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FBI Coerced Confession Deemed "Classified"
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Oct 22, 2007 01:24 PM
from the united-states-of-embarrassment dept.
from the united-states-of-embarrassment dept.
Steve Bergstein is one of several who have blogged about a recent court ruling that reads like most any bestselling crime novel. Apparently, when the court originally posted their decision (complete with backstory) it detailed how a coerced confession was obtained by the FBI from Abdallah Higazy in relation to the 9/11 attacks. The details, however, were later removed and deemed "classified". "As I read the opinion I realized it was a 44 page epic, too long for me to print out. I blogged about the opinion while I read it online and then posted the blog as I ate lunch. Then something strange happened: a few minutes after I posted the blog, the opinion vanished from the Court of Appeals website! [...] The next day, the Court of Appeals reissued the Higazy opinion. With a redaction. The court simply omitted from the revised decision facts about how the FBI agent extracted the false confession from Higazy. For some reason, this information is classified."
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Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Can't Have It Two Ways (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, this story is appalling, for several reasons: 1. Some information gets classified, that probably shouldn't be, and the fact that 2. The horse is out of the barn and shows that data, once posted, is impossible to recall, and then they further heighten interest in it by classifying it and raising a stink about it. Their actions have almost ensured world-wide dissemination.
What is worse is that their reaction to this will mostly likely make reasonable public access to information, rulings, testimony, almost impossible to get to.
On a side note, and dealing with my subject line: Guys, you can't have it both ways. Reading /. and listening to Air America, George Bush is either an evil genius able to mastermind these great conspiracies, or, he's dumb as a rock. How about not inserting him into the situation at all. It would serve not to marginalize the discussion and keep blame where it needs to be, the beureaucrats that make these decisions.
Parent
Re:Can't Have It Two Ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, you've fallen into his trap.
You see while GW is pretty much incapable of mustering the intelligence of the average 9th grader he does excel at one aspect of business and politics. He delegates extremely well. Not only that, but when the person he delegates something to messes up, he takes the blame and protects his people, thus insulating his delegation from public scrutiny.
In every situation, he makes no decisions. He brings in an expert to do that. You want evil genius? Hired. But if said evil genius is not there speaking into his ear, when you talk to GW you get the ninth grader.
I hope that explains it for you, because this is waaaay off topic.
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Re:Can't Have It Two Ways (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Can't Have It Two Ways (Score:5, Informative)
Well that was fascinating. Extracted the text from both PDFs and ran diff on the resulting text files. The big thing that was removed seemed to be the following passage. Seems pretty unpleasant.
There are other changes in there, though much smaller. I haven't gone through it exhaustively. The above seemed to be the big thing. Threats against the suspects family...
The only other thing that leapt out at me from a brief skim was the comment that they didn't believe a polygraph would be useful because "if he was a member of Al Quaeda, he could pass it." I find that comment fascinating, too.
Parent
Re:Can't Have It Two Ways (Score:5, Interesting)
A completely undeserved reputation. His big plan in '91, for example, was to parachute the 82nd Airborne behind Iraqi lines, capture an Iraqi city and hold for ransom. Schwartzkopf, sane human that he was, didn't think much of it and said so, but Cheney kept insisting on it for weeks.
Bush may be garden variety dumb, but Cheney is truly demented.
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Re:Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Even-handed coverage... (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that American soldiers can be tortured or killed is not sufficient cause to threaten to torture and kill the families of terrorism *suspects*.
And of course in this case, the FBI had to admit that this guy was innocent all along.
Or perhaps you think that the people who do torture or kill our soldiers will see how we are mistreating our own prisoners and be moved to change their behavior?
Parent
Re:Even-handed coverage... (Score:5, Insightful)
That is entirely the point. If you talk to any member of the JAG corps about torture they will tell you that the reason the US did not permit its troops to torture others is that it is the only way that the US could protect its own troops.
Of course there are always enemies that do not respect the rules of war, that is why the Nurenberg trials were held.
Te Abu Graihb photographs and more importantly the conspicuous decision not to hold anyone in the chain of command accountable for them has demonstrated that the US does torture. And as a result US servicemen who are captured by Jihadis can expect to be treated as brutally as the Abu Graihb photographs.
More importantly the US has conceeded the moral case in the war on terror. It is the same mistake made by the British at the start of the IRA terrorist campaign. Internment without trial did nothing to stop the violence and the future leadership of the IRA emerged from the internees. Gerry Adams wrote his famous series of monographs under the name 'Brownie' which developed the Ballot-Bomb strategy.
