latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-rendition6-2009nov06,0,3770282.story
latimes.com
Editorial
Italy got it right: CIA renditions are wrong
The conviction of 23 Americans in the abduction of Muslim cleric Abu Omar may be largely symbolic, but it sends an important message to the Obama administration.
4:41 PM PST, November 5, 2009
'Extrajudicial detentions" and "extraordinary renditions" were nicely scrubbed terms for the Bush administration's policy of capturing suspects in one country and spiriting them away to another, where they were harshly interrogated and even tortured. Now an Italian court has called this CIA practice by its real name -- illegal.
The conviction of 23 Americans and two Italians for kidnapping an Egyptian cleric off the streets of Milan in 2003 in one sense is largely symbolic: The defendants were tried in absentia, and the Italian government is not seeking their extradition; barring a successful appeal, the two governments may try to work out a clemency deal. Yet the decision matters. It repudiates President Obama's expressed desire to look away from the ugly past, and sends a strong message that the U.S. government cannot operate outside the law with impunity in the name of fighting terrorism.
The CIA abducted Hassan Osama Nasr on Feb. 17, 2003. The Muslim cleric, suspected of recruiting insurgents for Iraq and Afghanistan, was flown to Egypt, where he allegedly was tortured with electric shocks, beatings and threats of rape. He was released in 2007.
Obama has since ended CIA interrogations in secret prisons and shut overseas jails used by the CIA, but he has not stopped the practice of extraordinary rendition. The difference between his and his predecessor's policy is that the administration will now demand credible assurances that prisoners won't be tortured, and that prisoners will be "rendered to justice" rather than held indefinitely without trial.
We don't like renditions and think even the most dangerous criminals are entitled to due process, including extradition hearings. A war against violent extremists cannot be won by immoral or illegal means; the U.S. can't outsource dirty work and claim to have clean hands.
Some have questioned how this case differs from the capture of Nazi Germany's Adolf Eichmann by Israeli security forces in Buenos Aires in May 1960, an extrajudicial action that was widely praised at the time. One significant difference is that Argentina's military government was harboring a war criminal, whereas Italy had opened its own criminal investigation of Nasr when the CIA swooped in to kidnap him. Another is that Eichmann was put on trial, publicly. Nasr, to say the least, was not.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Jane Mayer on the CIA use of drones Oct 21, 2009
This is a conversation with Jane Mayer in the New Yorker about the CIA using drones to kill. Unmanned flying killing machines are being improved upon in miniature also- see full article in the magazine. This means anyone anywhere can be chosen, found, and killed with no one to confirm it's the right person, the right place, or in the company of children, family, etc. Just as "extraordinary rendition" brought innocent people to torture chambers, this now kills all present.
October 21, 2009
Jane Mayer on Predator Drones and Pakistan
In this week’s issue of the magazine, Jane Mayer writes about the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of drones to kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan—a program that the Obama Adminstration is relying upon more and more. (Subscribers can access the entire article; everyone else can buy access to this issue online.) Mayer spoke about the costs of a remote-controlled war, the C.I.A.’s lack of transparency, and the Pakistan’s complicated response.
How has the use of Predator drones by the United States changed the situation in Pakistan?
Well, there’s good news and bad news. According to the C.I.A., they’ve killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects. The bad news is that they’ve inflamed anti-American sentiment, because they’ve also killed hundreds of civilians.
And how is it different than other uses of American force?
It’s not coming from the military. It’s a covert program run by the C.I.A. People know about Predator drones, but not that there are two programs. The U.S.-military program is an extension of conventional military force. The C.I.A. runs a secret targeted-killing program, which really is an unprecedented use of lethal force in places where we are not at war, such as Pakistan. It’s a whole new frontier in the use of force.
John Radsen, a former lawyer for the C.I.A., told me that [the C.I.A.] “doesn’t have much experience with killing. Traditionally, the agency that does that is the Department of Defense.” You’ve got a civilian agency involved in targeted killing behind a black curtain, where the rules of the game are unclear, to the rest of the world and also to us. We don’t know, for instance, who is on the target list. How do you get on the list? Can you get off the list? Who makes the list? What are the criteria? Where is the battlefield? Where does the battlefield end? It originally seemed simple, because in the beginning it seemed like they would just go after Al Qaeda, but the target list has been growing, particularly in Pakistan.
How do these targeted killings not violate the U.S. ban on assassinations?
After 9/11, the Bush Administration declared that terrorism was no longer a crime; it was an extension of war. Soldiers are privileged to kill enemy combatants in a war, and America is legally allowed to defend itself. And these targeted killings became an extension of the global war on terror.
How long has there been drone activity in Pakistan? Is it new?
