He is the first CIA officer in history to face prison for a leak.

From the NYT report by Michael S. Schmidt:

The judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, said that in approving the sentence, she would respect the terms of a plea agreement between the former C.I.A. agent, John C. Kiriakou, and prosecutors, but “I think 30 months is way too light.”

The judge said “this is not a case of a whistle-blower.” She went on to describe the damage that Mr. Kiriakou had created for the intelligence agency and an agent whose cover was disclosed by Mr. Kiriakou. Before issuing the sentence she asked Mr. Kiriakou if he had anything to say. When he declined, Judge Brinkema, said, “Perhaps you have already spoken too much.”

And the Justice Department's War on Whistleblowers steamrolls ever forward.

On the support website for Kiriakou, who has also worked as a consultant for CBS News, a statement explaining the guilty plea:

Last month I decided to plead guilty to one count of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act in exchange for the government dropping all other charges against me. The decision to plead guilty was the most difficult decision of my life. I am glad to now have the certainty of being home with my children in 30 months. Thank you for your support at this difficult time for me and for my family. I wish I could thank each and every one of you individually, as your support has meant the world to me. Knowing I had supporters like you saved me at the most difficult times.

Ex-Officer for C.I.A. Is Sentenced in Leak Case - NYTimes.com (HT: @kgosztola.)

A waterboarding scene from the film "Zero Dark Thirty."

Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First One Hundred Days, explains seven simple steps to making US torture and detention policies once again acceptable to the American public, as illustrated in "Zero Dark Thirty."

Snip:

As its core, Bigelow’s film makes the bald-faced assertion that torture did help the United States track down the perpetrator of 9/11. Zero Dark Thirty -- for anyone who doesn’t know by now -- is the story of Maya (Jessica Chastain), a young CIA agent who believes that information from a detainee named Ammar will lead to bin Laden. After weeks, maybe months of torture, he does indeed provide a key bit of information that leads to another piece of information that leads… well, you get the idea. Eventually, the name of bin Laden’s courier is revealed. From the first mention of his name, Maya dedicates herself to finding him, and he finally leads the CIA to the compound where bin Laden is hiding. Of course, you know how it all ends.

However compelling the heroine’s determination to find bin Laden may be, the fact is that Bigelow has bought in, hook, line, and sinker, to the ethos of the Bush administration and its apologists. It’s as if she had followed an old government memo and decided to offer in fictional form step-by-step instructions for the creation, implementation, and selling of Bush-era torture and detention policies.

Today, January 11 2013, marks 11 years to the day after the administration of George W. Bush opened the terror detainee center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And today, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. My review of the film is here.

(Thanks, Laura Poitras!)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/11/the-7-easy-steps-steps-to-lear.html/feed 63 http://boingboing.net/2012/12/22/zero-dark-thirty-not-good.html http://boingboing.net/2012/12/22/zero-dark-thirty-not-good.html#comments Sat, 22 Dec 2012 17:20:43 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=202577 "Zero Dark Thirty," director Kathryn Bigelow's truthy-but-not-a-documentary-but-maybe-it-kinda-is thriller about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opened in New York and Los Angeles this week. I watched a screener last night. I thought it kind of sucked. There's a lot of buzz about what a great work of art ZDT is. I don't get it. In reviews of ZDT, fawning critics reflexively note that she directed Oscar-winning "Hurt Locker." Guys, she directed "Point Break," too.

The film is based in part on documents and interviews provided by government sources who participated in the real deal. In a New Yorker profile of Bigelow by NYT war reporter Dexter Filkins, the director explains, “What we were attempting is almost a journalistic approach to film.’"

It's not journalism. Strictly speaking, ZDT is drama, not documentary. But it's presented as a grey merging of the two; like "24" with a truthier implied pedigree.

Bigelow and screenwriter/co-producer Mark Boal describe it in a title card as based on "firsthand accounts." Boal told the NYT he approached the film as a journalist.

“I don’t want to play fast and loose with history,” he said.

