Amnesty, other NGOs, journalists and attorneys are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union. “Clapper” refers to James R. Clapper, Jr., the Director of National Intelligence.

The issue before the Court is whether we can challenge the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act, which basically allows “dragnet” surveillance of emails and phone calls without warrant and without sufficient independent judicial oversight.

Our argument is that we have standing to challenge the law’s constitutionality because as human rights advocates, journalists and attorneys, we rely on confidentiality in our international communications with victims of human rights abuses, whistle-blowers and government officials–and our work is severely impacted by the law. 

The Obama administration claims that we don’t have standing in the case because we can’t prove that we are impacted—i.e., subject to surveillance. But how can we prove such a thing when the information about who the government monitors is secret and the process of surveillance is designed to be undetectable?

And that gets at the heart of the unconstitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act. The law:

• Violates the First (freedom of speech, freedom of the press) and Fourth (against unreasonable searches and seizures) Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
• Invests the National Security Agency with sweeping power to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and emails.
• Doesn’t include a probable cause or warrant requirement, so its effect is to allow the NSA to conduct dragnet surveillance, not just surveillance directed at suspected terrorists and criminals.
• Doesn’t provide for meaningful judicial review or congressional or public oversight.

But the Supreme Court won’t be considering any of these claims when it hears oral arguments in our case this fall. The Court will only be pondering whether we have the right to bring a case at all. If that’s too long of a wait for you, then join the ACLU’s campaign to fix the FISA Amendments Act and end warrantless wiretapping.

Maher Arar

More than 60,000 people signed a petition delivered to the White House yesterday calling on President Barack Obama to issue a formal apology to US rendition victim Maher Arar.

In September 2002 Maher was traveling home to Canada from a family holiday in Tunis. His flight transited New York’s JFK airport where he was pulled aside by US immigration officials and detained.

Maher was targeted because he had been briefly seen in the company of an individual, Abdullah Almaki, who was a peripheral ‘person of interest’ in a Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) investigation. The Canadians shared this titbit of intelligence with their US allies who took it and ran with it.

There doesn’t seem to have been any meaningful investigation of Maher’s relationship with Almaki. In fact, their only connection was that Maher had once worked in a Canadian technology firm with Almaki’s brother.

This was a simple case of guilt by association, even though, it should be emphasized, the Canadian authorities didn’t even have any real evidence against Almaki either.

Maher was held in solitary confinement in New York for two weeks before US officials decided to ‘deport’ him. Maher was a dual citizen of both Syria and Canada who lived in the Canadian capital Ottawa. He should therefore, at very least, have been deported to Canada.

Instead officials arranged for Maher to be rendered to Syria – a regime well-known to the US to employ torture – as a suspected terrorist.

On his arrival in Syria, Maher was immediately transferred to prison where he was held, tortured, and abused for more than a year. He said later of the experience:

“It was so painful that I forgot every enjoyable moment in my life.”

Maher was beaten with electric cables and locked up alone for months in a claustrophobic “grave” measuring just 3ft by 6ft with only rats for company. He broke down under the abuse and falsely confessed to having attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan to make the beatings stop:

“I was willing to do anything to stop the torture.”

Fans of torture should note that even the Syrians don’t seem to have set much store in the confession they forced out of Maher, since they eventually released him in October 2003 stating that they could find no evidence of any link between him and Al Qaeda – or any other terrorist organization. Syrian official Imad Moustapha told reporters:

“We tried to find anything. We couldn’t”

Note the formulation – ‘we tried to find anything.’ Maher recalls being asked the same questions in Syria that he had been asked in New York and drew the inevitable conclusion that US officials had been pulling the strings throughout his detention.

Maher finally made it back to Canada after more than a year in captivity to be reunited with his wife and two young children. He began to campaign almost immediately for justice.

Maher’s case attracted a great deal of interest in Canada, culminating in the establishment of a Canadian Commission of Inquiry chaired by Dennis O’Connor which reported in September 2006:

“There is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada.”

Pretty categorical.

In January 2007 the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to Maher on behalf of the Canadian government and announced that Maher would receive a C$10.5m settlement in compensation for his ordeal.

