/p>\n
Reading the ICRC report, one becomes eventually somewhat inured to the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb as they are described: the cold and repeated violence grows numbing. Against this background, the descriptions of daily life of the detainees in the black sites, in which interrogation seems merely a periodic heightening of consistently imposed brutality, become more striking. Here again is Mohammed:<\/span><\/p>\n
After each session of torture I was put into a cell where I was allowed to lie on the floor and could sleep for a few minutes. However, due to shackles on my ankles and wrists I was never able to sleep very well….The toilet consisted of a bucket in the cell, which I could use on request [he was shackled standing, his hands affixed to the ceiling], but I was not allowed to clean myself after toilet during the first month…. During the first month I was not provided with any food apart from on two occasions as a reward for perceived cooperation. I was given Ensure to drink every 4 hours. If I refused to drink then my mouth was forced open by the guard and it was poured down my throat by force…. At the time of my arrest I weighed 78kg. After one month in detention I weighed 60kg.<\/span><\/p>\n
I wasn’t given any clothes for the first month. Artificial light was on 24 hours a day, but I never saw sunlight.<\/span><\/p>\n
7.<\/span><\/h4>\n
Q<\/span><\/i> : Mr. President,…this is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?<\/span><\/p>\n
President George W. Bush<\/span><\/i> : Look, I’m going to say it one more time…. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We’re a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws, and that might provide comfort for you.<\/span><\/p>\n
\u2014Sea Island, Georgia, June 10, 2004<\/span><\/p>\n
Abu Zubaydah, Walid Bin Attash, Khaled Shaik Mohammed\u2014these men almost certainly have blood on their hands, a great deal of blood. There is strong reason to believe that they had critical parts in planning and organizing terrorist operations that caused the deaths of thousands of people. So in all likelihood did the other twelve \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb whose treatment while secretly confined by agents of the US government is described with such gruesome particularity in the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross. From everything we know, many or all of these men deserve to be tried and punished\u2014to be \u00ab\u00a0brought to justice,\u00a0\u00bb as President Bush, in his speech to the American people on September 6, 2006, vowed they would be.<\/span><\/p>\n
It seems unlikely that they will be brought to justice anytime soon. In mid-January, Susan J. Crawford, who had been appointed by the Bush administration to decide which Guant\u00e1namo detainees should be tried before military commissions, declined to refer to trial Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was to have been among the September 11 hijackers but who had been turned back by immigration officials at Orlando International Airport. After he was captured in Afghanistan in late 2002, Qahtani was imprisoned in Guant\u00e1namo and interrogated by Department of Defense intelligence officers. Crawford, a retired judge and former general counsel of the army, told TheWashington Post<\/i> that she had concluded that Qahtani’s \u00ab\u00a0treatment met the legal definition of torture.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent….<\/span><\/p>\n
You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive.[14]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
Qahtani’s interrogation at Guant\u00e1namo, accounts of which have appeared in Time<\/i> and The Washington Post<\/i>, was intense and prolonged, stretching for fifty consecutive days beginning in the late fall of 2002, and led to his hospitalization on at least two occasions. Some of the techniques used, including longtime sitting in restraints, prolonged exposure to cold, loud music, and noise, and sleep deprivation, recall those described in the ICRC report. If the \u00ab\u00a0coercive\u00a0\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0abusive\u00a0\u00bb interrogation of Qahtani makes trying him impossible, one may doubt that any of the fourteen \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb whose accounts are given in this report will ever be tried and sentenced in an internationally recognized and sanctioned legal proceeding.<\/span><\/p>\n
In the case of men who have committed great crimes, this seems to mark perhaps the most important and consequential sense in which \u00ab\u00a0torture doesn’t work.\u00a0\u00bb The use of torture deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice. Torture in effect relinquishes this sacred right in exchange for speculative benefits whose value is, at the least, much disputed. John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who witnessed part of Zubaydah’s interrogation, described to Brian Ross of ABC News what happened after Zubaydah was waterboarded:<\/span><\/p>\n
He resisted. He was able to withstand the water boarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds…. And a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate because his cooperation would make it easier on the other brothers who had been captured. And from that day on he answered every question just like I’m sitting here speaking to you…. The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.<\/span><\/p>\n