Toward the end of the Bush Administration, the drone program in Pakistan ramped up, but when Obama became President, he accelerated it even faster. It’s surprising, but the Obama Administration has carried out as many unmanned drone strikes in its first ten months as the Bush Administration did in its final three years. It’s the favorite weapon of choice right now against Al Qaeda, and for good reason: It’s been effective in killing a lot of people the U.S. wants to see dead.
What does Pakistan think of the drones?
Originally, the Pakistani people’s reaction to the U.S. drone strikes in their country was incredibly negative. Pakistanis rose up and complained that the program violated their sovereignty. So, to obtain Pakistani support—or at least the support of the Zardari government—the Obama Administration quietly decided last March to allow the Pakistani government to nominate some of its own targets. The U.S. has been and is involved in killing not just Al Qaeda figures, but Pakistani targets—people like Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud who are enemies of the Pakistani state.
Are there any safeguards that prevent the U.S. from carrying out political vendettas for top Pakistani officials?
Well, the problem with this program is that it’s invisible; I would guess there must be all kinds of legal safeguards, and lawyers at the C.I.A. are discussing who we can kill and who we can’t, but none of that is available to the American people. It’s quite a contrast with the armed forces, because the use of lethal force in the military is a transparent process. There are after-action reports, and there’s a very obvious chain of command. We know where the responsibility runs, straight on up to the top of the government. This system keeps checks on abuses of power. There is no such transparency at the C.I.A.
How does the continued collateral damage from Predator drones square with General Stanley McChrystal’s order to the military to lay off the air strikes in Afghanistan and avoid civilian deaths?
Well, you could argue it either way. There is less collateral damage from a drone strike than there is from an F-16. According to intelligence officials, drones are more surgical in the way they kill—they usually use Hellfire missiles and do less damage than a fighter jet might.
At the same time, the fact that they kill civilians at all raises the same problem that McChrystal is trying to combat, which is that they incite people on the ground against the United States. When you’re trying to win a battle of hearts and minds, trying to win over civilian populations against terrorists, it can be counterproductive. That’s why [the former Petraeus adviser and counterinsurgency theorist] David Kilcullen wrote, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement.”
Are people in Pakistan scared to move around because of the drones?
According to some recent studies, terrorists are scampering around only at night and accusing each other of being spies and informing on one another. So it’s had the desired effect in unravelling terror cells.
If the C.I.A. doesn’t have experience killing people, who is piloting the drones?
It doesn’t take as much talent or experience or training to pilot a drone as it does to pilot a real plane. The skills are much like what you need to do well in a video game. And the C.I.A. has outsourced a lot of the drone piloting, which also raises interesting legal questions, because you not have only civilians running this program, but you may have people who are not even in the U.S. government piloting the drones.
You mention in your piece that drone pilots, who work from an office, suffer from combat stress.
Someone sitting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, can view and home in on a target on the other side of the world with tremendous precision, even at night, and destroy it. Peter Singer, who wrote a book on robotic warfare, said that cubicle warriors experience the same stress as regular warriors in a real war. Detached killing still takes a tremendous emotional toll inside our borders.
Why do you think the Obama Administration chose to rely more on drones?
Basically because they can. It’s sort of the least bad option. They can’t get into the tribal areas of Pakistan where a lot of Al Qaeda suspects are thought to be hiding, but they can see them with these drones. So it’s the only way they can get at them.
But there are all kinds of unintended consequences. For one thing, these missile strikes could scatter Al Qaeda, and cells could move to other parts of Pakistan, maybe down toward Karachi, where the population is denser. There have been reports of people already starting to move there.
Also, if the United States can legally kill people from the sky in a country that we’re not at war with, other countries will argue they can do the same thing. And the people using those joysticks in Langley and the deserts of Nevada could now be considered under international law to be engaged in warfare, which means they can legally be retaliated against. It’s a new horizon.
What would the outlines of a more transparent drone program look like?
Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, has noted that when the United States goes about killing people, we usually know who they can kill and where the battlefield is. International lawyers are calling for a public revelation of who is on this list, where can we go after them, and how many people can we take out with them. They want to know the legal, ethical, and political boundaries of the program.
October 21, 2009
Jane Mayer on Predator Drones and Pakistan
In this week’s issue of the magazine, Jane Mayer writes about the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of drones to kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan—a program that the Obama Adminstration is relying upon more and more. (Subscribers can access the entire article; everyone else can buy access to this issue online.) Mayer spoke about the costs of a remote-controlled war, the C.I.A.’s lack of transparency, and the Pakistan’s complicated response.
How has the use of Predator drones by the United States changed the situation in Pakistan?
Well, there’s good news and bad news. According to the C.I.A., they’ve killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects. The bad news is that they’ve inflamed anti-American sentiment, because they’ve also killed hundreds of civilians.
