Wars Based On Lies

A short video editorial discussing America's war in the middle east. Featuring clips from the documentary "Why We Fight", along with footage of speeches made by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

From Pol Pot To ISIS and Our War Criminals

In transmitting President Richard Nixon's orders for a "massive" bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, "Anything that flies on everything that moves".  As Barack Obama ignites his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger's murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery - including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields - I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. 

A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today's Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of "fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders". Once Nixon's and Kissinger's B52 bombers had gone to work as part of "Operation Menu", the west's ultimate demon could not believe his luck.

The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They levelled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left monstrous necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors 

"froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over."

A Finnish Government Commission of Enquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair's invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of some 700,000 people - in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of Jihadism. Al-Qaeda - like Pol Pot's "Jihadists" - seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of Shock and Awe and the civil war that followed. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. 

A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote recently, 

"The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy - and in particular our Middle East wars - had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here."

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington and London who, in destroying Iraq as both a state and a society, conspired to commit an epic crime against humanity. 

Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in "our" societies.

It is 23 years since this holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive "sanctions" on the Iraqi population - ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. 

It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, "blocked" - from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium.

Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. 

Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. "The children's vaccines", he said, "were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq - much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office - blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus "humanitarian" Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society's infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. 

"Imagine," the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, "setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable."

Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. 

His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. 

"I was instructed," Halliday said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults."

A study by the United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 "excess" deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. 

An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, "Is the price worth it?" Albright replied, "We think the price is worth it."

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as "Mr. Iraq", told a parliamentary selection committee, 

"[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live."  

When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. 

"I feel ashamed," he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. "We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence," he said, "or we'd freeze them out."

On 25 September, a headline in the Guardian read: "Faced with the horror of Isis we must act." The "we must act" is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC's Newsnight as an "apologist for Saddam". In 2003, Hain backed Blair's invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a "fringe issue".

Now Hain is demanding "air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support" for those "facing genocide" in Iraq and Syria. This will further "the imperative of a political solution". 

Obama has the same in mind as he lifts what he calls the "restrictions" on US bombing and drone attacks. 

This means that missiles and 500-pound bombs can smash the homes of peasant people, as they are doing without restriction in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia - as they did in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. On 23 September, a Tomahawk cruise missile hit a village in Idlib Province in Syria, killing as many as a dozen civilians, including women and children. None waved a black flag.

The day Hain's article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. 

Why not now in Iraq and Syria.

Like Ebola from West Africa, a bacteria called "perpetual war" has crossed the Atlantic. 

Lord Richards, until recently head of the British military, wants "boots on the ground" now. 

There is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Obama and their "coalition of the willing" - notably Australia's aggressively weird Tony Abbott - as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They have never seen bombing and they apparently love it so much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally,  Syria. This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

"In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces... a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals... a necessary degree of fear... frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention... the CIA and SIS should use... capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension."

That was written in 1957, though it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. 



Last year, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that "two years before the Arab spring", he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. 

"I am going to tell you something," he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, "I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria... Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate... This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned."

A truce - however difficult to achieve - is the only way out of this imperial maze.

Together with a truce, 

there should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. 

The issue of Palestine is the region's most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq. 

With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger's latest self-serving tome has just been released with its satirical title, "World Order". In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a "key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century". 

Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft".  

Only when "we" recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry.

By John Pilger


Note: I included the above 2 videos, which were not part of John Pilger's article. 

6 Million People Killed In CIA Wars Against 3rd World Countries

This is a 6:26 minute teaser

John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13 years in the agency. John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned.

The clip is showing parts of a lecture that Stockwell gave in 1987, explaining the CIA's secret war. A war he describes as 'The Third World War'. Not because it is the thermonuclear exchange that is commonly meant, but because it was mainly waged against people in the third world countries. In Stockwell's own words: 

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has mounted approximately 3,000 major operations and 10,000 minor operations of this nature, every one of them illegal and many of them "bloody and gory beyond comprehension". 

Below is the complete lecture:

The War On Democracy

'The War On Democracy' (2007), It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

The film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the Latin American region since the 1950s. 

The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. 

He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

It also looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America lead by indigenous leaders intent on loosening the shackles of Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent's natural wealth.

John Pilger says: 

"[The film] is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery. These people describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us."