This claim, echoed by President Bush in his speech, is a matter of fierce dispute. Bush’s public version, indeed, was much more carefully circumscribed: among other things, that Zubaydah’s information confirmed the alias (\u00ab\u00a0Muktar\u00a0\u00bb) of Khaled Shaik Mohammed, and thus helped lead to his capture; that it helped lead, indirectly, to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who was another key figure in planning the September 11 attacks; and that it \u00ab\u00a0helped us stop another planned attack within the United States.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
At least some of this information, apparently, came during the early, noncoercive interrogation led by FBI agents. Later, according to the reporter Ron Suskind, Zubaydah<\/span><\/p>\n
named countless targets inside the US to stop the pain, all of them immaterial. Indeed, think back to the sudden slew of alerts in the spring and summer of 2002 about attacks on apartment buildings, banks, shopping malls and, of course, nuclear plants.<\/span><\/p>\n
Suskind is only the most prominent of a number of reporters with strong sources in the intelligence community who argue that the importance of the intelligence Zubaydah supplied, and indeed his importance within al-Qaeda, have been grossly and systematically exaggerated by government officials, from President Bush on down.[15]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
Though it seems highly unlikely that Zubaydah’s information stopped \u00ab\u00a0maybe dozens of attacks,\u00a0\u00bb as Kiriakou said, the plain fact is that it is impossible, until a thorough investigation can be undertaken of the interrogations, to evaluate fully and fairly what intelligence the United States actually received in return for all the severe costs, practical, political, legal, and moral, the country incurred by instituting a policy of torture. There is a sense in which the entire debate over what Zubaydah did or did not provide, and the attacks the information might or might not have prevented\u2014a debate driven largely by leaks by fiercely self-interested parties\u2014itself reflects an unvoiced acceptance, on both sides, of the centrality of the mythical \u00ab\u00a0ticking-bomb scenario\u00a0\u00bb so beloved of those who argue that torture is necessary, and so prized by the writers of television dramas like 24<\/i>. That is, the argument centers on whether Zubaydah’s interrogation directly \u00ab\u00a0disrupted a number of attacks.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
Perhaps unwittingly, Kiriakou is most revealing about the intelligence value of interrogation of \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees\u00a0\u00bb when he discusses what the CIA actually got from Zubaydah:<\/span><\/p>\n
What he was able to provide was information on the al-Qaeda leadership. For example, if bin Laden were to do X, who would be the person to undertake such and such an operation? \u00ab\u00a0Oh, logically that would be Mr. Y.\u00a0\u00bb And we were able to use that information to kind of get an idea of how al-Qaeda operated, how it came about conceptualizing its operations, and how it went about tasking different cells with carrying out operations…. His value was, it allowed us to have somebody who we could pass ideas onto for his comments or analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n
This has the ring of truth, for this is how intelligence works\u2014by the patient accruing of individual pieces of information, by building a picture that will help officers make sense of the other intelligence they receive. Could such \u00ab\u00a0comments or analysis\u00a0\u00bb from a high al-Qaeda operative eventually help lead to the disruption of \u00ab\u00a0a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks\u00a0\u00bb? It seems possible\u2014but if it did, the chain of cause and effect might not be direct, certainly not nearly so direct as the dramatic scenarios in newspapers and television dramas\u2014and presidential speeches\u2014suggest. The ticking bomb, about to explode and kill thousands or millions; the evil captured terrorist who alone has the information to find and disarm it; the desperate intelligence operative, forced to do whatever is necessary to gain that information\u2014all these elements are well known and emotionally powerful, but where they appear most frequently is in popular entertainment, not in white rooms in Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n
There is a reverse side, of course, to the \u00ab\u00a0ticking bomb\u00a0\u00bb and torture: pain and ill-treatment, by creating an unbearable pressure on the detainee to say something, anything, to make the pain stop, increase the likelihood that he will fabricate stories, and waste time, or worse. At least some of the intelligence that came of the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures,\u00a0\u00bb like Zubaydah’s supposed \u00ab\u00a0information\u00a0\u00bb about attacks on shopping malls and banks, seems to have led the US government to issue what turned out to be baseless warnings to Americans. Khaled Shaik Mohammed asserted this directly in his interviews with the ICRC. \u00ab\u00a0During the harshest period of my interrogation,\u00a0\u00bb he said,<\/span><\/p>\n
