Is Western World more secure now?

All the people that have proven record of hard criminality are free whether they are US citizens, like Bush administration, CIA personnel and Black Water Company or Afghans, like Uzbaki Doustam whose atrocities are well documented, who actually could be considered the reason for the creation of Taliban because of his rape and murder of innocent Pashtun men women and children. The reason being that their cruelty was pointed to the Muslims. On the other hand innocent Muslims like Daniel Boyd, Dr. Rafil, Dr. Ali Tamimi, Dr. Afia Siddiqui, Ali Asad and thousands of others are incarcerated, tortured and put in to solitary confinement in the worst living conditions just because they are either assumed criminals or indicted with false charges. Have people in authority forgotten their own death that can approach them any instant and would leave no time to repent!

Following are the two transcripts from NPR with the links, please read the transcripts, listen to the story and check all those PDF files that are linked to this blog and also can be found on NPR.Org.

Can anyone put himself/herself or his/her loved ones in the position of those who are being subjected to this inhuman treatment and think that they would have no sense of revenge. Death is much easier than what is being done to these people in return, almost all of whom are not even those who might have, if at all, caused 9/11!

Can you imagine America being safer with these tactics. Either there should be strict boundries inside which every country keeps its citizens confined so that there is no mingling, no danger or there should be sense of mutual respect and regard to each others rights so that people can live in harmony, safe and sound. But the way American government is proceeding against the Muslims, the result can only be worse!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112196368&ps=rs

CIA Report Details Interrogation Techniques
by Dina Temple-Raston
August 25, 2009
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition
[4 min 4 sec]

When Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday that he would have a prosecutor look into possible abuse of detainees by the CIA, he said he was partly motivated by newly declassified documents from 2004 that provide details of the interrogations and the range of abuses inside the CIA's overseas prisons.
Read The CIA Report
CIA 2004 Inspector General's Report On Detention And Interrogation (19 MB)
CIA IG Report Conclusions
Read about techniques used during CIA interrogations, including threats to hurt al-Qaida suspects' family members.
The Justice Department just released parts of the 2004 report, which was previously released in 2007 but was so redacted that it revealed little new information. The less censored version is the largest single release of information about the Bush administration's detainee interrogation program so far.
The use of enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding and stress positions, has been known for some time. What is new is the chronology of other methods interrogators decided to employ on their own.
Interrogators threatened to kill and possibly sexually assault members of detainees' families — which violates anti-torture laws. And there were more basic abuses, such as stepping on shackles, washing someone with a wire brush, blowing smoke constantly in a detainee's face until he started to throw up and dousing detainees with water.
There was also something called "the hard takedown," which essentially meant grabbing a detainee and throwing him to the floor before moving him to a sleep-deprivation cell.
The report describes an episode in July 2002, before the Justice Department had formally authorized harsh methods, in which a CIA interrogator grabbed a detainee's neck and restricted the flow of the carotid artery until the detainee began to faint. The CIA then "shook the detainee to wake him." He did that same pressure-point technique two more times.
There are a number of ominous entries. One begins: "By November 2002, the agency had Abu Zubaydah and another high value detainee, Abd al-Nashiri, in custody." It is followed by a large block of blacked out text and then the sentence "and the Office of Medical Services provided medical care to the detainees." Clearly something bad happened before the medical services were called in, but it is unclear what it was.
Also redacted are the names and locations where these abuses took place.
The report also makes clear that some CIA agents were worried about what they were doing. The report says some CIA agents were worried they would wind up on some "wanted list" and would end up having to appear before the World Court for war crimes because of what they did. Another said "10 years from now, we're going to be sorry we're doing this."
As a general matter, inspector general reports like this one contain a roster of recommendations for the agency under review to follow — generally to ensure that abuses won't happen again.
This report is no different. There are four pages of recommendations, but they are all blacked out.
Related NPR Stories
Inspector General's Report On Abuse Allegations Aug. 24, 2009
Holder Names Prosecutor To Probe Interrogations Aug. 24, 2009
ACLU: Holder Should 'Go Ahead And Prosecute' Aug. 25, 2009
Probe Begins Into Whether CIA Abused Detainees Aug. 25, 2009
DOJ Prosecutor Investigates Interrogation Abuses Aug. 25, 2009

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112221856

CIA Documents: 'Black Sites,' White Noise And Intel

by Kevin Whitelaw
August 25, 2009

The Justice Department released a set of documents Monday night, including many legal opinions related to the CIA's interrogation and detention program.