And how is it different than other uses of American force?
It’s not coming from the military. It’s a covert program run by the C.I.A. People know about Predator drones, but not that there are two programs. The U.S.-military program is an extension of conventional military force. The C.I.A. runs a secret targeted-killing program, which really is an unprecedented use of lethal force in places where we are not at war, such as Pakistan. It’s a whole new frontier in the use of force.
John Radsen, a former lawyer for the C.I.A., told me that [the C.I.A.] “doesn’t have much experience with killing. Traditionally, the agency that does that is the Department of Defense.” You’ve got a civilian agency involved in targeted killing behind a black curtain, where the rules of the game are unclear, to the rest of the world and also to us. We don’t know, for instance, who is on the target list. How do you get on the list? Can you get off the list? Who makes the list? What are the criteria? Where is the battlefield? Where does the battlefield end? It originally seemed simple, because in the beginning it seemed like they would just go after Al Qaeda, but the target list has been growing, particularly in Pakistan.
How do these targeted killings not violate the U.S. ban on assassinations?
After 9/11, the Bush Administration declared that terrorism was no longer a crime; it was an extension of war. Soldiers are privileged to kill enemy combatants in a war, and America is legally allowed to defend itself. And these targeted killings became an extension of the global war on terror.
How long has there been drone activity in Pakistan? Is it new?
Toward the end of the Bush Administration, the drone program in Pakistan ramped up, but when Obama became President, he accelerated it even faster. It’s surprising, but the Obama Administration has carried out as many unmanned drone strikes in its first ten months as the Bush Administration did in its final three years. It’s the favorite weapon of choice right now against Al Qaeda, and for good reason: It’s been effective in killing a lot of people the U.S. wants to see dead.
What does Pakistan think of the drones?
Originally, the Pakistani people’s reaction to the U.S. drone strikes in their country was incredibly negative. Pakistanis rose up and complained that the program violated their sovereignty. So, to obtain Pakistani support—or at least the support of the Zardari government—the Obama Administration quietly decided last March to allow the Pakistani government to nominate some of its own targets. The U.S. has been and is involved in killing not just Al Qaeda figures, but Pakistani targets—people like Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud who are enemies of the Pakistani state.
Are there any safeguards that prevent the U.S. from carrying out political vendettas for top Pakistani officials?
Well, the problem with this program is that it’s invisible; I would guess there must be all kinds of legal safeguards, and lawyers at the C.I.A. are discussing who we can kill and who we can’t, but none of that is available to the American people. It’s quite a contrast with the armed forces, because the use of lethal force in the military is a transparent process. There are after-action reports, and there’s a very obvious chain of command. We know where the responsibility runs, straight on up to the top of the government. This system keeps checks on abuses of power. There is no such transparency at the C.I.A.
How does the continued collateral damage from Predator drones square with General Stanley McChrystal’s order to the military to lay off the air strikes in Afghanistan and avoid civilian deaths?
Well, you could argue it either way. There is less collateral damage from a drone strike than there is from an F-16. According to intelligence officials, drones are more surgical in the way they kill—they usually use Hellfire missiles and do less damage than a fighter jet might.
At the same time, the fact that they kill civilians at all raises the same problem that McChrystal is trying to combat, which is that they incite people on the ground against the United States. When you’re trying to win a battle of hearts and minds, trying to win over civilian populations against terrorists, it can be counterproductive. That’s why [the former Petraeus adviser and counterinsurgency theorist] David Kilcullen wrote, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement.”
Are people in Pakistan scared to move around because of the drones?
According to some recent studies, terrorists are scampering around only at night and accusing each other of being spies and informing on one another. So it’s had the desired effect in unravelling terror cells.
If the C.I.A. doesn’t have experience killing people, who is piloting the drones?
It doesn’t take as much talent or experience or training to pilot a drone as it does to pilot a real plane. The skills are much like what you need to do well in a video game. And the C.I.A. has outsourced a lot of the drone piloting, which also raises interesting legal questions, because you not have only civilians running this program, but you may have people who are not even in the U.S. government piloting the drones.
You mention in your piece that drone pilots, who work from an office, suffer from combat stress.
Someone sitting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, can view and home in on a target on the other side of the world with tremendous precision, even at night, and destroy it. Peter Singer, who wrote a book on robotic warfare, said that cubicle warriors experience the same stress as regular warriors in a real war. Detached killing still takes a tremendous emotional toll inside our borders.
Why do you think the Obama Administration chose to rely more on drones?
Basically because they can. It’s sort of the least bad option. They can’t get into the tribal areas of Pakistan where a lot of Al Qaeda suspects are thought to be hiding, but they can see them with these drones. So it’s the only way they can get at them.
