3455. Film Review: Burma Soldier; City of Life and Death

By Louis Proyect, The Unrepentant Marxist, May 13, 2011

Two films have come my way recently that deal in their own way with the systematic brutality of modern armies. “Burma Soldier”, an HBO Documentary that airs on Wednesday, May 18, tells the story of Myo Myint who joined the Burmese army in 1979 at the age of 16 and trained as specialist clearing landmines. An attack by Burmese insurgents severely injured Myint, leaving him without a leg, an arm and most of the fingers on the hand of the remaining arm. What he lost physically was offset by a political and spiritual transformation that turned him into a pro-democracy activist. Not only is “Burma Soldier” a stirring portrait of one man’s struggle against physical and political adversity, it is an excellent introduction to the country’s history. Now playing at the Film Forum in New York, “City of Life and Death” is a fictional account of the so-called Rape of Nanking, the Japanese army’s assault on China’s capital city in 1937 based on Iris Chang’s 1997 best-seller. I can recommend it but with major qualifications.

Even before his calamitous injuries, Myint began to question the cruel and anti-democratic role of the military. To start with, the dominant Burma nationality sought to impose itself on other ethnic groups in the same fashion as the Turks over the Kurds, or the Chinese over the Tibetans. The military that had seized power in 1962 sought to forcibly assimilate the “lesser” nationalities into its own warped vision of Burmese identity in accordance with the arrogant “modernizing” vision of both British colonialism and the “socialist” powers that forgot that there is no socialism without democracy.

He saw countless acts of brutality when on duty. Women, especially from the non-Burma nationalities, were forced to work as porters and even to walk in front of the soldiers in mine-infested terrain. Insurgent captives were routinely tortured. Myint recounts one incident in which a knife was plunged through the cheeks of a man during the course of an interrogation.

As you watch “Burma Soldier”, you cannot help but be reminded of the unfolding drama in the Middle East as one self-described “socialist” or “radical” government seeks to impose itself on a restive population. It is useful to remember that the brutal and corrupt Burmese military that has as dominant a role in the national economy as is the case in China or once was the case in Turkey.

General Ne Win, who came to a power in a 1962 coup, proposed a “Burmese Way to Socialism” that blended Marxist verbiage with outright nonsense. For example, the film describes his 1988 fiscal measures, taken on the advice of an astrologer. Win devalued the currency according to a formula: any monies divisible by the number nine were now invalid. So devastating were consequences for the poor and the working class that the seeds for today’s pro-democracy movement were implanted. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the main reason the Burmese people want the right to elect their own leaders freely is because that is a way to address economic exploitation, even that which occurs in the name of socialism. As a tarnished symbol of a degraded system, General Ne Win had much in common with Libya’s Qaddafi. Win claimed that his socialist system would mix Marxism and Buddhism, while Qaddafi’s recipe included Islam instead of Buddhism. In either case, you ended up with a despotic system that sparked a wholesale revolt.

After leaving the army, Myint embarked on an intellectual journey that led him to read a wide variety of philosophical and political books. He came to the conclusion that the system had to be transformed. He became an activist and took part in demonstrations following the 1988 economic restructuring. He also started a secret library of banned books. When he was arrested at a rally, he told the judge at his trial that “I don’t believe in the military regime”. That act of defiance led to a 15 year prison sentence.

The oppressive system in Burma has led to remarkable acts of courage from individuals such as Aung San Suu Kyi who was under house arrest for about the same number of years Myint was in prison. In the 1990 general election, her party won 59% of the votes and 81% (392 of 485) of the seats in Parliament. The army decided that the people’s will meant nothing and have ruled by terror for more than the past 20 years. One can only hope that the people of Burma will finally prevail since history and the unshakeable will of people like Myo Myint are on their side.

“City of Life and Death” is an unrelenting journey through the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937 that some scholars believe resulted in the deaths of as many as 300,000 civilians. Considering that these deaths occurred in the span of weeks rather than years, it has led some to consider it as one of the greatest atrocities of the 20^th century in terms of the time-frame.

