Wednesday 17 February 2010
by: H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye,
t r u t h o u t | Report

On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally released a “seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed.” The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed’s torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted “continuous sleep deprivation” under threats of harm, rendition, or being “disappeared,” were criticized by the British court as being “at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed’s torture places the implementation of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA’s secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed “black sites” by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified “Eyes Only” in the intelligence community, but the program’s roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950’s with the CIA’s Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency’s own files. This is the so-called “Lyle O. Kelly case.” The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents.

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William N. Grigg - April 24, 2009

During a call-in radio program broadcast in Moscow in the mid-1980s, the host — a Communist hack who displayed nearly Hannityesque servility toward his party masters — got tangled in his talking points.

At one point in his peroration, the Party mouthpiece insisted that the decadent West “stands on the brink of collapse”; shortly thereafter, he pronounced the glad tidings that the Soviet Bloc “is about to overtake the West!”

A few minutes later, a listener called in to pose an earnest but puzzled question. “Comrade, you said that the West is on the brink of collapse, and you also said we’re about to overtake them,” the caller observed. “But doesn’t that mean…?” The question trailed off into an awkward silence as the host suddenly understood that the term of his accidental syllogism would be that the Soviet Bloc would collapse before the decadent West.

Over the past two weeks, the leading voices of Republican conservatism have caught themselves in the coils of a similar snare.

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