But there are all kinds of unintended consequences. For one thing, these missile strikes could scatter Al Qaeda, and cells could move to other parts of Pakistan, maybe down toward Karachi, where the population is denser. There have been reports of people already starting to move there.
Also, if the United States can legally kill people from the sky in a country that we’re not at war with, other countries will argue they can do the same thing. And the people using those joysticks in Langley and the deserts of Nevada could now be considered under international law to be engaged in warfare, which means they can legally be retaliated against. It’s a new horizon.
What would the outlines of a more transparent drone program look like?
Michael Walzer, the political philosopher, has noted that when the United States goes about killing people, we usually know who they can kill and where the battlefield is. International lawyers are calling for a public revelation of who is on this list, where can we go after them, and how many people can we take out with them. They want to know the legal, ethical, and political boundaries of the program.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes
Glenn Greenwald <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/>
Thursday Oct. 8, 2009 13:09 EDT
A historian's account of Democrats and Bush-era war crimes
(updated below - Update II - Update III)
The American Propsect's Adam Serwer notes that <http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=10&year=2009&base_name=congress_torture_coverup> , yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment -- supported by the Obama White House -- to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act's mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled -- unanimously -- that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/10/foia/index.html> . But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and -- as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today <http://twitter.com/pierre/statuses/4711868371> -- its central purpose is to "legalize suppression" of evidence of American war crimes.
What made those detainee photographs so important from the start is that they depict brutal abuse well outside of the Abu Ghraib facility and thus reveal to Americans -- and the world -- that America's torture was not, as they've been constantly told, limited to rogue sadists at Abu Ghraib and the waterboarding of three bad guys. Instead, our torture regime was systematic, pervasive, brutal, fatal, and -- because it was the by-product of conscious policies set at the highest levels of government -- common across America's "War on Terror" detention regime. These photographs would have documented those vital facts; combated the false denials from torture apologists; fueled the momentum for accountability; and revealed, in graphic and unavoidable terms, what was truly done by America's government. But a Democrat-led Congress, at the urging of a Democratic President, is now taking extraordinary steps -- including a new law which has no purpose other than to suppress evidence of America's war crimes -- to ensure that this evidence never sees the light of day.
If a historian were to write about the events of the first nine months of 2009 when it came to transparency issues as they relate to the war crimes of the Bush years, the following is what would be written. Just remember this was all done with an overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress and a Democratic President elected on a promise to usher in <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/> "an unprecedented level of openness in Government" and <http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/21/obama.business/index.html> "a new era of openness in our country." There's no blaming Republicans for any of this:
In February, the Obama DOJ went to court to block victims of rendition and torture from having a day in court <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/09/state_secrets/index.html> , adopting in full the Bush argument that whatever was done to the victims is a "state secret" and national security would be harmed if the case proceeded. The following week, the Obama DOJ invoked the same "secrecy" argument to insist that victims of illegal warrantless eavesdropping must be barred from a day in court, and when the Obama administration lost that argument, they engaged in <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/28/al_haramain/> a series of extraordinary <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/02/obama-invokes-s/> manuevers <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/obama-administr/> to avoid complying with the court's order that the case proceed, to the point where the GOP-appointed federal judge threatened the Government with sanctions for noncompliance <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/22/state/n124823D29.DTL> . Two weeks later <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/21/obama-administration-tryi_n_168843.html> , "the Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, [tried] to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails."
In April, the Obama DOJ, in order to demand dismissal of a lawsuit brought against Bush officials for illegal spying on Americans, not only invoked the Bush/Cheney "state secrets" theory, but also invented a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/> to insist Bush officials are immune from consequences for illegal domestic spying. The same month -- in the case brought by torture victims -- an appeals court ruled against <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/28/secrecy/> the Obama DOJ on its "secrecy" claims, yet the administration vowed to keep appealing <http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/06/12/obama-doj-asks-full-panel-to-review-jeppesen/> to prevent any judicial review of the interrogation program. In responses to these abuses, a handful of Democratic legislators re-introduced Bush-era legislation to restrict the President from asserting "state secrets" claims <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/12/state_secrets/> to dismiss lawsuits, but it stalled in Congress all year. At the end of April and then again in August <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/24/ig_report/> , the administration did respond to a FOIA lawsuit <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Statement-of-President-Barack-Obama-on-Release-of-OLC-Memos/> seeking the release of torture documents by releasing some of those documents, emphasizing that they had no choice in light of clear legal requirements.