Hewing closely to the findings of Iris Chang, Chinese director Lu Chuan tells a tale of unremitting cruelty that amounts to a holocaust for his own people. Indeed, this story included its own Oskar Schindler, one John Rabe, a German businessman (despite his Anglo-sounding name) that ran Siemen’s branch operation in Nanking, who confronted the Japanese army over its abuses and sought to protect civilians in a Safety Zone that was often disregarded by the occupiers. In one scene, they come into the Safety Zone in order to dragoon 100 Chinese women into working as sex slaves for their troops.

Rabe (John Paisley) has a Chinese male secretary named Tang (played by Fan Wei, a Chinese comedian in a decidedly non-comic role) who like his boss appeals to the dubiously better judgment of the Japanese. In a departure from conventional holocaust type narratives, John Rabe is a member of the Nazi party who uses his ties to Hitler to sway the Japanese military brass. In one of the unfortunately all-too-glaring missteps of this well-intentioned film, there is no attempt to put his humanitarian impulses into any kind of context. We can only surmise that Rabe had an emotional attachment to the Chinese people that stemmed from having living in Nanking since 1909.

As might be expected, Tang is a passive figure who follows Japanese orders in more or less the same way that the Judenrat cooperated with Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, at least until the full horror of Japanese occupation is revealed. In one of the film’s more wrenching scenes, the soldiers hurl his 11 year old daughter through the second story window of an apartment building killing her instantly. Her offense was to try to interfere with a Japanese detachment that was rounding up Chinese women for a “comfort station”, including her mother.

Given the unrelenting procession of horrors that are depicted in this 133 minute film (Chinese captives burned alive, etc.), one might ask what might motivate an audience to remain in its seats until the bitter end, about which there is no doubt from the very beginning.

The NY Times review puts its finger on one of the film’s strengths:

“City of Life and Death” isn’t cathartic: it offers no uplifting moments, just the immodest balm of art. The horrors it represents can be almost too difficult to watch, yet you keep watching because Mr. Lu makes the case that you must. In one awful, surreal interlude, severed male heads swing from rope like ornaments, while in another, Japanese soldiers — having buried some Chinese men alive — stamp down the earth as if planting a crop.

Although I recommend this film with some reservations, I have to wonder about the strange world we are living in when the “immodest balm of art” suffices. Somehow, the visual power of Lu’s film is expected as a pay off when all else fails in terms of our conventional expectations of drama. Shot in black-and-, it certainly grips your attention with its flair for the macabre.

But despite my admittedly close attention to the gruesome action, I found myself troubled throughout by the film’s lack of context. There is nothing at all to explain why the Japanese occupation was so barbaric. In many ways, the film reminded me of the 1997 “Welcome to Sarajevo” that depicted the Serbs in pretty much the same terms, as demonic forces that killed for the love of killing.

Iris Chang’s book set the tone for the film by adopting the same stance toward the Japanese whose culture apparently set them on the course of a Nanking holocaust in the same way that German culture prepared the extermination of the Jews. Some critics of her books take exception to that view, however. In a 1998 review that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, David M. Kennedy wrote:

Elsewhere Chang serves notice that “this book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character,” but then immediately plunges into an exploration of the thousand-year-deep roots of the “Japanese identity”–a bloody business, in her estimation, replete with martial competitions, samurai ethics, and the fearsome warriors’ code of bushido, the clear inference being, despite the disclaimer, that “the path to Nanking” runs through the very marrow of Japanese culture.

In my view, wartime savagery is not the reflection of any national culture but instead the result of indoctrination that young men and women receive when they are drafted or when they enlist during the kind of fervor that arose after 9/11. Military training consists mainly of getting normal people to get used to the idea of killing, a most unnatural form of behavior no matter what a sociobiologist might tell you. It is not in our culture or in our genes. It is rather in the propaganda system of the hegemonic powers and their drill instructors that are carefully selected for their ability to transform ordinary people into killers. For insights into this, I recommend Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”.

