If you downed one too many while watching the Super Bowl, here’s at least one reason to hold your head high: Drinking beer can be good for your health.

But seriously, a new analysis of 100 commercial beers shows the hoppy beverage is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for bone health.

Though past research has suggested beer is chockfull of silicon, little was known about how silicon levels varied with the type of beer and malting process used. So a pair of researchers took one for the team and ran chemical analyses on beer’s raw ingredients. They also picked up 100 commercial beers from the grocery store and measured the silicon content.

The silicon content of the beers ranged from 6.4 mg/L to 56.5 mg/L, with an average of 30 mg/L. Two beers are the equivalent of just under a half liter, so a person could get 30 mg of the nutrient from two beers. And while there is no official recommendation for daily silicon uptake, the researchers say, in the United States, individuals consume between 20 and 50 mg of silicon each day.

However, other studies show that consuming more than one or two alcoholic beverages a day may be, overall, bad for health.

The take-home message for the casual drinker: “Choose the beer you enjoy. Drink it in moderation,” lead researcher Charles Bamforth of the University of California, Davis, told LiveScience. “It is contributing silicon (and more) to your good health.”

Bamforth and his colleague Troy Casey, both of the university’s Department of Food Science and Technology, detail their findings in the February issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

The silicon levels of beer types, on average:

* Indian Pale Ale (IPA): 41.2 mg/L
* Ales: 32.8 mg/L
* Pale Ale: 36.5 mg/L
* Sorghum: 27.3 mg/L
* Lagers: 23.7 mg/L
* Wheat: 18.9 mg/L
* Light lagers: 17.2 mg/L
* Non Alcoholic: 16.3 mg/L

Their research showed the malting process didn’t affect barley’s silicon content, which is mostly in the grain’s husk. However, pale-colored malts had more silicon than the darker products, such as the chocolate, roasted barley and black malt, which all have substantial roasting. The scientists aren’t sure why these darker malts have less silicon than other malts.

Hops were the stars of the beer ingredients, showing as much as four times more silicon than was found in malt. The downside: Hops make up a much smaller portion of beer compared with grain. Some beers, such as IPAs are hoppier, while wheat beers tend to have fewer hops than other brews, the researchers say.

“Beers containing high levels of malted barley and hops are richest in silicon,” Bamforth said. “Wheat contains less silicon than barley because it is the husk of the barley that is rich in this element. While most of the silicon remains in the husk during brewing, significant quantities of silicon nonetheless are extracted into wort and much of this survives into beer.”

(Wort is the sweet liquid that comes from mashing the grains and eventually becomes beer.)

Got beer?

While the researchers are not recommending gulping beer to meet your silicon intake needs, their study does add to others on the potential health benefits of this cold beverage.

The type of silicon in beer, called orthosilicic acid, has a 50 percent bioavailability, meaning that much is available for use in the body. Some foods, like bananas are rich in silicon but only 5 percent is bioavailable. This soluble form of silica found in beer could be important for the growth and development of bone and connective tissue, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Past research has suggested that moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis, a disease characterized by low bone mass and deterioration of bone tissue.

Another past study involving nearly 1,700 women reported last year in the journal Nutrition showed participants who were light to moderate beer drinkers had much better bone density than non-drinkers. The researchers suggested the beer’s plant hormones, not the alcohol, could be responsible for the bone boost.

(From trifter.com)

Bragdy Gwynant Brewery, housed in the front of the Tynllidiart Arms pub at Capel Bangor near the seaside town of Aberystwyth, occupies an area less than five-feet square.

The brewery reopened in August 2004 after a gap of two years and has a brewing capacity of 40.9 litres (nine gallons) per batch – all of which goes to the adjacent pub. The recipe for the beer is a closely guarded secret. Seasonal local produce is used wherever possible in the restaurant and bar, which attracts customers from far and wide.

(From visitbritain.us)

Margaret and Mark Phillips, who own the Tynllidiart Arms and the brewery, said the beer had a secret recipe.

“We thought it would be nice to brew our own local beer and luckily we had a brewer living a few doors down who was able to help.

I’m using a secret recipe but brewing beer is like making a good curry – it takes a few goes to get it absolutely spot on Brewer Chris Giles

Mrs Phillips added: “We’ve tried to use as many local ingredients as we can in the beer and we use the same policy in our restaurant.”

The brewery once claimed a place in the record books.

“It was in the Guinness Book of Records a few years ago as the smallest brewery in the world, but when it closed two years ago it lost its place,” said Mrs Phillips.

