By Nadia Prupis

The CIA on Tuesday released dozens of documents detailing its torture and rendition program under the Bush administration, from the horrific treatment of detainees to the agency’s 2002 plan to ask the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) not to prosecute interrogators.

The heavily redacted trove of more than 50 documents was published in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the ACLU last year, which sought records referenced in the U.S. Senate’s damning report on the CIA’s program—commonly referred to as the torture report—released in December 2014.

“These newly declassified records add new detail to the public record of the CIA’s torture program and underscore the cruelty of the methods the agency used in its secret, overseas black sites,” Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director, said Tuesday. “It bears emphasis that these records document grave crimes for which no senior official has been held accountable.”

Among the cases outlined in the documents is that of 34-year-old Gul Rahman, who was detained by the CIA in 2002 on suspicion of being an al Qaeda operative and who froze to death in one of the agency’s secret prisons in Afghanistan. During his captivity in November 2002, Rahman was beaten, doused with cold water, and left shackled in a cold cell, naked from the waist down.

The documents detail Rahman’s apparent resistance to the torture, including “[remaining] steadfast in outright denials” and “[complaining] about the violation of his human rights.”

Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said the details show that “Rahman was brutalized in part because his torturers decided that complaining about his torture was a form of resistance and he needed to be ‘broken.'”

The torture program’s architects, CIA-contracted psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, are currently facing a lawsuit from Rahman’s family.

By Derrick Broze

The CIA has released 50 new documents relating to post-9/11 torture and rendition practices.

On Tuesday the Central Intelligence Agency released 50 new documents which add even more detail to the disturbing use of torture, humiliation, and rendition. The documents depict brutal torture and paint a clear picture of CIA officials desperately working to suppress evidence of their actions. The documents were released in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union and Vice.

“A newly released CIA inspector general report about the death of detainee Gul Rahman concluded that he was singled out for especially harsh torture because of “pressure” to “break him,” the ACLU writes. Rahman was captured in October 2002 in Islamabad, Pakistan for suspicion of connection to Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and allied with al-Qaida. The CIA interrogators sought to “break” Rahman because he was uncooperative with his torturers, threw food, water bottles, and buckets full of feces at guards. The Associated Press describes his conditions according to the documents:

Rahman was shackled using the “short chain” method. His hands were chained together. His feet were chained together. Then, a short chain was used to shackle his hands to his feet.

“This position forced Rahman, who was naked below the waist to sit on a cold concrete floor and prevented him from standing up,” according to the declassified CIA inspector general’s report about his death.

Rahman was founded dead the next day. According to the report, “a palm-sized pool of dried blood was present in and around the mouth and nose of subject. Rahman was observed still shackled and slumped over in the seated position.” The cause of his death would later be reported as “undetermined;” however, the clinical conclusion found that he died of hypothermia. No one has been charged in death of Gul Rahman.

Documents also reveal that he was held nude or in a diaper for the majority of his detention. When diapers were unavailable the guards made “a handcrafted diaper secured by duct tape.” The tactic was enforced “solely for humiliation.” The guards also provided him with minimal food and sleep. “When they decided he wasn’t sufficiently “broken,” CIA personnel brutalized, starved, and froze him to death — and then lied about it,” the ACLU wrote.

The ACLU also learned that CIA psychologist Bruce Jessen told officials that Rahman was “resistant” and called for more intense forms of torture. Jessen and his cohorts claimed that Rahman had a “sophisticated level of resistance training.” The ACLU represents Mr. Rahman’s family in suing Jensen and James Mitchell. Both men are former U.S. military psychologists who are seen as the “architects” of the CIA’s torture program. The lawsuit accuses Jessen and Mitchell of operating a “joint criminal enterprise” and seeks compensatory damages of at least $75,000.

The documents make it clear that the practice of waterboarding was employed much more often than CIA officials and U.S. lawmakers would like the public to believe. The CIA’s logical brilliance included assumptions that prisoners who did not provide information must be withholding. Therefore, the less information a prisoner provided the more he would be tortured because“analysts are reluctant to agree that a detainee is not employing resistance techniques.”

The documents also contain newly disclosed sections that CIA officials were cautious about sending CIA detainees who had been tortured “to detention facilities where they would be available to the ICRC [the International Committee for the Red Cross].” The officials worried that prisoners would have an opportunity to tell the world about the torture. This fear led officials to request the attorney general give an advance guarantee not to prosecute any agents for their treatment of prisoners.

