WikiLeaks cables: India accused of systematic use of torture in Kashmir

Beatings and electric shocks inflicted on hundreds of civilians detained in Kashmir, US diplomats in Delhi told by ICR

Unrest in Kashmir, where a leaked cable said the Indian government 'condoned torture'. Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images

US officials had evidence of widespread torture by Indian police and security forces and were secretly briefed by Red Cross staff about the systematic abuse of detainees in Kashmir, according to leaked diplomatic cables released tonight.

The dispatches, obtained by website WikiLeaks, reveal that US diplomats in Delhi were briefed in 2005 by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) about the use of electrocution, beatings and sexual humiliation against hundreds of detainees.

Other cables show that as recently as 2007 American diplomats were concerned about widespread human rights abuses by Indian security forces, who they said relied on torture for confessions.

The revelations will be intensely embarrassing for Delhi, which takes pride in its status as the world’s biggest democracy, and come at a time of heightened sensitivity in Kashmir after renewed protests and violence this year.

Other cables released tonight reveal that:

• The Dalai Lama has told US officials that combating climate change is more urgent than finding a political solution in Tibet, which “can wait five to 10 years”.

• Rahul Gandhi, the crown prince of Indian politics, believes Hindu extremists pose a greater threat to his country than Muslim militants, according to the American ambassador to India.

• Five doctors were coerced by the Sri Lankan government to recant oncasualty figures they gave to journalists in the last months of island’s brutal civil war.

The most highly charged dispatch is likely to be an April 2005 cable from the US embassy in Delhi which reports that the ICRC had become frustrated with the Indian government which, they said, had not acted to halt the “continued ill-treatment of detainees”.

The embassy reported the ICRC concluded that India “condones torture” and that the torture victims were civilians as militants were routinely killed.

The ICRC has a long-standing policy of engaging directly with governments and avoiding the media, so the briefing remained secret.

An insurgency pitting separatist and Islamist militants – many supported by Pakistan – against security services raged in Kashmir throughout the 1990s and into the early years of this decade.

It claimed tens of thousands of lives, including large numbers of civilians who were targeted by both militants and security forces.

The ICRC staff told the US diplomats they had made 177 visits to detention centres in Jammu and Kashmir and elsewhere in India between 2002 and 2004, and had met 1,491 detainees. They had been able to interview 1,296 privately.

In 852 cases, the detainees reported ill-treatment, the ICRC said. A total of 171 described being beaten and 681 said they had been subjected to one or more of six forms of torture.

These included 498 on which electricity had been used, 381 who had been suspended from the ceiling, 294 who had muscles crushed in their legs by prison personnel sitting on a bar placed across their thighs, 181 whose legs had been stretched by being “split 180 degrees”, 234 tortured with water and 302 “sexual” cases, the ICRC were reported to have told the Americans.

“Numbers add up to more than 681, as many detainees were subjected to more than one form of IT [ill-treatment],” the cable said.

The ICRC said all branches of the Indian security forces used these forms of ill-treatment and torture, adding: “The abuse always takes place in the presence of officers and … detainees were rarely militants (they are routinely killed), but persons connected to or believed to have information about the insurgency”.

The cable said the situation in Kashmir was “much better” as security forces no longer roused entire villages in the middle of the night and detained inhabitants indiscriminately, and there was “more openness from medical doctors and the police.”

Ten years ago, the ICRC said there were some 300 detention centres, but there are now “a lot fewer”. The organisation had never however gained access to the “Cargo Building”, the most notorious detention centre, in Srinagar.

The abuse continued, they said, because “security forces need promotions,” while for militants, “the insurgency has become a business”.

In the same cable, American diplomats approvingly quoted media reports that India’s army chief, Lieutenant-General Joginder Jaswant Singh, had “put human rights issues at the centre of an [recent] conference of army commanders”.

The ICRC said a “bright spot” was that it had been able to conduct 300 sessions sensitising junior officers from the security forces to human rights.

The cables reveal a careful US policy of pressure in Kashmir, while maintaining a strictly neutral stance.

Two years after the cable on torture was sent, US diplomats in India argued strongly against granting a visa request from the government of India on behalf of a member of the Jammu and Kashmir state assembly who was invited to a conference organised by a think-tank in America.

Usman Abdul Majid, a cable marked secret said, “is a leader of the pro-GOI [government of India] Ikhwan-ul-Musilmeen paramilitary group, which … is notorious for its use of torture, extra-judicial killing, rape, and extortion of Kashmiri civilians suspected of harbouring or facilitating terrorists.”

The diplomats admitted that denying Majid’s application might have some repercussions with Indian officials, “especially those from India’s Intelligence Bureau who have been close to his case” but said it was essential to preserve a balanced approach to the Kashmir issue following the prior refusal of a visa to the leading separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani.

The cable notes that officials are “unable to verify with evidence the claims against Majid”.