“But we’ll be applying again in the next few weeks to become the smallest commercial brewery again.”

Brewer Chris Giles, who lives a few doors down from the brewery, runs a real ale business.

He said: “The brewery was originally the men’s outside toilet.”

“It’s very small and there’s not much room once all they brewing equipment is in there.”

“We don’t have a name for the beer yet and it’s in the experimental stage.”

“It may need a bit of development over the next few weeks before we get the definitive pint.”

“I’m using a secret recipe but brewing beer is like making a good curry – it takes a few goes to get it absolutely spot on.”

Tony Jerome of the Campaign for Real Ale (Camra) said: “We are always pleased to hear of real ale breweries re-opening as this means more choice for the beer consumer to try.”

(From article printed just after the brewery reopened. Source: BBC)

(Tynllidiart Arms)

As of 2009 Bragdy Gwynant was listed on a Wales pub crawl and is still listed under Welsh breweries in Wiki, but if you click on the link the page has been deleted. Note: the user with the name TexasAndroid who deleted it considers himself a “Reverter of vandalism,” so it’s possible the page had been vandalized and that’s why it was deleted, for now. Being a brewery based in  former outhouse: quite possible.

His own statement about editing at Wiki is: “I’m currently on Wikibreak, mostly burned out on Wikipedia. I’ll still be checking in a few times a week, but my amount of editing will likely remain quite low, as it has been in the past few weeks. As for the future, who knows….”

In 2009 CAMRA stated it was not brewing, but that site hasn’t been updated since then. Tynllidiart Arms still lists themselves as “home to the world’s smallest brewery.” It’s all a bit confusing.

As the Washington Post explained, the Task Force said, with no trace of irony, that “nearly 50″ of the men still imprisoned at Guantanamo “should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war.”

The administration’s invocation of the laws of war actually refers to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which authorized the President “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001″ (or those who harbored them), as interpreted by the Supreme Court in June 2004, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, in which it was asserted that “Congress has clearly and unmistakably authorized detention” of individuals covered by the AUMF.

This may technically be legal in the United States, but it is at odds with everyone else’s understanding of the laws of war. As every other civilized country understands them, the laws of war involve holding combatants for the duration of hostilities according to the Geneva Conventions, which, under Common Article 3, prohibits the “humiliating and degrading treatment” and coercive interrogations to which the men in Guantánamo were subjected, after President Bush declared in February 2002 that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Moreover, these men were never screened to ascertain whether they were actually combatants in the first place. Under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention (relative to the treatment of prisoners of war), if there is any doubt about whether those detained fit the description of Article 4 (broadly speaking, regular armed forces), they should be treated as Article 4 prisoners until their status has been determined by a competent tribunal. Held close to the time and place of capture, these were convened in every U.S. war from Vietnam onwards, and in the first Gulf War, for example, 1,196 tribunals were held, and 886 men were subsequently released.

However, competent tribunals were not held in Afghanistan (and are still not held to this day, under President Obama), and irregular soldiers (such as those fighting for the Taliban, or military forces related to al-Qaeda who were supporting the Taliban) slipped through the cracks of the protections assured to everyone detained in wartime, whether combatant or civilian, and were labeled as “unlawful enemy combatants,” who, according to the Bush administration, could be deprived of all rights.

This was nonsense, as the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed in 1958 in a commentary on the Fourth Convention (relative to the treatment of civilians) that “Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or … a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention.” Moreover, “There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.”

This interpretation was reinforced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in a judgment in 1998, but in the “war on terror,” the result of the Bush administration’s cynical maneuvering was Guantánamo, a prison in which men who had never been adequately screened were presumed to be guilty, even though, in most cases, the authorities knew nothing about them, largely because 86 percent of them had not been seized “on the battlefield,” as senior officials claimed, but had been sold to the U.S. military by their Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when bounty payments, averaging $5,000 a head, were being paid for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

As a result, the Obama administration’s justification for holding 50 men indefinitely without charge or trial reinforces the Bush administration’s false claim that there is a category of wartime prisoner who can be held indefinitely (as opposed to being held as a prisoner of war until the end of hostilities). What makes this conclusion even more unnerving is that the justification for holding these men indefinitely is evidence that, by President Obama’s own admission, is “tainted” by the use of torture.

In a major national security speech in May, when he first signaled that he was reviving the Bush administration’s justification for holding men indefinitely without charge or trial, he referred to prisoners who “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.”

