Oops

New York Times:

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, acknowledged Wednesday that the C.I.A. had failed to keep members of Congress fully informed of the facts that the agency had videotaped the interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees and destroyed the tapes three years later.

General Hayden’s comments struck a different tone than a message he sent to C.I.A. employees last Thursday, when he said that Congressional leaders had been informed about the tapes and of the “agency’s intention to dispose of the material.”

Emerging from a closed-door session with members of the House Intelligence Committee, General Hayden said Wednesday that “particularly at the time of the destruction we could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alert and informed.”

After the nearly four-hour hearing, Representative Silvestre P. Reyes of Texas, the committee’s chairman, called parts of General Hayden’s testimony “stunning” and said lawmakers were just at the beginning of what would likely be a “long-term investigation.”

Torture

ABC News:

Sometimes the music was American rap, sometimes Arab folk songs. In the CIA prison in Afghanistan, it came blaring through the speakers 24 hours a day. Prisoners held alone inside barbed-wire cages could only speak to each other and exchange their news when the music stopped: if the tape was changed or the generators broke down.

In one such six-foot-by-10-foot cell in February 2004, equipped with a low mattress and a bucket as a toilet, sat a man in shackles named Ibn al Sheikh al Libi, the former al Qaeda camp commander described by former CIA director George Tenet in his autobiography last year as "the highest ranking al-Qa'ida member in U.S. custody" just after 9/11.

In this secret facility known to prisoners as "The Hangar" and believed to be at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul, al Libi told fellow "ghost prisoners," one recalled to me for a PBS "Frontline" to be broadcast tonight, an incredible story of his treatment over the previous two years: of how questioned at first by Americans, by the FBI and then CIA, of how he was threatened with torture. And then how he was rendered to a jail cell in Egypt where the threats became a reality.

Laugh or cry?

At Daily Kos, diarist blueness has a terrific post. Go read.

Amnesty International Says Guantanamo Getting Worse

Spiegel Online:

Amnesty International has sharply criticized conditions at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a report released on Thursday, the organization said around 80 percent of the 385 inmates are being held in "cruel conditions of isolation" with almost no contact with the outside world.

"While the United States has an obligation to protect its citizens" the report said, "that does not relieve the United States from the responsibilities to comply with human rights."

Earlier moves to relax the conditions and to increase opportunities for socialization among detainees seem to have been reversed, Amnesty said. The isolated prisoners are now spending 22 hours alone in a windowless cell with no natural light or fresh air. They exercise alone, often at night and can go for days without seeing daylight. Inmates have their meals alone in their cells, which are constantly lit, and they are observed 24 hours a day.

The New York Times editorial page gets it

American Liberty at the Precipice:

In another low moment for American justice, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that detainees held at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to be heard in court. The ruling relied on a shameful law that President Bush stampeded through Congress last fall that gives dangerously short shrift to the Constitution.

The right of prisoners to challenge their confinement — habeas corpus — is enshrined in the Constitution and is central to American liberty. Congress and the Supreme Court should act quickly and forcefully to undo the grievous damage that last fall’s law — and this week’s ruling — have done to this basic freedom....

When the Founding Fathers put habeas corpus in Article I of the Constitution, they were underscoring the vital importance to a democracy of allowing prisoners to challenge their confinement in a court of law. Much has changed since Sept. 11, but the bedrock principles of American freedom must remain.