However, from the United States – the country that detained Maher and which deliberately and willfully rendered him to Syria to be tortured – there has been only deafening silence.

Actually, it’s worse than that.

The Obama administration has actively taken steps to oppose and frustrate Maher’s attempts to gain remedy in American courts for the ill-treatement he suffered as a direct consequence of US actions.

To add insult to injury Maher’s name still appears on the US ‘no fly’ list making international travel for him both extremely difficult and hazardous.

This is quite simply wrong – on both counts.

The United States has an international legal obligation to provide remedy to individuals who are wrongly detained and subjected to abuse.

It also has a moral obligation to make this situation right.

It shouldn’t be a hard decision. If Canada can do it, the US can too.

Instead the White House has chosen a different path. In Maher’s words the Obama administration has preferred

“to turn a blind eye on holding torturers to account.”

Amnesty International is working with our partners in the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) to put pressure on the Obama administration to search its conscience, recapture the spirit of hope and change that imbued the 2008 campaign trail, and actually make amends to someone America has wronged.

You can add your voice to those calling for America to do the right thing by tweeting @barackobama or calling the White House comment line on (202)-456-1111 and highlighting Maher’s case.

It is, quite literally, the least you can do.

Yup, it’s that time of the year again:

What does that mean? You have two options:

1) If you’re an NDAA junkie, and already know that the Smith/Amash effort to improve the NDAA just lost in the House this morning, then sign this action calling for repeal of Sections 1021 & 1022.

2) If you have no idea what I’m talking about then keep reading for an NDAA 101.

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is an important piece of legislation passed every year to authorize defense expenditures. In and of itself, it’s not a big deal. But it often gets hijacked for other purposes (see Wikipedia entry for Pork barrel) and sometimes for really bad ones–and thus our story begins.

Last year a bipartisan group led by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) passed amendments to the 2012 NDAA that dealt with how the government detains suspected terrorists. The detention provisions, specifically Sections 1021 and 1022–signed in to law with the rest of the NDAA by President Obama on New Year’s eve while most of us were in Times Square–further entrenched indefinite detention, discrimination based on citizenship, and the paradigm of global unending war in US law.

The 2012 NDAA was a big setback for human rights, because every person has the right to due process, to a speedy and fair trial, and to be free from discrimination and abuse.

But there was an upside to the 2012 NDAA: it sparked a rightful outcry across the political spectrum. That’s worth repeating: across the political spectrum, as in from left to right. The Tea Party and Occupy even held joint demonstrations! Together!

While the intermingling of  tie-dye shirts with red, white and blue Bald Eagle sweaters was a bit jarring, it has been great to see people come together to defend shared values–in this case, protecting civil liberties from abuse of power by the state.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s been a lot of disagreement over what the NDAA detention provisions actually do. You can read them yourself (see Sections 1021 and 1022) and here are links to several interpretations about what the NDAA detention provisions mean:

(A) Joe the Plumber and I could be locked up forever and that’s all I care about

(B) Amnesty’s NYC office could be be hit with a drone strike

(C) stop worrying about it, we’re keeping you safe

(D) Hawai’i and Virginia aren’t going to play this game

(E) Section 1021 is unconstitutional

(F) They’re bad and we need to fix them–along with a broader system of badness tied to that other four-letter symbol of human rights violations, the AUMF

Personally, I’m going with (F), but I like (D) and (E), sympathize with (A), don’t like (B) and am very sure (C) is wrong. I know that’s complicated, but the solution to the NDAA detention provisions is simple: repeal Sections 1021 and 1022.

Will Congress listen and fix the NDAA? So far, the answer is no. The House voted today on amendments to the 2013 NDAA, but the well-intentioned efforts that would have repealed or substantially amended Sections 1021 and 1022 were defeated. (Thank you Representatives Amash (R-MI), Nadler (D-NY), Paul (R-TX), Smith (D-WA) and many others for your efforts.)

But the 2013 NDAA process is far from over, now it moves to the Senate. The detention provisions could be repealed, stay the same–or become even more problematic: last year Senator Ayotte (R-NH) tried to pass an amendment—known as the “torture amendment”–that would have let the CIA chose its own interrogation tactics, in secret. Luckily it failed due to public pressure from people like you. But it underscores that we have to be vigilant not only in fixing the NDAA but in making sure it doesn’t get worse.