To its credit, the administration has belatedly acknowledged that the decision regarding whether or not to hold these men is not the exclusive province of the executive branch. As the Post explained, officials stated that “each detainee has the right to challenge his incarceration in habeas corpus proceedings in federal court.” This is a welcome acknowledgment, as the courts’ role, mandated by an enormously significant Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, has been noticeably sidelined by the administration, even though, in the last 16 months, District Court judges have ruled, in 32 out of 41 cases, that the government’s supposed evidence – largely derived from the prisoners themselves, or from their fellow prisoners – is so “tainted” as to be useless and unbelievable.

Judges have also taken exception to the President’s hidden sub-text – that other compelling evidence has come from the intelligence agencies – noting, on several occasions, that the “mosaics” of intelligence put forward to justify detention may be useful in terms of gathering intelligence, but fail to stand up to scrutiny in a court of law.

No indication has yet been provided as to the identities of the 50 men that the Task Force advocates holding indefinitely, but it is a safe bet that one is Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti (profiled on Truthout last October), who has always maintained that he was a humanitarian aid worker, caught up in the post-invasion chaos of Afghanistan.

Noticeably, al-Kandari has been persistently uncooperative with the interrogators in Guantánamo, and has refused to implicate himself in any terrorist-related activities.

But according to the authorities, in a version of reality concocted almost exclusively from multiple levels of hearsay provided by other prisoners, while in Afghanistan, between August and December 2001 he managed not only to visit the al-Farouq training camp (the main training camp for Arabs in the years before 9/11), but also provided instruction to al-Qaeda members and trainees, to serve as an adviser to Osama bin Laden, and to produce recruitment audio and videotapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad.

Al-Kandari is one of the men whose only hope now is that a District Court judge will see through the authorities’ flimsy case against him, but for those seeking justice for genuine terrorists (or those, at least, against whom something resembling real evidence exists), the news from the Task Force is at least more encouraging. As the Post explained, the Task Force has recommended that “about 35 prisoners should be prosecuted in federal or military courts.”

Without the distraction of the 50 supposedly dangerous men who can be held indefinitely without evidence, this figure rather comprehensively demonstrates the colossal failure rate of the Bush administration’s experiment at Guantánamo: of the 779 men held, just under 5 percent are to face trials. If anything demonstrates that doing away with establishing safeguards in wartime and establishing guilt through arrogant presumption is a disastrous idea, it should be this statistic.

Making up the rest of the 95 percent of Guantánamo’s prisoners who should never have been detained are “at least 110 detainees” who have been cleared for release. As the Post explained, the Task Force “deemed approximately 80 detainees, including about 30 Yemenis, eligible for immediate repatriation or resettlement in a third country. About 30 other Yemenis were placed in a category of their own, with their release contingent upon dramatically stabilized conditions in their home country.”

This is another swipe at the chaos of the Bush administration’s policies, of course, as the figure of 110 can be added to the 44 prisoners already released by Obama, but it is not without its problems. The Post tiptoed around Obama’s cowardly refusal to release any cleared Yemenis for the foreseeable future, in the face of unprincipled attacks from Republicans and member of his own party, who attempted to equate the cleared Yemenis with the failed Christmas Day plane bomber.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had apparently been in contact with an al-Qaeda-inspired group in Yemen that included Saudi ex-prisoners released by George W. Bush, despite warnings from the intelligence services that they were among the handful of dangerous men in Guantánamo, but in the hysteria that recently prevailed, the cleared Yemenis were sacrificed for political gain.

The unadorned figures also fail to reveal that, of the 50 men from other countries, the majority cannot be repatriated because of fears that they will be tortured on their return.

On the anniversary of President Obama’s failure to close Guantánamo – and also to fully repudiate the Bush administration’s vile policies – the plight of these men should not be overlooked. Although the Post noted that the administration “anticipates that about 20 detainees can be repatriated by this summer,” and “has received firm commitments from countries willing to settle an additional 25 detainees who have been cleared for release,” experiences this year have indicated that other countries are reluctant to provide new homes for these men when the United States has washed its hands of them.

The blame for refusing to allow any cleared prisoner to settle in the United States, if they cannot be repatriated, lies with the president, with lawmakers, with the Justice Department and judges in the Court of Appeals and numerous media outlets.

But its impact not only continues to sour relations with other countries asked to do America’s dirty work, it also threatens to leave innocent men stranded in Guantánamo for an undefined amount of time. Back in October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that 17 men from China (the Uighurs), who had won their habeas petitions, had to be rehoused in the United States because they could not be repatriated, and because no other country and been found that would take them, he explained that their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Fifteen months later, Judge Urbina’s words still ring true, as they may on this day next year, when some of these men may still be held in Guantánamo unless America accepts responsibility for its own mistakes.

