Pentagon Cites Tapes Showing Interrogations

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect.

The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged that it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and Congressional investigations.

The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.

The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.

The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terrorism suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention site in Charleston, S.C., where the two men have been held.

The initial findings of the Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in American custody. A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review was incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that interrogation videotapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.

The only tape the officials described is of Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was arrested in December 2001 while in college in Illinois and moved five years ago to the jail after being designated an “enemy combatant.” Government officials say they believe he was an operative for Al Qaeda who was plotting attacks.

Two government officials said that the tape showed Mr. Marri being manhandled by his interrogators, but did not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching what they believed could be classified as torture. According to one Defense Department official, the interrogators dispensing the rough treatment on the tape were F.B.I. agents.

An F.B.I. spokesman declined to comment, citing a continuing review of detention practices that is being carried out by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

Mr. Black, the spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said its director, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, had reviewed the tape and was satisfied that Mr. Marri’s treatment was acceptable.

He said that Mr. Marri was chanting loudly, disrupting his interrogation, and that interrogators used force to put duct tape on his mouth, while Mr. Marri resisted. Mr. Black said most of the videos showing Mr. Marri’s interrogations had been destroyed. The government has never charged Mr. Marri, but because of his designation as an enemy combatant, the Pentagon is allowed to hold him indefinitely.

The scale of detention and interrogation by the military, with tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, dwarfs that of the C.I.A., which has held fewer than 100 high-level Qaeda suspects. The C.I.A. has acknowledged videotaping only two terrorism suspects, in 2002, and military officials said that the review, ordered in late January by James R. Clapper, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, had similarly found that only a small number of detainee interrogations had been videotaped.

“This is not a widespread practice,” said Mr. Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. He said that it was up to individual military commanders whether to tape interrogations and that the videotapes were often used as the basis of written intelligence reports. In addition to the existing interrogation videotapes, there are existing recordings that show interactions between military guards and terrorism suspects, including detainees’ forcible removal from cells at Guantánamo, military officials said.

Images of rough treatment of detainees is a delicate subject for the Pentagon. Soldiers’ snapshots of the abusive treatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq set off a firestorm and led to prison terms for a number of military personnel.

Congress imposed a ban in 2005 on all harsh interrogation methods by the military but left a loophole for the C.I.A. Last month, Congress voted to extend the ban to the C.I.A., but President Bush vetoed the bill.

The C.I.A. acknowledged in December that in 2005 it had destroyed the only interrogation videotapes that its officers had made; the tapes showed two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al- Rahim al-Nashiri.

Lawyers for Mr. Marri, who have challenged his imprisonment in court, sought access to any tapes or other records of his interrogations, but in 2006 a federal judge in South Carolina said the government did not have to produce any tapes. That decision is being appealed.

Jonathan Hafetz, one of the lawyers, said Mr. Marri had heard guards describe “a cabinet full of tapes” showing his interrogations, but had never had independent confirmation that such tapes existed. Mr. Marri has alleged that earlier in his imprisonment he was deprived of sleep, isolated and exposed to prolonged cold.

Mr. Hafetz said he planned to file papers in court on Thursday describing the psychological harm done to Mr. Marri. “Locking someone up for five years without charges is a disgrace and a betrayal of American and constitutional values,” he said.

The difficulties in the Pentagon’s review can be glimpsed in a seven-page court filing last month by Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, the military commander at Guantánamo Bay.

Admiral Buzby’s report describes an array of digital video recorders used to capture “activities” — it does not specify whether interrogations are included — in at least four subcamps at Guantánamo. But the systems automatically recorded over older material when they reached capacity, he wrote.

In some cases, Admiral Buzby wrote, “We suspect that the recording devices contain recorded data but we are unable technologically to confirm whether data remains.”

Gains Cited in Hunt for Liberia Ex-Warlord’s Fortune

By MARLISE SIMONS

THE HAGUE — For two years, Charles Taylor, the West African warlord and former president of Liberia, has been locked in a Dutch high-security jail, leaving the compound only in an armored car that speeds across The Hague as it delivers him to his war crimes trial.

But while he is in the dock, the hunt is still on for his legendary missing fortune. Prosecutors say the most exhaustive effort to date is under way to pinpoint the money the former dictator is believed to have amassed by pilfering the coffers of his country and running smuggling operations, particularly of diamonds, deep inside neighboring states.

No money has been seized, but investigators say they have made some breakthroughs recently.

“We have new information that more than $1 billion passed through Taylor’s personal bank accounts between 1997 and 2003 when he was president,” said Stephen Rapp, the chief prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is trying Mr. Taylor at an outpost in The Hague. Last year, experts advising the United Nations Security Council estimated Mr. Taylor’s fortune at half that amount.