Secret Insignias From The ‘Black Ops’ World

Like A Space-Phoenix From Hell

The Latin phrase below the Phoenix translates to "The Devil You Know." That's the rationale behind the spy-satellite operators at the National Reconnaissance Office, who peer into the workings of foreign military arsenals from hundreds of miles into space.

This patch, from National Reconnaissance Office Launch 49, puts a bold face on a failure: the Future Imagery Architecture, a $10-billion disaster in the guise of a satellite able to peer through heavy cloud cover.

The end of Future Imagery Architecture meant that NRO had to continue with its KH "Keyhole" satellite family, many of which the United States uses to spy on Russian nukes. Launch 49 of the KH-11 series supposedly used spare parts from Future Imagery Architecture -- hence the Phoenix design.

Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen

• Special Projects Flight Test Squadron

  No one patch may cobble together as many symbols as this one does. "Rat 55" is the call sign for pilots flying theT-43A, a radar testbed ("Rat," get it?) with an Air Force serial number ending in 55.
  The rat's holding a pair of radar devices, one stretched outward and one near its butt, "both of which recall the radome configuration" of the plane. Other flight-test operators for classified aircraft wear patches with wizardy features, so presumably that's what's up with the rat's hat.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen

 

• Confirmed: The Air Force Totally Hides Aliens From Us

  You don't know how many Freedom of Information Act requests we've filed in the hope of finding the Alien Technology Exploitation Division, the intrepid souls who'll soon announce a sources-sought contract to develop the Hyperspace Blaster. Alas, they don't exist.
  A former officer at Air Force Space Command tells Paglen that he and his friends had the patches made at their own expense after getting endlessly ribbed for working in a secure vault "where they kept the alien bodies." They wore them on their flight suits for months before a one-star general asked where he could get one of his own.
  Oh, and the barely-decipherable legend on the bottom? It's Klingon for "Don't Ask." Paglen got it in the mail from its creator after mentioning that he knew about its existence on the Colbert Report.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• Special Projects Flight-Test Squadron

  Welcome to Area 51.
  Out in the Nevada desert, in a place called Groom Lake, the Air Force's most secretive organization tests its advanced prototypes. Supposedly, Lockheed's F-117A Nighthawk stealth plane went through Groom Lake's test facilities -- one of many flown by the Special Projects Flight Test Squadron, whose patch this is.
  The diamond shape in the center of the undated patch "may refer to early designs of stealth aircraft," Paglen writes. Those planes are parked next to the dismembered Martians.
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• Space Spies Are Ready to Breach Your Borders

  Paglen won't be able to find the origins of every patch he comes across. But rarely is a mystery more appropriate than in the case of the Sensor Hunters, whoever they are. Illustrated by one of MAD Magazine's spies, their brief(cases) include spying on the entire world, with swaggering disregard for nations' claims to control their own internal affairs.
  The twinkling stars probably suggest these guys have something to do with space, but all Paglen writes is that they "devoted to reconnaissance and intelligence operations."
  Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
• 

• • Drone Strikes From Space?

    The PAN satellite is so secretive that people joke it stands for "Pick a Name," rather than "Palladium at Night." Launched into geostationary orbit in September 2009, no military or intelligence agency claims to operate the communications device.
    Paglen reports that's led space-watchers to suspect it's a rare CIA-controlled satellite, used as a "communications relay for armed CIA Predator and Reaper drones operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan."
    Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
  • 
  • • The Only Thing Falling To Earth Is Your Secrets

      This one belongs to the Hawaii-based 6594th Test Group, the wide receivers of military intelligence. In the early days of photo-reconnaissance satellites, back in the 1960s, the images taken by satellites printed to actual film. That meant anything the satellite observed had to be physically transported back to Earth for analysis.
      Those were the "Falling Stars" in this patch: Film canisters ejected from the satellites fell to earth over the Pacific. The 6594th Test Group "had to go out in airplanes and try to catch them as they fell from the heavens," Paglen says. This patch is one of his favorites.
      Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
    • 
    • • I Want To Believe (In The Navy's Communications Network)

        The Navy uses a system of Boeing-designed space satellites to keep mariners connected with each other and home base while they're out at sea. The system is known as the Ultra-High Frequency Follow-On program.
        If you squint enough, that kinda-sorta-maybe abbreviates to UFO. Naturally, some wise-cracking sailor -- Paglen doesn't specify whom -- had the idea to make this X-Files-inspired patch.
        Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
      • 
      • • The More Secretive The Drone, The More Psychedelic The Patch