___________________________________________

Andy Worthington is a journalist and the author of “The Guantanamo Files” (Pluto Press), the first book to tell the stories of all the prisoners in Guantanamo. He maintains a blog here.

If we are to have a military, then we want it to protect us, right? From “Don’t ask/don’t tell,” to firing Gay translators during the exact time we needed them the most, we have done more to damage our military than any Gay who may surreptitiously ogle a male organ in a shower; or heterosexual counterparts who might surreptitiously ogle a woman soldier, but otherwise behave themselves.

Word: those go out of their way to make any of this a problem are the problem, not those who fancy men or have different plumbing.

Irony: the problem here is not Gays or women in the military, or showers, or foxholes, or… The problem is soldiers who would rather not do their duty than do it if they know Gays may be in the military, or pursue booty rather than do their duty. The problem is also military contractors who treat rape as if it’s something to be swept under the rug. The problem is jackasses who believe their hormones, their dislikes and religious opinions, mean more than defending the country they swore to protect, or doing their job.

This is an easy one. Discipline and following orders must rule. Simple. Forcing ones attentions or opinions on anyone else; even when off duty, means a soldier is endangering “unit cohesion.” If they make it into a problem then they no longer deserve to be a soldier. Period.

We don’t reward those who hate, or are driven by out of control impulses, by kicking out Jews, Blacks… why do we make an exception for Gays, as long as they are doing their duty?

We shouldn’t.

Trials in NY or Elsewhere

“Danger, Will Robinson! Danger, Will Robinson! Terrorist trials in NYC? Doctor Smith wants you to be very afraid! Very afraid!”

Ah, if only we had Robbie’s nameless Lost in Space progeny on the national stage these days. I might even suggest promoting him to presidential spokes-bot just to point out the irony, though I think Robbie from Forbidden Planet would be a wiser choice. We fight terrorists because “they hate our freedoms,” but decide those freedoms are to be tossed in the trash when convenient?

I also have a problem with trials in NYC for those who may have planned 9/11. Not because of safety, or that terrorists deserve “special treatment:” of the worst kind. No, just the opposite. New York has had plenty of high profile trials and I believe we should respect the freedoms fought for no matter what the nationality of a defendant is; or the charge levied against him. Gassing Kurds and murdering the politically, socially inconvenient is what tyrants do. That’s why due process exists and should be; must be, applied to all… no matter where they come from.

My problem is… how the hell do you even begin to get a pool for a jury who can judge such a case fairly in the city where such a big, tragic, event happened?

You see I believe in our justice system. I think it’s a hell of a lot better than to shoot, hang, cut off a head, electrocute or waterboard and then prove guilt later: if at all. Other nations railroad defendants, or just take them out and shoot them. Other nations pick and choose who should have rights and who should have no rights based on nationality, color of skin, racial purity, religious beliefs or some absurdly narrow definition of sexual preferences.

Such choices always prove politically and socially driven, as we found out when Black “justice” was not even “separate but equal” justice. I don’t claim we have been pure by any means, but I will never defend such “justice” like those who support using it regarding accused terrorists and terrorist enablers.

I am proud of what we are attempting to do, and I only type “attempting” because no justice system is perfect. So proud that if they want to do it here in Nashville then so be it. In fact I’ll help: be part of the jury, whatever.

If we’re not willing to show we believe in our own system by our own actions; except just killing those we find disagreeable, then what the hell are we fighting for, except to become more like them?

I’m kind of sad, though. We missed an opportunity. Teabaggers and Sarah Palin; those who consider themselves brave patriots, were just here. Perhaps we should have held the trial at Opryland Hotel next to them. Let’s see how “brave” and “patriotic” they really are.

And, yes, I would have willingly helped protect them, if asked to. But I probably wouldn’t have been the best choice for that job, for I certainly would have laughed as they twisted their cowardly frilly panties and whined in fear.

So many supposed brave patriots acting like the sniveling cowards they really are? Sorry. That irony I have no desire to apply my wrinkle releasing Sunbeam to. Maybe they might learn how to be true patriots, though I doubt it. Or maybe they’ll choke on it, and the nation will be better off without them.

“Move more to the center?”

Millions of starving vultures ask you to lay down on the shoulder of the road and pretend you’re dead. They promise: they won’t do a thing, and ignore pain you might feel.