3065. Saudi Arabia Executes an Indonesian Maid

By Daniel Victor and Jennifer Jett, The New York Times, November 1, 2018

Tuti Tursilawati in her early 30s was executed on Monday, seven years after she was convicted of murdering her employer in the Saudi city of Taif. A rights group, Migrant Care, has said she was defending herself from sexual assault.

Indonesia is protesting Saudi Arabia’s execution this week of one of its citizens, a domestic worker, saying the kingdom failed to notify her family or the Indonesian government beforehand.

Tuti Tursilawati, a mother of one in her early 30s from Majalengka, Indonesia, was executed on Monday, seven years after she was convicted of murdering her employer in the Saudi city of Taif. A rights group, Migrant Care, has said she was defending herself from sexual assault.

President Joko Widodo of Indonesia said Wednesday that he had contacted Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, to protest the kingdom’s actions.

During a visit by Mr. Jubeir last week to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi lauded the Saudi government’s commitment to better protecting the Indonesians living and working there, according to The Straits Times of Singapore.

There are about 1.5 million documented and undocumented Indonesian workers in Saudi Arabia, Anis Hidayah, founder of Migrant Care, said in a phone interview from Ms. Tuti’s hometown, where officials were visiting her family to offer condolences.

Ms. Hidayah said sexual abuse, long working hours, improper housing and other mistreatment were common for women like Ms. Tuti, working abroad in private homes that are difficult to monitor.

Saudi Arabia has not commented on Ms. Tuti’s execution or Indonesia’s formal protest.

Ms. Tuti was the fourth Indonesian executed in Saudi Arabia since 2015, including one, Zaini Misri, who was put to death in March. All of the executions were carried out without first notifying Indonesian officials; the two countries have no agreement requiring each other to do so. Other Indonesians in Saudi Arabia are still on death row.

Many women from Indonesia work as maids in the Middle East and various Asian countries, often leaving their families behind for the promise of steady income. But safety concerns led Indonesia to temporarily bar domestic workers from going to the Middle East from 2011 to 2013.

In 2015, it barred them from going to 21 countries, mostly in the Middle East, after Saudi Arabia executed two Indonesian domestic workers in one week on murder convictions. Many Indonesians have sought work in Saudi Arabia anyway.

The two countries agreed last month to ease those restrictions, allowing a limited number of Indonesian workers to go to Saudi Arabia. On Wednesday, Hanif Dhakiri, the Indonesian manpower minister, said he was reviewing that decision, The Jakarta Post reported. Ms. Hidayah and other activists are urging him to cancel it.

Last year, Indonesia also revised its law on protecting overseas workers to improve training for workers before they go abroad, streamline administrative services and increase coordination among different levels of government.

Indonesian officials say they have repeatedly asked Saudi officials to notify them before executions are carried out. Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, the Indonesian Foreign Ministry’s director for overseas citizen protection, said Ms. Tuti had spoken to her mother on a video call less than two weeks ago, saying she was healthy and not worried about being executed, according to The Post.

In addition to facing physical abuse, migrant workers often struggle to adjust to the cultural differences in Saudi Arabia, whose strict interpretation of Islamic law forces foreigners to abandon many of their customs. Last week, 19 Filipina workers were arrested at a Halloween party in Riyadh, the Saudi capital. They were temporarily released to the custody of the Philippine Embassy on Wednesday, according to Rappler, a Philippine news site.

2713. Charged in the U.S., American Businessman jailed and raped in Columbian Prison

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times, September 25, 2017

“I was ordered down from the slab where I slept. I was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. They pushed me down to the floor by my head and shoulders. One of them had a knife at my Adam’s apple. I tried to leave my body, pretend that I wasn’t living it. I wanted to die. I’ve regretted at times since then that I didn’t jerk my head away and let my throat be cut.”

That is the remarkably disturbing story of Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, a former dot-com entrepreneur and Goldman Sachs banker. He faces trial in early October in federal court in Manhattan on charges of conspiracy to commit security and wire fraud but has already spent a harrowing 10 months in a Colombian jail, where, he says, he was abused and, ultimately, raped.