          Groom Lake doesn't just house cutting-edge piloted planes. It's also home to the Desert Prowler, a Lockheed-designed drone shrouded in mystery since its 2005 launch -- and, perhaps, related to a different secret drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel aloft over Kandahar.
          And since its remote pilots and crew can't exactly flaunt their involvement with the program, their patches will have to suffice. The Roman numerals for 9 and 11 partially bound the badge -- subtle! -- and the rainbow-emanating eye has a lightning bolt through it, suggesting that the drone is armed and ready to rain vengeance for 9/11 on presumed Kandahari insurgents. Wild guess: The lightning-bolted Omega in the thought balloon indicates the drone is dreaming of a violent end to its targets.
          Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
        • 

        • The Dragon Is In Ur Base, Killing Ur Dudes

          You're an imagery analyst, so naturally you see yourself as a Tolkein-esque flying serpent, dispensing destruction from the heavens. That's the apparent animating impulse behind what Paglen can only call the Unknown Dragon Patch. Dragons typically stand in for signals-intelligence satellite launches; their wing patterns on patches "symbolize the massive gold-foil dish antennae" of SIGINT spacecraft.
          Better still, the Latin translates to "All Your Base Are Belong To Us," which we remember as the earliest and most bizarre of all memes. Maybe the crew operating the "largest satellite in the world," which the National Reconnaissance Office launched into space on Friday, will have a Double Rainbow patch someday.
          Image: Courtesy Trevor Paglen
        • Source: Wired

Gitmo Detainees Didn't Commit Suicide, They Were Murdered

NCIS Hid Medical Evidence About Guantanamo Suicides

The Senior Medical Officer (SMO) at Guantanamo who attended at least two of three high-profile “suicides” at Guantanamo nearly eight years ago concluded at the time that, contrary to the conclusions of a later government investigation, the detainees did not die by hanging but by “likely asphyxiation” from “obstruction” of the airway. Moreover this SMO found a prisoner he examined and pronounced dead had “cotton clothing material in [his] mouth and upper pharynx.” (See pgs. 5-7 of this PDF to view the SMO’s original findings.)

The finding is consistent with other accounts, and with the theory the three prisoners died from a torture procedure known as “dryboarding,” as researcher Almerindo Ojeda described in an 2011 story at Truthout.

Yet, unaccountably, the SMO was never formally interviewed by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which had the Department of Defense mandate to investigate the supposed suicides. Furthermore, the SMO’s account was not included in the NCIS final report. This new finding is one of a number of such discoveries detailed in a new investigatory report published last month by The Center for Policy and Research (CPR) at Seton Hall University School of Law.

Thus far, their report has been totally ignored by the press.

Other findings in CPR’s new report either ignored or overlooked in previous investigations include the fact that guards who searched the deceased’s rooms only hours prior to their deaths did “not discover anything that a detainee could hang himself with…. in the manner of the rumors” of their death by hanging.

CPR’s report, “Uncovering the Cover-ups: Death in Camp Delta,” was supervised by Seton Hall law professor (and attorney for some Guantanamo detainees) Mark Denbeaux, and co-written by Charles Church, Ryan K. Gallagher, Adam Kirchner and Joshua Wirtshafter. Joseph Hickman, who was at Guantanamo at the time of the deaths, and who figured so prominently in Scott Horton’s January 2010 Harper’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” acted as lead investigator. A full PDF download of the paper is available at this link.

This article will summarize CPR’s findings, but it is highly recommended that readers study the entire report.

Newly Uncovered Documents

Last month, Scott Horton wrote an article at Harpers Magazine, “The Guantanamo ‘Suicides,” Revisited,” which reproduced and annotated a document that had been suppressed in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) release of documents concerning their investigation into three purported suicides at Guantanamo on June 10, 2006. The document, part of a group of documents associated with a separate Staff Judge Advocate investigation of the deaths, had sat unexamined on a DoD FOIA website for literally years, until both Seton Hall and Scott Horton brought it to the public’s attention. The original can be found on pgs. 15-17 of this PDF.

The explosive document — a sworn statement by Master of Arms Denny called to attend to the suicides that evening — states a number of facts from a witness on the scene that directly contradicts the story promulgated by Guantanamo officials and the NCIS report into the deaths. (Denny was named by Horton, but not described by name in the CPR report.) Horton and CPR describe Denny’s account in some detail, including the fact attempts to revive a still living “suicide” were not made for some time, and that cloth wrapped tightly around his neck was not removed.