I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop…. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent…wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.<\/span><\/p>\n
For all the talk of ticking bombs, very rarely, if ever, have officials been able to point to information gained by interrogating prisoners with \u00ab\u00a0enhanced techniques\u00a0\u00bb that enabled them to prevent an attack that had reached its \u00ab\u00a0operational stage\u00a0\u00bb (that is, had gone beyond reconnoitering and planning). Still, widespread perception that such techniques have prevented attacks, actively encouraged by the President and other officials, has been politically essential in letting the administration carry on with these policies after they had largely become public. Polls tend to show that a majority of Americans are willing to support torture only when they are assured that it will \u00ab\u00a0thwart a terrorist attack.\u00a0\u00bb Because of the political persuasiveness of such scenarios it is vital that a future inquiry truly investigate claims that attacks have been prevented.<\/span><\/p>\n
As I write, it is impossible to know what benefits\u2014in intelligence, in national security, in disrupting al-Qaeda\u2014the President’s approval of use of an \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb might have brought to the United States. What we can say definitively is that the decision has harmed American interests in quite demonstrable ways. Some are practical and specific: for example, FBI agents, many of them professionals with great experience and skill in interrogation, were withdrawn, apparently after objections by the bureau’s leaders, when it was decided to use the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb on Abu Zubaydah. Extensive leaks to the press, from both officials supportive of and critical of the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures,\u00a0\u00bb undermined what was supposed to be a highly secret program; those leaks, in large part a product of the great controversy the program provoked within the national security bureaucracy, eventually helped make it unsustainable.<\/span><\/p>\n
Finally, this bureaucratic weakness led officials of the CIA to destroy, apparently out of fear of eventual exposure and possible prosecution, a trove of as many as ninety-two video recordings that had been made of the interrogations, all but two of them of Abu Zubaydah. Whether or not the prosecutor investigating those actions determines that they were illegal, it is hard to believe that the recordings did not include valuable intelligence, which was sacrificed, in effect, for political reasons. These recordings doubtless could have played a critical part as well in the effort to determine what benefits, if any, the program brought to the security of the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n
Far and away the greatest damage, though, was legal, moral, and political. In the wake of the ICRC report one can make several definitive statements:<\/span><\/p>\n
1. Beginning in the spring of 2002 the United States government began to torture prisoners. This torture, approved by the President of the United States and monitored in its daily unfolding by senior officials, including the nation’s highest law enforcement officer, clearly violated major treaty obligations of the United States, including the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture, as well as US law.<\/span><\/p>\n
2. The most senior officers of the US government, President George W. Bush first among them, repeatedly and explicitly lied about this, both in reports to international institutions and directly to the public. The President lied about it in news conferences, interviews, and, most explicitly, in speeches expressly intended to set out the administration’s policy on interrogation before the people who had elected him.<\/span><\/p>\n
3. The US Congress, already in possession of a great deal of information about the torture conducted by the administration\u2014which had been covered widely in the press, and had been briefed, at least in part, from the outset to a select few of its members\u2014passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and in so doing attempted to protect those responsible from criminal penalty under the War Crimes Act.<\/span><\/p>\n
4. Democrats, who could have filibustered the bill, declined to do so\u2014a decision that had much to do with the proximity of the midterm elections, in the run-up to which, they feared, the President and his Republican allies might gain advantage by accusing them of \u00ab\u00a0coddling terrorists.\u00a0\u00bb One senator summarized the politics of the Military Commissions Act with admirable forthrightness:<\/span><\/p>\n
Soon, we will adjourn for the fall, and the campaigning will begin in earnest. And there will be 30-second attack ads and negative mail pieces, and we will be criticized as caring more about the rights of terrorists than the protection of Americans. And I know that the vote before us was specifically designed and timed to add more fuel to that fire.[16]<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n