Newly traced bank records and other documents show Liberian money flowing into Mr. Taylor’s accounts, as well as large cash withdrawals and transfers to foreign banks, Mr. Rapp said. “The records showed he controlled enormous funds which he hid,” the prosecutor said. “The big question is how much of that wealth is still left.”

The court now has the aid of a London law firm with experience in recovering wealth stolen by dictators and other leaders. Court officials said the firm was being paid by Western governments but they would not release other details, saying that could jeopardize the investigation.

Mr. Taylor, 60, has been charged with pillaging, but his hidden accounts and assets are also central to his prosecution on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecutors want to demonstrate how he financed operations that dragged neighboring Sierra Leone into a civil war that lasted more than a decade.

Prosecutors argue that in his drive to expand his power in the region, Mr. Taylor used stolen millions, including profits from smuggled diamonds, to buy the loyalty, weapons and supplies for rebels in Sierra Leone and other neighboring countries. His indictment holds him accountable for the rebels’ barbaric methods, as they pillaged, killed, raped, used children as soldiers and hacked off hands or feet of innocent civilians.

No one knows how much money was stolen in the region or raised from the diamond fields of Sierra Leone and parts of Guinea. Evidence presented at the trial showed that enslaved laborers were often forced to dig for diamonds at gunpoint and could be executed for keeping a stone. Court investigators have said diamonds were often sold cheaply and used to pay for clandestine weapons shipments.

Millions of dollars of income from government timber concessions and Liberia’s shipping flags of convenience often went directly to Mr. Taylor, Western diplomats have said.

If the international judges’ panel finds him guilty of pillaging, the court can seize assets proved to belong to him or his associates and use the money for restitution.

The list of claimants is likely to be long. Trust funds have been set up in Liberia and Sierra Leone for war victims, among them the thousands who were mutilated by machetes. Each country may have claims for war damages and for pilfering state coffers and resources like diamonds and timber, prosecutors have said.

Not least, the court could claim funds for its expenses on Mr. Taylor’s defense.

The former Liberian dictator, who arrives for court in tinted glasses and impeccable suits, has insisted he has almost no money and cannot even pay for his defense. The governments of Nigeria and Liberia, where Mr. Taylor is believed to have considerable investments and real estate, have not cooperated with the court’s requests for information and freezing his assets, prosecutors said.

As a result, the court is paying $70,000 per month to his defense team, which includes a dozen people. It pays an additional $30,000 per month in other expenses, like the team’s office rent and salaries for the four investigators assigned to him.

Mr. Taylor, who had fretted about what he called the “low level” of his court-appointed defense team, obtained a court order last summer providing him with a large team of more senior lawyers.

If Mr. Taylor’s assets are found, the court could bill him for his defense, expected to cost $3 million to $4 million. Such costs are now paid by the governments who help finance the United Nations-backed court. The United States, which had high hopes for Mr. Taylor in 1997 when he was elected president, and backed him with aid and assistance, is a major donor.

Investigators say Mr. Taylor has demonstrated his skills in hiding money and fooling people, including the court, before. He built his first fortune as a government official in the 1980s and pocketed more than $900,000 before fleeing an embezzling charge. He was arrested in Boston, but while awaiting extradition he escaped from a Massachusetts jail and disappeared.

He is believed to have collected millions as a warlord in the 1990s from entrepreneurs in exchange for favors.

“We know now that many of Taylor’s assets are hidden off-shore or behind the names of his associates,” said Mr. Rapp, the chief prosecutor. But large cash withdrawals during his tenure as president suggest that he spent much of it on the war effort, according to investigators.

The United Nations has frozen $6 million in assets, in the name of Mr. Taylor or his associates, in 10 countries. “It’s a start, but it can’t be seized until we prove it’s Taylor’s money,” Mr. Rapp said.

The London lawyers are enlisting law enforcement agencies to press banks in several financial havens to cooperate, according to Mr. Rapp, who said that some countries, including the Bahamas and Switzerland, are already helping.

“Enough progress has already been made to show that more can be found,” he said.

The Unstudied Art of Interrogation

By SCOTT SHANE

Washington

HOW do you get a terrorist to talk? Despite the questioning of tens of thousands of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last six years, and a high-decibel political battle over torture, experts say there has been little serious research to answer that crucial question.

The Bush administration has yet to fill the void, instead getting enmeshed in a defense of waterboarding — which the Central Intelligence Agency says it has not used in five years but which critics have seized on as a powerful symbol of how not to conduct war. And Congress, for its part, has skipped over the question in passing a bill (knowing that it would be vetoed by President Bush) that bans harsh interrogations but requires the C.I.A. to use only the tactics listed in the Army’s playbook.