US diplomats repeatedly refer to human rights abuses by security and law enforcement agencies within India. In a cable from February 2006, officials reported that “terrorism investigations and court cases tend to rely upon confessions, many of which are obtained under duress if not beatings, threats, or, in some cases, torture”.

A year later a brief for the visiting acting coordinator for counter-terrorism, Frank Urbancic, described India’s police and security forces as“overworked and hampered by bad … practices, including the widespread use of torture in interrogations.”.

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Judge rules that regardless of evidence that 3 Guantánamo detainees were TORTURED TO DEATH and later declared ‘suicides’ by the Pentagon in a cover-up, their families should be denied a hearing in court due to ‘national security concerns’.

AFP: US judge dismisses hearing into Guantanamo ‘suicides’

WASHINGTON — A US federal judge dismissed Wednesday a complaint by the families of two Guantanamo detainees who alleged the men’s deaths in 2006 had been covered up when the Pentagon ruled them as suicides.

In her ruling, US District Judge Ellen Huvelle said “the highly disturbing nature of allegations in a complaint cannot be a sufficient basis in law” for the case to be heard.

The families of Saudi prisoner Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami of Yemen had asked the judge to reexamine the case in March after adding new testimony from military officials, including an officer who served at the US prison camp in southern Cuba the night of the events.

At the time of their deaths, Al-Zahrani, 22, and Al-Salami, 33, had been detained without charge and held incommunicado for about four years at the US naval base.

The Pentagon maintains the two men, along with a third detainee, Mani al-Utaybi of Saudi Arabia, committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. Utaybi’s family did not file a complaint.

But first-hand accounts provided by soldiers raised questions about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, and suggested the men may have died as the result of torture at a site off base known as “Camp No,” according to the petition.

One of the soldiers — Joe Hickman, an army officer on duty at a watch tower with a view of the cells where the men were held overnight June 9-10, 2006 — said he witnessed them being transported by van to Camp No — so called because when asked if the camp existed soldiers would say “no”.

Later, rather than returning the men to their cells, the van pulled up to an infirmary.

Hickman was told by a medical soldier that three dead prisoners had been brought to the infirmary “because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised,” the petition said.

But he was later told that the official cause of the men’s deaths was that they had been found hanged in their cells.

In her ruling on Wednesday, Huvelle pointed to a decision by a federal appeals court in Washington stating that matters relating to the conditions of detention in Guantanamo remain the purview of Congress alone — not the courts — due to national security concerns.

“The question before the court is not whether homicide ‘exceeds the bounds of permissible official conduct in the treatment of detainees in US custody and demands accountability’ or whether the families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami deserve a remedy,” Huvelle said.

“Rather, the question is ‘who should decide whether such a remedy should be provided.’”

Al-Zahrani’s father Talal denounced the ruling, saying “the courts should be investigating my son’s death and holding those responsible accountable.”

“President Obama should be defending human rights and the democratic values the US preaches to the world, rather than going to court to defend the lies and gruesome crimes of the Bush administration,” he added.

President Barack Obama has acknowledged his administration has “fallen short” of his campaign promise to shutter the controversial facility within a year of taking office.

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Why Were CIA Torture Tapes Destroyed?

Why Were CIA Torture Tapes Destroyed? A former CIA officer aware of the details of the 2002 interrogation of the two al-Qaeda suspects told me that the tapes’ images were “horrific.”

The case of the missing 92 CIA interrogation tapes would be a good subject for a modern day Agatha Christie mystery. Someone at the CIA decided the tapes had to be destroyed — even at the risk of an obstruction of justice charge — but no one’s confessing. By now John Durham, the assistant U.S. attorney investigating the tapes’ destruction, must be scratching his head wondering if everyone at the CIA was complicit.
(See the Top 10 CIA Movies.)

What we know to be fact is that in 2005, the then-head of the CIA’s clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, ordered the destruction of 92 videotapes of the interrogation in Thailand of two al-Qaeda suspects. The tapes were then destroyed, but that’s where the trail ends. We can only guess whether Rodriguez acted on his own authority or on the orders of a higher-up. And then there’s the question of why the tapes were destroyed. Did the CIA want to destroy graphic evidence of sleep-deprivation or waterboarding? They were interrogation methods approved by the Department of Justice in memos sent to the CIA, and therefore shouldn’t have been deemed a legal problem. The closest thing we come to answer is an internal CIA e-mail released last Thursday, in which an unidentified CIA officer writes that Rodriguez decided to destroy the tapes because they made the CIA “look horrible; it would be devastating to us.”
(See pictures of the waterboarding protest.)

But was Rodriguez acting on his own, or following orders? Rodriguez’s lawyer said his client had cleared the decision up and down the CIA’s chain of command, even notifying Congress. The CIA director at the time, Porter Goss, denies it, saying he never approved the decision to destroy the tapes. But in one e-mail an unidentified CIA official writes that Goss had approved the tapes’ destruction — but only after the fact. The CIA’s acting General Counsel at the time, John Rizzo, also denies he knew of the decision, and says he was informed only after the tapes’ destruction.

