British soldiers tortured and murdered up to 20 Iraqis in cold blood, the High Court was told yesterday.

It happened after a three-hour gun battle at an Army checkpoint near Basra, a lawyer claimed.

Rabinder Singh said a group of local men were taken prisoner and transported to an Army camp where they were beaten with a rusty tent pole, punched, slammed against walls, denied water, blasted with loud music and forced to strip naked in the presence of a woman – a humiliation for Muslim men.

The next day, he said, only nine were still alive – and 20 corpses were returned to their families. One was teenager Hamid Al-Sweady.

The Army claims the men all died in the initial gun battle, but Hamid’s uncle Khuder Al-Sweady and five survivors of the incident yesterday began a court battle in London to win an independent inquiry.

The clash in May 2004 came after insurgents launched a heavy attack on a checkpoint known as Danny Boy in Al Majar-al-Kabir – the town north of Basra where six military policeman had been murdered the previous year.

According to Army accounts, the soldiers were heavily outnumbered but fought back heroically, mounting a bayonet charge at one point, until the attackers were defeated. The Army says only nine Iraqis were taken away alive for questioning.

But Mr Singh said that when the shooting was over, the British troops took bloody revenge. He said: ‘It is the claimants’ case that at least some of those captured were tortured and killed by British troops between 14 and 15 May 2004, and that there has been no effective investigation into what happened to them in that 24-hour period.

‘This constitutes a substantive and procedural breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.’

He added: ‘There is a lot of evidence from soldiers at the battlefield that there were more than nine that were taken alive.

‘Many of the bodies of the Iraqis returned on 15 May 2004 were severely disfigured and some appeared to show marks of torture and mutilation.’

The Ministry of Defence says a tenmonth Royal Military Police investigation showed the 20 dead were killed in the initial battle. The corpses were taken to be identified before being returned to their families, with no evidence of torture. The hearing continues

Source: Mail Online

As the nation struggles to make sense of a wave of new revelations regarding the “harsh interrogation techniques” brought to bear on detainees by the CIA, two very different narratives are shaping up to describe the treatment of captured al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah in April and May of 2002.

On one hand, there is what might be called the “official” version, as presented in a timeline released by the Senate Intelligence Committee and summarized by the Washington Post. According to this version, Abu Zubaydah was subjected only to traditional interrogation methods until an August 1 memo from Justice Department lawyer Jay Bybee gave a green light for the use of waterboarding and other aggressive techniques.

On the other, there is a far more incriminating narrative that has been pieced together by various observers over the last several years. In this version, harsher methods were being applied to Abu Zubaydah as early as mid-April, and by mid-May he had been subjected to virtually every aggressive technique short of waterboarding.

This second version appears to be supported by a number of external facts. One is that in 2005, the CIA destroyed all videotapes of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation from prior to August 1, even though taping had begun in April.

There were also two peculiar episodes of heightened security alerts in the US in April and May, which were said at the time to have been based on information obtained from Abu Zubaydah. These vague and ultimately implausible threats gave a strong impression that Abu Zubaydah might have been inventing al Qaeda plots simply to satisfy his interrogators.

The interrogation of Abu Zubaydah

All parties appear to agree that following Abu Zubaydah’s capture in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, CIA and FBI agents immediately began questioning him using traditional rapport-building interrogation techniques. He quickly proved willing to discuss al Qaeda plans and philosophy in general terms and even named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of 9/11.

However, the CIA soon came to believe that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information about more specific, imminent threats, and lawyers from the CIA, the National Security Council, and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel began discussing alternative interrogation plans.

In May, the CIA formally asked the OLC to furnish an opinion on the legality of waterboarding and other techniques derived from the the Defense Department’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program.

The official version of the story insists that these alternative plans were not put into effect until after the August 1 Bybee memo had provided legal cover for harsher measures. In contrast, alternative sources provide a wealth of information which suggests that the policy towards Abu Zubaydah had begun shifting much earlier.

According to a lengthy article published in Vanity Fair in July 2007, by mid-April the CIA had begun implementing a plan to extract information from Abu Zubaydah by breaking down his personality. This plan was designed by two psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jensen, who had no prior experience with interrogation. Both had come out of the military’s SERE program, which had been designed to train US personnel to resist attempts to break them if they were captured by enemies.

The SERE program was originally developed to mimic the brainwashing techniques which were used by the Chinese on captured Americans during the Korean War and which were intended to induce false confessions rather than accurate intelligence.

Former SERE trainer and military interrogator Colonel Steven Kleinman, who is quoted in the Vanity Fair article, has been speaking out widely about the “shocking” nature of the CIA decision to hire Mitchell and Jensen. He recently told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, “There’s a lot of people who don’t understand the difference between a model that would train people to resist harsh interrogation … and intelligence interrogation which is designed to elicit cooperation.”

Abu Zubaydah makes himself useful…

Continued At Raw Story

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.

CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people. “There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely,” he said. He said the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus. “So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same.” But Besser said it was unclear why the virus was causing so many deaths in deaths in Mexico and such mild disease in the United States.

Source: Reuters

Missing vials of a potentially dangerous virus have prompted an Army investigation into the disappearance from a lab in Maryland.

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command agents have been visiting Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, to investigate the disappearance of the vials. Christopher Grey, spokesman for the command, said this latest investigation has found “no evidence of criminal activity.”

The vials contained samples of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, a virus that sickens horses and can be spread to humans by mosquitoes. In 97 percent of cases, humans with the virus suffer flu-like symptoms, but it can be deadly in about 1 out of 100 cases, according to Caree Vander Linden, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. There is an effective vaccine for the disease and there hasn’t been an outbreak in the United States since 1971.

The vials had been at the research institute’s facility at Fort Detrick, home of the Army’s top biological research facility, for more than a decade. The three missing vials were among thousands of vials that were under the control of a senior scientist who retired in 2004. When another Fort Detrick scientist recently inventoried the retired scientist’s biological samples, he discovered that the three vials of the virus were missing. The original scientist’s records about his vials dated back to the days of paper-and-pen inventories.

During the investigation, the retired scientist and another former Fort Detrick researcher cooperated with investigating agents and, according to Vander Linden, they came back to the facility to help look for the vials.

Vander Linden said the investigators know that several years ago an entire freezer full of biological samples broke down and all the samples had to be safely destroyed. But a complete inventory of what was in the freezer was not done before the samples were destroyed. Vander Linden said there’s a “strong possibility” the vials were in that freezer and destroyed, but that isn’t known for sure.

This investigation comes two months after all research at the research institute facility at Fort Detrick was halted for a complete computer-based inventory of all disease samples at the fort. That inventory is expected to be complete before summer and may help solve the mystery of the three missing vials, officials said.

The Army investigation is in its final stages and is expected to be closed soon.

Source: CNN