The film has been blasted by critics of torture (how fucked up is it that "critics of torture" is even a thing?) as elevating and validating the role of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in finding and killing Al Qaeda's number one.

But that criticism isn't just coming from war critics and human rights advocates: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), himself a survivor of torture, went on radio and television to decry the Sony Pictures release, as the LA Times reports:.

"You believe when watching this movie that waterboarding and torture leads to information that leads then to the elimination of Osama bin Laden. That's not the case," McCain said on CNN's "The Situation Room," adding that torture had yielded false information from detainees.

McCain and fellow senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.) sent a letter echoing this statement to Sony on Wednesday. CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen at CNN has a piece up at CNN.com about the criticism coming from Washington; his original long-form critique of the film is required reading.

As was been widely reported in the months leading up to the film's release, the CIA granted ZDT's filmmakers unprecedented access to sources within the agency, perhaps believing that "Hurt Locker" was an indication of the likely positive treatment the War on Terror would receive in this project.

But just this week, acting CIA director Michael Morell issued an unusual statement condemning it.

"The film creates the strong impression that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Ladin," the statement reads. "That impression is false."

A pretty bold statement, though even he can't bring himself to use the word "torture."

The film's release comes just after the Senate intelligence committee's approval of a long-awaited report which concludes that "harsh interrogation measures" used by the CIA didn't lead to substantive intelligence gains.

That 6,000-page report has not been released to the public. It should be. It'd do a better job than this film does of explaining to America what if any upside there is to torturing people identified as enemies.

Apart from the semi-fictionalized jingoistic narrative, and the way the whole thing feels like pro-torture propaganda, I just don't see the cinematic greatness.

Yes, it was beautifully shot; yes, there were some solid performances by talented actors.

But as Glenn Greenwald wrote over email, as we were debating the film's merits, "it felt banal, trite, thin, predictable - yeah, some parts were filmed nicely, but overall, just as a film, it was totally mediocre at best."

Glenn was just on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show today talking about the film, and wrote a great piece at the Guardian about ZDT. Snip:

There is zero opposition expressed to torture. None of the internal objections from the FBI or even CIA is mentioned. The only hint of a debate comes when Obama is shown briefly on television decreeing that torture must not be used, which is later followed by one of the CIA officials - now hot on bin Laden's trail - lamenting in the Situation Room when told to find proof that bin Laden has been found: "You know we lost the ability to prove that when we lost the detainee program - who the hell am I supposed to ask: some guy in GITMO who is all lawyered up?" Nobody ever contests or challenges that view.

In the LA Times, Steven Zeitchik and Rebecca Keegan point out how interesting it is that "Argo," a leading competitor against "Zero Dark" in the Oscar race, "also centers on a CIA operative and has strong political themes." I loved "Argo." And the Ben Affleck drama on the 1979 Iran hostage crisis takes even greater liberties with history. Snip:

But "Argo" has faced almost no criticism over matters of accuracy, perhaps because, though a poster declares that "the mission was real," filmmakers and marketers have stopped short of using the word journalism in connection with the film.

As I was watching ZDT last night, I also thought, man, it's nice to see a big feature *sort of* pass the Bechdel Test for once (here's a video explainer). But what a lame exception to the sexist norm.

The interaction between Jessica Chastain's lead female character "Maya" and Jennifer Ehle's "Jessica," both CIA analysts, feels contrived and convenient: Thelma and Louise Do Islamabad.

Why is Ehle as a chief CIA operative jumping up and down like a schoolgirl, texting her bestie (over what looks like unencrypted IM! With smiley emoticons!) as if she's waiting for a blind date, when her "source" rolls into Camp Chapman? And this, after "Jessica" had just finished baking a fucking *cake* for the guy? In the actual reports, it should be noted, the base cook made the cake.

And it ended up being a hot date, indeed.

Also this has nothing to do with sexism, I guess, but guys, why is Chastain eating all the time?

In an interview with the BBC, Ehle says: “You have two women in it who are not defined in any way by their relationship with men. They are defined by their relationship with their job and by what they do. What they do happens to be hunting men.”