Take action to let your elected officials know where you stand on the NDAA.

What’s your interpretation of the NDAA? Use the comments or Tweet #NDAA @ZekeJohnsonAi

In his press conference on the eve of the arraignment the Chief Prosecutor, General Mark Martens, tried to address this issue:

“Some have said that any attempt to seek accountability within the Military Commissions system must inevitably be tainted by torture… we acknowledge your skepticism, but we also say that the law prohibits the use of any statement obtained as a result of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and we will implement the law.”

Of course the law also requires the state to investigate allegations of torture – yet in the case of the five defendants being arraigned this hasn’t happened. That might explain some of our skepticism.

Yet, it keeps ‘spilling’ out at every turn.

Almost as soon as the arraignment began the courtroom feed was cut and white noise pumped into the viewing gallery because one of the defense attorneys had “spilled” classified information by trying to raise how his client had been treated in custody.

Only minutes after proceedings had got back underway the defendants then refused to listen to the translation of the court proceedings through the headphones they had been given.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s attorney David Nevin explained to the court why his client wouldn’t wear the equipment provided:

“The reason he wouldn’t put the headphones in his ears has to do with how he was tortured.”

Judge Pohl was forced to order consecutive translation over the court’s PA system, the cumbersome logistics of which bedeviled almost every subsequent exchange.

Not long after that Mr. Nevin asked the Prosecution to identify the individuals sitting at the back of the courtroom on the government’s side commenting:

“The presence of unknown shadowy people is extremely disturbing for my client.”

The individuals in question were FBI Agents observing the arraignment.

This is a defense tactic to be sure, but it is a legitimate tactic nonetheless. If the defendants had been handled lawfully it wouldn’t be an option.

The Military Commissions are in part designed to make it easier for the government to navigate the legal problems that the past ill-treatment of the Guantanamo detainees has created.

But this is not a problem that can be process-managed away.

One of the most interesting developments observing this proceeding was the apparent matter-of-fact acceptance on all sides of the courtroom that what happened to the defendants in CIA custody amounted to torture.

The word ‘torture’ came up repeatedly throughout the arraignment but at no point did anyone on the government side, either in the courtroom or in press briefings, try to make the argument that the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques used on them did not amount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Even Judge Pohl seemed to have made up his mind on this point telling the defense at one point that there would be an opportunity for the defense to ‘right this wrong’ at trial.

During the Omar Khadr trial the question of torture and duress was largely brushed under the carpet. The premature end of the case in a guilty plea deal meant that the court’s decision to exclude testimony relating to Khadr’s mistreatment in U.S. custody was quickly forgotten.

That is not likely to happen this time.

The 9/11 defendants seem intent on contesting this case to the bitter end and at some point the torture issue is going to have to be dealt with or any subsequent convictions will be beyond unsound.

In conversation with reporters, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali’s Defense Counsel James Connell made a prediction:

 “[This] is only the beginning of a trial that will take years to complete, followed by years of appellate review. Indeed, we may all meet again another ten years from now if the Supreme Court strikes down the Military Commissions as unconstitutional for the second time.”

This is not an entirely unlikely scenario. It will certainly be years until we reach the final arguments in this case. It’s going to be years before it even starts.

This is all so unnecessary, if this case had gone to federal court immediately after the defendants had been captured it would have completed years ago – as more than 350 terrorism-related cases have been since 9/11.

That’s what is so depressing about the Military Commissions – nobody is being well served by this process. Not the defendants, not the victims, and, most certainly, not the American people.

Tom Parker is currently at Guantanamo Bay to observe the Military Commissions proceedings against five alleged 9/11 co-conspirators

Last week a court in Brooklyn convicted Al Qaeda operative Adis Medunjanin of plotting to bomb the New York subway.

Bosnian-born US citizen Medunjanin conspired with Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay to launch a major attack before the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2009.

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials disrupted the plot before anyone could get hurt, and arrested those involved.

Make no mistake, this plot represented a serious threat to the United States. It was conceived in 2008 by the then head of Al Qaeda’s external operations, Rashid Rauf.

