IslandMix

Senior US senators and congressmen are pressing for a criminal investigation of the CIA for obstruction of justice after it admitted destroying two videotapes showing apparently abusive interrogations of al-Qa'ida suspects in 2005.

The digital recordings apparently show a team of CIA agents subjecting Abu Zubayadh, the agency's first detainee, and another suspect to abusive interrogation. The tapes were apparently destroyed because CIA officers feared prosecution for torture, which is a felony under US law.

"We haven't seen anything like this since the 18-minute gap on the tapes of Richard Nixon," said Senator Edward Kennedy who accused the CIA of "a cover-up." He called on the Attorney General Michael Mukasey to investigate.

Congresswoman Jan Harman said that in early 2003, she had warned the CIA not to destroy any videotapes dealing with interrogation practices.

"To my knowledge, the Intelligence Committee was never informed that any videotapes had been destroyed," Ms Harman, said.

Senator John Rockefeller, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said there must be a review of "the full history and chronology of the tapes, how they were used, and the reasons for destroying them".

White House officials declined to comment.

A US expert on torture said he believed the digital recordings show CIA interrogation teams carrying out torture including waterboarding or partial drowning of al-Qa'ida suspects in detention centres not on US soil. The interrogations probably took place in Jordan or Egypt where the US has close relations with the national intelligence agencies, said Malcolm Nance who advises the Department of Homeland Security on terrorism.

Mr Nance, who has conducted anti-torture training sessions, said the interrogations would have been relayed live by video link to the CIA's directorate of operations in Langley, Virginia. They would have been observed by the director of the CIA, along with a team of interrogation experts including, a psychologist and doctor, he said.

"They start by slapping the prisoner around, putting him in stress positions and finally strapping him on the waterboard where he is bound down and has water poured into his lungs," he continued. "It's very hard to watch people going through this form of torture," he said. "They get hysterical and whatever they say is of no value anyway.

"Typically a camera is focused on the detainee's face to watch for signs that he is cracking; another camera shows the interrogation team in operation," he said.

The New York Times reported that the CIA destroyed at least two videotapes of the interrogation of two al-Qai'da operatives in the midst of Congressional and legal investigations into its "black site" secret detention programme.

The CIA director, General Michael Hayden, said the decision to destroy the tapes was made "within the CIA" to protect the safety of the agents involved.

Senators and congressmen now want an inquiry into whether CIA officials deliberately withheld information from them as well as the courts and the September 11 Commission.

General Hayden's explanation was dismissed as unbelievable by Mr Nance. "There are ways of hiding the identity of those involved," he said.

Call for criminal inquiry as CIA destroys torture tapes - Independent Online Edition > Americas

Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale

Mamdouh Habib, 49, an Australian citizen, was caught up in the rendition system after being arrested near the Pakistani-Afghan border shortly after the 9/11 attacks. His lawyers say he was bundled aboard a small jet by men speaking English with American accents and flown to Egypt, the country where he was born. For the next six months, they say, he was held in a Cairo jail, where he was hung from hooks, beaten, given shocks from an electric cattle prod, and told he was to be raped by dogs.

Habib also says that he was shackled and forced into three torture chambers: one filled with water up to his chin, requiring him to stand on tiptoe for hours, a second with a low ceiling and two feet of water, forcing him into a painful stoop, and a third with a few inches of water, and within sight of an electric generator which his captors said would be used to electrocute him. He made statements - which he has since withdrawn - declaring that he had helped train the 9/11 attackers in martial arts. Habib was moved to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo. Last January he was released without charge and allowed to return to his wife and three children in Sydney.

Maher Arar, 34, a Canadian citizen, was seized in September 2002 while travelling through JFK airport in New York, on his way home after a holiday in Tunisia. After being questioned for 13 days about a terrorism suspect - the brother of a work colleague - he was handcuffed, placed in leg irons, and put aboard an executive jet. Hearing the crew describe themselves as members of the "special removals unit", and discovering he was bound for Syria, the country where he was born, he begged them to return to the US. The crew, he says, ignored his pleas and suggested he watch a spy film that was being shown on board. After landing in Jordan, Arar says he was driven to Syria, where he was held in a small underground cell which he likened to a grave. His hands were repeatedly whipped with cables, he says. He added that he would eventually confess to anything put to him. Arar was released a year later after the Canadian government took up his case. The Syrian ambassador in Washington announced that no terrorist links had been found. Arar is suing the US government.

Amnesty International has highlighted the plight of two Yemeni friends, Salah Nasser Salim 'Ali, 27, and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah, 37, arrested separately in August 2003. Salah was detained in Indonesia, then flown to Jordan, where Muhammad was already under arrest. They say they were hung upside down and beaten for several days, before being flown to an unknown country about four hours' flying distance.

Neither man knew that the other was under arrest, but both described being detained in solitary confinement in an old underground prison, staffed by masked American guards, where western music was played in their cells 24 hours a day. Both men say they were moved after eight months, spending around three hours in a small aircraft, and then a helicopter, before being taken to another underground prison, this time modern, with air conditioning and surveillance cameras in the cells. This too was run by Americans, they say. The two men were returned to Yemen last May, but remain in custody. Amnesty says Yemeni officials have said they are being held at the request of US authorities. "What we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of US secret detentions around the world," said Sharon Critoph, the Amnesty researcher who interviewed them in Yemen.

Ahmed Agiza, 43, a doctor, and Muhammad Zery, 36, were abducted in Stockholm in December 2001, with the connivance of the Swedish government. Both were seeking asylum in Sweden, and had been convicted in absentia of membership of a banned Islamist group in their native Egypt. Agiza admits knowing Ayman Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, but says he severed all links many years ago and insists he has renounced violence.