You've come a long way, baby.*

ZDT is a visually arresting work. It was shot by Australian DP Greig Fraser (remember his provocative "Call of Duty: Black Ops" TV ads?), much of it in a handheld run-and-gun style. One imagines the night-vision scenes to be faithful to the visual experience of those Navy SEALs during the fabled midnight Abbotabad raid. And the atmosphere throughout is lifted greatly by Alexandre Desplat's masterful score.

But as filmmaker Alex Gibney writes in the Huffington Post about those creative high points,

It's all the more infuriating therefore, because the film is so attentive to the accuracy of details -- including the mechanism of brutal interrogations -- that it is so sloppy when it comes to portraying the efficacy of torture. That may seem like a small thing but it is not. Because when we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture "got" bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good "end" can justify brutal "means."

Where are figures like Khaled el-Masri, the innocent German father and car dealer who was kidnapped and tortured at a "black site" over a spelling error that led to CIA agents mistaking him for a bad guy? Are stories like that an okay price to pay for gains that may not even have been gained?

And then there's the biggest unasked question of all: did the extrajudicial assassination of "UBL," rather than bringing him to a Nuremberg-style trial, really serve our democracy best?

My problem with "Zero Dark Thirty" isn't just that it validates the use of torture, and sends a clear message that the systematic violation of human rights, drone strikes, and extrajudicial assassinations are just the dirty truths that "protecting our freedom" requires.

My problem is that its use of accurate documentary detail and artistic verisimilitude seems not merely a weak justification for its inaccurate depiction of torture's value, but a way of drawing the eye to it, a whispering and surreptitious endorsement.

And to borrow a line from the film's protagonist, the pottymouthed CIA torture vixen Maya, that's "kind of fucked up."

# # #

In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.

Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan. It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.

More at The Guardian, and the ACLU website.

We've covered el-Masri's case before here on Boing Boing, including the inclusion of documents related to his case in Wikileaks cable dumps. Also, a documentary from Witness.org details his story, and the damage to his body and mental health.

Jessica Chastain as CIA agent “Maya” in Zero Dark Thirty. Photo: Sony/Columbia Pictures

• Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian on the new Kathryn Bigelow film about the capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden: "With its release imminent, [Zero Dark Thirty] is now garnering a pile of top awards and virtually uniform rave reviews. What makes this so remarkable is that, by most accounts, the film glorifies torture by claiming - falsely - that waterboarding and other forms of coercive interrogation tactics were crucial, even indispensable in finding bin Laden."

• Spencer Ackerman in Wired News: "Bigelow is being presented as a torture apologist, and it’s a bum rap. David Edelstein of New York says her movie borders on the “morally reprehensible” for presenting “a case for the efficacy of torture.” The New York Times’ Frank Bruni suspects that Dick Cheney will give the film two thumbs up. Bruni is probably right, since defenders of torture have been known to latch onto any evidence they suspect will vindicate them as American heroes. But that’s not Zero Dark Thirty."

• Adam Serwer in Mother Jones: "The critical acclaim Zero Dark Thirty is already receiving suggests that it may do what Karl Rove could not have done with all the money in the world: embed in the popular imagination the efficacy, even the necessity, of torture, despite available evidence to the contrary."

• Peter Bergen at CNN: ""Zero Dark Thirty" is a great piece of filmmaking and does a valuable public service by raising difficult questions most Hollywood movies shy away from, but as of this writing, it seems that one of its central themes -- that torture was instrumental to tracking down bin Laden -- is not supported by the facts."

• Andrew Sullivan: "I have not seen the movie yet, so I have to rely on descriptions of its plot. But if it portrays torture as integral to the killing of Osama bin Laden, it is a lie. If Bigelow is calling torture "harsh tactics" she is complicit in its defense. And lies do have an agenda, whatever Bigelow says."

• Greg Mitchell rounds up more links to those praising or condemning the movie's approach to torture and "harsh interrogation techniques."