Jimmy Jones tells you, “Go ahead! Drink! It’s just Kool Aid.”

When landing on an island island infested with cannibals, is it wise to use a bullhorn to announce, “It’s dinnertime?”

All of the above would be sheer foolishness. So is listening to the advice of those who hate you beyond all rationality, and will never be honest brokers when it comes to compromise. They will never, ever, agree to bipartisanship. Indeed the more we move towards them the further to the right they will go. They have said so. And now that they’ve had their big Mass. victory, why the hell should they?

The irony here is that our Pelosis, our Harry Reids and our Barack Obamas have publicly stated their response will be compromise. Why the man that you are so desperate to hate even gave you a break in the summer so you could gather together and start teabagging. He’s was willing to suspend all efforts so Mr. Brown and his lovely, available, daughters could ascend. Eh, be seated. Early.

How’s that for bipartisanship, something you have no notion how to appreciate and have no interest in, and never have?

How’s that for “change?”

Change, hell. Personally, I think the captain is so determined to make nice that he’s willing to do a 180 and head this Titanic ship of state right back towards the iceberg. The same iceberg the previous captain was doing all he could do to hit over and over again.

Giving rights to non-Americans

We proudly let the French plant the Statue of Liberty in our harbor, yet we show dedication to our own principles by refusing to live by them when dealing with everyone else? What, we believe only the some new version of “true Aryans” deserve rights, and everyone else better shut up or be conquered?

The difference between us and them is we are supposed to live by our principles. We are supposed to be fighting for freedom, rather than casting our principles aside when they are inconvenient. Washington knew this when he demanded his troops treat British prisoners with respect. No waterboarding. No equivalent of live electric wires. No raping of their children while they sit in cells helpless and watch.

The irony here is that those who promote the need for such things would be happier fighting with the other side where they have no problems with the niceties a truly free nation has to deal with. But such irony is usually a great joke that the intentionally blind refuse to see.

If we iron out the wrinkles, will the sightless ever see the error of their ways… the deaf hear the call to be true patriots? Of course not. But, more important, will they win their demand a whole nation must swim ever closer to the sirens who lure us all into the rocks: so we can continue to become more like the most oppressive nations in human history?

Most great and free nations go extinct because they refuse to stay true to the very freedoms: the principles, they were founded on. So that is an old question with few satisfactory answers. Especially when we’re considering where we are going these days.

-30-

Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 30 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.

© Copyright 2009
Ken Carman and Cartenual Productions
All Rights Reserved

I also explained the use of a secret facility within Bagram as part of a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, and asked pointed questions about the whereabouts of a number of men, known to have been held in secret prisons in Afghanistan, who are not on the list and whose apparent disappearance has never been explained — and also covered this topic in another recent article, “UN Secret Detention Report Asks, ‘Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?’”

In this second article based on the prisoner list, I look specifically at Bagram as a prison in a war zone, examining the murky relationship between the US and Afghan authorities regarding the detention of prisoners in wartime, asking whether the prison under President Obama conforms to the Geneva Conventions, and exposing new information about a network of secret prisons in forward operating bases and other locations around the country.

For those who fear that there are hundreds of prisoners in Bagram who have been have been held for many years, it should be noted that the limited information provided by the list is somewhat reassuring. Of the 645 prisoners listed, all but a hundred or so were seized in the last two years. There is a caveat, however. Based on the numbering system used, it appears that a total of 3,000 prisoners have been held at Bagram since the last of the regular prisoners was transferred to Guantánamo in November 2003, but although some have been freed — as part of an essentially inscrutable review process — it is not known how many others have been transferred either to Afghan custody (under a similarly inscrutable arrangement) or to Block “D” of Kabul’s main prison, Pol-i-Charki.

Refurbished by US forces in early 2007, Block “D” is where 45 of the 46 Afghan prisoners repatriated from Guantánamo since August 2007 have ended up. The one exception is Mohamed Jawad, released last August, who won his habeas corpus petition in a US court, but the other 45 have been subjected to equally opaque policies regarding their continued detention, and decisions about whether they should be tried or released, and, if the former, whether trials should be based on anything other than dubious “evidence” recycled from Guantánamo. The overriding question about Block “D” — which lawyers are hoping to test in US courts following the recent transfer of four Afghans from Guantánamo — is whether Block “D” is under Afghan or American control.