Mr. Tuzman originally made his name starting technology companies: He achieved a degree of fame during the dot-com bust as the founder of govWorks.com, which was chronicled in the documentary film “Startup.com.” But in 2015 he was charged with securities fraud while he was chief executive of Kit Digital, a publicly traded video software and services company that filed for bankruptcy in 2013. He has pleaded not guilty.

The details of those charges are less interesting — and less troubling — than what has happened thus far.

James Margolin, a spokesman for the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment about Mr. Tuzman’s case. But prosecutors have not challenged Mr. Tuzman’s contention that he was raped or abused. Indeed, they say they told the Colombian authorities about the allegations.Mr. Tuzman says his ordeal began in September 2015. He was on a business trip to Bogotá and was planning to fly back to Philadelphia days later for Rosh Hashana when, he said, half a dozen Colombian officers surrounded him and told him to go with them.

“My heart sank to my stomach because I thought a family member or business partner had been kidnapped and I was being taken to safety,” he told me in an interview. “Later, in a side room at the airport, they told me that actually I was being arrested. I begged to know why. All they would say was that it was at the direction of the U.S. government.”

Mr. Tuzman said he had no idea he had been charged, and, in contrast to many white-collar arrests, the United States government made no attempt to discuss with his lawyer the possibility of Mr. Tuzman’s surrendering voluntarily in the United States.

Mr. Tuzman was put in a cell in La Picota, a notorious prison.

“It had over a hundred people packed in it, stuffed against the walls and the rails, asking those of us in line for food, water, aspirin, whatever,” he said. “The stench of feces and vomit was overwhelming. There were literally people who had defecated in their pants.”

Mr. Tuzman assumed that he would be quickly extradited to the United States. But he soon found himself in “a parallel universe,” he said. “In the beginning, every day I thought: ‘They’re going to let me out tomorrow. They have to realize this is a mistake.’”

But weeks went by. His lawyers asked the United States Embassy to step in, warning that he could be abused or killed. When Mr. Tuzman’s lawyers recommended that he be released into the custody of a United States official and brought home where he could be rearrested, the United States authorities said their hands were tied by legal protocol.

That October, he said, he was raped. Within an hour, he told his lawyer, Amanda Blaurock of Pedley & Blaurock, about it during an in-person meeting. She then went to the United States Embassy.

When the Mr. Tuzman’s imprisonment in Colombia was finally brought to the attention of a federal judge, Paul G. Gardephe, in the Southern District of New York, Judge Gardephe said he was “shocked” by the government’s unwillingness to step in.

“There is credible evidence here that this man is undergoing significant abuse, to the point that there is reason to be concerned about his life,” the judge said. He also challenged the government to “tell me face to face they can’t do anything about the conditions this man is in, and that if he has to stay there for nine months, there is nothing they can do about that.”

Judge Gardephe lashed out at the prosecutors who recommended that, as an alternative to bringing Mr. Tuzman home, they could help him be moved to another prison, known as Cómbita.

“Having sentenced numerous Colombian defendants in this courtroom, and having heard over and over again about the conditions that they were in during the period of time that they were awaiting extradition at Cómbita,” the judge said, “it’s shocking to me that the government’s solution to the problem would be to transfer him to Cómbita. It’s shocking to me.”

In a later hearing, however, Judge Gardephe said: “To the extent that Tuzman has been mistreated in Colombia, there is no contention that the U.S. government engineered, arranged for or induced that mistreatment. Indeed, the evidence before this court is all to the contrary.”

Mr. Tuzman was extradited to the United States in July 2016. Why the prosecutors didn’t move more rapidly once he had been arrested — and why they arrested him in Bogotá instead of waiting until he came home — isn’t entirely clear. The prosecutors have made the case that he was a flight risk — that he might flee to the United Arab Emirates, where he had family and friends.