Certainly the debate is rich in emotion, with each side claiming the moral heights: You approve torture! You’re coddling terrorists! But the arguments have been scant on science to back them up.

“We don’t have any idea — other than anecdote or moral philosophy — what really works,” said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution, author of “Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror,” set to be published in June.

There is the Army Field Manual 2-22.3, officially titled “Human Intelligence Collector Operations.” It eschews coercion and instead offers general advice on behavior (“People tend to want to talk when they are under stress and respond to kindness and understanding during trying circumstances”). It offers 19 approaches to interrogation that Congress wants the C.I.A. to stick to, including Mutt and Jeff, or good cop, bad cop; We Know All, in which the interrogator pretends merely to be confirming details of a story he knows already; Rapid-Fire Questioning, to produce contradictions that can then be challenged; Ego Up, in which flattery produces a bond; and False Flag, in which an American interrogator poses as one from another nation. The principles are familiar to anyone who’s watched enough police procedurals.

But the manual’s inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decisionmaking, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator’s art either. Nor has there been a systematic effort to analyze the successes and blunders of the interrogations carried out since the attacks of 2001.

Steven M. Kleinman, a colonel in the Air Force reserve and a veteran interrogator in Iraq and elsewhere, says the government spends billions on spy satellites but almost nothing on studying interrogation. This is true, he said, despite a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

“We need to bring scientific standards for interrogation to the same level of sophistication that we bring to satellite imagery and intercepting communications,” said Mr. Kleinman, who has studied the American interrogation programs used for high-level German and Japanese prisoners during World War II, which he judges superior to those developed since 2001.

Both Mr. Wittes and Mr. Kleinman occupy a middle ground of sorts in the standoff between Congress and the White House. They are outspoken opponents of the harshest methods used by the C.I.A. in 2002 and 2003. But they also argue that the Congressional bill imposing the Army’s methods would make bad policy in the long run by stifling creativity and deterring serious study of a critical subject.

Mr. Kleinman said he envisioned a new intelligence agency or subagency devoted solely to interrogation — sponsoring research, conducting training and building a team of sophisticated interrogators with linguistic and psychological skills. He speaks of creating a high-level interrogation center in the United States where settings could be customized for a particular suspect, Hollywood-style, “whether it’s a Bedouin tent or a suite at the Waldorf.”

“The overriding principle should be: Make it as easy as possible for someone to cooperate with you,” he said. “If we want someone to re-create in minute detail something that happened three years ago, how can we help them remember?”

Mr. Kleinman said such a center would be wired for video and audio recording, in part to assure that interrogators follow the rules but also to let analysts with various kinds of expertise return to the suspect’s exact words and body language.

In a quiet effort to shift public talk from the past (waterboarding) to the future, a panel of experts, named by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the intelligence agencies, has been pressing the administration to begin research on identifying the most effective, humane ways of questioning terrorist suspects. Robert A. Fein, a Harvard psychologist who heads the group, made such a presentation to 70 officials at the White House in January. According to people who have heard his talks, Dr. Fein, who declined to comment for this article, is concerned that even the word “interrogation” is tainted by torture. He uses the term “intelligence interviewing” for the skills he promotes.

All the talk of comfortable conditions, helping terrorists remember and preserving sessions on videotape stands in almost comic contrast to the C.I.A.’s approach in 2002, which resorted to exposure to heat and cold, bombardment with noise, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said the agency’s methods “have proven to be very effective, producing information that has led to the capture of terrorists and the disruption of their operations.” All the methods were lawful, he said, noting that the program “has evolved over time.”

The argument against the use of pain or physical torture is practical as well as moral. From the Spanish Inquisition to Pol Pot’s Cambodia, brutal interrogations have been used to force confessions, often without regard to truth.

The government stopped sponsoring interrogation research in the 1970s, after Congressional investigators uncovered gruesome accounts of “mind control” experiments with drugs like LSD. In the polarized atmosphere of the waterboarding debate, it remains to be seen whether Congress or the public will endorse a carefully regulated program to find new ways of persuading people to give up their secrets.

Bush vetoes bill outlawing CIA waterboarding

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Saturday vetoed legislation passed by Congress that would have banned the CIA from using waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques.

Lawmakers included the anti-torture measure in a broader bill authorizing U.S. intelligence activities.

"Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," Bush said in his weekly radio address. He added that the vetoed legislation "would diminish these vital tools."