Most of the attention was focused on the 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general, but the other documents provide new windows into the details of the CIA's now-shuttered network of secret prisons overseas, as well as its treatment of al-Qaida detainees. They also describe how the interrogation program evolved after the inspector general report revealed a series of alleged abuses.

Here are some notable excerpts from the new documents:

The Detainee Experience

A 2004 document prepared by the CIA offers a stark account of the typical treatment of a high-value al-Qaida detainee. It began with the initial rendition, where the prisoner was flown to a secret CIA prison, called a "Black Site" in the document. "During the flight, the detainee is securely shackled and is deprived of sight and sound through the use of blindfolds, earmuffs, and hoods," the document says. After an initial interview, unless the suspect was unusually cooperative, he was taken to a cell, stripped naked, fitted with a diaper and shackled vertically as part of the sleep deprivation process. Officials also described a typical interrogation session as interrogators moved through a series of increasingly harsh techniques, including facial slaps and cramped confinement, if they thought the detainee was withholding information. These techniques were often combined to increase their effectiveness.

Read The 2004 Document (PDF).

Conditions In The CIA's Secret Overseas Prisons

A 2006 Justice Department memo offers surprisingly specific descriptions of the standards at the CIA's overseas prisons. "The CIA plays white noise in the walkways of the detention facilities to prevent detainees from being able to communicate with each other while they are being moved within the facilities," the memo says, offering decibel readings from inside the cells and in the halls. The cells were lighted 24 hours a day (by two 17-watt T-8 fluorescent bulbs — "about the same brightness as an office.") Some of the more cooperative detainees were given eyeshades to help them sleep. Steven Bradbury, the principal deputy assistant attorney general at the time, wrote in the memo that these measures were legal because they were designed not to punish prisoners, but instead for the security of CIA personnel. He added that while courts had found some of the measures illegal in certain circumstances, they should be permitted in the CIA prisons. "Because the CIA detains only the extremely dangerous individuals whom it has determined to pose serious threats to the United States or to be planning terrorist attacks ... its interest in being able to observe its detainees at all times is considerably greater, in most circumstances, than the need to keep a pretrial detainee under constant surveillance in a U.S. prison or jail."

Read The 2006 Memo (PDF).

Interrogations After 2006

After the CIA emptied its secret prisons in September 2006 and sent the remaining detainees to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it asked for Justice Department guidance on resuming an interrogation program. CIA officials were seeking permission to use a reduced number of interrogation techniques, omitting the most controversial ones, including waterboarding. They proposed using measures like facial slaps and sleep deprivation, which they said were "the most indispensable to the effectiveness of the interrogation program." In his reply on July 20, 2007, Steven Bradbury, the principal deputy assistant attorney general at the time, wrote that the Justice Department agreed the CIA's proposal did not violate any of the new U.S. laws barring mistreatment of detainees. For example, he found that the CIA program does not meet the definition of "cruel treatment" or "outrages upon personal dignity" as laid out in the Geneva Conventions. He also noted that the program was carefully limited. From March 2002 through 2006, the CIA held only 98 detainees, 30 of whom had been subjected to so-called enhanced techniques.

Read The 2007 Reply (PDF).

Were The Interrogations Effective?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA to declassify two memos that he said showed that the interrogation program produced vital intelligence. One is a 2005 CIA report that says detainee reporting was "pivotal" in the war against al-Qaida. While there are many problems with detainee accounts, the CIA says interrogations produced information that helped lead to the capture of additional terrorist suspects, helped to thwart terrorist plots, and built a more complete portrait of how the al-Qaida network functioned. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, "provided information that set the stage for the detention of Hambali," the leader of Jemaah Islamiya, a large Indonesian affiliate of al-Qaida. The report claimed that detainee interrogations also helped lead to the arrest of Jose Padilla, who originally was accused of planning to set off a radioactive device, but was convicted only on charges of supporting terrorism. The report does not, however, make any distinction between information obtained through conventional interrogations and that extracted using harsh techniques like waterboarding.

Read The 2005 Report (PDF).
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CIA Report Details Interrogation Techniques Aug. 25, 2009
CIA Bruised By Probes Of Prisoner Abuse Aug. 25, 2009