Government authorities contend the three prisoners died in an act of simultaneous suicide by hanging, an act JTF Guantanamo Commander Harry Harris described only one day after the deaths as “asymmetrical warfare.” It is this version of what happened that has been accepted by a wide section of the press. Horton’s article surmises that the prisoners may have died at Guantanamo’s “Camp No,” also known as “Penny Lane,” thought to be a special CIA black site at Guantanamo used to coerce prisoners, including through torture, to turn informants for the U.S. government.

CPR’s report goes much farther than Horton’s article in documenting exactly how the government pulled this document — Exhibit 25 of the NCIS report — and replaced it with random pages from elsewhere in the group of documents gathered in the course of the investigation. Detailed in Appendix D of the report, the work is an impressive piece of forensic research.

This deliberate suppression of information contrary to the government’s story should be a matter of public outrage and congressional investigation, but the CPR report also shows how the Obama administration’s Justice Department deliberately misled congressional queries about the report in the wake of the 2010 Harpers report and earlier Seton Hall CPR investigation and report, “Death in Camp Delta” (PDF).

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not clear at present, Horton’s recent article, which drew upon work done by Seton Hall’s (CPR), did not include reference to to a number of other new findings and documents CPR uncovered in their ongoing analysis of the Guantanamo deaths (including the SMO report). The documents describe how important evidence contradicting the official narrative were withheld from the NCIS report. 

Furthermore, when congressional representatives went to the Department of Justice to ask for an investigation, they were lied to about how long the investigation had taken, and whether or not there was evidence that showed something other than death by hanging.

According to the CPR Executive Summary, besides the findings discussed above, the new report concludes:

• Contrary to standard investigative protocol, NCIS never authenticated “suspected suicide notes.”
• Contrary to standard suspected suicide protocol, NCIS never investigated the behavior, state of mind, or emotional condition of the dead men during the minutes, hours, days, and weeks before they died.
• NCIS failed to investigate multiple irregularities in protocol, among them: tampering with the contents of cells where the men were reported to have died, as well as more than fifty discrete events so irregular that they had no specific designation in the log book, and that were so secret that their details were redacted which occurred for hours before the alleged crime scene was secured and investigated by NCIS….
• Contrary to extensive protocol, the Camp Commander ordered the cessation of video recording of the events.

Cover-Up Or “Conspiracy Building”?

The most compelling evidence of a cover-up consists of contemporaneous reports that all three prisoners were found with socks or other cloth material shoved deep into their throats. It was this account of the deaths that Guantanamo authorities moved quickly to cover-up and replace with a story that the detainees had hanged themselves.

According to Horton’s 2010 article, the Joint Detention Group Commander, Michael Bumgarner, gathered camp personnel hours after the deaths and told them “you all know” the prisoners had died from swallowing rags and choking to death, but the press would be told something different: the prisoners had died by hanging themselves.

In May 2011, Alex Koppelman, then writing for Adweek, but currently the News Editor for The Guardian/US, wrote an influential article criticizing Scott Horton for “conspiracy building.” He decried the story about Baumgarner’s speech about “rags” — because Bumgarner denied to him having ever made it. Koppelman’s account was later cited in a government legal brief used to counter a lawsuit by the relatives of two of the Guantanamo “suicides.” I deconstructed Koppelman’s account in a series of articles that examined his arguments in detail.

But the new evidence in Horton’s article and the Seton Hall report demonstrates conclusively that multiple witnesses on the scene, including the Senior Medical Officer, found cloth material inside the deceased’s mouths and throats. This was no “conspiracy building”: the evidence was covered up.

Among many telling details in the new documents, Master of Arms Denny’s account of how one detainee, ISN 093, Yasser Talal al Zahrani, was found alive even two hours after he supposedly hanged himself. Denny witnessed cloth matching a ligature placed around Zahrain’s throat being wrapped around his hands:

I observed a Corpsman wrapping an altered detainee sheet… around the detainee’s right wrist. The other side of the material was bound to the detainee’s left wrist with approximately a foot of cloth in between. The cloth was not on the detainees [sic] wrists when the Camp 1 guards removed the handcuffs a few minutes earlier.