The House of Representatives approved the legislation in December and the Senate passed it in February despite White House warnings it would be vetoed.

CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.

The simulated drowning technique has been condemned by many members of Congress, human rights groups and other countries as a form of illegal torture.

The U.S. Army Field Manual prohibits waterboarding and seven other interrogation methods and the bill would have aligned CIA practices with the military's.

In his remarks, Bush did not specifically mention waterboarding.

But he said: "The bill Congress sent me would not simply ban one particular interrogation method, as some have implied. Instead, it would eliminate all the alternative procedures we've developed to question the world's most dangerous and violent terrorists."

It is unlikely that Democrats, the majority party in Congress, could muster enough votes to overturn Bush's veto. The bill passed the House and Senate on partisan votes, short of the support needed to reverse the president.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Xavier Briand)

Mass grave discovered in Iraq

The site in Diyala province contains the remains of maybe 100 people, officials say.
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

5:43 AM PST, March 8, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqi security forces discovered a grave containing the badly decomposed remains of as many as 100 people in Diyala province, U.S. and Iraqi officials said today.

Police said the Iraqi forces were conducting a routine raid Friday when they found the grave concealed in an orchard near the town of Khalis, about 50 miles northeast of Baghdad.

"The skeletal remains appear to have been in the grave for a long time, and we have not yet determined who might be responsible for their death and burial," Maj. Winfield Danielson, a U.S. military spokesman, said by e-mail.

U.S. and Iraqi investigators believe hundreds of thousands of people were killed and buried in similar graves under Saddam Hussein. But police said today they suspect this grave was more recent.

Diyala has been plagued by sectarian fighting since Hussein's overthrow in 2003, and numerous communal graves have been discovered on the outskirts of its cities and villages.

Sunni militants loyal to Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates in 2006 declared the province the center of their self-styled caliphate, where they imposed their brutal version of Islam. Hundreds of people were reported kidnapped and killed for working with the U.S. and Iraqi authorities, or for other perceived infractions.

A series of U.S.-led offensives has driven the insurgents from many of their Diyala sanctuaries in the last year, but attacks persist.

Police said five people were killed when two roadside bombs exploded minutes apart this morning along a well-traveled route through Wajihiyah, about 15 miles east of Baqubah, the Diyala provincial capital.

The first blast hit a civilian car, killing a woman and her two children, and injuring her husband and another relative, police said. The second bomb exploded near a passing minibus, killing two people and injuring eight others, they said.

On Friday, a U.S. soldier was killed and another injured in an explosion while conducting operations in Diyala, the military said in a statement. At least 3,975 U.S. personnel have been killed since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, according to the independent website icasualties.org.

The number of attacks has dropped more than 60 percent nationwide since the summer, when the U.S. military completed the buildup of 28,500 additional troops in Baghdad and surrounding regions. But U.S. officers believe many insurgents have relocated to northern Iraq, where much of the current violence is taking place.

alexandra.zavis@latimes.com

A Times special correspondent in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Horrifying and Unnecessary

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

¶ Waterboarding.

¶ Using military working dogs.

¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

¶ Conducting mock executions.

¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops.

“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” General Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

Scorched-Earth Strategy Returns to Darfur

By LYDIA POLGREEN

SULEIA, Sudan — The janjaweed are back.

They came to this dusty town in the Darfur region of Sudan on horses and camels on market day. Almost everybody was in the bustling square. At the first clatter of automatic gunfire, everyone ran.

The militiamen laid waste to the town — burning huts, pillaging shops, carrying off any loot they could find and shooting anyone who stood in their way, residents said. Asha Abdullah Abakar, wizened and twice widowed, described how she hid in a hut, praying it would not be set on fire.

“I have never been so afraid,” she said.

The attacks by the janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias that came three weeks ago, accompanied by government bombers and followed by the Sudanese Army, were a return to the tactics that terrorized Darfur in the early, bloodiest stages of the conflict.

Such brutal, three-pronged attacks of this scale — involving close coordination of air power, army troops and Arab militias in areas where rebel troops have been — have rarely been seen in the past few years, when the violence became more episodic and fractured. But they resemble the kinds of campaigns that first captured the world’s attention and prompted the Bush administration to call the violence in Darfur genocide.

Aid workers, diplomats and analysts say the return of such attacks is an ominous sign that the fighting in Darfur, which has grown more complex and confusing as it has stretched on for five years, is entering a new and deadly phase — one in which the government is planning a scorched-earth campaign against the rebel groups fighting here as efforts to find a negotiated peace founder.

