No Kidding

U.S. forces may have committed war crimes, says International Criminal Court
Wednesday, Nov 16, 2016 1:00 PM UTC
by Ben Norton, Salon

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has said U.S. forces may have committed war crimes in several countries.

The prosecutor’s office said in a report released on Monday that there is a “reasonable basis to believe” that prisoners held by U.S. forces were tortured in Afghanistan and at CIA detention facilities in Poland, Lithuania and Romania during 2003 and 2004.

Scores of detainees were subjected to “torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape,” the report said. “The information available suggests that victims were deliberately subjected to physical and psychological violence, and that crimes were allegedly committed with particular cruelty and in a manner that debased the basic human dignity of the victims.”

“These alleged crimes were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals,” the office added. “They appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ‘actionable intelligence.’”
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The U.S. is not a member of the ICC. It refused to join when the court was created in 2003. Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland and Romania are all members, however, meaning that the court has jurisdiction over crimes committed in those countries.

John Bolton, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. when the ICC was created, helped lead the campaign against it. Bolton is now being considered as a potential secretary of state in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.

Excerpts of a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2014 confirmed that the CIA committed torture in its detention and interrogation program from 2001 to 2006. The full report was never released, however, and may have been destroyed.
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The ongoing U.S. war in Afghanistan marked its 15th anniversary in October. In an attack in early November, U.S. airstrikes killed more than 30 Afghan civilians, in the same area where the U.S. bombed a hospital operated by Doctors Without Borders a year earlier.

The scope of the report barely scratches the surface of U.S. military intervention. It does not address the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, nor does it include the the drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; the 2011 war in Libya; or the current bombing campaigns in Iraq and Syria.

Donald Trump May Select an Architect of Bush’s Torture Program to Run CIA
by Lee Fang, The Intercept
November 11 2016, 11:14 a.m.

Donald Trump may select Jose Rodriguez, one of the primary architects of the George W. Bush torture program, to run the Central Intelligence Agency, according to a law firm with close ties to Trump.

Rodriguez, the former director of the National Clandestine Service, helped developed the CIA black sites, secret prisons operated in foreign countries where interrogators used a range of torture tactics, including the use of “waterboarding,” the simulated drowning technique once used by the Khmer Rouge and Nazi agents to glean information from detainees.

At least 136 individuals were detained and tortured by the CIA. Interrogation tactics also included forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and confinement in a small box.

Rodriguez is unapologetic about his role in the program, telling 60 Minutes that “we did the right thing for the right reason,” even if it meant “going to the border of legality.”
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Rodriguez not only crafted the Bush torture program, but played a key role in the cover up. Following revelations of the effort, Rodriguez worked directly to get rid of the evidence and destroyed 92 video tapes revealing the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

In destroying the tapes, Rodriguez claimed that he was simply protecting agents in the field from reprisals from terrorists. But as one declassified email noted, Rodriguez was in fact concerned about public backlash from the brutal visuals. “Heat from destroying is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into [the] public domain — he said that out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” the email noted.

Rodriguez has defended his tenure at the CIA, telling Amy Davidson of the New Yorker that his interrogation techniques were “sometimes harsh, but fell well short of what is torture.” Rodriguez argued that such methods were valid because they were reviewed by government lawyers and certain members of Congress were briefed.