This was a complex case and it showcased all the advantages of using the criminal justice system to prosecute suspected terrorists.

The trial was able to handle sensitive intelligence securely. Several convicted Al Qaeda terrorists, including Zazi and Ahmedzay, actually testified for the prosecution.

Happy to be associated with the trial, the UK government arranged for a former confederate of shoe bomber Richard Reid to address the court from his cell in Britain.

Due process was observed, and the trial was concluded with little fuss and no threat to the general public. To the best of my knowledge there has been no criticism of the verdict either at home or abroad.

It looked like what it was: the exercise of justice.

Now contrast that story with the process that gets under way in Guantanamo tomorrow with the arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four alleged 9/11 co-conspirators.

It has taken almost a decade for this case to come to court. At Gitmo the rules keep changing. Attorney-client privilege has been violated. Evidence has been withheld. Hearsay is given greater weight than in a criminal trial.

Defense attorneys aren’t even allowed to look at the Wikileaks documents about their clients that are now freely available on the web.

The fact, that some defendants have been tortured has, to date, been treated as a matter of little consequence by the Commissions.

Most troubling of all, even if an individual is found innocent of all charges before the Military Commissions, the government may decide to keep him locked up in the same cell as before as a Prisoner of War for as long as it feels necessary.

If you are acquitted in federal court you leave the building a free man. That is a pretty significant difference.

This is why the majority of defendants before the Military Commissions have ended up striking a plea deal – it is the only way to guarantee that they will eventually get off the island and return home.

No matter how hard the Obama administration tries to repackage the Military Commissions, they are damaged goods.

The optics are horrible, despite the reforms introduced by the Obama administration and the evident professionalism of the military lawyers, there are few people outside the United States who see the Military Commissions as a fair process.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged co-conspirators should have been tried in federal court – like Adis Medunjanin, and the hundreds of other terrorism cases successfully prosecuted in federal courts since the 9/11 attacks.

This was an opportunity to demonstrate to the world the strength of our values and our commitment to fundamental human rights such as the right to due process and a fair trial. It is a test that we have flunked badly.

President Obama had it right on the campaign trial – despite all his tinkering, Military Commissions remain a colossal failure.

Afghan Young Women for Change (YWC) activists, holding placards which read "where is justice?", take part in a protest denouncing violence against women in Afghanistan in Kabul on April 14, 2012.

President Obama made an announced visit to Afghanistan on May 1 to sign an agreement intended to lead to a pullback of US troops from Afghanistan by 2014. The document is very specific on issues around the arrangements related to security and interestingly, trade and commerce but inadequate when talk to turns to human rights in general and specifically women’s rights.

Amnesty will continue to urge the US government to implement an action plan to protect and promote women’s rights in Afghanistan as they pull back from the country.

Women in Afghanistan, however, aren’t waiting around for vague assurances by the US and Afghan governments. They are taking matters into their own hands and demanding justice for the victims of past human rights violations and the promotion of human rights for all in their country.

Young Women for Change led a demonstration protesting against injustice and calling out the Afghan government for its failure to prosecute human rights violations committed against women and girls. They noted:

“Since Nawroz, New Year, at least five women have been killed in Afghanistan. Three women were killed in Herat, one of whom was beheaded by her husband. Another woman was killed by her husband in Khost and another was hanged after the unjust decision of the tribal court in Paktya”

But now, even the rights of the women to protest the injustices of the government are under threat. They are under threat from a Taleban movement that espouses and extreme ideology that stands against women’s rights.

But the threat to women and girls are also from an Afghan government that has shown a worrying pattern of pandering to Taleban ideology at the expense of human rights and a US government that seems more interested in declaring victory on the “war on terror” than in securing human rights gains promised by the Bush and Obama administrations.

The Obama – Karzai agreement doesn’t come close to what Afghan women are demanding. The agreement also doesn’t come close to what US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton said in 2010 to female Afghan officials:

We will not abandon you, we will stand with you always … [it is] essential that women’s rights and women’s opportunities are not sacrificed or trampled on in the reconciliation process.

This is why the US must implement an action plan to ensure that the US and its allies carry out promises made to the women of Afghanistan. And we need your help to demand that Afghan women’s rights are non-negotiable.