Related BB post: "The teaser trailer for Kathryn Bigelow's controversial Zero Dark Thirty hits the web" (Jamie Frevele)

The basic set-up is probably familiar to you. Milgram told his test subjects that they were part of a study on learning. They were tasked with asking questions to another person, who was rigged up to an electric shock generator. When the other person got the questions wrong, the subject was supposed to zap them and then turn up the voltage. The catch was that the person getting "zapped" was actually an actor. So was the authority figure, whose job it was to tell the test subject that they must continue the experiment, no matter how much the other person pleaded for them to stop. In Milgram's original study, 65% of the subjects continued to the end of the session, eventually "administering" 450-volt shocks.

But they weren't doing it calmly. If you read Milgram's paper, you find that these people were trembling, and digging nails into their own flesh. Some of them even had seizure-like fits. Which is interesting to know when you sit down to read about Michael Shermer's recent attempt to replicate the Milgram experiments for a Dateline segment. Told they were trying out for a new reality show, the six subjects were set up to "shock" an actor, just like in Milgram's experiments. One walked out before the test even started. The others participated, but had some interesting rationales for why they did it — and a simple ingrained sense of obedience wasn't always what was going on.

Our third subject, Lateefah, became visibly upset at 120 volts and squirmed uncomfortably to 180 volts. When Tyler screamed, “Ah! Ah! Get me out of here! I refuse to go on! Let me out!” Lateefah made this moral plea to Jeremy: “I know I'm not the one feeling the pain, but I hear him screaming and asking to get out, and it's almost like my instinct and gut is like, ‘Stop,’ because you're hurting somebody and you don't even know why you're hurting them outside of the fact that it's for a TV show.” Jeremy icily commanded her to “please continue.” As she moved into the 300-volt range, Lateefah was noticeably shaken, so Hansen stepped in to stop the experiment, asking, “What was it about Jeremy that convinced you that you should keep going here?” Lateefah gave us this glance into the psychology of obedience: “I didn't know what was going to happen to me if I stopped. He just—he had no emotion. I was afraid of him.”

Read the rest in Michael Shermer's column at Scientific American

Three decades after Pedro Garcia Arredondo ordered the torture and "disappearance" of an agronomy student, the former chief detective of Guatemala's now-defunct National Police has been convicted and sentenced to 70 years in prison. From Amnesty International today:

Witnesses testified how [Édgar Enrique Sáenz Calito] was taken to “the little room” (“el cuartito”) where the Sixth Command typically interrogated guerrilla suspects.

The victim’s wife Violeta Ramírez Estrada told the court how she visited her husband in a prison hospital following his arrest and he bore signs of having been tortured – he had been subjected to beatings, water-boarding and cigarette burns, and electric shocks had been applied to his genitals.

(via @wolfe321)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/22/guatemala-former-police-chief.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/02/scientologys-hole-alle.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/02/scientologys-hole-alle.html#comments Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:48:59 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=174536

Debbie Cook was in for only 7 weeks in 2007, but her experience was brutal. She testified that Miscavige had two hulking guards climb into her office through a window as she was talking to him on the phone. "Goodbye" he told her as she was hauled off to the gulag. Like Rinder, she described a place where dozens of men and women were confined to what had been a set of offices. Cook testified that the place was ant-infested, and during one two-week stretch in the summer with temperatures over 100 degrees, Miscavige had the air conditioning turned off as punishment. Food was brought up in a vat riding on a golf cart. Cook described it as a barely edible "slop" that was fed to them morning, noon, and night. Longtime residents of the Hole began to look gaunt.

They had to find places on the floor or on desks to sleep at night. Rinder said there were so many of them they slept only inches from each other, and having to get up in the middle of the night was a nightmare of stepping over sleeping figures in the dark.

In the morning, they were marched out of the offices and through a tunnel under Gilman Springs Road to a large building with communal showers. They were then marched back to the Hole, and during the day would be compelled to take part in mass confessions.

