okay that's messed up

Ex-CIA Operative Says Prison Was Punishment for Whistleblowing on Torture

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou is the only CIA employee connected to its interrogation program to go to prison. But he was prosecuted for providing information to reporters, not for anything connected to waterboarding or other actions that today’s Senate Intelligence Committee report calls “torture.”

No other person connected to the program has been charged with a crime, after the Justice Department said their actions had been approved legally or that there was not sufficient admissible evidence in a couple cases of potential wrongdoing, even in light of the death of two detainees in the early 2000s.

Today the Justice Department said that the Senate Intelligence report didn’t provide new information that would lead them to reopen any of the old cases.

Kiriakou was the first person with direct knowledge of the CIA interrogation program to publicly reveal its existence, in an interview with ABC News in 2007. He is now serving a nearly-three-year prison sentence for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, but he says that’s only what the government wants people to believe.

“In truth, this is my punishment for blowing the whistle on the CIA’s illegal torture program and for telling the public that torture was official U.S. government policy,” Kiriakou said in a letter last May from a prison in Loretto, Penn. “But that’s a different story.”

In his groundbreaking interview with ABC News and later with other news outlets, Kiriakou described the details of the program which he had been briefed on but never witnessed firsthand. In some cases, it turned out that even Kiriakou, who served briefly as an ABC News consultant, was misled or kept in the dark about the extent of the program

For instance, he told ABC News that al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah broke after being water boarded once for less than 35 seconds and began answering “every question” the next day. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks," Kiriakou said.

But later it was revealed Kiriakou was wrong and Zubaydah had been waterboarded 83 times, according to CIA documents released in 2009. Kiriakou later said in a book that the number of waterboarding sessions “rais[ed] questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Though Kiriakou’s 2007 admissions angered the CIA, the Agency said they were unrelated to the DOJ investigation that in 2012 accused Kiriakou of disclosing the name of the covert CIA operative to a reporter.

Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one charge in early 2013 and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Since, he and his supporters have mounted a public campaign aimed at getting him a pardon.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/cia-operative-prison-punishment-whistleblowing-torture/story?id=27474359

That's quite the pay scale

2 psychologists earned $81M from CIA torture tactics

The Central Intelligence Agency’s torture of detainees was developed by two inexperienced contractors who were eventually paid $81 million for their work, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the program released Tuesday.

The two psychologists were working at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

They had no knowledge of interrogation techniques, al Qaeda, counterterrorism or “any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise,” the report said.

The report suggests that the program was poorly managed with limited oversight. A surprisingly small number of officials were running the program.

The two contractors played a central role — they developed, operated and assessed its interrogation operations.
Modal Trigger

“The CIA relied on these two contractors to evaluate the interrogation program they had devised and in which they had obvious financial interests,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California, said in a statement on the Senate floor.

From 2005 to 2008, the CIA “outsourced almost all aspects of its detention and interrogation program to this company,” Feinstein said. The contract was worth $181 million but only $81 million was paid, she said.

The two contractors personally conducted interrogations, including waterboarding, of the CIA’s most significant detainees. They provided official evaluations of the psychological state of detainees to determine if the enhanced techniques would continue.

“Evaluating the psychological state of the very detainees they were interrogating is a clear conflict of interest and a violation of professional guidelines,” Feinstein said.

The two contractors even acted as a liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services.

The names of the two contractors were not provided, but they were referred to in the report by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar.

http://nypost.com/20.....e-tactics/

will be interesting to see how this develops

Americans Involved in Torture Can Be Prosecuted Abroad, Analysts Say

UNITED NATIONS — The United States is obliged by international law to investigate its citizens suspected of engaging in torture, but even if it does not, Americans who ordered or carried out torture can be prosecuted abroad, by legal bodies including the International Criminal Court, legal experts say.

Whether they will be is another question. That’s largely a political determination. But calls for international prosecution, legal experts say, are likely to grow so long as the United States chooses not to prosecute its own.

“If I am someone implicated in the torture report, I am thinking twice about traveling to Europe anytime soon,” said Steve Vladeck, a law professor at American University in Washington. “It puts those governments in a sticky position if someone who is accused of torture presents themselves on that country’s soil.”

Three questions arise from the United States Senate’s release of an internal investigation into the interrogation tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency.

First, must the United States prosecute its own citizens? According to the International Convention on Torture, which the United States has ratified, the federal authorities are obligated to conduct “a prompt and impartial investigation.”

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, said in a statement on Wednesday that while he welcomed the release of the Senate report, he hoped it would lead to accountability of those who ordered, enabled, or carried out torture. “The convention lets no one off the hook — neither the torturers themselves, nor the policy-makers, nor the public officials who define the policy or give the orders.”

Second, can the International Criminal Court prosecute these cases?

In principle, yes, though the prospects of a prosecution, experts say, are exceedingly slim and a political hot potato. Even though the United States has not signed the treaty that created the tribunal, the court can prosecute the most serious crimes in countries that have signed it, like Afghanistan, where some of the torture was said to have occurred.

Indeed, in early December, the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, for the first time confirmed that she was “assessing available information” on the American military’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

“While continuing to assess the seriousness and reliability of such allegations, the office is analyzing the relevance and genuineness of national proceedings by the competent national authorities for the alleged conduct described above as well as the gravity of the alleged crimes,” the prosecutor said in a report summarizing the work of her office.

Poland, long suspected of having an American-run “black site” for terror suspects, also falls under the court’s jurisdiction. A former Polish president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, on Wednesday confirmed the existence of the secret prison on his country’s territory, saying that it was part of an effort to build Polish-American trust.

Jordan J. Paust, professor of international law at the University of Houston, said that any of the 122 countries that have submitted themselves to the authority of the I.C.C. could arrest a torture suspect and then turn him or her over to The Hague-based tribunal. The prospect of a prosecution overseas, he said, could be even more likely, because of the Obama administration’s reluctance to prosecute, which he called a major disappointment.

But for Ms. Bensouda, who has had enormous difficulty even gaining custody of some of her most high-profile defendants, let alone winning convictions, the prospect of going after Americans could prove especially tricky. The court is still new, and fragile, said one of her former colleagues, Alex Whiting, and picking a fight with the United States could be “damaging” to the court’s standing in the world.

“On the other hand the legitimacy of the court depends on it reaching a point where it treats countries alike,” said Mr. Whiting, who was the prosecution coordinator in The Hague from 2010 until last year and now teaches law at Harvard University. “The court is in a very difficult position on this.”

Besides, trying a case that involves torture, especially in a place like Afghanistan, is likely to be difficult, he and others said, especially if the United States refuses to cooperate in furnishing evidence of who did what and who gave orders. A case against the Kenyan president, Uhuru Kenyatta, fell apart, Ms. Bensouda said, because she could not muster sufficient evidence to proceed.

The third and final question: Can a C.I.A. officer suspected of torture — or even the former C.I.A. boss, Michael V. Hayden — be arrested while visiting Europe, under universal jurisdiction laws? Again, in principle yes, though diplomatically, that seems unlikely anytime soon. Several countries have laws on the books that allow them to try those accused of human rights abuses. Spain in 1998 sought to prosecute the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, on these grounds.

Diane Orentlicher, a law professor at American University, said that countries that pursued cross-border justice most aggressively have since limited the reach of their laws. “That said, efforts to invoke universal jurisdiction or to persuade states where torture occurred to prosecute those responsible are likely to continue as long as the United States is seen as falling short of meeting its own responsibilities to ensure accountability,” she argued.

http://www.nytimes.c.....&_r=0