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Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National
Security Agency
"Worse" Than Guantanamo: U.S. Expands Secretive
Prison Inside Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
"They've Ruined My Life": Torture Survivor Maher
Arar Recalls how U.S. Sent Him to Syria Where He Was Jailed
and Tortured For 10 Months
Total Information Awareness Lives On Inside the National
Security Agency
More than two years ago Congress halted plans for a controversial
plan called Total Information Awareness to create the world's
largest surveillance database to track your phone calls, purchases,
Internet usage, reading material, banking transactions. The
National Journal has now revealed the program has quietly
continued inside the NSA. [includes rush
transcript]
In 2003, lawmakers voted to shut down Total Information
Awareness - a program that developed technologies to predict
terrorist attacks by mining government databases and the personal
records of people in the United States.
Months earlier New York Times columnist William Safire had
warned about the dangers of the program. In a column headlined
"You Are A Suspect" Safire wrote:
"If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
passage, here is what will happen to you:
"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every
magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you
fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive,
every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you
make, every trip you book and every event you attend --
all these transactions and communications will go into what
the Defense Department describes as 'a virtual, centralized
grand database.'
"To this computerized dossier on your private life
from commercial sources, add every piece of information
that government has about you -- passport application, driver's
license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records,
complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime
paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance --
and you have the supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information
Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
"This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It
is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next
few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power
he seeks."
Following public outcry, the program was halted primarily
because of privacy concerns, but also because its main advocate
was John Poindexter, known for his involvement with the Iran-Contra
scandal of the 1980s.
It now appears that the project "was stopped in name
only" and that TIA is in fact continuing. The National
Journal reports that TIA was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development
agency - known by its acronym DARPA - to another group, which
builds technologies primarily for the NSA. The names of key
projects were changed, apparently to conceal their identities,
but their funding remained intact, often under the same contracts.
The issue resurfaced earlier this month when, during a hearing
of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
- Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon questioning John Negroponte,
the head of Domestic Security, Robert Mueller, the head
of the FBI and General Michael Hayden, the former head of
the NSA, about the project.
We are joined by Shane Harris, the reporter for the National
Journal who wrote the story "TIA
Lives On".
- Shane Harris, reporter for the National Journal.
"Worse" Than Guantanamo: U.S. Expands Secretive
Prison Inside Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan
The U.S. is holding 500 at the base in wire cages at the
Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul in Afghanistan. Some have
been detained for up to three years. They have never been
charged with crimes. They have no access to lawyers. They
are barred from hearing the allegations against them. Officials
describe the jail's conditions as primitive. We speak with
human rights attorneys Clive Stafford Smith and Michael Ratner.
[includes rush
transcript]
"While an international debate rages over the future
of the American detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison
in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects
in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges."
That is the opening line of a front-page article in Sunday's
New York Times detailing the US-run prison at Bagram Air Base,
north of Kabul. The Times reports that some of the detainees
at Bagram have been held for as long as two or three years.
Unlike those at Guantanamo, they have no access to lawyers,
no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary
reviews of their status as "enemy combatants." One
Pentagon official told the Times the current average stay
of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.
The numbers of detainees at the base had risen from about
100 at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year.
The paper says the increase is in part the result of a decision
by the U.S. government to shut off the flow of detainees to
Guantanamo Bay after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners
had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether
those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been
tested in court.
While Guantanamo offers carefully scripted tours for members
of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous
secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors
except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make
public the names of those held there. The prison may not be
photographed, even from a distance.
Citing unnamed military officials and former detainees, the
Times reports that prisoners at Bagram are held by the dozen
in wire cages, sleep on the floor on foam mats and are often
made to use plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations,
detainees rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a
small exercise yard. The U.S. military on Sunday defended
Bagram air base saying detainees there are treated humanely
and provided "the best possible living conditions."
But evidence of abuse of prisoners at Bagram has emerged
over the years. In December 2002, two Afghan prisoners were
found dead, hanging by their shackled wrists in isolation
cells at the prison. An Army investigation showed they were
treated harshly by interrogators, deprived of sleep for days,
and struck so often in the legs by guards that a coroner compared
the injuries to being run over by a bus. No one has been prosecuted
for the deaths, though both were ruled homicides and the Army
claims the men were beaten to death inside the jail.
We are joined on the line by Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born
human rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo
Bay, many of whom passed through Bagram Air Base. He is legal
director of the charity Reprieve. We are also joined by Michael
Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
- Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer
who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom
passed through Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of
the charity Reprieve.
"They've Ruined My Life": Torture Survivor
Maher Arar Recalls how U.S. Sent Him to Syria Where He Was
Jailed and Tortured For 10 Months
Canadian citizen Maher Arar announces he will "most
likely" be appealing a recent U.S. federal court ruling
to dismiss his lawsuit challenging the U.S. government policy
known as extraordinary rendition. The judge, David Trager,
said he could not interfere in the case because it involves
crucial national security and foreign relations issues. [includes
rush
transcript]
A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Canadian
citizen against the U.S. government for detaining him and
sending him to Syria where he was jailed and tortured. Maher
Arar was the first person to mount a civil suit challenging
the U.S. government policy known as extraordinary rendition.
In October 2002, he was detained at JFK airport while on
a stopover in New York. He was then jailed and secretly deported
to Syria. He was held for almost a year without charge in
an underground cell not much larger than a grave. Charges
were never filed against him.
In a ruling earlier this month, the federal judge, David
Trager, said he could not interfere in the case because it
involves crucial national security and foreign relations issues.
In an 88-page judgment, Trager wrote "One need not have
much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our
relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this
case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials
had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar"s removal
to Syria."
The Center for Constitutional Rights launched the lawsuit
on Arar's behalf in January 2004 against former attorney general
John Ashcroft and other U.S. officials, seeking undisclosed
damages.
Maher Arar joins us on the line from his home in Canada.
- Maher Arar, filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government
for detaining him and sending him to Syria where he was
jailed and tortured. He was the first person to mount a
civil suit challenging the U.S. government policy known
as extraordinary rendition.
For a copy of today’s program, call 1 (800) 881 2359.
Our website is www.democracynow.org.
Our email address is mail@democracynow.org.
Democracy Now! is produced by Mike Burke, Sharif Abdel Kouddous,
Ana Nogueira, Elizabeth Press, Jeremy Scahill and Parvez Sharma.
Mike Di Filippo is our engineer.
Thanks also to Uri Galed, Angela Alston, Orlando Richards,
Simba Russeau, Johnny Sender, Rich Kim, Joe Murgio, John Randolph,
Chris Zucker, Karen Ranucci, Denis Moynihan, Eric Rweyemamu,
Jenny Filipazzo and Isis Phillips.
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