In a transcript of a military hearing, prisoner Abu Zubaydah describes the waterboarding treatment he was forced to endure. “They shackle me completely, even my head; I can’t do anything. Like this, and they put one cloth in my mouth and they put water, water, water.” Zubaydah said that right before he felt like he would die interrogators stood the board back up and he told them, “If you want to kill me, kill me.”

It seems that the perpetrators of these crimes and their submissive order followers will likely not see prosecution anytime soon. In May, the D.C. Circuit court affirmed a federal judge’s decision to keep the Senate report on CIA torture classified. At the same time the CIA inspector general’s office claims they accidentally deleted their copy of the full report. As new details emerge it becomes crystal clear how low the United States military and intelligence officials are willing to go to pursue “justice.” It’s more important than ever to remind the free hearts and mind of this world the truth about torture, especially in light of presidential candidates who would like to continue the practices.

Image Credit: TheFreeThoughtProject.com

Derrick Broze is an investigative journalist and liberty activist. He is the Lead Investigative Reporter for ActivistPost.com and the founder of the TheConsciousResistance.com. Follow him onTwitter.

This article may be freely reposted in part or in full with author attribution and source link.

(activistpost.com)

By Joseph Jankowski

The U.S. Navy has held meetings with American presidential hopeful and Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan to discuss the possibility of implanting humans with microchips fitted with global positioning (GPS) technology, reports The Sun.

According to Vice Admiral Wisecup, who has retired from full-time service to work in a Navy department called the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group, the meeting broadened “our understanding of the merger of humans and machines.”

“A bunch of navy officers came to my house and one of the main topics was this chip implant strategy,” Transhumanist and Futurist Istvan said.

Zoltan Istvan is currently running for president of the United States as a part of theTranshumanist Party.

The Transhumanist Party aims to “uphold the energy and political might of millions of transhumanist advocates out there who desire to use science and technology to significantly improve their lives.”

Istvan told The Sun that the Navy is worried that soldiers could enter service with chips already implanted into them and is “struggling to create policy” around this issue.

“You can imagine how challenging that would be if someone had a non-authorized chip implant on a nuclear base, so policy has to be created and created soon,” says Istvan.

I helped the US Navy do some policy work on this issue.

The presidential candidate believes that within 10 to 15 years, artificial intelligence will advance to the point of solving all of civilization’s most vexing problems, including death, and he has even traveled around America in an “immortality bus” mocked up like a coffin to promote his ideas.

“It’s crazy to me that we don’t develop it and use it in ourselves (humans) more, and especially in our children,” says the Transhumanist.

Istvan believes that GPS microchipping could be beneficial to parents who want to be able to keep track of their children and could have allowed investigators to find the body of Lane Graves, who was killed in an alligator attack, in just a matter of minutes.

“As a father of a two and five-year-old, I’m a big believer in the future that all children will get chipped, perhaps like all children get vaccines in the US,” Istvan told The Sun.

Joseph Jankowski is a contributor for Planet Free Will.com. His works have been published by recognizable alternative news sites like GlobalResearch.ca, ActivistPost.com, Mintpressnews.com and ZeroHedge.com.

(activistpost.com)

June 15, 2016 | 9:52am

Belgian intelligence services sent a note to French counterparts about the possible groups, and it was sent to police across France on Tuesday, a French security official said Wednesday.

French authorities remain “very cautious” about the information because they receive such notes routinely, the official said.

The official said the information does not change the French government’s overall understanding of the threat. France is already under high alert because Islamic State extremists targeted Paris last year and have threatened violence during the European Championship soccer tournament taking place at the moment.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to be able to discuss sensitive security information, had no information about specific targets or how many extremists could be en route.

Belgium’s Derniere Heure tabloid reported Wednesday that Belgium’s anti-terror office has warned police that fighters with access to weapons could have left Syria about 10 days ago bound for Belgium and France. It was the latest of several recent reports that fighters from Syria could pose an imminent threat.

Modal Trigger

The paper, which said it had obtained an alert message, said fighters traveling without passports were believed to be trying to reach Europe by boat via Turkey and Greece. A Brussels shopping mall, an American fast-food chain and police could be among their targets.

Belgium’s security threat analysis center said Wednesday it is keeping the country’s security alert status at its current level.

“We are still on level three, quite a high level of threat,” said Benoit Ramacker, spokesman for the Crisis Center. Level three out of a possible four means the threat is considered serious and probable.

Ramacker said, “These kinds of potential targets are under protection anyway” and that “nothing has changed in terms of security.”

He declined to comment specifically on the reports, saying only that “there is a lot of information coming in.”

Belgium has been on level three or above since November, in the wake of the massacres in Paris that killed 130 people, with extra police and military mobilized.

(New York Post)

By Mac Slavo