In May, after the British High Court ruled that a torture victim had the right to obtain evidence in the possession of British intelligence agencies documeting the CIA's abuse of him, the Obama administration threatened <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/12/obama/> that it would cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if the court revealed those facts, causing the court to conceal them. Also in May, Obama announced he had changed his mind <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301751.html> and would fight-- rather than comply with -- two separate, unanimous court orders compelling the disclosure of Bush-era torture photos, and weeks later, vowed he would do anything <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/01/photos/index.html> (including issue an Executive Order or support a new FISA exemption) to prevent disclosure of those photos in the event he lost yet again, this time in the Supreme Court. In June <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/08/AR2009060804117.html?hpid=topnews> , the administration "objected to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security." In August, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder announced <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/24/holder/index.html> that while some rogue torturers may be subject to prosecution, any Bush officials who relied on Bush DOJ torture memos in "good faith" will "be protected from legal jeopardy." And all year long, the Obama DOJ fought (unsuccessfully) <http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/10/they-tortured-a-man-they-knew-to-be-innocent.html> to keep encaged at Guantanamo a man whom Bush officials had tortured while knowing he was innocent.
That's the record which an historian, wedded as faithfully as possible to a narration of indisputable facts, would be compelled to write. And those are just disclosure and transparency issues relating to Bush-era crimes. None of that has anything to do with ongoing assertion of detention powers, habeas corpus denials, renditions, transparency issues generally <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/17/transparency/> , the Democrats' active efforts <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/opinion/08thu1.html> just this week to prevent abuses of the Patriot Act and FISA, etc. (for those with Twitter, just read Marcy Wheeler's infuriating account <http://twitter.com/emptywheel> from the last two hours of how key Democrats in the Senate -- led by Dianne Feinstein and Pat Leahy -- just gutted virtually every effort to rein in Patriot Act and FISA abuses that were sponsored by Feingold, Durbin and even Arlen Specter: NAJIBULLAH ZAZI!!!). And now this war on transparency is all culminating with a White House-backed effort -- spearheaded by key ally Joe Lieberman -- to sweep aside two federal court rulings and to write a new exemption for FOIA that has no purpose but to prevent the world from seeing new and critical evidence of systematic American war crimes. If the stated goal of Democrats had been to use their newfound control of Government to protect and suppress Bush-era war crimes, how could they have done any better?
UPDATE: When I interviewed House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter back in June <http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/10/foia/index.html> , she vowed to do everything possible to stop the Lieberman/Graham/Obama photo suppression amendment, arguing that FOIA was every bit "as sacred to Democrats as Social Security and Medicare." If only that were true. Back in June, Slaughter -- with the help of an intense campaign from blogs and civil libertarians -- did succeed in blocking its enactment, but as Mother Jones' Nick Baumann reports <http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/10/detainee-abuse-photos-suppression-bill> , the legislative mechanism used by Lieberman this week virtually assures its passage, even though Slaughter vows still to oppose it.
Two other related notes: (1) a journalist emails me to remind that I should add to Obama's anti-transparency crusade the White House's efforts to water down the "journalist shield law" <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/01/AR2009100105038.html> to the point where it would easily enable the Government to compel disclosure of the identity of whistle-blowers in the national security context (i.e., the kind who told Dana Priest about CIA black sites and Eric Lichtblau about illegal NSA eavesdropping) -- a clear violation of Obama's campaign platform that was engineered by the White House in secret rather than out in the open <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/us/01shield.html> ; and (2) I wasn't able to watch the Patriot Act proceedings today, but -- in addition to Wheeler's linked descriptions above -- the normally rhetorically restrained Adam Serwer just wrote <http://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/4713711866> of the Senate Democrats' bill: "Senate passes PATRIOT Act Reauthorization. They should name it after J. Edgar Hoover."
UPDATE II: Quite related to all of this: The Nation's Chris Hayes today examines how many liberal advocacy groups <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091026/hayes> allow themselves to be controlled by the White House and subject themselves to collective message coordinating. As Hayes notes, Jane Hamsher refers to these controlled progressive groups as the "veal pen," which she expertly described here <http://campaignsilo.firedoglake.com/2009/09/06/van-jones-a-moment-of-truth-for-liberal-institutions-in-the-veal-pen/> . There are many reasons why the reaction to things such as what I describe in today's post from progressive groups (as distinct from the very vocal civil liberties groups) has been so muted and acquiescent -- e.g., a tribal refusal to criticize one's own, a gut belief that someone as good and just as Barack Obama couldn't possibly really be continuing Bush/Cheney policies and complicitly helping to suppress their war crimes, the anger that one provokes from one's own "allies" with such criticism, etc. -- but the organized co-option process which Hayes and Hamsher document, accompanied by the fear of losing access and funding, is a very significant factor.