Despite these small reassurances about Bagram, I would not like to give the impression that all is well with the prison. The length of time that the majority of the 645 men have been held may appear to be quite reasonable — between one and two years — but this is supposed to be a prison in a war zone, and those detained should be screened on capture to make sure that they have not been seized by mistake, and then held for the duration of hostilities. Instead, there is every indication that prisoners are, in general, seized according to the defining characteristics of the “War on Terror,” as played out in both Iraq and Afghanistan — indiscriminate dragnets and raids based on often dubious intelligence — which not only fail to win “hearts and minds,” but also demonstrate a unilateral (and illegal) reworking of the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions and the prevention of torture

If there is any doubt about a wartime prisoner’s status — because he is not wearing a uniform, for example — he is entitled to an Article 5 competent tribunal, held close to the time and place of capture, at which he can call witnesses. The US military pioneered these tribunals from Vietnam onwards, and was preparing to undertake them in December 2001, when the prisons at Kandahar and Bagram opened, until the orders came from on high that, in the “War on Terror,” they were unnecessary. In its extraordinary arrogance and contempt for the law, the Bush administration decided that no screening was required, and that it was sufficient for the President to declare that, on capture, all the men were “enemy combatants,” who could be held indefinitely without any rights whatsoever.

The purpose — as became apparent at Guantánamo, when President Bush declared that the Geneva Conventions did not extend to those held in the “War on Terror” — was not to keep men off the battlefield for the duration of hostilities, but to provide the lawless conditions in which they could be interrogated for “actionable intelligence.” The result, as has been chronicled as Guantánamo, at Bagram, at Abu Ghraib and in the secret prison network, was a torture regime, purportedly sanctioned by memos written by lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which claimed to redefine torture for the use by the CIA, or, in the case of the military, through “enhanced interrogation techniques” approved by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, which later migrated to Iraq.

In many ways, these techniques were first conceived at Bagram, where the use of sleep deprivation and brutal stress positions (the “strappado” technique, or “Palestinian hanging”) was widespread, and the regime was so brutal that, in 2002, at least two prisoners (and possibly as many as five) were murdered in US custody.

Despite official claims that the conditions at Bagram have improved in the years since, a BBC report in June 2008, based on interviews with men held in the prison between 2002 and 2008, found that only two “said they had been treated well,” while the rest complained that “they were beaten, deprived of sleep and threatened with dogs.” In “Undue Process” (PDF), a Human Rights First report published in November 2009, a distinction was made between those held in Bagram’s early years, and those held since 2006, when, as the report noted, ex-detainees “described significantly better treatment than those captured earlier, but some still told of being assaulted at the point of capture and being held in cold isolation cells for several weeks after their capture.”

Moreover, in October 2009, during a panel discussion following the launch of the new Guantánamo documentary, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” former prisoner Omar Deghayes explained how his Pakistani brother-in-law was recently captured on a visit to Afghanistan and ended up in Bagram. As Omar described it, his brother-in-law’s wife, who was allowed to talk to her husband through a videophone system established by the International Committee of the Red Cross in early 2008, reported “how horribly and badly tortured he was, how he had marks on his eyes and was really badly battered.”

Importing Guantánamo-style reviews to Bagram

In an attempt to stifle dissent — and, it seems, as part of a cynical maneuver to encourage the Court of Appeals to reverse the habeas victories last March of the three foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries — the Obama administration announced last September that it was introducing a new review process for the Bagram prisoners. Submitted in court documents relating to the government’s appeal (PDF), the proposals allowed, for the first time, prisoners to call witnesses in their defense.

This was an improvement, because, until 2007, there was no formal review process at all, and as District Court Judge John D. Bates noted last March, when he granted the habeas corpus petitions of the three foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram, the system that was then put in place — consisting of Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Boards — “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo” (the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, the one-sided review process convened in 2004-05, which the Supreme Court found inadequate in Boumediene v. Bush, the June 2008 ruling granting the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights).

With incredulity, Judge Bates noted that the Bagram prisoners are not even allocated a personal representative from the military, as happened during the CSRTs at Guantánamo, and also noted that, although they are allowed to represent themselves:

Detainees cannot even speak for themselves; they are only permitted to submit a written statement. But in submitting that statement, detainees do not know what evidence the United States relies upon to justify an “enemy combatant” designation — so they lack a meaningful opportunity to rebut that evidence. [The government’s] far-reaching and ever-changing definition of enemy combatant, coupled with the uncertain evidentiary standards, further undercut the reliability of the UECRB review. And, unlike the CSRT process [which was followed by annual review boards], Bagram detainees receive no review beyond the UECRB itself.