As a result many US politicians who should have known better supported the IRA even as they were murdering civilians in the UK. People like Rudy Giuliani were attending IRA fundraisers right up to 9/11. Giuliani even gave Gerry Adams a 'humanitarian award' on behalf of NYC and expressed the hope that he would force Clinton to speak to Adams even without the renunciation of violence that Clinton demanded. A few months later Adams and Co blew up a shopping mall.
In the days after 9/11 everything changed. It was no longer hip to support the IRA. Rudy attended a NORAID fundraiser immediately after 9/11 but only after the IRA agreed the money would go to the 9/11 victims. After that US funding for NORAID disappeared entirely and the IRA finally accepted the demands that they had long resisted to disarm.
The reason the IRA had to pack it in was precisely because they had finaly lost the moral case that had been carelessly handed to them in the opening years of the troubles.
The model that HMG followed in defeating the IRA was to copy the West German authorities strategy for dealling with the Baader-Meinhof gang. The Germans refused to treat the RAF as political prisoners, they were always treated as common criminals.
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Re:Even-handed coverage... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it isn't as bad as what the Islamics do, I don't think that the US government holding that behavior up as something to do it'self is a good thing. We are supposed to be FIGHTING this behavior, not emulating it.
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Secure Your Valuables (Score:5, Funny)
Here are the two opinions. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Here are the two opinions. (Score:5, Funny)
That's right, folks: you're being protected from the terrorists by people whose understanding of the modern world has yet to surpass that of 1990s sitcom writers.
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Re:Here are the two opinions. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Intentionally allowing the bad guys to go free. (Score:5, Insightful)
This kind of "law enforcement" actually makes us LESS safe than simply doing nothing at all. Is the FBI *really* staffed by living, thinking humans? How could they possibly do this kind of thing and not be incredibly ashamed of themselves!?
If its hot, get it local... (Score:5, Insightful)
If it is a web page, and you have the full Acrobat, then use the web capture facility to get a copy of it and store it away.
The web is wonderful. But it has more opportunities to be "corrected" than the Soviet Union did during the Stalin's purges of the 30s and 40s.
Yours,
Jordan
Confession - the Mother of Evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why a confession should never be trusted on its own — without other evidence. Nor is it really trusted on its own by the courts in free countries, such as ours — as evidenced by this very case.
They may have coerced an admission from him, that it was his device, but without details on where he got it, and how he used it, that admission is quite worthless even if he were scared for his family's life enough to not backpaddle from the addmission in court... I'm quite proud, that he was not sufficiently scared, though...
And, finally, we only know the details of the coercion from one side. The FBI agent, according to the article, merely "did not contest" the fact of coercion. That's not an admission of guilt by any measure...
In Defense of Bush (sorta) (Score:5, Insightful)
Had there been no secretive FBI, no secretive CIA, no emphasis on the Federal power from the get go, none of this could have happened. Everyone looks at Bush / Cheney as if he were the mastermind of some vast conspiracy, when the practical matter is that we have had almost 75 years of a massive federal government on a wartime footing, just waiting for the next enemy to arrive. These agents don't need orders to torture people or to kill perceived enemies. They have been waiting to do this their whole lives. They need orders NOT TO, and they really need to be not employed at all.
Instead, what the left wing is arguing for is a banana republic type of government - rule by personality, when instead, the best lesson to learn is that the government is the problem, and the solution to ensure our freedom is to deconstruct the government from the get go. If we could only put the "good guy" in charge of the police state, everything will be ok. Except that, we will still have a police state.
Look at the facts. What Democrats opposed passage of the full 9/11 commission recommendations - essentially turn the USA into a police state. What Democrat has offered to repeal USA PATRIOT? What Democrat has volunteered to narrow the scope of CIA and FBI? There will be more Federal terror, not less, before this unfortunate behavior winds its course. We have to learn to discipline ourselves as voters - that, every time we panic and ask our government to protect us - we are really just empowering a bunch of thugs to enslave us.