The government has carried out a series of coordinated attacks in recent weeks, using air power, ground forces and, according to witnesses and peacekeepers stationed in the area, the janjaweed, as their allied militias are known here. The offensives are aimed at retaking ground gained by a rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, which has been gathering strength and has close ties to the government of neighboring Chad.

Government officials say that their strikes have been carefully devised to hit the rebels, not civilians, and that Arab militias were not involved. They said they had been motivated to evict the rebels in part because the rebels were hijacking aid vehicles and preventing peacekeepers from patrolling the area, events that some aid workers and peacekeepers confirmed.

“We are simply trying to secure the area from the bandits that are troubling civilians in the area,” said Ali al-Sadig, a government spokesman. “There is nothing abnormal about a government doing this.”

But residents of the towns said the rebels had been long gone by the time the government attacks began, leaving defenseless civilians to flee bombs and guns. In interviews, survivors of the attacks described a series of assaults that had left dozens dead, turned large sections of towns into hut-shaped circles of ash and scattered tens of thousands of fearful residents, including hundreds of children, who fled classrooms in the middle of a school day and have not been reunited with their families.

“My son Ahmed, he ran, but I have not seen him since,” said a woman named Aisha as she waited for a sack of sorghum from United Nations workers in Sirba, one of the towns that was attacked. “I just pray he is still hiding in the bush somewhere and will come back to me.”

A Terrorized Population

The United Nations estimates that the recent fighting has forced about 45,000 people to flee their homes in Darfur, which is roughly the size of Texas and has a population of about six million people. Some fled to Chad, where they have not been able to reach the safety of refugee camps because of continued bombing along the border. Others fled to Jebel Moun, a rebel stronghold to the east, and aid workers fear for the safety of about 20,000 people who are in the path of future attacks if the government presses ahead with its offensive and the rebels vow to resist.

Military officials from the peacekeeping force in Darfur said in recent days that the Sudanese military had added nearly a brigade of troops to West Darfur, along with two dozen tanks and armored vehicles and many heavy weapons.

“You see a buildup from both sides,” said Ameerah Haq, the senior United Nations aid official in Sudan. “Both sides must desist. We have a population that is just being attacked and hit from both sides.”

Pressure is mounting on Sudan over Darfur. In January, a long-sought hybrid United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force began working in Darfur, but the Sudanese government’s quibbling over which countries the troops will come from and bureaucratic delays have stalled the force’s deployment.

Sudan’s biggest trading partner and ally, China, has also come under pressure from advocates who have linked the Olympic Games in Beijing this summer to the fighting in Darfur. China has been more publicly critical of the Sudanese government in recent weeks. Sudan has also been trying to improve its relationship with the United States, and last week, President Bush’s new special envoy to Sudan, Richard S. Williamson, visited Darfur and the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, meeting with President Omar al-Bashir. Any improvement in relations, he said, would be contingent on tangible improvements in the humanitarian situation.

“Since the first of the year another 75,000 people in Darfur have been displaced,” Mr. Williamson said in a telephone interview. “That is more than a thousand a day. There are not going to be any changes until that reverses.”

Origins of a Conflict

Despite the pressure, the government seems determined to fight on, and the most powerful rebel groups — the biggest factions of the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army — have refused to sit down for talks. So the violence continues, tracing a familiar arc as it wears on.

It was five years ago last week that an attack by rebels from non-Arab tribes like the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa, seeking greater wealth and autonomy for the neglected and impoverished region of Darfur, prompted the Arab-dominated government to marshal Arab militias in the region that ultimately evicted millions from their homes, burning, looting and raping along the way. The campaign effectively pushed many non-Arab people off their land and into vast, squalid camps across Darfur and Chad.

In the first two years of the conflict, 2003 and 2004, joint attacks by the Sudanese Army, janjaweed militiamen and the government’s old Russian-made Antonov bombers terrorized Darfur, waging a brutal counterinsurgency against non-Arab rebel groups by attacking their fellow tribesmen in their villages. At least 200,000 are believed to have died as a result of the violence or sickness and hunger caused by the crisis, according to international estimates, with the majority of violent deaths in that period.

But in the past two years, the conflict has grown more complex and chaotic, and while some coordinated attacks by janjaweed militias and aerial bombardment have occurred, they were not of the same scale or intensity. But Darfur has remained a deadly place.

In 2006, before a peace agreement and then in the aftermath of its failure, rebel groups fractured and began fighting among themselves. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and hundreds died as a result of their battles. Today, according to some estimates, two dozen rebel groups are jockeying for territory and influence in Darfur. Some analysts and human rights workers say the government has sown chaos by splintering the rebel groups to weaken them.

