For the Good of the Cause

Torturing people, that is. Is this a story that will just fade away or will our elected representatives do their job? I have doubts, but maybe, just maybe some more sunlight will be shed on this horrible episode in our history. Seymour Hersh and Jane Mayer have done great work on the issue but more needs to be done.

In today's NYT we read about one of the people caught up in the mess of rendition and Guantanamo. Now I have no idea about the guy's innocence but the fact that we just let him go, given the justice department's and administration's policies on handling these people, one would think that if we had an airtight case against the guy, he would still be behind bars. Whatever they had on him, whether he deserved it or not, they put him through hell. Among the horrors was 40 months being held incommunicado.

After being arrested in Pakistan in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, he was held as a terror suspect by the Americans for 40 months. Back home now, Mr. Habib alleges that at every step of his detention - from Pakistan, to Egypt, to Afghanistan, to Guantánamo - he endured physical and psychological abuse.
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American officials said he admitted to training some of the Sept. 11 hijackers and to having prior knowledge of the attack, but they never charged him. Mr. Habib said any confessions he made were a result of torture and were not genuine.

"Whatever they wanted me to sign," he said, "I signed to survive."

Despite his activities in Afghanistan, Australian officials said there was no evidence that he trained any of the hijackers. One official said, "I have absolutely no sympathy for him," but added that whatever he did, it did not justify the torture he said he had endured.
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He said the American woman told him "this is your last chance," and that an Australian official said, "I'm sorry for you, Mr. Habib, you're never going to see your kids anymore."

Mr. Habib said he was taken to a room with hooks on the wall and a barrel, set sideways like a roller, on the floor. His arms were stretched out, he said, and each wrist was handcuffed and fastened to a hook on the wall. By his description, the only way not to be left hanging was to stand on the barrel; an electric wire ran through it. Mr. Habib said he believed the interrogators in that room were Pakistani.

Mr. Habib said that when he refused to confess to being part of a 1995 terror plot, one man turned on the current. He lifted his feet to avoid the shock, he recalled, and he was suspended from the wall.

"I lost everything," he said. He doesn't know how long he was unconscious, but he said that when he came to, he again refused to confess to terrorism. While he was still hanging from the wall, another man, who said he was a martial arts expert, came in and, Mr. Habib said, "starts jump-kicking in my face, jump-kicking in my stomach."

The next night, he said, the Pakistanis took him to an airport where he saw 15 or 20 beefy men wearing masks, black T-shirts and combat boots. From their voices, he said, he knew they were Americans. Mr. Habib started to fight with the Pakistanis, he recalled, and "then the Americans came and started beating me."

They beat him quiet and stripped him naked, he said. Men in black masks came into the room. One had a still camera, the other a video camera. "They make picture of everything in my body," he said.
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He said he was handcuffed and shackled and put on a plane. Then, he said, the men put duct tape over his mouth, a bag over his head and goggles over the bag.

In November 2001, Maha Habib received a fax from the Australian Foreign Ministry. "We remain confident that your husband is detained in Egypt," it said, adding that "the government has received credible advice that he is well and being treated well."

Mr. Habib said that his chief interrogator spoke Arabic and English and later appeared in Afghanistan when Mr. Habib was held there. He said that during interrogations, he was surrounded by men who hit him and doused him with ice water.

During what he called "the worst day in my life," Mr. Habib said an interrogator told him: "Mamdouh, I've got your family here - you're going to talk to us.' " The interrogator taunted him with the possibility of seeing his wife and four children. Mr. Habib said that in his delirium, he believed they were there. When he realized they were not, he said, "I became crazy."

He said he jumped up, still shackled to a chair, and attacked the interrogator.

He said he was dragged from the room, handcuffed. "And they hang me from the ceiling," he said. "They got sticks and everyone, they go on beating me." He lifted his shirt to show the bruise on his back. "I want to die," he said.
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In Afghanistan, he said, female soldiers "touched me in the private areas" while questioning him. "They was swearing at me, 'you criminal,' 'you terrorist,' " he said. Interrogators also put a helmet connected to wires on his head, Mr. Habib said. When they did not like his answers, he said he would feel a jolt, and his body would start shaking.

He spent only a week at Bagram before being flown to Guantánamo in May 2002. He arrived sick and faint. "I was really scared," he said. "I don't know who I am."

When his interrogators asked about his treatment in Egypt, he said, he told them about the psychological abuse using his wife and children. Soon, he said, his Guantánamo interrogators were doing the same.

Three or four times, he said, when he was taken to an interrogation room, there were pictures doctored to make it appear that his wife was naked next to Osama bin Laden. "I see my wife everywhere, everywhere," he said.

He said that during one interrogation session, a woman wearing a skirt said to him, "You Muslim people don't like to see woman," he said. Then she reached under her skirt, Mr. Habib said, pulling out what he described as a bloody stick. "She threw the blood in my face," he said.

The way I have it figured, I would say anything to appease an interrogator who was threatening me with physical and mental pain, not to mention the possibility I wouldn't see my family again. Does anyone really think this is an effective way to get information?

The next step is real hearings on the matter. Where is McCain? Where is Hagel? Where is Kerry, Reid, Durbin? The NYT reported today that we may be close to hearings.

The inquiry would be the first by Congress to address the C.I.A.'s conduct in what has remained a shadowy corner of American counterterrorism efforts. The agency is believed to be holding at least three dozen senior members of Al Qaeda at secret sites around the world, and former intelligence officials say it has been involved in the extrajudicial handing over to third countries of scores of other suspects, in an arrangement known as rendition.
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The top Republican on the panel, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, confirmed in an interview on Friday that he and his staff were reviewing a proposal submitted by the top Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, which called for a formal investigation into detention, interrogation and rendition. Mr. Roberts said he was not sure that a formal investigation was warranted, but he suggested that the two sides could agree on a review.

It's a start.