Re:In Defense of Bush (sorta) (Score:5, Insightful)
The machine is not broken, the Constitution remains to this day a framework that is viable, and valid. It is the men in government that torture its meanings, and pervert the rule of law. So, YES, Bush does need bashing, impeached, and a couple of other things. It is directly under his rule that a 'war' was invented, the war on terror, so that he could press the powers of wartime to further oppress the American public. I do not post AC, and I urge anyone that is disturbed by the way things have been going in American politics and government lately to stand and be counted. There is but one candidate for 2008 that dares utter the word Constitution, never mind abide by it.
You sir, you shall not defend Bush, for doing so is to say it's okay what he has done, and what has been done to My rights in his name. I say it is NOT right. I protest, both what he has done and what you are NOW doing to my rights by being passive and accepting and nearly forgiving him. The captain sinks with the ship, and if you think Bush deserves to slip away in a life raft, you are very mistaken.
Parent
Google News question (Score:5, Interesting)
Redacted part (Score:5, Informative)
Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother "live in scrutiny" and would "make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell." Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: "that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don't advise people of their rights, they don't - yeah, probably about torture, sure."
Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I'm screwed and my family's in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine."
Higazy explained why he feared for his family:
"The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is --they're suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam's security force--as they later on were called his henchmen--a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word 'torture' comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn't imagine them doing anything to my sister."
And Higazy added:
"[L]et's just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be --might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn't going to risk that. I wasn't going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that's convincing? And I said okay."
For those who have had no counter-terrorism exp (Score:5, Informative)
The suggestion by a poster that they "give him warm milk and cookies" is actually one of many proven methods of interrogation.
Interrogation - the act of questioning. One has a number of people interact with the subject, and one or more of those people takes "the side" of the person being interrogated, bonding with them on many levels.
This works very very often.
It is far more effective, gives highly reliable results, and if cross-referenced, will yield even more results.
In short: Torture does not work. Interrogation - not involving torture - does work.
We'd be far better off spending 1/1000th as much as we waste on military ops against terrorists and hiring trained police interrogators (not torturers) and detectives who understand the social and cultural background of the terrorists.
Mind you, a few nukes in Saudi Arabia would solve the whole problem, since Iraq has nothing to do with 9-11. FYI, Pakistan is not our ally, no matter what they tell you.
Re:so, what were they? (Score:5, Informative)
Higazy alleges that during the polygraph, Templeton told him that he should cooperate, and explained that if Higazy did not cooperate, the FBI would make his brother "live in scrutiny" and would "make sure that Egyptian security gives [his] family hell." Templeton later admitted that he knew how the Egyptian security forces operated: "that they had a security service, that their laws are different than ours, that they are probably allowed to do things in that country where they don't advise people of their rights, they don't - yeah, probably about torture, sure."
Higazy later said, "I knew that I couldn't prove my innocence, and I knew that my family was in danger." He explained that "[t]he only thing that went through my head was oh, my God, I am screwed and my family's in danger. If I say this device is mine, I'm screwed and my family is going to be safe. If I say this device is not mine, I'm screwed and my family's in danger. And Agent Templeton made it quite clear that cooperate had to mean saying something else other than this device is not mine."
Higazy explained why he feared for his family:
The Egyptian government has very little tolerance for anybody who is --they're suspicious of being a terrorist. To give you an idea, Saddam's security force--as they later on were called his henchmen--a lot of them learned their methods and techniques in Egypt; torture, rape, some stuff would be even too sick to . . . . My father is 67. My mother is 61. I have a brother who developed arthritis at 19. He still has it today. When the word 'torture' comes at least for my brother, I mean, all they have to do is really just press on one of these knuckles. I couldn't imagine them doing anything to my sister.
And Higazy added:
[L]et's just say a lot of people in Egypt would stay away from a family that they know or they believe or even rumored to have anything to do with terrorists and by the same token, some people who actually could be --might try to get to them and somebody might actually make a connection. I wasn't going to risk that. I wasn't going to risk that, so I thought to myself what could I say that he would believe. What could I say that's convincing? And I said okay.
Parent
Re:Scary and stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Ideally, we are. In reality, thinking that we're the good guys is a lot easier and more profitable than living up to the expectation.
Parent
Re:They Should Have (Score:5, Informative)
Higazy wasn't a bad guy--he was completely innocent. He had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism. The coerced confession wasn't just legally problematic, it actually sent a completely innocent man to jail. If he hadn't been lucky enough for the pilot who owned the radio to show up and say "hey, that's mine", he'd be in jail today.
The baby Jesus weeps for humanity when slobberers like you open your mouth.
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