Senator Barack Obama was only saying aloud what every other legislator knew: that for all the horrified and gruesome expos\u00e9s, for all the leaked photographs and documents and horrific testimony, when it came to torture in the September 11 era, the raw politics cut in the other direction. Most politicians remain convinced that still fearful Americans\u2014given the choice between the image of 24<\/i> ‘s Jack Bauer, a latter-day Dirty Harry, fantasy symbol of untrammeled power doing \u00ab\u00a0everything it takes\u00a0\u00bb to protect them from that ticking bomb, and the image of weak liberals \u00ab\u00a0reading Miranda rights to terrorists\u00a0\u00bb\u2014will choose Bauer every time. As Senator Obama said, after the bill he voted against had passed, \u00ab\u00a0politics won today.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
5. The political damage to the United States’ reputation, and to the \u00ab\u00a0soft power\u00a0\u00bb of its constitutional and democratic ideals, has been, though difficult to quantify, vast and enduring. In a war that is essentially an insurgency fought on a worldwide scale\u2014which is to say, a political war, in which the attitudes and allegiances of young Muslims are the critical target of opportunity\u2014the United States’ decision to use torture has resulted in an enormous self-administered defeat, undermining liberal sympathizers of the United States and convincing others that the country is exactly as its enemies paint it: a ruthless imperial power determined to suppress and abuse Muslims. By choosing to torture, we freely chose to become the caricature they made of us.<\/span><\/p>\n
8.<\/span><\/h4>\nIn the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and a famously colorful hard-liner, appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and made the most telling pronouncement of the era: \u00ab\u00a0All I want to say is that there was ‘before’ 9\/11 and ‘after’ 9\/11. After 9\/11 the gloves come off.\u00a0\u00bb In the days after the attacks this phrase was everywhere. Columnists quoted it, television commentators flaunted it, interrogators at Abu Ghraib used it in their cables. (\u00ab\u00a0The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees, Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.\u00a0\u00bb [17]<\/a><\/sup> )<\/span><\/p>\n
The gloves came off: four simple words. And yet they express a complicated thought. For if the gloves must come off, that means that before the attacks the gloves were on. There is something implicitly exculpatory in the image, something that made it particularly appealing to officials of an administration that endured, on its watch, the most lethal terrorist attack in the country’s history. If the attack succeeded, it must have had to do not with the fact that intelligence was not passed on or that warnings were not heeded or that senior officials did not focus on terrorism as a leading threat. It must have been, at least in part, because the gloves were on\u2014because the post-Watergate reforms of the 1970s, in which Congress sought to put limits on the CIA, on its freedom to mount covert actions with \u00ab\u00a0deniability\u00a0\u00bb and to conduct surveillance at home and abroad, had illegitimately circumscribed the President’s power and thereby put the country dangerously at risk. It is no accident that two of the administration’s most powerful officials, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, served as young men in very senior positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. They had witnessed firsthand the gloves going on and, in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, they argued powerfully that it was those limitations\u2014and, it was implied, not a failure to heed warnings\u2014that had helped lead, however indirectly, to the country’s vulnerability to attack.<\/span><\/p>\n
And so, after a devastating and unprecedented attack, the gloves came off. Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen \u00ab\u00a0high-value detainees,\u00a0\u00bb tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away. Like the grotesque stories in the ICRC report, the decision sits before us, a toxic fact, polluting our political and moral life.<\/span><\/p>\n
Since the inauguration of President Obama, the previous administration’s \u00ab\u00a0alternative procedures\u00a0\u00bb have acquired a prominence in the press, particularly on cable television, that they rarely achieved when they were actually being practiced on detainees. This is especially the case with waterboarding, which according to the former director of the CIA has not been used since 2003. On his first day in office, President Obama issued executive orders that stopped the use of these techniques and provided for task forces to study US government policies on rendition, detention, and interrogation, among others.<\/span><\/p>\n
Meantime, Democratic leaders in Congress, who have been in control since 2006, have at last embarked on serious investigations. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Christopher Bond, the chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, have announced a \u00ab\u00a0review of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program,\u00a0\u00bb which would study, among other questions, \u00ab\u00a0how the CIA created, operated, and maintained its detention and interrogation program,\u00a0\u00bb make \u00ab\u00a0an evaluation of intelligence information gained through the use of enhanced and standard interrogation techniques,\u00a0\u00bb and investigate \u00ab\u00a0whether the CIA accurately described the detention and interrogation program to other parts of the US government\u00a0\u00bb\u2014including, notably, \u00ab\u00a0the Senate Intelligence Committee.\u00a0\u00bb The hearings, according to reports, are unlikely to be public.<\/span><\/p>\n