In what appeared to be a direct response to Judge Bates’ damning criticisms, the Obama administration announced that, under the new rules, each prisoner would be assigned a US military official to represent him (as happened at Guantánamo), and that prisoners would also have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is “reasonably available” (as also happened at Guantánamo, even though no foreign witness was ever summoned to Cuba to testify).

It was also announced that the boards would determine whether prisoners should be held by the United States, turned over to Afghan authorities or released, but although the proposals included a promise that, “For those ordered held longer, the process will be repeated at six-month intervals,” the unilateral flight from the Geneva Conventions was confirmed not only in the decision to export Guantánamo’s discredited tribunal system to Bagram, but also in a section detailing how prisoners would be treated on capture.

As the submission explained, new prisoners would be subjected, on capture, not to Article 5 tribunals, but to cursory reviews by “the capturing unit commander” and by the commander of Bagram to ascertain that they “meet the criteria for detention.” Moreover, the DoD insisted that it was not merely holding prisoners “consistent with the laws and customs of war,” but was also holding those who fulfill the criteria laid down in the Authorization for Use of Military Force (the founding document of the “War on Terror,” approved by Congress within days of the 9/11 attacks), which authorized the President to detain those who “planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001,” or those who supported them.

This is depressingly close to the “new paradigm” of warfare introduced by Bush and Cheney, and it is, perhaps, no surprise that, as criticisms began to mount, the administration strategically announced that it was in the process of transferring control of Bagram to the Afghan government. It remains to be seen how swiftly the proposed transfer will occur, but it is unsurprising that the announcement has been made, for two reasons: firstly, because it diverts attention from current US policy, and secondly, because, as with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) in Iraq, it allows the US government to abdicate all responsibility for the mistakes it has made. Signed in November 2008, the SOFA in Iraq has led to the transfer of thousands of prisoners in US control to the custody of the Iraqi government, even though what awaits them is not a review of whether their detention by US forces was a mistake, but the chaos of the Iraqi judicial system.

Secret prisons

This is disturbingly cynical, of course, but what makes it even worse is a reasonable assumption that the transfer of Bagram to Afghan control will not include the transfer of any prisoners regarded as significant. For these men, the likelihood is that the US government will retain control of a secretive “black jail” within Bagram airbase, exposed by the Washington Post and the New York Times in November 2009, and will continue to seize men in nighttime raids, sending them either to this facility, or to one of nine “Field Detention Sites” on military bases, “often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families,” as Anand Gopal reported in a ground-breaking exposé last week, which revealed the extensive torture and abuse of those held.

Gopal’s account is not the only insight into the dark realities of current US detention policies in Afghanistan, beyond Bagram, beyond the Geneva Conventions, and, it seems, beyond the law. Late last year, a reliable Afghan source informed a lawyer friend of mine that there were, at the time, about two dozen secret facilities in Afghanistan, including three or four in Herat, four or five in northern Afghanistan, and three or four in Kabul. According to this source, the majority were US facilities, although a few were run by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan government’s domestic intelligence agency, and a few others were run by the Afghan Army. The source added, “They are all worse than Bagram. All contain a mix of combatants, criminals, and totally innocent persons. The main difference is that those at the US prisons are fed better. No one has any rights.”

In addition, just last week, in response to my recent articles, a military insider let me know that, “Not only were there facilities in Bagram, but in Kandahar and Salerno as well. Saw them first-hand between 2006 and 2009, but was told not to speak of the jails.” These, it was noted, were “unsanctioned facilities,” which were off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

As eight years of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld should have taught us, once you abandon the Geneva Conventions, all that lies beyond is secrecy and torture. The Obama administration has certainly tinkered with the Bush administration’s legacy, but as the stories of Bagram, the “dark jail” and the network of secret facilities demonstrates, tinkering threatens only to drive the dark truths further underground, and what is needed is the courage to thoroughly repudiate the brutal practices at the heart of the “War on Terror.”

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to his RSS feed (He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see his definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo.”

The British government has been running a wide-ranging inquiry into the manner in which the UK and United States were led to war in Iraq by then-President Bush and then-Prime Minister Tony Blair. An astonishing amount of damning evidence and information has been uncovered and publicly aired, including the following statements delivered by a senior member of Parliament (MP) on Tuesday:

A senior Welsh MP said last night he knew “for certain” Tony Blair and George Bush struck a deal to invade Iraq at their notorious Crawford Ranch meeting in 2002 – a year before war was declared. Elfyn Llwyd, Plaid Cymru’s parliamentary leader, said he had seen a confidential memo to that effect, although he would not divulge its exact contents.

