03/02/09 – Amna Akbar – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Amna Akbar.
She's a clinical fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Welcome to the show.
Hi Scott, thanks for having me.
Well, it's great to have you here.
I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
And you're part of the legal team, correct, that represents this man, Mohammad Farag Bashmila?
That's correct.
Mohammad Bashmila, who was held by the United States for a few years in a secret detention and rendition program, is a client of the clinics and we've been representing him for a few years now.
So this is the first I've heard of this guy was when this essay was published at the Huffington Post.
I hadn't heard of him before that.
Apparently he was a victim of rendition and held from October 2003 to May 2005, is that right?
Yeah, that's correct.
Mr. Bashmila was picked up by the Jordanian officials and Jordanian intelligence back in 2003 when he had stopped there because his mom was receiving some sort of medical treatment.
And after the Jordanian intelligence interrogated him and tortured him for a handful of days, they transferred him to the CIA rendition team.
By now many of your listeners are probably relatively familiar with the ordeal that many former detainees and detainees have described.
The CIA rendition team stripped him, blindfolded him, cuffed him, took photographs of him, put in an anal probe of some sort and put him onto a flight.
He was then transferred to Bagram Air Base where he was held for six months and again there tortured, kept in solitary confinement, not allowed any communication with the outside world.
Again after six months subjected to the same humiliating treatment, he was boarded again up on a plane and then transferred to another site at an unknown location, likely in Eastern Europe, where he was held for another 12 or 13 months.
And then he was returned to Yemen where he was held for an additional six months or so and then he was released in May 2005 without any terrorist related charge.
Well now in the essay it describes the mistreatment in part, loading him on the plane.
It doesn't get as specific as you say about taking pictures and the rape or pseudo-rape you described there.
But you say that he was tortured in Afghanistan.
Can you be more specific about that?
Do you know which prison he was held at?
Was it at the Salt Pit?
Well we believe he was held at the prison at Bagram Air Base and in terms of the treatment that he suffered, it really ranged from the basic fact that he was kept in solitary confinement, kept incommunicado, no contact with the outside world, no contact with his family, no contact with the Red Cross as is required by international law, and subjected to constant loud music and other kind of white noise.
He was kept shackled in his various cells for long periods of time, etc.
So he really dealt with a gamut of different types of torture during his treatment.
Well I mean it sounds like when you talk about the music and that kind of thing, keeping him shackled in the cell long term, it sounds like it's maybe just enough to show that the Geneva Convention isn't being applied.
But it doesn't sound like you're saying that they dunked him in ice water and sick dogs on him and hung him from the ceiling to crush his chest and suffocate him and those kinds of things that we've, you know, some of the people at Bagram have been beaten to death, right?
So he hasn't had to go through that level.
That degree of torture was not applied to your client in this case.
We believe that what he was subjected to was torture as it's defined by international law, but you are absolutely right that in reading reports from different detainees who have been held in the war on terrorism and different government documents that have come out, we have learned that there are various types of abuse and torture that different detainees have been subjected to.
And so we hear of everything from extreme isolation to, as you say, abuse to the point of murder and death.
And so there is a range and our client fits into it in a particular place.
Have you been able to tie it to the memos in the sense of the Order 1, Order 2, and Order 3 levels of abuse?
Which memos are you referring to?
Well, I wish I knew the names and dates of them exactly.
I don't think it's the most famous Bybee memo or anything.
But I'm thinking of the book Torture Team by Philip Sands where he talks about how, I guess it was the military guidelines that Jim Haynes and Rumsfeld had come up with that basically categorized the different abuse techniques in three different categories of different levels of severity.
Yeah, I don't know offhand which level of severity it fits into per that rubric that was developed.
But what we do know is that from, again, government documents and other public reports is that each and every interrogation method was approved at the highest levels of the United States government in general.
And then specifically when those different techniques were applied to a particular detainee that they were approved on a specific case-by-case basis as well.