In February, Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called for the establishment of what he calls a \u00ab\u00a0nonpartisan commission of inquiry,\u00a0\u00bb better known as a \u00ab\u00a0Truth and Reconciliation Committee,\u00a0\u00bb to investigate \u00ab\u00a0how our detention policies and practices, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, have seriously eroded fundamental American principles of the rule of law.\u00a0\u00bb Since Senator Leahy’s commission is intended above all to investigate and make public what was done\u2014\u00a0\u00bbin order to restore our moral leadership,\u00a0\u00bb as he said, \u00ab\u00a0we must acknowledge what was done in our name\u00a0\u00bb\u2014he would offer grants of immunity to public officials in exchange for their truthful testimony. He seeks not prosecution and justice but knowledge and exposure: \u00ab\u00a0We cannot turn the page until we have read the page.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
Many officials of human rights organizations, who have fought long and valiantly to bring attention and law to bear on these issues, strongly reject any proposal that includes widespread grants of immunity. They urge investigations and prosecutions of Bush administration officials. The choices are complicated and painful. From what we know, officials acted with the legal sanction of the US government and under orders from the highest political authority, the elected president of the United States. Political decisions, made by elected officials, led to these crimes. But political opinion, within the government and increasingly, as time passed, without, to some extent allowed those crimes to persist. If there is a need for prosecution there is also a vital need for education. Only a credible investigation into what was done and what information was gained can begin to alter the political calculus around torture by replacing the public’s attachment to the ticking bomb with an understanding of what torture is and what is gained, and lost, when the United States reverts to it.<\/span><\/p>\n
President Obama, while declaring that \u00ab\u00a0nobody’s above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing…people should be prosecuted,\u00a0\u00bb has also expressed his strong preference for \u00ab\u00a0looking forward\u00a0\u00bb rather than \u00ab\u00a0looking backwards.\u00a0\u00bb One can understand the sentiment but even some of the decisions his administration has already made\u2014concerning state secrecy, for example\u2014show the extent to which he and his Department of Justice will be haunted by what his predecessor did. Consider the uncompromising words of Eric Holder, the attorney general, who in reply to a direct question at his confirmation hearings had declared, \u00ab\u00a0waterboarding is torture.\u00a0\u00bb There is nothing ambiguous about this statement\u2014nor about the equally blunt statements of several high Bush administration officials, including the former vice-president and the director of the CIA, confirming unequivocally that the administration had ordered and directed that prisoners under its control be waterboarded. We are all living, then, with a terrible contradiction, an enduring one, and it is not subtle, any more than the accounts in the ICRC report are subtle. \u00ab\u00a0It was,\u00a0\u00bb as Mr. Cheney said of waterboarding, \u00ab\u00a0a no-brainer for me.\u00a0\u00bb Now Abu Zubaydah and his fellow detainees have stepped forward out of the darkness to link hands with the former vice-president and testify to his truthfulness.<\/span><\/p>\n
\u2014March 12, 2009<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n
Notes<\/span><\/h5>\n[1]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See \u00ab\u00a0 Restoring Trust in the Justice System: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Agenda in the 111th Congress<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb 2009 Marver Bernstein Lecture, Georgetown University, February 9, 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n
[2]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See \u00ab\u00a0 President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb September 6, 2006, East Room, White House, available at cfr.org.<\/span><\/p>\n
[3]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See, for the authoritative account, Dana Priest, \u00ab\u00a0 CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb The Washington Post<\/i>, November 2, 2005.<\/span><\/p>\n
[4]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Jonathan Alter, \u00ab\u00a0 Time to Think About Torture: It’s a New World, and Survival May Well Require Old Techniques That Seemed Out of the Question<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb Newsweek<\/i>, November 5, 2001. See also Raymond Bonner, Don Van Natta Jr., and Amy Waldman, \u00ab\u00a0Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb The New York Times<\/i>, March 9, 2003.<\/span><\/p>\n