Critics of the military action in Iraq have long suspected Mr Blair and President Bush came to an agreement at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in April 2002, a claim Mr Blair denied in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry last week. Mr Llwyd said he had offered to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry himself, in private if necessary.

The Meirionnydd Nant Conwy MP said: “I think other things should have been pursued [at the inquiry], in particular the detailed conversation at the ranch in Crawford in April 2002. I do know that the deal was struck, I know for certain it was struck at that stage so just to pretend months down the road that no deal had been struck I think is unforgivable. I have offered to give evidence and Chilcot has said ‘I’ll come back to you’. At that stage I will have private discussions with him.”

MP Llwyd refers here to the infamous Downing Street Memos, a collection of British government documents that lay out George W. Bush’s intent to invade and occupy Iraq whether or not there was any WMD/terrorism evidence to support the action, documents that further demonstrate Prime Minister Tony Blair’s willing acquiescence to the plan. Most damning of all is the secret memo dated 23 July 2002, explaining that war in Iraq was coming, and if the facts did not support the action, those facts would be twisted and buried. “There was a perceptible shift in attitude,” read the memo [emphasis added]. “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

These documents, along with testimony from the likes of MP Llwyd, offer a vivid portrait of a Bush administration far gone in the pursuit of its own militant plans, and more than willing to break laws and deceive the public to achieve the ends they sought. It was a nest of criminals that occupied the White House for those eight long years, proof of this continues to pile up in vast drifts, and nothing comes of it.

Quite the contrary, in fact. A recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility slapped a big fat “Not Guilty” stamp on the jackets of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the two central authors of the notorious “torture memos” that argued the legal justifications for the use of torture by the Bush administration. Worse, it appears Obama’s DOJ went out of the way to make sure Bybee and Yoo escaped free and clear from any censure for their despicable activities. According to a recent Newsweek report:

An upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors – Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor – violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter.

But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action – which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.

The truth of the matter is plain enough. Yoo and Bybee are not going to turn themselves in. Neither are any of the other actors in this gruesome play. If any measure of justice is going to be achieved, it will fall upon Congress, President Obama and his Department of Justice to get it done. Subpoenas must be issued, evidence gathered and testimony heard for the truth to be brought forth and for punishment to be meted out.

But this DOJ cannot even accept the judgment of its own OPR on two comparatively minor foot soldiers of the Bush administration without sanding down the conclusions enough to spare Yoo and Bybee the punishment they so richly deserve. Is there any hope at all that the larger players in the Bush-era criminal activities – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz most prominently – will be brought to justice when those two lesser lights are allowed to return to a law school classroom and a seat on the federal bench?

Disgraceful as it is to say, don’t hold your breath.

Speaking of evidence, there is this: a bomb in Karbala exploded on Wednesday, killing and wounding dozens of Shiite pilgrims. Another bomb in Karbala was attached to a military vehicle and killed and wounded dozens on Wednesday. Another bomb killed and wounded several other pilgrims outside Baghdad on Wednesday. Gunmen shot and killed a police officer in Kirkuk on Wednesday. The day before, a suicide bomber killed 54 and wounded dozens more in the outskirts of Baghdad. As of Wednesday, almost 5,000 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq, and nearly 50,000 more have been wounded. More than a million Iraqi civilians have likewise been killed and wounded.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz, Rice, and a dozen other members of the Bush administration, including Yoo and Bybee, are directly responsible for this carnage. They lied through their teeth and broke any number of laws to see it done. They are guilty of much more than the war crimes they committed in both Iraq and the United States. They are guilty of bankrupting this nation with two wars begun on false pretenses and perpetuated to enrich the few, while further cementing the stranglehold “defense spending” has on our growth as a civilized nation.

Thanks in no small part to the Iraq debacle, there is no political impetus to lay a finger on the wildly bloated “defense” budget, even as the fabric of our society shreds and shatters under the economic yoke placed upon our necks by the previous administration. Ours is a government staffed from stem to stern with political cowards who refuse to heal these wounds, and with those who are just as culpable as those members of the Bush administration (read: members of Congress who voted to support each and every criminal act that led us to this place).

Justice? When it comes to the Bush administration, the word has no meaning. They have escaped that justice, and we are all less free because of it.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: “War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You to Know” and “The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.” His newest book, “House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America’s Ravaged Reputation,” is now available from PoliPointPress.