According to evidence to a Swedish parliamentary inquiry last year, they were taken to Bromma airport, Stockholm, by uniformed Swedish police and Americans wearing suits. They were stripped, searched, sedated and dressed in boiler suits and hoods. They were shackled and bundled on to a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, before being flown to Cairo. This aircraft has flown in and out of the UK at least 60 times since December 2001, most recently with a new tail number. Senior Swedish police officers told the parliamentary inquiry the aircraft was operated by the CIA.

Both men later told relatives and Swedish diplomats that they were subjected to electric shock torture in Egypt. Zery was released from prison almost two years later. Agiza was jailed for 25 years, reduced to 15 on appeal.


Seized, held, tortured: six tell same tale | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

Guantánamo man's family release 'torture' dossier

A British resident held by the US as an alleged terrorist has claimed his captors repeatedly tortured him, subjecting him to beatings, sexual abuse and threats of execution.
Omar Deghayes, 37, is one of five British residents who the United Kingdom government last week asked the US to release from Guantanámo Bay, after years of refusing to help them because they were not UK citizens.

Yesterday the family of Mr Deghayes decided to release a detailed dossier of alleged torture which the former law student dictated to a lawyer who visited him in the Cuban internment camp.

He is a Libyan national whose family fled to the UK after their trade unionist father was murdered by the Gadafy regime in 1980.
Mr Deghayes was captured in Pakistan - his family claim by bounty hunters - after the US attacked Afghanistan. They say he had gone there to start a business exporting dried fruit to a leading supermarket.

In the dossier, he claims to have seen US guards kill people, witnessed prisoners being partially drowned, and saw the Qur'an thrown into a toilet by a US guard.

The new claims come after earlier Guardian reports of Mr Deghayes's ill treatment, including allegations that he was left blinded in one eye after a soldier plunged his finger into it, and claims that he had human excrement smeared on his face.

Mr Deghayes grew up in Brighton and studied law at Wolverhampton University and then studied in Huddersfield. His family say he is not a terrorist and opposed violence.

The US says al-Qaida tells its operatives to allege ill treatment, though parts of Mr Deghayes' account are consistent with those from former detainees.

The dossier contains far more allegations and detail than previously made public. Mr Deghayes says "sexual abuse did occur", but says he can not bear to relive the details until he is released: "It is very distressing and sad to go through and remember again."

He says he was threatened with being sent back to Libya where his family fear he would be killed.

He was first arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in late 2001-early 2002, then taken to Bagram in Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.

The allegations challenge President George Bush's repeated claims that the US does not use torture.

He says that in Lahore prison he was subjected to electric shocks: "The more I scream they will laugh and do it again ... my screams all in vain."

He says that in Pakistan he was handed over to the Americans who hooded him and placed him on plane in a torture position.

"Two soldiers locked their arms into mine and lifted me off the ground. All my [weight] borne by my arms which were shackled behind my back.

"I was thrown in the plane. There were many others in the torture position."

After he was moved to Bagram in Afghanistan, he says he saw electric shocks used on other detainees and here he also saw death threats, with guards pointing their rifles at the Muslim men.

He says he also witnessed a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards: "The American said he tried to take the gun."

Another inmate was beaten to death: "One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming.

"There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again."

Another inmate, Mr Deghayes claims, was beaten until blood dripped on the cell floor and he was left "paralysed and mentally damaged".

In Bagram he says he was chained in a cage "with hands stretched above [my] head ...causing suffocation".

In Bagram he says he went without food for 45 days and was subjected to water torture: "They hold me naked in the night, freezing cold, and throw buckets of water and fill the bucket and throw [it] again. I shiver and shake badly and try to sit down to gain warmth. They kick and punch and say stand up until I fall to the ground in weakness."

While moving from Bagram to Guantánamo, he says he was so ill he suffered hallucinations that he was back in the UK and travelling on a train, after beatings and 45 days without food.

In Guantánamo Mr Deghayes says he was beaten on his first day. Special teams which tackle allegedly disruptive prisoners repeatedly beat him up, he claims.

Prisoners were also given mystery injections. He says an FBI interrogator called Craig said he would face execution, and that he would not get a proper trial.

He says: "Many times one FBI interrogator by the name of Craig said, 'Omar, it is nothing like the law you studied in the UK. There will never be a proper court and lawyers etc, it would be only a military tribunal to determine your future and your life. Your best choice is to cooperate with me."

He says he was subjected to taunts insulting his religion and during his first year in Guantánamo a Qur'an was thrown in a toilet, causing a riot among inmates. As a punishment his head and beard were shaved.

In Guantánamo, he says, "they would pretend to search and want to put their hands on people's genitalia".

His brother, Abubaker Deghayes, 39, said: "I cannot believe how the Americans can do this to him, and astonished how he could survive this."

Mr Deghayes's mother, Zohra Zewawi, said she feared for her son's mental health if he ever is released.

"I worry that something has happened to his mind.

"He is being tortured. I read his diary. When he gets out I fear he will not be normal Omar. I'm sure he will have changed."

Guantánamo man's family release 'torture' dossier | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

The C.I.A. is a CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION that does DIRTY WORK for the White Ruling Class in order to accumulate and preserve White Power Worldwide.......................
An Audience with Philip Agee - Indymedia Ireland
..........This call for a so-called Criminal Inquiry is nothing but a struggle amongst competing sectors within the White Ruling Class:
TorontoSun.com - Eric Margolis - Final disgrace for Bush & Co.

The End Result of ANY Investigation of the C.I.A. will be of NO BENEFIT to the vast Hordes of Taxpaying Machines within U.S. Domestic Borders.