During these, Rinder says people he had considered friends would put on a show for the officials overseeing them, trying to outdo each other with vile accusations against each other. Cook testified that Miscavige wanted Marc Yager and Guillaume Lesevre, two of his longest-serving and highest-ranking officials, to confess to having a homosexual affair. The men were beaten until they made some forced admissions. When Cook objected to what was happening, she herself was made to stand in a trash can for twelve hours while insults were hurled at her, she was called a lesbian, and water was dumped on her head.

Scientology's Concentration Camp for Its Executives: The Prisoners, Past and Present ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/02/scientologys-hole-alle.html/feed 136 http://boingboing.net/2012/05/03/stuff-that-isnt-obviously-to.html http://boingboing.net/2012/05/03/stuff-that-isnt-obviously-to.html#comments Thu, 03 May 2012 19:00:56 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=158251 Courtesy of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a list of "things that government officials could do to an American citizen and still claim later that they didn't know they were "torturing" that citizen."

Prolonged isolation; Deprivation of light; Exposure to prolonged periods of light and/or darkness; Extreme variations in temperature; Sleep adjustment; Threats of severe physical abuse; Death threats; Administration of psychotropic drugs; Shackling and manacling for hours at a time; Use of "stress" positions; Noxious fumes that caused pain to eyes and nose; Withholding of any mattress, pillow, sheet or blanket; Forced grooming; Suspension of showers; Removal of religious items; Constant surveillance; Incommunicado detention, including denial of all contact with family and legal counsel for a 21-month period; Interference with religious observance; and Denial of medical care for serious and potentially life-threatening ailments, including chest pain and difficulty breathing, as well as for treatment of the chronic, extreme pain caused by being forced to endure stress positions, resulting in severe and continuing mental and physical harm, pain, and profound disruption of the senses and personality.

The legal issue was whether John Yoo should be entitled to "qualified immunity" in a case brought by Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen detained as an "enemy combatant." "Qualified immunity" is a doctrine that bars claims against government officials if, at the time they acted, it was not "sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would have understood that what he or she was doing violated the plaintiff's rights." The idea is to try to preserve some freedom of action for officials who have to act in areas where the law may not always be clear. If it applies, no lawsuit.

So, next question: do you think a "reasonable official" in 2001-03, when John Yoo was in the government, should have understood that doing those things to an American citizen -- one who, by the way, had not been convicted of or even charged with a crime -- violated that citizen's rights?

Would the Last Civil Right in America Please Remember to Close the Door on Its Way Out? ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/05/03/stuff-that-isnt-obviously-to.html/feed 54 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/brian-woods-dmz-a.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/brian-woods-dmz-a.html#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:00:21 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=155354
As the final volume of Brian Wood's brilliant anti-war graphic novel DMZ nears publication, Dominic Umile looks back on the series' 72 issue run of political allegory and all the ways that it used the device of fiction to make trenchant comic on the real world. DMZ is a story about the "State of Exception" that the American establishment declared after 9/11, a period when human rights, civil liberty, economic sanity, and the constitution all play second-fiddle to the all-consuming war on terror. Like the best allegories, it works first and best as a story in its own right, but it is also an important comment on the world we live in.

In DMZ #8, Matty Roth reviews a series of New York Times newspapers to reconstruct a timeline of the book’s war. Burchielli’s panels are nearly blacked-out. It’s as if Roth is squatting on a darkened stage: Nothing behind him is discernible outside of more yellowed newspapers, each slugged with copy that’s painfully close to our own real-life headlines. Brian Wood’s chief character is despondent and sounds like many of us do today in the era of Occupy Wall Street, hostilities in Afghanistan, the Obama administration’s drone campaign, and rampant corruption plaguing state and federal government, all amid an ever-theatric run-up to another presidential election.

Even as DMZ had another 64 issues and more than five years to go, Roth’s thoughts are rendered with an undeniable degree of both prescience and finality: “I never paid attention to politics. Never seemed to be a point. Politics happened the way it happened regardless of what anyone thought or did. So why bother?”

