Another issue has to do with the fact that it appears unlikely to me that Special Operations command wasn’t running some of these abusive interrogations on a small scale in other countries. I’m thinking, for instance, Columbia, other Latin America, Africa, etc. Remember, on 9/11, Mitchell was apparently working out of Special Ops at Ft. Bragg. Their mentor, Aldrich, had a long history with Special Ops, as did many of the SERE trainers.

One SAP, two SAPs… who knows. The full story if ever unravelled will be complex and internecine.

By the way, please don’t hestiate to ever criticize or “do battle” with some concept or fact I propose. If I’m wrong about something, I’d rather know. If another POV helps me understand a dimension of a complex problems, I want to know that too. None of us have a monopoly on any of this material. It’s too dense.

What WAS intriguing to me from this entry is that Timing of the initial statement-October 2001-right after 9/11,and Rumsfeld allegedly issues the directive to SAP members to “Grab whom you must. Do what YOU WANT.”

Now this was well before the atrocities at Abu Ghraib,and even longer before the der Spiegel interview where Helgerson admitted torture occured PRIOR to the date “torture memos” were written.( Panorama/BBC article from last week)

I recall a thread here a month or so ago discussing WHY Rumsfeld wanted to wrest the control from CIA and place under Pentagon jurisdiction. The theory was it was for the explicit purpose of running a “B” team-without CIA oversite.

At least that was my understanding of the discussion.

I will bookmark or copy your comment for further reference, and I thank you for putting it here for readers.

@30, klynn, one of the links was behind a firewall, but I read the other, and the main point being the activities of the Israelis as partners in the torture process. This is worthy of a full post. Many assumed the torture issue in Israel was settled when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled against certain forms of coercive interrogation. But as elsewhere, the struggle continues there, as well. Moreover, Israelis have been reported at some of the U.S. torture sites. Of course, so have the British, the Germans, Canadians, Egyptians and others. — The issue deserves wider exposure and discussion.

@33 Gitcheegumee — The entire story of Rumsfeld’s parallel and competitive torture program at DoD is a very interesting one. I have held off reporting that way b/c I have always been suspicious about the whole rivalry meme. I don’t discount it either, but in the world of spooks, you don’t know if the story you are getting is to enlighten or mislead. My recent studies are leaning me more and more to the idea the CIA was always in charge.

Copper Green is reported by American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to be one of several code names for a U.S. black ops program, according to an article in the May 24, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. According to Hersh, the task force was formed with the direct approval of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,October 2001, and run by Deputy Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. Hersh claims the special access program members were told “Grab whom you must. Do what you want”.

The program allegedly designed physical coercion and sexual humiliation techniques for use against Muslim Arab men specifically, to retrieve information from suspects, and to blackmail them into becoming informants.

According to the article, the sexual humiliation techniques were based on the book, The Arab Mind, written by the late cultural anthropologist Raphael Patai in 1973. The book claimed to be a “study of Arab culture and psychology”. According to Hersh’s anonymous intelligence source, the Patai book was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior”, which gave life to two themes: “One, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation”.
Hersh claims to have spoken to a senior CIA official who said the program was designed by Rumsfeld to wrest control of information from the CIA, and place it in the hands of the Pentagon.
According to Hersh’s sources, the program was so successful in Afghanistan, that Cambone decided to introduce the SAP program to operations during 2003 invasion of Iraq, eventually leading to the use of common soldiers instead of using special ops forces exclusively. In Hersh’s view, the program was used on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, leading directly to the prisoner abuse by US soldiers there.

Wikipedia

if we say, “it is the entire cia” they will do whatever it takes preventing that investigation

In other words, if the party who is filing the FOIA is listening, that memo is crucial as evidence in a credible allegation of a crime against international humanitarian and human rights law which is punishable under universal jurisdiction by any other country in the world if it isn’t punished here. The courts examining the FOIA case need to take that into account. Medical experimentation on people in custody is a major crime on its own, regardless of any accusations of torture.

(I know you are aware of all this, I just wanted to make sure it was on the record)

Thank you for this post. Did you have a chance to go look at those links I posted in the comments of your previous piece irt other nations participating?

It is clear, failure to address this will continue to degrade our diplomatic trump irt our historical human rights record. Additionally, we have just announced to the world that anyone can do the same to our service personnel.

Every time I’m just about to give up one of the right wingers does something so disgusting, so absurd, so dangerous that one just has to hang in there for a little longer.

Lets all work together to see some of the Bush-Cheney scum jailed for their lawbreaking.

Get out in the streets in front of your Congressional Representative’s office and raise hell. Start your own “prosecution” protest group.

KEEP ASKING ALL POLITICIANS AT ALL PUBLIC EVENTS

“WHY DO YOU SUPPORT TORTURE?”
If they aren’t actively calling for enforcement of our Federal Torture Laws, They DO Support Torture and a dual standard of Justice.

SIGN THE PETITIONS
Demanding
prosecution for all those leaders
in Bush’s Administration that
Conspired to Torture at ANGRYVOTERS.ORG

http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG

Only Prosecution Stops Torture, Abuse of Power, our Constitution & Rule Of Law