In 2007, Arab tribes, some of which had allied with the government and some of which had taken up arms to fight the rebels, also began to fight one another. Many of the violent deaths of 2007 were caused by these bloody battles between Arab groups and their militias, according to aid workers and diplomats in the region.

But as the conflict enters its sixth year, an older, deadly pattern is returning, and with it fears are rising among villagers, aid workers, diplomats and analysts that Darfur is headed for a new cycle of bloodletting and displacement on a vast scale.

In recent weeks, bombs dropped from government planes hit Abu Surouj, Sirba, Suleia and other towns in West Darfur, then came janjaweed militiamen, who killed, raped and burned, helping themselves to livestock and grain, furniture and clothing. In one town, the raiders pried the corrugated metal roof off a school, aid workers said. In another, water pumps were destroyed.

“This is the kind of destruction that makes it hard for people to return,” said Ted Chaiban, the Unicef representative in Sudan, who has toured the area of the attacks. “People need security. They are totally vulnerable.”

Violence in Chad

The recent violence in Chad, where rebel groups with bases in Sudan tried to topple the government in early February, has worsened matters. Rebels in Darfur, who diplomats and analysts say have received arms and cash from the family of Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, rushed into Chad to help defend him, creating a vacuum in the territory they had occupied. Sudan’s government seized the opportunity to retake the ground and now appears to be pushing farther into areas long held by the rebels, according to peacekeepers stationed here.

Few people in the region were unhappy to see the Justice and Equality Movement evicted. Banditry was rife in the territory it controlled, and for months aid groups had dodged carjackings and other attacks. African Union peacekeepers had been barred from the area, according to Brig. Gen. Balla Keita, the new regional commander of the hybrid United Nations-African Union force in West Darfur.

"They were causing a lot of insecurity," General Keita said of the rebels, but he added that this did not justify attacks on heavily populated areas.

In Suleia, only a few hundred residents remained of the 15,000 who had lived here. Those left behind were too weak to run and have sought safety near the army camp at the edge of town, sleeping in the open, huddled together for warmth against the frigid night winds.

The Sudanese soldiers here have promised to protect them from militiamen who still roam the edges of town. They prevented militiamen from stealing sacks of grain delivered by aid groups, residents said.

Adam Adoum Abdullah, a former rebel fighter who joined the Sudanese Army as part of a peace deal with one rebel group in 2006, commandeered an army truck to help collect what little food, blankets and bits of shelter remained in the town for those sleeping out in the cold next to the army camp.

“I am ashamed that the janjaweed come with the soldiers,” Mr. Abdullah said. “What kind of army are we to fight like this? These people, they are suffering. We must help them.”

Gates praises Indonesian military but cautions on human rights

The Defense secretary says the U.S. is willing to sell weapons to the key Southeast Asian ally.
By Peter Spiegel
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

12:12 PM PST, February 25, 2008

JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today that the U.S. was still willing to sell Indonesia new weaponry, particularly for its navy and air force. But he cautioned that democracies must have firm civilian control of their militaries, which must be disciplined for human rights abuses.

Gates praised Jakarta for moving to professionalize its military, which for decades under former President Suharto ruled the archipelago with an iron fist until the late dictator was deposed a decade ago.

Although Gates did not criticize the Indonesian military's current conduct, he made a point to emphasize that democracies must investigate and prosecute allegations of corruption or abuse within their armed forces.

"In addition to the importance of civilian control of the military, there cannot be even a taint of corruption or a hint of tolerance for human rights abuses," Gates told the Indonesian Council on World Affairs.

During the last three years, the Bush administration has moved to lift restrictions on military ties between the two countries that were first cut after Indonesian military atrocities committed in East Timor in 1991.

Congress has moved to withhold some of the aid until past abuses by the Indonesian military were accounted for, and human rights groups have argued that the armed forces still are not fully answerable to civilian authorities.

Gates' address followed his afternoon meetings with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono. U.S. officials traveling with Gates said he pushed to deepen security ties with Indonesia, which as the world's largest Muslim country has become a key ally in the region and a model of the kind of secular Muslim state the Bush administration hopes to replicate elsewhere.

Although Indonesia has become the second-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the region, at about $15.7 million this year, Indonesian government officials have expressed repeated frustration with the slow pace of U.S. military sales.

In recent months, Indonesia has discussed acquiring weapons from China and Russia, with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin vowing during a visit here in September to sell Jakarta $1 billion of advanced weaponry.

The discussions with the Russians and Chinese were seen by analysts as a hedge against inaction, but Gates emphasized that all U.S. restrictions on arms sales to Indonesia were lifted by the Bush administration in November 2005. At a news conference with Gates after their talks, Indonesia's defense minister said his consideration of non-U.S. weaponry was sound acquisition policy.