A "System" of Torture?: 'DMZ's' Argument Through Comment, and Comics ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/brian-woods-dmz-a.html/feed 1 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/evidence-of-britains-colonia.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/evidence-of-britains-colonia.html#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:44:48 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=155199
After 50 years of secrecy, the British archive of papers related to colonial handovers have been made public. The trove of papers document (among other things), the brutal torture of Kenyans who participated in the Mau Mau uprising, a vicious purge of "enemies" in colonial Malaya, and the forced relocation of indigenous people from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, followed by a coverup that included lies to the UN. Also in the documents is an order requiring colonial governments to destroy evidence of wrongdoing, against a disclosure such as this, which suggests that the 8,800 documents being released are only a tiny fraction of the evidence of Britain's crimes.

The papers at Hanslope Park include monthly intelligence reports on the "elimination" of the colonial authority's enemies in 1950s Malaya; records showing ministers in London were aware of the torture and murder of Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya, including a case of aman said to have been "roasted alive"; and papers detailing the lengths to which the UK went to forcibly remove islanders from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

However, among the documents are a handful which show that many of the most sensitive papers from Britain's late colonial era were not hidden away, but simply destroyed. These papers give the instructions for systematic destruction issued in 1961 after Iain Macleod, secretary of state for the colonies, directed that post-independence governments should not get any material that "might embarrass Her Majesty's government", that could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others eg police informers", that might compromise intelligence sources, or that might "be used unethically by ministers in the successor government".

Among the documents that appear to have been destroyed were: records of the abuse of Mau Mau insurgents detained by British colonial authorities, who were tortured and sometimes murdered; reports that may have detailed the alleged massacre of 24 unarmed villagers in Malaya by soldiers of the Scots Guards in 1948; most of the sensitive documents kept by colonial authorities in Aden, where the army's Intelligence Corps operated a secret torture centre for several years in the 1960s; and every sensitive document kept by the authorities in British Guiana, a colony whose policies were heavily influenced by successive US governments and whose post-independence leader was toppled in a coup orchestrated by the CIA...

Some idea of the scale of the operation and the amount of documents that were erased from history can be gleaned from a handful of instruction documents that survived the purge. In certain circumstances, colonial officials in Kenya were informed, "it is permissible, as an alternative to destruction by fire, for documents to be packed in weighted crates and dumped in very deep and current-free water at maximum practicable distance from the coast".

The release was precipitated by a civil suit over torture in the Mau Mau uprising.

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/18/evidence-of-britains-colonia.html/feed 32 http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/tony-blair-channels-ronald-rea.html http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/tony-blair-channels-ronald-rea.html#comments Wed, 11 Apr 2012 22:07:30 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=154075 When the Qaddafi regime fell in Libya, the headquarters of the secret police were occupied by the rebel forces, who retrieved a large quantity of memos and documents detailing the cooperation between western governments and the Qaddafi regime, including the sale and maintenance of network surveillance equipment, and, notoriously, the use of Qaddafi's torturers on suspected terrorists who were secretly rendered to Libya by western intelligence agencies.

One set of documents show that the UK intelligence service worked to kidnap and render Libyan dissident Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his pregnant wife, Fatima Bouchar, for a horrific round of torture that was directly overseen by UK intelligence agents, with the knowledge of the CIA.

Now Tony Blair, who was prime minister of Britain at the time of the illegal kidnapping and torture, denies having any recollection of the programme, and insists that Libya was a fine partner in the war on terror.

A UK parliamentary committee is attempting to investigate the matter, and filed a freedom of information request with the US government for documents on UK participation in illegal rendition programmes. The CIA objected to the request, and a US judge denied it on the grounds that it had been made by a "foreign government entity" (the UK's all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition). Deputy committee chair Tony Lloyd called the ruling "odd" and "an abuse of the spirit of freedom of information." He noted that the judge had not rejected the proposal on the grounds of national security, but because "a parliamentary body that was part of the British state was 'not acceptable.'" Richard Norton-Taylor has more in the Guardian.

The CIA's approach echoes that adopted by MI6 and MI5, which have fought to prevent the disclosure in British courts of evidence relating to the US practice of extraordinary rendition.