Pakistani tribesmen carry the coffin of a person allegedly killed in a US drone attack. (Photo by THIR KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Brennan’s argument had two main planks: That drones work and that their use is entirely legal. Both claims deserve close examination because neither is quite as simple as it seems.

In a classic rhetorical device Brennan threw out perhaps the most contentious aspect of his analysis as though it was a given, stating that “as a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, and associated forces.”

Wars are fought between states in defined theaters of conflict. Brennan drew a comparison with World War II, but World War II was fought on the territories occupied by the parties to the conflict and not just anywhere that was considered expedient.

In World War II the United States and its allies recognized the neutrality of non-combatant states.

A great example of how the Allies operated within these constraints and still managed to protect their citizens, involves the Nazi pocket battleship Graf Spee being scuttled in Montevideo harbor. Look it up, it’s a fantastic story.

Better yet watch the movie, it’s good too.

A more appropriate analogy for the point Brennan was trying to make would have been President Nixon’s much reviled decision to secretly bomb Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. That too was an illegal act under international law and it didn’t end well.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject, another thing we didn’t feel the need to do in World War II was torture people and, lest we forget, the other side in that conflict had death camps, Kamikaze pilots, V1 guided missiles and V2 ballistic rockets.

Even Nixon didn’t go as far as trying to legalize torture.

Another legally contentious issue is the fact that the drones used for the strikes in Pakistan, and some of the strikes in Yemen, are being operated by the CIA, rather than by military personnel.

This is being done precisely because the CIA is less transparent than the US military, and because the Obama administration wants to conduct these operations with as much secrecy, and as little oversight, as possible.

The problem here is that CIA officers don’t meet the traditional Geneva standard for lawful combatants as they don’t typically wear uniforms or carry their weapons openly. The extent to which they fall under a recognized chain of command and observe the laws and customs of war are also debatable.

You may recall the phrase “unlawful combatant” from the Bush era. That label fits the drones program perfectly.

So, if they are not legal, do CIA drone strikes at least work? At the tactical level, as Brennan outlined, Al Qaeda does appear to be at least temporarily weakened.

However, since 2005 Al Qaeda has prepared for this eventuality by adopting a concept of operations developed by Abu Musab al-Suri called nizam la tanzim.

This literally translates as ‘a system, not an organization’ and it is a variant of the theory of leaderless resistance propounded by the American Aryan Nations propagandist Louis Beam in the 1980s and 90s.

You know it better as the ‘lone wolf’ threat.

For several years now, Al Qaeda Central has adjusted to its new reality by seeking to inspire attacks rather than plan and conduct them itself. The Fort Hood shootings and the failed Times Square bombing are just two examples of this approach.

That’s the thing about asymmetrical opponents – just when you come up with a tactic that you think works, they come up with a tactic to negate it.

As for the strategic dimension, it is difficult to make the case that Pakistan is a more stable country because of drone strikes than it was ten years ago, and Pakistan has nukes.

So let’s drill down on some of the detail about CIA drone use.

There are two distinct types of CIA drone mission: ‘personality strikes’ and ‘signature strikes’. Personality strikes target an individual on one of the Obama administration’s kill lists. Signature strikes are operations triggered by pattern analysis – pulling together threads such as suspect vehicles, suspect buildings, communications nodes, group numbers and patterns of behavior to identify a promising target of opportunity.

There has been a lot of talk about the accuracy and near infallibility of the drones program – Brennan himself has said in the past that drones have killed 40 militants for every innocent civilian life lost – but the reality is nothing like as neat and tidy.

We don’t know many facts about the drone programs operated by the CIA but what we do know does not support the surgical strike narrative.