[5]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>\u00ab\u00a0 President Bush’s News Conference<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb The New York Times<\/i>, September 15, 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n
[6]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>From \u00ab\u00a0CIA\u2014Abu Zubaydah. Interview with John Kiriakou.\u00a0\u00bb This is the rough and undated transcript of a video interview conducted by Brian Ross of ABC News, apparently in December 2007, available at abcnews.go.com<\/a>. Quotations from this document have been edited very slightly for clarity. See also Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, \u00ab\u00a0 Coming in from the Cold: CIA Spy Calls Waterboarding Necessary But Torture<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb ABC News, December 10, 2007.<\/span><\/p>\n
[7]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See \u00ab\u00a0Working Group Report on Detainee Interrogations in the Global War on Terrorism: Assessment of Legal, Historical, Policy, and Operational Considerations,\u00a0\u00bb April 4, 2003, in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror<\/a><\/i> (New York Review Books, 2004), pp. 190\u2013192. A great many of these documents, collected in this book and elsewhere, were leaked in the wake of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, and have been public since late spring or early summer of 2004.<\/span><\/p>\n
[8]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See David Johnston, \u00ab\u00a0 At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb The New York Times<\/i>, September 10, 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n
[9]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Mark Hosenball, \u00ab\u00a0 How Good Is Abu Zubaydah’s Information?<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb Newsweek<\/i> Web Exclusive, April 27, 2002.<\/span><\/p>\n
[10]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Johnston, \u00ab\u00a0At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics.\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n
[11]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation\u2014July 1963<\/i> and Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual\u20141983<\/i>, both archived at \u00ab\u00a0Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past,\u00a0\u00bb National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 122. For the historical roots of the \u00ab\u00a0alternative set of procedures\u00a0\u00bb see Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture:<\/i> CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror<\/i> (Metropolitan, 2006); and Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals<\/i> (Doubleday, 2008), especially pp. 167\u2013174. See also my\u00ab\u00a0The Logic of Torture,\u00a0\u00bb The New York Review<\/i>, June 24, 2004<\/a>, and Torture and Truth<\/a><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n
[12]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard L. Rosenberg, and Ariane de Vogue, \u00ab\u00a0 Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation,’<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb ABC News, April 9, 2008.<\/span><\/p>\n
[13]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>The bracketed comment appears in the ICRC report.<\/span><\/p>\n
[14]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Bob Woodward, \u00ab\u00a0 Detainee Tortured, Says US Official: Trial Overseer Cites ‘Abusive’ Methods Against 9\/11 Suspect<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb The Washington Post<\/i>, January 14, 2009.<\/span><\/p>\n
[15]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See Ron Suskind, \u00ab\u00a0 The Unofficial Story of the al-Qaeda 14<\/a>,\u00a0\u00bb Time<\/i>, September 10, 2006. See also Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9\/11<\/i> (Simon and Schuster, 2006), pp. 99\u2013101, and Mayer, The Dark Side<\/i>, pp. 175\u2013177.<\/span><\/p>\n
[16]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See \u00ab\u00a0Statement on Military Commission Legislation: Remarks by Senator Barack Obama,\u00a0\u00bb September 28, 2006.<\/span><\/p>\n
[17]<\/a><\/span><\/sup>See my Torture and Truth<\/a><\/i>, p. 33.<\/span><\/p>\n
(Source: \u201cNew York Review Of Books\u201d (USA), Volume 56, Number 6 \u00b7 April 9, 2009)<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
Lien:<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n
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Home – Accueil \u00a0 TUNISNEWS 8\u00a0\u00e8me ann\u00e9e, N\u00b0\u00a03227 du 24.03.2009 \u00a0archives : www.tunisnews.net\u00a0\u00a0 AISPP: Sofiane Mossaabi annonce qu\u2019il commence une gr\u00e8ve de la faim \u00e0 la prison de Borj El Amri AFP: Crash ATR tunisien: Tuninter surprise et m\u00e9contente, \u00e9voque des pressions Reuters: Italy convicts crash pilot who paused to pray Business News: Tunisie – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[55,40,29],"class_list":["post-16733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-55","tag-40","tag-fr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tunisnews.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}