Still, he was publicly scheduled to speak at a conference in Florida about a month after his arrest. And he was not unknown to federal prosecutors. Mr. Tuzman is a Harvard alumnus and said, “I had been at my Harvard class reunion in Boston a few months before my arrest, and bumped into Preet Bharara,” who was then the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York. They have a mutual friend.

Mr. Tuzman is home in New York awaiting his trial. But he said he rarely forgets what happened after the rape: “A few days after the assault, I was put on what they call a prison trial, where the guards purposefully leave their lookout stations and go away. I was put on a table and accused of being a snitch for reporting what had happened to me. That’s the worst thing you can be accused of in prison. My knees were shaking. I thought it was the end of my life. I’m only alive now because I hadn’t given up their names.”

It took some cajoling to get Mr. Tuzman to open up. “It has taken me a very long time to feel prepared to talk about some of this,” he said. “You have to get past fear of reprisals, self-hate, all this other stuff that goes through your head.

“There’s a code of silence on this kind of prison assault, which was reinforced by an official at the U.S. Embassy who visited me in La Picota and told me things could get worse for me if I spoke to the press. But at some point, I guess, I needed to find meaning in all of this.”

The trial he faces in New York is no small matter. A jury will decide his case. But he said he needed to speak out about what had happened to him already.

“The U.S. effectively uses the extradition system and foreign prisons like those in Colombia as ‘black sites,’ even for holding American citizens,” he said. “I simply cannot understand why the United States would let one of its own citizens be subjected to this, and I want to help ensure it never happens again.”

1997. Video Clip: A Short History of Sweatshops

By Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, 2011

1762. Cuban LGBTs Are Still waiting for Equal Rights

By Jimmy Roque Martínez, Havana Times, March 11, 2015

The legislative bill aimed at modifying Cuba’s current Family Code is still waiting to be delivered to the National People’s Power Assembly (Parliament). This process ought to be transparent, but, as tends to be the case in Cuba, it is at times rather confusing.

According to parliamentary regulations, the procedure for modifying a law is as follows:

Parliamentary representatives, the national offices of grassroots organizations, parliamentary commissions, citizens and others are entitled to advance legislative initiatives (Article 62).

Those eligible can present prospective bills to the president of the National Assembly along with their corresponding reasoning (Article 63).

We have been informed that the bases for the proposal to modify the Family Code have already been approved by the Ministry of Justice, the Attorney General’s Office, the University of Havana, the National Center for Sexual Education (CENESEX), the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Public Health, the Ministry of Education and the Supreme Court (*).

These are institutions and organizations that, in one way or another, have a say in the modification of the Family Code.

Upon receiving the legislative proposal, the parliamentary chair conveys it to the pertinent commission (as per Article 67). After the proposal has been analyzed by the commission, the chair decides whether to include the bill in the order of the day for discussion (Article 71).

But in practice…

Things happen rather differently in practice, as the decision as to what issues are to be discussed by parliament is in powerful and hidden hands, mechanisms that are even further removed from the people.

What seems to be followed in practice most often is a “legislative plan”, a list of the issues that are to reach parliament for discussion.

I haven’t been able to clearly find out what authority develops this plan. It is speculated that it’s the Council of Ministers or its Joint Commission, working in conjunction with the Communist Party Politburo and the Council of State. Perhaps it’s the Parliamentary Secretary.

It is also said that the bill seeking to modify the Family Code has been waiting to be included in this plan for years, but, no one knows the current status of the proposal exactly.

Everything seems to indicate that there are conservative forces blocking the modification of the current code.

Rumors I haven’t been able to confirm suggest that the Communist Party vice-secretary, Jose Machado Ventura, who is against same-sex marriages, is one of the bill’s opponents.

That said, a representative interested in passing the bill could exercise their legislative initiative and bring the issue up for discussion at parliament.

In this connection, on July 26 last year, the members of the Rainbow Project asked Mariela Castro to exercise her individual right to legislative initiative to submit a family code bill that explicitly recognizes the rights of the LGBT community and of their relatives.

