Egypt 'fabricated terror group'

[reprehensor]

From the BBC;

Egypt 'fabricated terror group'

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

A US-based human rights group has accused the Egyptian government of using torture and false confessions in a high-profile anti-terrorism case.

Twenty-two alleged members of an unknown Islamist group, the Victorious Sect, were accused of planning attacks on tourism sites and gas pipelines.

Human Rights Watch says its research suggests the security forces may have fabricated the group's name.

It reports claims the case was used to justify renewing emergency laws.

Continued...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7137950.stm

From Human Rights Watch;

Anatomy of a State Security Case - The “Victorious Sect” Arrests

December, 2007

On April 19, 2006, Egyptian and international media reported that authorities had just arrested members of an extremist armed group in Cairo that was alleged to have been plotting terrorist attacks. Among the headlines were “Egypt foils terror bombing attempt” and “Egypt says terror group broken up.” The Egyptian Interior Ministry had announced that day that State Security Investigations (SSI), Egypt’s domestic intelligence agency, had arrested 22 suspects who they alleged had been plotting to bomb civilian targets in and around Cairo, including gas pipelines and tourist sites, and to kill Muslim and Christian religious figures. The Interior Ministry said the group was called al-Taifa al-Mansura, “The Victorious Sect.”

Five days later, on April 24, a string of bombings in Dahab, in the Sinai Peninsula, killed 18 people—the first bombing attack in Egypt since 2005 and the only such attack in 2006. (At this writing, there had been no major bombing attacks in Egypt since the Dahab attack.) Unsurprisingly, some journalists connected the April 19 announcement with the subsequent Dahab bombings, suggesting that the group arrested might be connected to the bombings. Some observers also offered deeper analyses of the Victorious Sect arrests based on information provided in the interior ministry statement, suggesting that new strains of “Salafi Jihadism” were on the rise in Egypt and that the threat of terrorism in Egypt was growing.4

The facts about the arrests, however, tell another story...

Our investigation gives reason to be deeply skeptical about the allegations made against the 22 men. Beyond coerced confessions, there appears to be no compelling evidence to support the government’s dramatic claims. Indeed, it appears that SSI may have fabricated the allegations made against at least some and possibly all of them. The very name given to the group—“Victorious Sect”—may have been invented by SSI officers. Moreover, whether or not the original arrests were justified, it is clear that there are currently no legal grounds for the continued detention of the 10 men of the 22 who are believed to remain in custody. The State Security prosecution office has declined to refer any of the cases to court and in 2006 issued orders that all of the men should be released...

What I heard was not just torture; it was beyond imagination. What I heard, it was so unbelievable, even I came to believe that maybe they were involved in something. I started wondering: for them to be tortured like that they must have been involved in some plot. You cannot imagine how harsh it was to hear that, the screaming, how harshly they were tortured . . . . I heard some of them screaming when they were being electrocuted. I could hear the electricity too, the “zizzzt, zizzzt.” ...

Former detainees asserted that the apparent purpose of the torture was to coerce the men to confess to the plots that were later described in the April 19 announcement...

Continued...
http://hrw.org/reports/2007/egypt1207/1.htm#_Toc184531094

Hmm. Coerced confessions via torture... no way. Sounds awfully familiar...

The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

Way.