So we do know that in the case of our client, like in the case of all of the individuals who have been held in this program or who are currently being held possibly, there has been general approval and then specific approval of application of particular techniques to those individuals.
And now is it the case that you and the legal team are making, is it that this man is completely innocent, he's not a terrorist, he has no ties to any terrorist groups or you're saying that's besides the point or what?
I think the bottom line in our litigation is that it doesn't matter what any particular individual has and has not done.
What the United States government has done in this case is authorized torture, has authorized abuse of a sort that violates international law and violates our international obligations and that it should not be allowed under any circumstances.
I should clarify the suit that you're referring to, Jeppesen, Mohammed v.
Jeppesen data plan, is a lawsuit that was brought by the ACLU where a co-counsel in that case and our client is a killed plaintiff who was brought in 2008 against Jeppesen data plan which is a subsidiary of Boeing.
So he's one of the five in this suit that is in controversy just in the last week because of the Obama administration's invocation of the state secrets privilege, is that the same case?
Yeah, that's exactly right.
That case was briefed by the Bush administration where, again your listeners are likely aware of it, the Bush administration had taken the position at the very outset of the case that it was inappropriate for judicial determination and so should be dismissed.
The district court agreed with the Bush administration back in 2008.
We appealed that determination and then as you say at the beginning of February we went to court to argue the appeal, Ben Wisner of the ACLU argued that case and we were somewhat taken aback by Obama's legal team standing up and telling the court that they were taking essentially the same exact position as the Bush administration, arguing that the case should be dismissed and was inappropriate for judicial review.
That argument was ridiculous at the outset but continues to grow more and more ludicrous as more and more information hits the public sphere in terms of the allegations in the suit and in general the contours of the program.
So whether this guy actually is Osama Bin Laden's best friend or never had anything to do with any terrorist group of any description is not even really part of the question of any of these legal proceedings.
It's not an issue that you're trying to debate now because he's not being charged so for intents and purposes he's been acquitted and set free.
That's correct.
He's never been charged with anything related to terrorism and in the Jeppesen suit, I mean the key allegations in that suit are that Jeppesen data plan provided critical flight services to the United States government in flying our client Binyam Muhammad and a couple of other guys in the lawsuit into the secret detention program.
In other words that this private company aided in embedded torture and should be liable for that.
At a very basic point we're asking for discovery in court.
We believe that Jeppesen data plan as a participant in this program should have to answer some very basic questions about its involvement with the U.S. government in perpetuating this program and these abuses.
Well now there's also been talk lately about Senate investigations perhaps by the intelligence committees and or the creation of some sort of independent commission to go back and perhaps even lead to some prosecutions of administration officials.
Has your legal team been contacted by these Senators?
Have you told your story to them yet?
We haven't been in touch with any Senators just yet but what we have done is we've joined a call to the Obama administration to set up a commission of inquiry to look into the war on terrorism and detention policies more broadly of the last eight years.
Our specific interest in doing that is that we think that the American public deserves information about what has been done in their name over the last eight years specifically with regard to the secret detention and rendition program.
The government has been incredibly secret about what it's been doing and we don't think that that's right.
That being said we think that a commission must be part of a larger transitional justice agenda so along with calling for a commission we are also calling for prosecution of war crimes as you mentioned.
Along with other advocates in this field we have been happy that the Obama administration has taken some positive steps in this regard but the ongoing secrecy and the failure to address the victims that already exist and out there in the world has been incredibly discouraging.
Our client for example Mohammed Bashmila who we've been talking about to this day the United States government has not acknowledged that he was ever held in US custody and in addition to an apology he is seeking acknowledgement that he was held.
The other piece of this that we're involved with is that we're co-plaintiffs and co-counsel with Center for Constitutional Rights and Amnesty International in a FOIA lawsuit seeking information about the workings of this program and we have been litigating that case for a few years.
We also have some FOIA requests on behalf of Mohammed Bashmila another client of ours Mohammed Al-Assad who is also held in this program seeking information about their detention and rendition by the US government and in both cases we've been fighting a very hard fight to get anything out of the government.