What adds to the mystery is that it wasn’t as if the tapes’ disposal was a routine administrative matter, easily lost in the press of business. One of the internal CIA e-mails described White House counsel Harriet E. Miers as “livid” when she heard about the tapes being destroyed, especially since she’d instructed that she be consulted before any decision was made about what do with the tapes.
(Read “Five Questions for the CIA IG’s Interrogation Report.”)

I haven’t been able to clear up the mystery either, beyond the fact that a former CIA officer aware of the details of the 2002 interrogation of the two al-Qaeda suspects told me that the tapes’ images were “horrific.” He believes that although the interrogations fell within the guidelines provided by the Department of Justice, if the public ever saw them, it would conclude that “enhanced interrogation” is just another name for torture.

But what’s really too bad is that Durham hasn’t been tasked with explaining the broader mystery of why, in the first place, the CIA is even interrogating prisoners of war. The 1947 National Security Act established the CIA as a civilian spy agency, not as some Pentagon backroom where you get to do things you don’t want the American people to find out about. But more to the point, the military is much better equipped to interrogate prisoners. It has its own interrogation school at Fort Huachuca, not to mention hundreds of language-qualified and experienced interrogators. It also has the Uniform Code of Military Justice to deal with interrogations that have gone bad. (Some almost inevitably do.) Unlike the CIA, military interrogators have immediate access to legal counsel. It’s not an accident that military misdeeds such as those at Abu Ghraib go right to trial, while CIA investigations drag on for years — and drag down morale.

Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer, is TIME.com’s intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

See pictures of Gitmo detainees.

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Keith Olbermann: Debunking Cheney

Probe in to C.I.A. torture

“President Obama banned torture but officials say terrorist interrogation techniques prevented attacks, Bob Orr reports. Analyst Dan Bartlett spoke on the possibility of a criminal prosecution.”

0:42 – A C.I.A. contractor beat a prisoner with a heavy flash light and that prisoner died in custody.

…Since when do we call murder a “harsh tactic”? and the point that some (i.e. Dick Cheney) try to push down our throats that these “harsh tactics” saved lives is just plain silly and really belongs only on the 24. It’s silly for two reasons; we are Americans and do not torture, well at least not until Bush II. As a global power in this unipolar world we set the standard for the rest of the world–and what type of standard is this anyways. Secondly, if one were tortured while under investigation it is only logical to satisfy the your interrogators by answering with whatever they wanted to hear as to end the torture process. Eventually everyone will break if they are tortured for an extended period of time (like Khalid Sheik Mohammad being waterboarded 183 times), by break I don’t mean they will necessarily give actual, true insight into their activities. Indeed, KSM later boasted that he wasted our time/resources by giving false information and therefor sending agents after empty events.

MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects

British agents alleged to have questioned men at Pakistani interrogation centre after they had been brutally mistreated

The London headquarters of MI5. Photograph: Frank Baron

Officers of the Security Service, MI5, are being accused of “outsourcing” the torture of British citizens to a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency in an attempt to obtain information about terrorist plots and to secure convictions against al-Qaida suspects.

A number of British terrorism suspects who have been arrested in Pakistan at the request of UK authorities say their interrogation by Security Service officers, shortly after brutal torture at the hands of agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), has convinced them that MI5 colluded in the mistreatment.

Those men have given detailed accounts of their alleged ordeals at the hands of the ISI over the last four years. Some of them appear to have been taken to the same secret interrogation centre in Rawalpindi, where they say they were repeatedly tortured before being questioned by MI5.

Tayab Ali, a London-based lawyer for two of the men, said: “I am left with no doubt that, at the very worst, the British Security Service instigates the illegal detention and torture of British citizens, and at the very best turns a blind eye to torture.”

One man from Manchester says that in 2006 he was beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and had three fingernails slowly extracted by ISI agents at the Rawalpindi centre before being interrogated by two MI5 officers. A number of his alleged associates were questioned in Manchester at the same time and two were subsequently charged. This man’s lawyers say his fingernails were missing when they were eventually allowed to see him, more than a year after he was first detained. They say they have pathology reports that prove the nails were forcibly removed.

(Continue reading: The Guardian)

The Torture Sessions

Ever since Americans learned that American soldiers and intelligence agents were torturing prisoners, there has been a disturbing question: How high up did the decision go to ignore United States law, international treaties, the Geneva Conventions and basic morality?

The answer, we have learned recently, is that — with President Bush’s clear knowledge and support — some of the very highest officials in the land not only approved the abuse of prisoners, but participated in the detailed planning of harsh interrogations and helped to create a legal structure to shield from justice those who followed the orders.

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

(Continue reading: New York Times)