We have received no reply in the seven months since.

The road before the Family Code bill is becoming winding and mysterious. It looks as though Cuba will remain behind on this issue for some time to come, while the government takes hasty steps in other areas, such as the promotion of foreign investment and private property.

1676. U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Releases Report on CIA Torture Practices After 9/11

By Mark Mazzetti, The New York Times, December 9, 2014

A photo from Abu Gharib torture practices in Iraq

WASHINGTON — A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A.'s operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.”

During his administration, President George W. Bush repeatedly said that the detention and interrogation program, which President Obama dismantled when he succeeded him, was humane and legal. The intelligence gleaned during interrogations, he said, was instrumental both in thwarting terrorism plots and in capturing senior figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney and a number of former C.I.A. officials have said more recently that the program was essential for ultimately finding Osama bin Laden, who was killed by members of the Navy SEALs in May 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The Intelligence Committee’s report tries to refute each of these claims, using the C.I.A.'s internal records to present 20 case studies that bolster its conclusion that the most extreme interrogation methods played no role in disrupting terrorism plots, capturing terrorist leaders — even finding Bin Laden.

The report said that senior officials — including the former C.I.A. directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — repeatedly inflated the value of the program in secret briefings both at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and in public speeches.

In the report’s foreword, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said that she “could understand the C.I.A.'s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and C.I.A. was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack.”

“Nevertheless,” she continued, “such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security. The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the intelligence community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards.”

Ms. Feinstein is expected to speak about the report in the Senate on Tuesday.

The C.I.A. issued an angry response to the report, saying in a statement that it “tells part of the story,” but that “there are too many flaws for it to stand as the official record of the program.”

The response acknowledged mistakes in the detention and interrogation program and in the agency’s analysis of the information gathered in interrogations. But, the agency said, “we still must question a report that impugns the integrity of so many C.I.A. officers when it implies — as it does clearly through the conclusions — that the agency’s assessments were willfully misrepresented in a calculated effort to manipulate.”

The entire report is more than 6,000 pages long, but the committee voted in April to declassify only its 524-page executive summary and a rebuttal by Republican members of the committee. The investigation was conducted by staff members working for Democratic senators on the committee.

The New York Times and other news organizations received an advance copy of the report and agreed not to publish any of its findings until the Senate Intelligence Committee made them public. The Times did not receive an advance copy of the Republican rebuttal.

Many of the most extreme interrogation methods — including waterboarding — were authorized by Justice Department lawyers during the Bush administration. But the report also found evidence that a number of detainees had been subjected to other, unapproved methods while in C.I.A. custody.

The torture of prisoners at times was so extreme that some C.I.A. personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to continue the interrogation sessions.

The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.

During one waterboarding session, Abu Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” The interrogations lasted for weeks, and some C.I.A. officers began sending messages to the agency’s headquarters in Virginia questioning the utility — and the legality — of what they were doing. But such questions were rejected.

“Strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic),” wrote Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.

“Such language is not helpful.”

The Senate report found that the detention and interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and dozens of other prisoners were ineffective in giving the government “unique” intelligence information that the C.I.A. or other intelligence agencies could not get from other means.

The report also said that the C.I.A.'s leadership for years gave false information about the total number of prisoners held by the C.I.A., saying there had been 98 prisoners when C.I.A. records showed that 119 men had been held. In late 2008, according to one internal email, a C.I.A. official giving a briefing expressed concern about the discrepancy and was told by Mr. Hayden, then the agency’s director, “to keep the number at 98” and not to count any additional detainees.

The committee’s report concluded that of the 119 detainees, “at least 26 were wrongfully held.”

“These included an ‘intellectually challenged’ man whose C.I.A. detention was used solely as leverage to get a family member to provide information, two individuals who were intelligence sources for foreign liaison services and were former C.I.A. sources, and two individuals whom the C.I.A. assessed to be connected to Al Qaeda based solely on information fabricated by a C.I.A. detainee subjected to the C.I.A.'s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the report said.