The fact all the “suicides” had their hands bound was supposed to be evidence of collaboration in the “asymmetrical warfare” that was simultaneous suicide. But Denny’s account shows the “evidence” was being fabricated after the supposed suicides themselves.

The Seton Hall report deserves wide exposure and Congress must undertake its own investigation, as it’s evident that DOJ and the Obama administration have no intention of looking further into what happened. But according to Seton Hall’s Executive Director for Communications, Janet LeMonnier, attempts to get attention from multiple attempts at media outreach have garnered “very little interest,” and CPR personnel are frustrated at the lack of response.

Even so, Mark Denbeaux told me in a phone interview that Seton Hall’s investigations are going forward, and another report with even more new revelations is due out early next year.

By Jeff Kaye

US Embraced Foreign Detention & Torture Of Terror Suspects

Changes made to a key FBI interrogation manual highlight the bureau's increasing focus on questioning suspects—including Americans—in overseas prisons.

What happens when an FBI agent steps into a foreign prison to interrogate a US citizen? For several years, even as the FBI has cooperated with foreign governments to question Americans locked up in countries such as Kuwait, South Sudan, andYemen, the Obama administration has been tight-lipped about the rules that govern such interrogations. FBI officials have told Congress that the same rules apply when FBI agents interview suspects at home and overseas. But an internal bureau interrogation manual suggests that the truth is more complicated—and new information from the FBI shows that key edits were made to the manual as the Obama administration shifted away from the Bush-era practice of questioning terrorism suspects at Pentagon- or CIA-run facilities, and toward outsourcing detentions to foreign regimes.

The FBI acknowledges that information it shares with foreign countries sometimes leads to the arrest of people the FBI is interested in, including Americans, and that its agents sometimes interview these suspects. This controversial practice, often called proxy detention, has been denounced by human rights advocates who say it circumvents suspects' constitutional rights. But it took a lawsuit from the ACLU to force the Obama administration to disclose a manual that offers advice to FBI agents conducting these interviews.

When the manual, titled "Cross-Cultural, Rapport-Based Interrogation" was released in 2012, the sections that dealt with proxy detention were heavily redacted. The FBI's page-and-a-half of "recommended practices" for conducting interviews of suspects in foreign custody was entirely redacted:

"Recommended practices" (p. 51)

The section on "recommended practices" for interrogations overseas was entirely redacted. (This redaction continues for the entire next page, too.)

Another section, titled "Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas," was also heavily censored:

Annex B Title (p. 47)

Then, in December, I broke the story of a bizarre FBI mistake: In 2010, a top agent at the bureau, thinking (incorrectly) that he could copyright the manual, deposited an unredacted version at the Library of Congress, where anyone could read it. But the tale gets even stranger.

The interrogation manual deposited at the Library of Congress was labeled "Version 3" and dated August 18, 2008, just a few months before President George W. Bush left office. A side-by-side comparison showed that the section dealing with proxy detentions had changed dramatically between this Bush-era version and the 2011 one released to the ACLU.

The Bush-era section focused on interviews in Defense Department facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan—not suspects held by foreign governments. It was titled "Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews in Combat Zones,"—minus the word "Overseas," with its broader meaning. And the page-and-a-half on "recommended practices" that was entirely redacted in the 2011 version wasn't in this version of the manual at all.

So when were the changes made? Recently, an FBI spokesman got me an answer. He said the tweaks came "around late 2010,"—well into the Obama administration—and "were mainly based on additional experiences gained overseas along with additional research on the subject matter."

Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University, says it is "extremely troubling" that it took the ACLU to uncover the manual, and that "these rules seem to expand without notice or public discussion. [It is] clear evidence there are insufficient internal or external controls on the FBI."

In recent years, the Obama administration has continued to shift away from unilateral measures such as drone strikes, and toward working with foreign allies through means like proxy detention. Publicly disclosed funding to train and equip foreign militaries to fight terrorism has increased from $218.6 million in 2012 to a requested $290.2 million in 2014, and defense officials recently told The Hill that the government's secret counterterrorism budget now has less money going to Afghanistan and more going to North Africa and the Middle East. Data collected byLong War Journal show that drone strikes in Pakistan peaked in 2010 and havedeclined every year since; similar data for Yemen show a peak in 2012 and a decline in the years since.

For more on what the FBI's work with American citizens overseas can look like in practice, check out my recent investigation in the May/June issue of Mother Jones.

By Nick Baumann