UPDATE III: Russ Feingold just wrote a scathing condemnation of the behavior of his Senate Democratic colleagues and, especially, the Obama administration <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/8/791144/-Its-Not-the-Prosecutors-Committee,-its-the-Judiciary-Committee> with regard to what they just did with the Patriot Act and FISA renewals, including this:
I am also very troubled that administration officials have been taking positions behind closed doors that they are not taking publicly. . . [I]f the administration wanted to further water down the already limited reforms in the bill that was on the table, they should have said so openly. Instead, at our only public hearing we were told that the Justice Department did not have positions on the crucial issues about to be discussed. Then, over the past week, in classified settings, the Department has weighed in against even some of the limited reforms that Sen. Leahy originally proposed.
The administration loves to posture in public as though they support various reforms -- to lead their wild-eyed supporters to believe they do -- only to work in secret to gut those same reforms. Feingold adds that "[a]t the beginning of the year, I had high hopes for the Patriot Act reauthorization process." Why? Just because of small facts like these:
We had just elected a President with a strong civil liberties record in the Senate. His Attorney General had supported some reforms during consideration of the last reauthorization bill in 2005. And Democrats controlled the Senate by such a large margin that our advantage on the Judiciary Committee ended up at 12-7 after Sen. Specter switched parties.
Despite all of that, Feingold ended up having to vote against the new Patriot Act bill that he spent all year leading because it was diluted to the point where very little was fixed and some things were actually made worse. When it comes to transparency and civil liberties, that's what the Democratic Congress and White House are. If the record I documented here isn't enough to see that, then take it from someone who sees them up close and personal every day <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/8/791144/-Its-Not-the-Prosecutors-Committee,-its-the-Judiciary-Committee> .
-- Glenn Greenwald
____________________________________________________________________________
Spending Bill Includes Provision to Block Release of Abuse Photos <http://www.truthout.org/1008094>
Thursday 08 October 2009
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
US Supreme Court justices are expected to meet Friday to decide whether to take up the case.
Congressional lawmakers moved a step closer Wednesday toward banning the Department of Defense from releasing photographs depicting US Soldiers abusing detainees held in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conferees on the Senate and House Appropriations Committees released a Homeland Security spending bill summary <http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/Homeland_Security_FY10_Conference.pdf> , which includes a provision that would allow President Obama to authorize "the Secretary of Defense to bar the release of detainee photos," essentially exempting the images from Freedom of Information Act requests.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the government in 2003 to gain access to photographs and videos related to the treatment of "war on terror" prisoners in US custody, criticized committee members who supported the measure.
"Congress should not give the government the authority to hide evidence of its own misconduct, and if it does grant that authority, the Secretary of Defense should not invoke it," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project. "If this shameful provision passes, Secretary [of Defense Robert] Gates should take into account the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners, and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos will ultimately be far more damaging to our national security than their disclosure would be.
"The last administration's decision to endorse torture undermined the United States' moral authority and compromised its security. The failure of the current administration to fully confront the abuses of the last administration will only compound these harms."
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered the release of the photos in a June 2005 ruling that was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in September 2008. The Obama administration indicated earlier this year it would abide by a court order and release at least 44 of the photographs in question, but President Obama backtracked, saying he conferred with high-ranking military officials who advised him that releasing the images would stoke anti-American sentiment and would endanger the lives of US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As Truthout previously reported <http://www.truthout.org/091109A> , the Obama administration petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case at the same time the president privately told Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) he would work with Congress to help get a measure passed aimed at blocking the photographs from being released.
That revelation was made in a footnote contained in a 33-page petition <http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/dodvaclu_certpetition.pdf> the Obama administration filed with the high-court in August.
According to the petition and other documents, the photographs at issue includes one in which a female solider pointed a broom at one detainee "as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into [his] rectum."
Other photos are said to show US soldiers pointing guns at the heads of hooded and bound detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. The filing also notes that the detainee abuse was investigated by the US Army's Criminal Investigation Division and "three of the six investigations led to criminal charges and in two of those cases, the accused were found guilty and punished."
Supreme Court justices are expected to meet Friday to discuss whether they intend to take up the case. Presumably, the Obama administration would withdraw its Supreme Court petition if Congress passes a final version of the bill with the language banning the photos intact.
Obama's decision to fight to conceal the photos to the Supreme Court marks an about-face on the open-government policies that he proclaimed during his first days in office.
On January 21, Obama signed an executive order <http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Freedom_of_Information_Act/> instructing all federal agencies and departments to "adopt a presumption in favor" of Freedom of Information Act requests and promised to make the federal government more transparent.
"The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears," Obama's order said. "In responding to requests under the FOIA, executive branch agencies should act promptly and in a spirit of cooperation, recognizing that such agencies are servants of the public."