Many Republicans have said that the report is an attempt to smear both the C.I.A. and the Bush White House, and that the report cherry-picked information to support a claim that the C.I.A.'s detention program yielded no valuable information. Former C.I.A. officials have already begun a vigorous public campaign to dispute the report’s findings.

In its response to the Senate report, the C.I.A. said that to accept the Intelligence Committee’s conclusions, “there would have had to have been a yearslong conspiracy among C.I.A. leaders at all levels, supported by a large number of analysts and other line officers.

“This conspiracy would have had to include three former C.I.A. directors, including one who led the agency after the program had largely wound down,” it added.

“We cannot vouch for every individual statement that was made over the years of the program, and we acknowledge that some of those statements were wrong. But the image portrayed in the study of an organization that — on an institutional scale — intentionally misled and routinely resisted oversight from the White House, the Congress, the Department of Justice and its own O.I.G. simply does not comport with the record,” the statement said. O.I.G. stands for Office of Inspector General.

The battle over the report’s conclusions has been waged behind closed doors for years, and provided the backdrop to the more recent fight over the C.I.A.'s penetration of a computer network used by committee staff members working on the investigation. C.I.A. officers came to suspect that the staff members had improperly obtained an internal agency review of the detention program over the course of their investigation, and that they broke into the network that had been designated for the committee’s use.

Most of the detention program’s architects have left the C.I.A., but their legacy endures inside the agency. The chief of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center said during a meeting with John O. Brennan, the current C.I.A. director, in April that more than 200 people working for him had at one point participated in the program.

According to the Senate report, even before the agency captured its first prisoner, C.I.A. lawyers began thinking about how to get approval for interrogation methods that might normally be considered torture. Such methods might gain wider approval, the lawyers figured, if they were proved to have saved lives.

“A policy decision must be made with regard to U.S. use of torture,” C.I.A. lawyers wrote in November 2001, in a previously undisclosed memo titled “Hostile Interrogations: Legal Considerations for C.I.A. Officers.”

The lawyers argued that “states may be very unwilling to call the U.S. to task for torture when it resulted in saving thousands of lives.”

The Intelligence Committee report describes repeated efforts by the C.I.A. to make that case, even when the facts did not support it. For example, the C.I.A. helped edit a speech by Mr. Bush in 2006 to make it seem as if key intelligence was obtained through the most brutal interrogation tactics, even when C.I.A. records suggested otherwise.

In 2002, the C.I.A. took custody of Abu Zubaydah, who was brought to Thailand. There, two C.I.A. contractors named James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were in charge of the interrogation sessions, using methods that had been authorized by Justice Department lawyers. The two contractors, both psychologists, are identified in the Senate report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar.

The program expanded, with dozens of detainees taken to secret prisons in Poland, Romania, Lithuania and other countries. In September 2006, Mr. Bush ordered all of the detainees in C.I.A. custody to be transferred to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after that the C.I.A. held a small number of detainees in secret at a different facility for several months at a time — before they were also moved to Guantánamo Bay.

Mr. Obama spoke expansively about the Senate report in August, saying that any “fair minded” person would believe that some of the methods that the C.I.A. used against prisoners amounted to torture. He said he hoped that the report reminded people that the “character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy but what we do when things are hard.”

At the same time, Mr. Obama said that he understood the pressure that the C.I.A. was under after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that “it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had.”

Taken in its entirety, the report is a portrait of a spy agency that was wholly unprepared for its new mission as jailers and interrogators — but that embraced its assignment with vigor. The report chronicles millions of dollars in secret payments between 2002 and 2004 from the C.I.A. to foreign officials, aimed at getting other governments to agree to host secret prisons.

Cables from C.I.A. headquarters to field offices said that overseas officers should put together “wish lists” speculating about what foreign governments might want in exchange for bringing C.I.A. prisoners onto their soil.