"We review all equipment from all countries, including the United States, in a balanced and very fair-minded way," Sudarsono said.

peter.spiegel@latimes.com

Romania Base Suspected CIA Prisoner Site

MIHAIL KOGALNICEANU AIR BASE, Romania (AP) — It always happened at 1 a.m. In a secluded corner of this heavily guarded airfield, two snipers would creep across a rooftop and take their positions. Moments later, just below, a black minibus would arrive and wait.

Three times in 2004, and twice more in 2005, a jet landed and the black bus drove out to meet it. Large, mysterious parcels were exchanged that, according to a Romanian official who says he witnessed it, looked like bundled-up terror suspects.

The official, a high-ranking veteran with inside knowledge of operations at the base, said the planes then left for North Africa with their cargo and two CIA handlers aboard.

His descriptions, told on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press, add to suspicions surrounding Romania's involvement in "extraordinary rendition" — the beyond-the-law transfer of U.S. terror suspects from country to country by the CIA. Human rights advocates say renditions were the agency's way to outsource torture of prisoners to countries where it is permitted practice.

Romania's precise role is a little-reported part of the system that is being slowly revealed, often to the chagrin of U.S. allies. In an embarrassing reversal after years of denial, Britain admitted Thursday that its military outpost on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia had twice been used as a refueling stop for the secret transport of terrorism suspects.

The European Commission on Friday accused Poland and Romania of dodging its requests to clarify their involvement. Both countries deny accusations of wrongdoing, including a report by Dick Marty, a Swiss official working for the Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, who accused the CIA of running secret prisons in the two countries.

Prisoners typically were shackled and kept naked and in isolation, he alleged, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Such treatment also would run contrary to Romania's own laws and its commitment to human rights, a key condition to the Balkan nation's 2007 accession to the European Union.

According to the Romanian official:

_ U.S. pilots routinely filed bogus flight plans — or none at all — and headed to undeclared destinations.

_ C-130 Hercules cargo planes and other U.S. military aircraft arriving from Iraq regularly parked in a restricted area just off the runway, where they feigned technical trouble and sat under guard for days at a time — awaiting repairs that never occurred.

_ Three buildings on the military portion of the air base were strictly off-limits to Romanians but were frequented and controlled by the Americans.

"It was all set up and simulated to look like normal activity. But believe me, it was very unusual," said the official, who said he needed anonymity to protect himself.

"If you are 50 yards away, you say they are 'parcels,'" he said. "But I think people were on (the plane) and I think they were bundled up." The entire scene was completely out of character with normal aircraft arrivals or standard cargo protocol, he said.

But top Romanian authorities deny the CIA ran so-called "black sites" on their territory. While the official described a pattern of highly unusual flight maneuvers and covert American activities, he says he never saw a prisoner.

Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base, former presidential security adviser Ioan Talpes said in an interview with the AP, had an arrangement with the CIA that gave the agency the right to use the base as needed.

"There were official arrangements of a secret and confidential nature which gave CIA planes the right to land at Romanian airports," said Talpes, who worked at the time for ex-President Ion Iliescu. "They had actions there that we didn't know about," Talpes said. He said Iliescu signed an agreement guaranteeing that Romania would secure the perimeter and otherwise not interfere.

John Sifton, who conducts independent human rights investigations, said the dates and descriptions of the flights described by the base official match the timing and routes of known CIA rendition flights recorded in Eurocontrol flight databases.

Those included an April 2004 flight from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that went out of its way to stop at Mihail Kogalniceanu before heading on to Casablanca, Morocco.

"It was a time when they were moving people around," Sifton told the AP. The Romania stopovers, he added, "look pretty shady to me."

Marty's report concluded that the CIA secretly held al-Qaida operatives, Taliban leaders and other "high-value detainees" in Romania and Poland between 2002 and 2005.

The report, citing unnamed intelligence officials, said five people either authorized or were aware of the Romania operation: Iliescu, Talpes, former Defense Minister Ioan Mircea Pascu, Sergiu Medar, a former head of military intelligence, and current President Traian Basescu. Detainees were subjected "to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture" and underscored "a permissive attitude on the part of the Romanian authorities."

Basescu's office refused to discuss the allegations. "What business do we have with this?" it replied. Pascu called it "a closed subject," and Medar declined a request to be interviewed.

Beyond the midnight flights and the bus, the base official who spoke with the AP said he had questions about what went on aboard larger aircraft from Iraq that arrived at the base and then parked for several days, supposedly awaiting repairs.

"They misinformed. They lied," he said. "It happened many times and there was nothing anyone could do about it."