Here’s what we do know:

1. We know that Special Rapporteur Philip Alston reported to the United Nations that “the CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.”
2. We know that that doesn’t look good to our allies who are much more concerned with upholding international law than we are.
3. We know that the first CIA ‘personality strike’ in Pakistan killed two children, as well as the intended target.
4. We know that some of the targeting intelligence used for drone strikes came from Al Qaeda double agent Humam Khalil al-Balawi who ultimately killed 8 CIA operatives, including his handlers, in a suicide bombing on a US Forward Operating Base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009.
5. We know that the first ‘signature strike’, which occurred in Afghanistan in February 2002, killed three entirely innocent people and no militants. A drone fired on three Afghan men in the vicinity of Zhawar Kili simply on the basis that one man in the group was abnormally tall, and bin Laden was believed to be of a similar height.
6. We know that it took fourteen attempts before the CIA finally killed the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Baitullah Mehsud in a drone strike in Waziristan in 2009. To spell it out, that means thirteen of fourteen strikes did not hit their intended target.
7. We know that before he was killed Baitullah Mehsud considered drones a wonderful recruitment tool. He once told a local reporter: “Every drone strike brings me three or four new suicide bombers.”
8. We know that there have been more than 260 CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.
9. We know that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London estimates that between 282 and 535 civilians, including more than 60 children, have been killed in these strikes.
10. We know that there have been 27 drone strikes in Yemen since 2009 in which a reported 198 militants and 48 civilians have been killed.
11. We know that at least four US nationals, including one minor, have been deliberately targeted and killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen.
12. We know that President Obama has pressured the Yemen government to keep a Yemeni reporter, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who has investigated the impact of US drones strikes in Yemen, locked up in jail.

In short, we know that Brennan’s 40-to-1 metric was, at best, wrong and, at worst, a deliberate falsehood.

We know that drones do kill militants but they also kill innocent civilians.

We know that they kill both of them outside the framework of any recognized international law.

We also know that yesterday’s speech, which masqueraded as an exercise in transparency, was in fact anything but.

©PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP/Getty Images

It feels like we have been here before. Another testosterone-fueled memoir from a charter member of President Bush’s torture team unapologetically seeks to justify the unjustifiable with inflated claims of attacks thwarted and secret battles won.

Latest to the plate is Jose Rodriguez, former Head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, and the man charged with implementing the application of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) to detainees that fell into the CIA’s clutches after 9/11.

Rodriguez was not always quite so willing to boast about his handiwork. In 2005 he destroyed 92 videotapes of high value detainees Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri being water-boarded at secret CIA prisons in Thailand.

At the time Rodriguez justified his action to CIA Director Porter Goss by telling him that the tapes would make the CIA “look terrible; it would be devastating to us.”

Rodriguez was at least right about that. Larry Siems, who reviewed almost 140,000 previously classified documents obtained by the Freedom of Information litigation conducted by the ACLU, recently summed up the EIT program in the following terms:

“They tortured innocent people. They tortured people who may have been guilty of terrorism-related crimes, but they ruined any chance of prosecuting them because of the torture.

They tortured people when the torture had nothing to do with imminent threats: They tortured based on bad information they had extracted from others through torture; they tortured to hide their mistakes and to get confessions; they tortured sometimes just to break people, pure and simple.”

Obviously, that is unlikely to make for very edifying viewing.

In his memoir, Hard Measures, Rodriguez tries to make the case that what he describes as the CIA’s “legal, authorized, necessary, and safe” black site program was run to higher standards than the abusive military interrogations that took place in Abu Ghraib and Bagram, and he expresses his concern that the public might be confused between the actions of his officers and “the mindless actions of some MPs [Military Police]”.

That is a version of events which is hard to square with the facts now in the public domain – CIA officers threatened detainees with drills and pistols, planned to confine detainees in boxes with insects crawling all over them, and subjected one detainee to near-drowning 183 times in a month.

When the CIA grabbed Khalid el Masri by mistake they still held him in a black site for three months, abused him, subjected him to forced-feeding when he went on hunger strike to protest his confinement and then finally dumped him exhausted and naked on a hillside in Albania even they knew he was completely innocent of any connection to terrorism.

The CIA held on to el Masri, a German national, for so long solely because it was worried that his release would compromise its black site program. El Masri has still not fully recovered from his ordeal.

“Legal, authorized, necessary, and safe” are not exactly the first words that come to mind to describe such methods.

Rodriguez tries to claim that EITs saved lives and were an indispensible intelligence tool. As John McCain has powerfully argued, this is somewhat beside the point – torture is illegal and an anathema to our values as a nation.