1495. Forging an Identity for Black Iraqis

By Saad Salloum, The New York Times, July 22, 2014

BAGHDAD — Jalal Dhiyab Thijeel was tall, funny and handsome, qualities that should have made him a popular man in Basra, Iraq, where he lived. But he was also black, one of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have been pushed to the margins of society based on their skin color.

In 2003, inspired by the opening of Iraqi society after the American invasion and, later, by the success of Barack Obama in overcoming his own country’s history of racism, Jalal began to push for anti-discrimination laws in Iraq. For his audacity, Jalal was assassinated last year in Basra.

Most estimates show there are about 400,000 Iraqis who trace their origins back to sub-Saharan Africa, most of them living in the south around Basra, though a few push the count as high as two million. There are few written accounts of their early history in the country, though what records do exist show that the first of them arrived in what is now Iraq as slaves as early as the seventh century.

Just as blacks did much later in the United States, blacks in Mesopotamia worked in wealthy homes and in backbreaking agricultural work, including clearing marshland. A series of slave uprisings rocked the region from 869 to 883, but were eventually quelled.

Trading in African slaves — brought from Zanzibar on the Indian Ocean and as far west as Ghana on the Atlantic — continued into the 1920s, when it was finally banned.

But as in America, abolition did not mean an end to discrimination. While a number of laws promise equality, anti-black racism in Iraq pervades everything from housing to jobs to cultural life. Blacks in Iraq are routinely called “abd,” meaning “slave.” They mostly hold menial or low-level jobs.

Still, a distinct black culture has survived. Basra Iraqis often turn to black healers to exorcise evil spirits, to cure them of physical and psychological illnesses — even though, in an attempt to escape discrimination, Iraqi blacks have assumed Sunni, Shiite or other identities.

Jalal’s crime was to believe that this could change. Inspired by both President Obama and his hero, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he founded the Supporters of Human Freedom in Basra, which advocates for civil rights and a distinct, recognized identity for Iraqi blacks — inspiring so many people to join him that blacks in Basra sometimes called him “Iraq’s Martin Luther King.”

In a country where ethnic divisions are built into the political structure, a strong, defined ethnic identity is critical. Indeed, blacks are almost alone in their lack of government-mandated quotas for elected positions; not a single black has ever achieved high political office.

To build racial unity, Jalal began teaching classes for blacks on their rich cultural heritage. He also helped encourage black Iraqi hip-hop, which erupted as a music scene in southern Iraq after the American invasion.

The music tapped into black musical traditions and expressed — as in the United States — a visceral reaction to discrimination. As the lyrics of one rap song put it: “We say that the past has been defeated, and we will forget it in a time when we bury our dead, everybody has a voice.”

The case has never been fully investigated, a fact that leads even sympathetic Iraqis to shrug: Iraq is a violent place. Many people are gunned down in sectarian violence, their murders unsolved.

Jalal’s assassination was not just racial, but without a doubt political. His photo of President Obama was like a red flag to Shiite political parties, backed by Iran. Jalal insisted that black representatives should stand in elections as blacks, taking votes from Sunni and Shiite parties alike.

In response to the latest Sunni insurgency, the United States is pressuring Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to make his government more inclusive as a way to help halt its disintegration. World attention has focused on the big three ethnic groups: Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Such inclusiveness is badly needed, but justice demands that the table be expanded. Iraqis need to recognize that theirs is a multiethnic country, and that respect for minority rights is what makes any country strong.

Since Jalal’s assassination, Iraq’s blacks have slunk back into the shadows. In Basra, blacks have resumed their identification as Shiites or Sunnis. Even Jalal’s family refuses to speak out about what happened to him. They mourn him in private, the tall, handsome husband and father who liked to make people laugh.

Jalal was my friend. The best ways to honor his memory would be a thorough investigation into his assassination, and for Iraq to enact its first-ever anti-discrimination law. Who knows, perhaps one day he will be honored as an Iraqi Martin Luther King — not just by blacks, but by all Iraqis.

Saad Salloum is the editor in chief of Masarat, a magazine that advocates for Iraqi minorities, and a co-founder of the Iraqi Council on Interfaith Dialogue.