Senate Candidate Levitt Challenges Torture Secrecy and Drone Policies

US Senate candidate David Levitt of California called on his party's leaders to reverse the policy of secrecy regarding the abuse, kidnapping, torture and death of Muslim suspects in US custody, and to suspend the policy whereby the president, without judicial review and without knowing the identities of the victims, assassinates terror suspects in their countries using drone weapons.

 

Democratic candidate for US Senate David Levitt of California called on his party's leaders today to reverse the policy of secrecy regarding the abuse, kidnapping, torture and death of Muslim suspects in US custody, and to suspend the policy recently revealed in the New York Times whereby the president, without judicial review and without knowing the identities of the victims, assassinates terror suspects in their countries using drone weapons.


Dr. Levitt, a computer scientist running for US Senate, seeks to offer alternatives to current costly national security policies that make extensive use of secrecy and violence while inspiring groups like Al Qaeda and making Americans less safe.


Levitt asks the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, incumbent California Senator Dianne Feinstein, to begin by releasing information about abused Guantanamo Bay prisoners witnessed by at least 26 FBI employees, as reported on CNN, Israel news and elsewhere as early as 2005.


The many FBI witnesses cooperated after realizing Guantanamo interrogators were impersonating FBI agents in their work. Their reports were confirmed by the Department of Defense.


The reports say: "On several occasions witnesses saw detainees in interrogation rooms chained hand and foot in fetal position to floor with no chair/food/water; most urinated or defecated on selves and were left there 18, 24 hours or more," according to one FBI account that was published by CNN. One FBI witness saw a detainee "shaking with cold," while another noted a detainee in a sweltering unventilated room was "almost unconscious on a floor with a pile of hair next to him (he had apparently been pulling it out through the night). CNN quoted from an FBI statement that said an interrogator squatted over the Quran and that a German shepherd dog was ordered to "growl, bark and show his teeth to the prisoner."