The parliamentary group, meanwhile, is fighting a refusal by the British government to disclose papers that, it says, would reveal UK complicity in the secret flights and subsequent abuse of individual suspects. The information tribunal in London is expected to give a ruling on the request soon.

Tony Blair has 'no recollection' of Libyan dissident's rendition

(Image: Tony Blair interviewed by Fortune, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from thenickster's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/04/11/tony-blair-channels-ronald-rea.html/feed 33 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/maher-arar-on-canadas-pro-to.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/maher-arar-on-canadas-pro-to.html#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2012 05:23:08 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=147618 Maher Arar, a Canadian who was rendered to Syria for years of brutal torture on the basis of bad information from Canada's intelligence agencies, writes in Prism about the revelation that Canadian public safety minister Vic Toews has given Canadian intelligence agencies and police the green light to use information derived from torture in their work. Arar cites examples of rendition and torture based on the "Hollywood fantasy that underlines the 'ticking bomb' scenario that minister Toews was apparently contemplating when he wrote this directive."

What makes this direction even more alarming is that the fat annual budgets devoted to enhancing national security have not been balanced by a similar increase in oversight. In fact, the government chose to ignore the most important recommendation of Justice O’Connor which is to establish a credible oversight agency that has the required powers to monitor and investigate the activities of the RCMP and those of other agencies involved in the gathering and dissemination of national security information. Unlike the powerless Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP (CPC) or the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) this agency would also be granted subpoena power to compel all agencies to produce the required documents.

Coming back to the directive one can only cite two examples here which I believe are sufficient to illustrate the hollowness of the argument presented in the directive. The first relates to the invasion of Iraq which we now know was based on false intelligence (see this video) that was extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi while he was being tortured in Egypt. Al-Libi was later found dead inside his prison cell. Some human rights activists believe the Gaddafi regime liquidated him three years after he was rendered to Libya by the CIA.

Torture Directive 2.0 (Thanks, Richard!)

(Image: Rothenburg Germany Torture Museum, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from nanpalmero's photostream) (Thanks, Richard!)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/07/maher-arar-on-canadas-pro-to.html/feed 18 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/meet-more-western-companies-th.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/meet-more-western-companies-th.html#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:41:45 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=144835 Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation profiled FinFisher and Amesys, two of the companies that had been caught selling network spying tools to despotic regimes around the world, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. This week, EFF continues the series with profiles of Italy's Area SpA (which sells electronic tracking software to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria) and Germany's Trovicor (which sells spyware to a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa).

In 2011, at the same time that news of Syria’s violent crackdown on democratic protests graced the pages of the world’s newspapers, an Italian company called Area SpA was busy helping the Syrian’s dictator Bashar al-Assad electronically track the dissidents his army was firing upon in the streets. Area SpA had begun installing “monitoring centers” that would give the Syrian government the ability “to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country” as well as “follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens’ networks of electronic contacts.”

Worse, as the violence in Syria escalated in mid-2011, “Area employees [were] flown into Damascus in shifts” in the government’s push to finish the project, according to a report from Bloomberg News.

Spy Tech Companies & Their Authoritarian Customers, Part II: Trovicor and Area SpA ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/21/meet-more-western-companies-th.html/feed 16 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/15/uk-govt-yes-we-kidnapped-p.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/15/uk-govt-yes-we-kidnapped-p.html#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:16:39 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=144085 After the fall of the Qaddafi regime, secret police documents were discovered linking the UK spy agency MI6 with the kidnap of two leading Libyan dissidents and their families, in order to deliver them to Qaddafi's torturers. The UK government has admitted that its spies are guilty of this crime, but point to a law that says that British spies can't be held liable for their crimes, provided that the secretary of state signs off on them, and the secretary did.

The "acts" can take place only overseas and remain illegal both under the laws of the country where they are committed and possibly under international law. But, section 7 says, with the stroke of a pen a secretary of state can rule that no UK law can be brought to bear.