Lieberman and Graham sharply criticized Obama's original decision not to fight the appeals court ruling in favor of the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court. Lieberman and Graham then sponsored an amendment - the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 - attached to the Senate's Homeland Security appropriations bill that called for the Department of Defense to prohibit the release of abuse photographs for a period of three years.
The Senate unanimously passed the Lieberman/Graham amendment on July 9. Congressmen Mike Conaway (R-Texas) and Heath Shuler (D-North Carolina) sponsored similar legislation in the House. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at the time it was a strong possibility the language barring release of the photographs would be stripped from the final version of the spending bill, which now appears unlikely.
In a statement after House and Senate conferees <http://appropriations.house.gov/pdf/FY10_Homeland_Conferees_Appointed-10.1.09.pdf> on the Appropriations Committee met Wednesday, Lieberman and Graham said they are both "looking forward" to swift passage of the legislation and urged Obama to sign the bill into law.
"I'm pleased Congress has finally acted to prevent the further release of photos showing detainee abuse," Graham said <http://lgraham.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=30e64542-802a-23ad-4b6e-175a6676dc5d&Region_id=&Issue_id=> . "I hope the courts will give deference to the Executive and Legislative branches who now speak with one voice prohibiting the photos' release. From the beginning I have said these photos do not add anything new. The release of these photos would be used by our enemies to incite violence against our soldiers and civilians serving abroad."
Last September, in upholding a lower court ruling ordering the release of the photos, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals noted that past US administrations had championed the release of photos that showed prisoners of war being abused and tortured.
Notably, after World War II, the US government publicized photos of prisoners in Japanese and German prisons and concentration camps, which the court noted, "showed emaciated prisoners, subjugated detainees, and even corpses. But the United States championed the use of the photos as a means of holding the perpetrators accountable."
Additionally, the appeals court shot down arguments like those made by Graham, saying, "It is plainly insufficient to claim that releasing documents could reasonably be expected to endanger some unspecified member of a group so vast as to encompass all United States troops, coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan," the appeals court panel of judges ruled.
The appeals court further added that releasing "the photographs is likely to further the purposes of the Geneva Conventions by deterring future abuse of prisoners."
Monday, September 14, 2009
Obama Admin Fights Bagram Detainee Court Access
September 14, 2009
Obama Admin Fights Bagram Detainee Court Access
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/09/14/us/politics/AP-US-Terror-Detainees.html
Filed at 9:16 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration argued late Monday that allowing terrorism detainees in Afghanistan to file lawsuits in U.S. courts challenging their detention would endanger the military mission in that country.
Although the Pentagon is giving the roughly 600 detainees at Bagram Airfield a new chance to challenge their detentions, the Obama administration stuck with Bush administration policy in a court filing Monday night that said the Bagram detainees' rights shouldn't extend as far as U.S. courtrooms.
In a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, the Justice Department said Bagram detainees should not be given equal rights to sue in the United States that the Supreme Court granted last year to detainees being held at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba.
The administration argued in its brief that Bagram is in an active war zone and the sovereign nation of Afghanistan, and there are sensitive diplomatic considerations involving detainees held there. That's in contrast to Cuba, which has no diplomatic relations with the United States and does not have the security implications of a war zone, the administration said.
The filing was made in response to a ruling in April by U.S. District Judge John Bates, who said foreign detainees at Bagram should be allowed to sue in U.S. civilian courts to challenge their confinement. Bates said the cases of the Guantanamo and Bagram detainees were essentially the same -- the first time a federal judge applied the Supreme Court's ruling on Guantanamo detainees to those held elsewhere in the world.
Bates' ruling was applauded by human rights organizations and drew a rebuke from congressional Republicans who said the judge, an Army veteran nominated by then-President George W. Bush, was endangering national security.
Obama's Justice Department has sided with the congressional Republicans and put forward the same argument as the Bush administration. It said in Monday's 85-page filing that allowing Bagram detainees access to U.S. courts would divert military personnel at Bagram and ''have serious adverse consequences for the military mission in Afghanistan.''
Bates' ruling ''reverses long-standing law, imposes great practical problems, conflicts with the considered judgment of both political branches, and risks opening the federal courts to habeas claims brought by detainees held in other theaters of war during future military actions,'' the filing said.
The filing comes on the heels of media reports over the weekend that the Pentagon has a new policy for Bagram detainees to challenge their detentions before military review boards. The prisoners will be given a U.S. military official to serve as their personal representative to help argue their case and for the first time they will be able to call witnesses and submit evidence in their defense.
Bates had cited the Bagram detainees' lack of representation or access to evidence in his April ruling.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Fear Was No Excuse - Miami Herald 9/11/09
Fear was no excuse to condone torture BY CHARLES C. KRULAK and JOSEPH P. HOAR
Posted on Fri, Sep. 11, 2009 www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1227832.html
In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to ``take off the gloves.'' As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.