But even on his own terms, Rodriguez’s claims don’t stand up. His successor as Head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, Michael Sulick, certainly didn’t agree with this assessment. At an event at Fordham University in April 2010 Sulick commented in response to a question regarding the impact of the Obama administration’s prohibition on waterboarding:

“I don’t think we’ve suffered at all from an intelligence standpoint.”

It is also clear from the few excerpts of Hard Measures that have appeared in the press so far that Rodriguez is not much of a big picture guy – a rather surprising shortcoming in a professional intelligence officer.

Rodriguez readily admits that the propaganda damage done to the United States by its association with torture was “immense” but he doesn’t seem to grasp that this in turn had real world consequences. As former FBI Special Agent Jim Clemente put it recently:

“In the end all the tough-guy talk won’t be enough to counter the fact that torture cost American lives, it didn’t save them.”

Another FBI Special Agent, Ali Soufan, who led the investigation of the USS Cole bombing and successfully interrogated numerous Al Qaeda suspects, has also recently spoken out against Rodriguez’s claims:

“EITs were designed by bureaucrats with no experience with al Qaeda… By people who had never met a terrorist, let alone interrogated one. Unsurprisingly, it ended in disaster. False leads were chased, and real opportunities were missed. And justice was never served.”

Soufan also noted that Rodriguez’s book is being published with almost no redactions, while his own memoir, The Black Banners, was heavily censored before publication by the CIA:

“The public battle over EITs, reminds me of Winston Churchill’s remark that, ‘A lie gets halfway around the world, before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.’ This, incidentally, is why the books defending EITs, have no redactions. Because after all you can’t redact fiction.”

We are never going to hear the end of claims that tortured worked while its proponents can bolster their arguments with vague references to classified documents and secret successes.

So far, not one of these claims has stood up to close examination once exposed to public view, but until we have a definitive record of what was done in the CIA’s black sites new claims will inevitably keep surfacing.

For three years we have been waiting for the publication of just such a record. In 2009 the Senate Select Intelligence Committee (SSIC) embarked on a comprehensive investigation of the EIT program. The study is now almost 6,000 pages long and it has reportedly found little evidence to suggest EITs produced any vital intelligence.

Scandalously, there is a very real possibility that this report will never see the light of day. The same people who are promoting Jose Rodriguez’s revisionist torture narrative are also trying to block the publication of the SSIC report.

Senate Republicans have withdrawn their support from the SSIC investigation. Some Senate Democrats are nervous that unilaterally publishing the report will give the Republicans ammunition that they are soft on terrorism.

Doing the right thing is not high on many agendas during an election campaign.

Critics allege that by publishing the report SSIC would be undermining the vital work of US intelligence agencies and it is a charge that is worth considering.

In a newly published written exchange between Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) and General David Petraeus and during the latter’s confirmation hearings for his new post as Director of the CIA, the general was asked if he would cooperate with SSIC’s review.

His response was admirably principled and unequivocal:

“I believe that a holistic and comprehensive review of the United States Government’s detention and interrogation programs can lead to valuable lessons that might inform future policies… The best way to gain a common set of facts would be to reach out to the intelligence and military communities responsible for detentions and interrogations and for implementing future policies.”

It is difficult to imagine anyone better placed to conservatively assess the potential risks to the intelligence community than the current Director of the CIA, and if General Petraeus isn’t concerned then that should probably be the end of this particular debate.

But it hasn’t been.

That is why Amnesty has now launched a campaign to put pressure on lawmakers to get the SSIC report out. You can add your voice to the chorus of American voters demanding to know what was done in their name by taking action.

As for Jose Rodriguez, he was part of management team at CIA who failed to protect American lives before 9/11 and then failed to protect American values afterwards. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why anyone would take his self-serving version of history seriously.

Pakistani Shiite Muslims protest after the sectarian killings in Quetta on April 14, 2012. Eight people, including seven Hazara, were gunned down in separate sectarian targeted incidents. (Photo: BANARAS KHAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Sectarian violence promoted by religious extremists  is not new to Pakistan, but the latest series of brutal attacks on the otherwise peaceful Hazara people has reached a breaking point in recent weeks.  Despite the fact that nearly 30 people have died in the past two weeks,  the Government of  Pakistan seems incapable – if not unwilling – to step in to stop this siege of terror.