President Bush and other administration officials have confirmed the existence of the rendition program but have not named the countries involved. They say the U.S. does not engage in torture.

Romanian officials said the U.S. military has invested about $18 million in Mihail Kogalniceanu Airport, including a $4 million perimeter fence, a new hangar and road improvements. Romania has supported and provided troops for the U.S.-led campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Talpes, the former presidential security adviser, said Romanian authorities did not intrude on the U.S. "respected zone" at Mihail Kogalniceanu, used mostly to ferry troops and supplies to Iraq and Afghanistan — because they did not want to make "an unfriendly gesture."

Pressed about whether prisoners were tortured, he said bluntly: "Even if I knew that one of my allies did something, I wouldn't tell you."

CIA chief spokesman Mark Mansfield said the agency had no comment about the black bus scenario, but he defended renditions as both legal and effective.

"They have disrupted potential attacks by taking terrorists off the streets, and they have allowed us, as well as our foreign partners, to gain invaluable intelligence on the terrorists who remain at large," Mansfield said.

Sen. Norica Nicolai, a former prosecutor who led a parliamentary investigation, said her probe found no evidence that the CIA operated a prison or conducted interrogations in Romania.

Nicolai said she was still waiting for Marty to respond to a September request to divulge his sources. "It's in our interests to try to see what happened. We are not a third-world country," she said.

But Cosmin Gusa, a leading opposition lawmaker, said a full accounting was unlikely. "Nobody wants to go deeper," he said. "They don't want to talk about this. This topic is a deadly one."

Justice Dept. is examining its water-boarding advice

The agency wants to know if its officials misled the CIA, which employed the interrogation technique until 2006.
From the Associated Press

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened an internal investigation into whether its top officials improperly authorized or reviewed the CIA's use of waterboarding when interrogating terror suspects, according to documents released Friday.

The investigation was revealed at the request of Democratic Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. A Justice Department spokesman, however, said the inquiry had been continuing for several years.

Questions about waterboarding are part of a larger Justice probe of the so-called Bybee memo, wrote H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, in a Feb. 18 letter to the two senators.

"Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," Jarrett wrote.

Asked for details, Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said, "This is not a new investigation, but rather has been ongoing for some time."

Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.

The memo at the heart of the internal Justice inquiry was dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by then-Assistant Atty. Gen. Jay Bybee for then- White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. It defined torture as recognized by U.S. law as covering "only extreme acts" causing pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.

The Bush administration maintains that waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top Al Qaeda detainees Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. Earlier this month, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said that waterboarding was used in part because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent.

The CIA banned its personnel from using waterboarding in 2006. Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators.

Durbin called the internal Justice inquiry "long overdue" and said the U.S. government had prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime.

"Within the question how America could come to use interrogation techniques of the Inquisition is the question how the Department of Justice could have overlooked its own precedents to authorize waterboarding," added Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor.

Liberia's Taylor appears at his trial

Ex-president is accused of atrocities in Sierre Leone's civil war.
From the Associated Press

July 4, 2007

THE HAGUE — Former Liberian President Charles Taylor appeared in court Tuesday for the first time since the start of his trial for atrocities committed during Sierra Leone's bloody decade-long civil war.

Wearing a blue suit and yellow tie, Taylor appeared 20 minutes late at a procedural hearing during which judges for the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone explained why they agreed to postpone hearing the first prosecution witnesses until Aug. 20.

Taylor has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges that he controlled and armed rebels who killed, raped, mutilated and enslaved civilians during Sierra Leone's civil war, which ended in 2002.

The trial got underway June 4 for just one day and sat for a second day later in the month, but Taylor boycotted both sessions after firing his court-funded attorney and complaining that he was not getting a fair trial.

First prosecution witnesses were due to be heard Tuesday, but prosecutors and a court official responsible for ensuring that Taylor gets a fair trial filed a motion last week asking for the witness testimony to be delayed until August to allow preparation time for Taylor's new defense team, which has not yet been appointed.

Explaining the decision to grant the postponement, presiding judge Julia Sebutinde of Uganda blamed officials in the court's registry for not appointing new defense attorneys in time for the trial to start.

Taylor announced that he had fired his attorney in a letter to the three-judge panel on the first day of hearings and demanded a more senior trial attorney, arguing that prosecutors had far more lawyers on their team.

Prosecutors say they will call dozens of witnesses who will link Taylor to Sierra Leone rebels.

The prosecutors contend that the Liberian leader shipped rebels arms, ammunition and supplies such as alcohol and drugs used to desensitize children forced to fight. In return he got diamonds, they say, many of them mined by slave laborers.