We're hoping that with the Obama administration's emphasis on transparency that we'll get more in the coming months but so far it's hard to tell.
Well it seems like this isn't going to go away I mean any kind of long-term strategy by the Obama administration to continue to invoke the state secrets privilege and so forth seems like they might be able to get away with some of that in court and thwart civil lawsuits and that sort of thing but after all there are untold numbers of torture victims here who are going to continue coming forward like this attempting to sue in civil court and things like that this isn't going to go away.
The law has got to be applied doesn't it?
Yeah I think that's right I mean I think you're right that it's not going to go away at the same time I think I can't overemphasize the importance now of people who care about these issues who believe that the US government needs to provide information about what's been done in the last several years.
It's incredibly important for those of us who care about these issues to speak out now if you look at other moments of transitional justice in other settings or any other time when a particular government has committed torture and other types of crimes accountability mechanisms really don't come into play until you have a massive call by civil society.
So I would urge all those people who care about these issues who supported President Obama to take seriously that fact and that even though Obama might represent change in some ways to make that change truly meaningful on these issues we are really going to have to push hard and make our voices heard on these issues.
The other thing that you said was the untold number of victims in the war on terrorism and I think that's another really important point that you know we put out a report a few years ago that listed all the names of people disappeared in this particular program of whom we're aware but we don't have all the names we don't know all of the people who have disappeared in the program.
We don't know all the stories of the families who have been devastated by members of their family being disappeared and I think it's important to keep that in mind as we consider what the stakes are here and to keep in mind the human face of devastation of this program and of the larger war on terrorism policies.
Well you know one thing that you mentioned earlier was that you believe that your client in this case was held for a time somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Can you tell me what exactly what indications you have that that's the case?
In this work that we do on working on the issue of secret detention and rendition it's a bit like putting together a puzzle.
We pay very close attention to different accounts that have come out from various detainees, we pay attention to details that our own clients have told us about where they were held and we pay attention to public reports that have come out regarding where prisons may have been held over the last several years.
I mean it's really by piecing together those various bits that we think the prison was held in Eastern Europe.
The other interesting point that I didn't mention is this, when you read our client's account about his detention in the first facility in Bagram Air Base, the facility was run down and looked like an older facility.
When he's transferred to the second prison in the unknown location, his description in the declaration we filed in the Jeppesen suit is very Kafkaesque and scary.
What he's told us about and what you read in that declaration is a description of a brand new facility, state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, brand new cell that he was kept in, etc.
It's not only scary to think of these prisons in different parts of the world, but it's also scary to think that these prisons may have been built for the specific purpose for the US to use in this program.
There's been news stories about one air base in Poland that was a Nazi command post and then was a Soviet base of some kind and then was being used as a ghost prison here by the Americans.
But I guess this doesn't sound like that same place if we're talking about a brand new Halliburton-built facility somewhere, huh?
We can't say whether or not it's brand new or not, but it certainly seemed, in our client's account in speaking to him, it does seem like a new or refurbished facility.
Well, I guess the more we find out about these torture stories, the more it becomes apparent how much we don't know.
And it seems like the next few years could be taken up with the truth of these stories actually coming out.
Yeah, I mean, I think so.
If the political will was there, we could find out everything in the next week.
But we really have to push on that.
And in the meantime, until that happens, I think you're right that we will keep hearing these stories from around the world.
Yeah.
Well, thanks for pushing.
If it's not you, it's not anybody.
So I always am thankful whenever I hear about these groups of lawyers, whether it's the Innocence Project or people at the Center for Constitutional Rights or what have you, the ACLU basically working many times for free or for very low pay in order to take on the most important challenges of our time.
So you deserve some credit for being part of that effort.
Thank you, Stan.
You deserve credit for getting the word out there because our work is meaningless unless other people know about it.
So kudos to you for all that you're doing as well.
All right, everybody, that's Amna Akbar.
She's clinical fellow at the International Human Rights Clinic at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you.