The situation in the Balochistan province, located  in south-west Pakistan  has always been complex with a number of different ethnic groups, a seccesionist movement and various Taliban leaders all vying for power. Things have become even worse  in the last few years with escalating tensions between the United States and Pakistan over the NATO supply route leading to even more unrest in Quetta, Balochistan’s capital city and bringing an onslaught of tragedy to the Hazara who live there.

For hundreds of years, the Hazara people of Pakistan had lived in the shadows of the low mountains of Quetta.  Located on the border between Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the city has always been a crossroads of goods and people.  Belonging to the minority Shia sect of Islam and easily distinguishable from the other ethnic groups of the region because of their Central Asian features, the Hazara are an easy target.

In particular, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a sectarian, militant group have been targeting the Hazara minority in Balochistan in a series of brazen attacks.  Last September, religious processions organized by the community were targeted twice. Then came the brutal assault on a bus carrying Shia Hazara pilgrims to Quetta. All the men and boys aboard were taken out of the bus, lined up and shot, as their mothers, wives and sisters watched from inside. The assailants were unafraid, and had insured that the highway was blocked on both ends when they conducted that ambush.  Later that evening, two more Hazara men were killed after being dragged out of their cars at a traffic light in Quetta. The total death toll for the day was over thirty dead and scores more injured.

The killing has continued since and has taken on a frenetic pace this past week. Since March 26, 2012, nearly 30 people have died in targeted attacks on the Hazara Shia. Six were shot dead execution style while drinking tea at one of the many roadside stalls in Quetta. The attack on March 29, again involved a hijacked bus whose Hazara passengers, including a woman, were singled out and then summarily murdered with automatic weapons.

Recent days have  brought even more attacks, with the hapless members of the community taking to the streets of Quetta, before an apathetic provincial administration and the wrath of terrorist groups that can kill with impunity.

According to a report produced by the community, local authorities in Balochistan have taken only superficial measures or none at all to stop the killings or bring their killers to justice. Public religious edicts issued by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi members and labeling the extermination of Hazara as a religious duty continue to be distributed freely in mosques, via handbill and even text message in Quetta.

The volatile mix of apathy and terror is exacerbated by the general unrest and lawlessness in Baluchistan. Unlike other nationalist forces in the province, the Hazara are patriotic Pakistanis unwilling to support any secessionist causes, which makes their situation even more precarious.

In their own words; the Shia Hazara of Quetta are a peace love community under siege from a collusion of forces; the brazen Lashkar-e-Jhangvi whose assailants are killing them at will, an apathetic Balochistan Government that does not see them as worth protecting, and the silence of everyone else who is watching them die.

Lacking political connections, resources and unwilling to take on the same tactics of violence and intimidation used by all those around them; the only recourse that the Hazara of Quetta can hope for is that the world who hears of them, does not think they are too small, too unknown and too helpless to be allowed to exist.

Follow Rafia on Twitter @rafiazakaria

“We came here for our students under arrest. This is not their place, they should be at their classrooms.”

According to BIANET, the independent human rights news organization that reported on the faculty lectures, some 600 high school and university students are currently under arrest.  Their offenses vary: a number of students were arrested for selling concert tickets; some for demanding free education; some for taking part in demonstrations; one for carrying a sign that declared “Women are not slaves of men nor power”.  This particular student was found not guilty of “being a member to a terrorist organization”; however she and five other students were found guilty of making “propaganda of a terrorist organization”.

Sounds incredible?  Not when you take into account Turkey’s loosely written anti-terrorism laws, under which people expressing opinions that coincide with the opinions of “terrorist groups” are routinely sent to prison.

Almost six years ago, Amnesty International issued a major report on the flaws and potential for abuse of Turkey’s anti-terrorism laws, and campaigned against their being instituted.  As can be seen from the cases cited above, little has changed since the report was issued.  Nor has the quashing of free expression by students been limited to the Turkish justice system.  The Turkish minister of Education recently reported to the Turkish Parliament that in 2010 and 2011 a total of 7,043 college students have been subjected to disciplinary investigations at their colleges. 4,602 of them have received suspensions while 55 have been expelled.   If you are a student in Turkey, it probably would be wise to keep to yourself any political or social opinions you might have.

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