The act had been drafted as a consequence of a series of European court judgments in the 1980s that forced Britain's ultra-secretive intelligence agencies to emerge into the daylight of the public domain.

How secret renditions shed light on MI6's licence to kill and torture (via Warren Ellis) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/15/uk-govt-yes-we-kidnapped-p.html/feed 55 http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/north-carolina-town-still-prot.html http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/north-carolina-town-still-prot.html#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:54:16 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=143331 a local aviation contractor was a key player in the CIA's “torture taxi” business. “I don’t want to live in a country that acts this way,” said Julia Elsee, 87, protesting at the Johnston County Airport.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/north-carolina-town-still-prot.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/26/report-north-carolina-aviatio.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/26/report-north-carolina-aviatio.html#comments Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:24:46 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=140878 Physicians for Human Rights: "A report (PDF) prepared by professors and students at the University of North Carolina School of Law states that the CIA has been relying on Aero Contractors, Ltd., a North Carolina operated civil aviation company to transport detainees to international destinations for detention, interrogation and torture." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/26/report-north-carolina-aviatio.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/torture-common-again-in-post-s.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/torture-common-again-in-post-s.html#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:12:55 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=139573 Guardian UK via Richard Engel.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/17/torture-common-again-in-post-s.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/20/danish-human-rights-activist-a.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/20/danish-human-rights-activist-a.html#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:16:17 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=135374

Update: Zainab is back home!

Carstenagger sez, "The blogger and human rights activist Zainab Alkhawaja has been detained since Thursday, December 15th, where she was detained after being teargassed while participating in a peaceful demonstration. Her husband and her father are imprisoned, her father sentenced to life in prison and allegedly hideously tortured. Zainab is in *great danger* of being tortured, given the present climate in Bahrain. Zainab is a very courageous activist, which prompted NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof to tweet: 'I suggest that Bahrain officials avoid torturing and imprisoning @AngryArabiya. Some day she could be their president.' Here is how YOU can help: Zainab is a Danish citizen. Our new Minister of Foreign Affairs is all too fond of photo ops with Hillary Clinton, but he will succumb to pressure and hopefully create a diplomatic incident to protect one of his citizens. Please drop him a line on udenrigsministeren@um.dk and express your concern for Zainab Alkhawaja and ask him to use his influence to demand her release [Ed: see above -- she's back home]."

Dansk aktivist anholdt i Bahrain (Thanks, Carsten!)

(Photo: @mazenmahdi) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/20/danish-human-rights-activist-a.html/feed 15 http://boingboing.net/2011/12/03/canadas-secret-police-to-gov.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/03/canadas-secret-police-to-gov.html#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 21:15:25 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=132752
The head of Canada's secret police has asked the government to fight against a proposed ban on information gleaned through torture. The chief of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says that torture is essential to Canada's security in its fight against terrorism.

In the letter, Judd urges the minister to fight an amendment to C-3 proposed by Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh that would prohibit CSIS and the courts from using any information obtained from torture or “derivative information”: information initially obtained from torture but subsequently corroborated through legal means.

“This amendment, if interpreted to mean that ‘derivative information’ is inadmissible, could render unsustainable the current security certificate proceedings,” Judd writes.

“Even if interpreted more narrowly to exclude only information obtained from sources and foreign agencies who, on the low threshold of ‘reasonable grounds’ may have obtained information by way of torture, the amendment would still significantly hinder the Service’s collection and analysis functions...”

Bahdi said the prohibition on torture was part of Canadian law long before the C-3 amendment. But CSIS needs to be made accountable, she said. “There has to be a cultural shift in CSIS so they take seriously the prohibition on torture and understand it’s not there to tie their hands behind their backs so they can’t do their work, but to ensure that their work has some integrity. … If torture produced national security, the regimes in the Middle East would be the safest places in the world.” [emphasis mine]

CSIS head urged government to fight ban on information obtained through torture

(Image: Torture Museum 4522, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from thukral's photostream) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/12/03/canadas-secret-police-to-gov.html/feed 91