But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas -- and his scare tactics.
We have seen how ill-conceived policies that ignored military law on the treatment of enemy prisoners hindered our ability to defeat al Qaeda. We have seen American troops die at the hands of foreign fighters recruited with stories about tortured Muslim detainees at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. And yet Cheney and others who orchestrated America's disastrous trip to ``the dark side'' continue to assert -- against all evidence -- that torture ``worked'' and that our country is better off for having gone there.
In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Cheney applauded the ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' -- what we used to call ``war crimes'' because they violated the Geneva Conventions, which the United States instigated and has followed for 60 years. Cheney insisted the abusive techniques were ``absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.'' He claimed they were ``directly responsible for the fact that for eight years, we had no further mass casualty attacks against the United States. It was good policy . . . It worked very, very well.''
Repeating these assertions doesn't make them true. We now see that the best intelligence, which led to the capture of Saddam Hussein and the elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was produced by professional interrogations using noncoercive techniques. When the abuse began, prisoners told interrogators whatever they thought would make it stop.
Torture is as likely to produce lies as the truth. And it did.
What leaders say matters. So when it comes to light, as it did recently, that U.S. interrogators staged mock executions and held a whirling electric drill close to the body of a naked, hooded detainee, and the former vice president winks and nods, it matters.
The Bush administration had already degraded the rules of war by authorizing techniques that violated the Geneva Conventions and shocked the conscience of the world. Now Cheney has publicly condoned the abuse that went beyond even those weakened standards, leading us down a slippery slope of lawlessness. Rules about the humane treatment of prisoners exist precisely to deter those in the field from taking matters into their own hands. They protect our nation's honor.
To argue that honorable conduct is only required against an honorable enemy degrades the Americans who must carry out the orders. As military professionals, we know that complex situational ethics cannot be applied during the stress of combat. The rules must be firm and absolute; if torture is broached as a possibility, it will become a reality. Moral equivocation about abuse at the top of the chain of command travels through the ranks at warp speed.
On Aug. 24, the United States took an important step toward moral clarity and the rule of law when a special task force recommended that in the future, the Army interrogation manual should be the single standard for all agencies of the U.S. government.
The unanimous decision represents an unusual consensus among the defense, intelligence, law enforcement and homeland security agencies. Members of the task force had access to every scrap of intelligence, yet they drew the opposite conclusion from Cheney's. They concluded that far from making us safer, cruelty betrays American values and harms U.S. national security.
On this solemn day we pause to remember those who lost their lives on 9/11. As our leaders work to prevent terrorists from again striking on our soil, they should remember the fundamental precept of counterinsurgency we've relearned in Afghanistan and Iraq: Undermine the enemy's legitimacy while building our own. These wars will not be won on the battlefield. They will be won in the hearts of young men who decide not to sign up to be fighters and young women who decline to be suicide bombers. If Americans torture and it comes to light -- as it inevitably will -- it embitters and alienates the very people we need most.
Our current commander-in-chief understands this. The task force recommendations take us a step closer to restoring the rule of law and the standards of human dignity that made us who we are as a nation. Repudiating torture and other cruelty helps keep us from being sent on fools' errands by bad intelligence. And in the end, that makes us all safer.
Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.
Monday, September 7, 2009
US tried to soften Treaty on Detainees- Wash Post 9/09
U.S. Tried to Soften Treaty on Detainees
Bush White House Sought to Shield Those Running Secret CIA Prisons
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702225.html?hpid=topnews
From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.
The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites.
Instead of embracing a far-reaching ban on arrests, detentions and abductions of people without disclosing their fate or whereabouts or ensuring "the protection of the law," the United States pressed in 2004 for a more limited prohibition on intentionally placing detainees outside legal protections for "a prolonged period of time." At the time, the CIA was secretly holding about a dozen prisoners.
Foreign governments criticized the U.S.-preferred wording, calling it vague and saying that proving intent would be hard and should not be necessary.
In the end, the Bush administration declined to endorse the treaty's broadly worded ban, which at least 81 countries have now signed, including all members of the European Union and many nations with checkered human rights records, such as Algeria, Argentina, Cuba and Guatemala.
A White House official said the Obama administration is reviewing the previous U.S. stance on the treaty as part of a wider look at international human rights accords that Washington has not signed. The official did not say when a decision might be made.
The administration has already reversed its predecessor's decision to shun the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is monitoring the treaty's implementation. But it has also said it will retain the ability to capture and transfer suspects to third countries, a practice known as rendition, while stressing that it will not do so if detainees are at risk of torture.
The documents detailing U.S. proposals to loosen some of the treaty's key language were released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by Amnesty International, but many passages were redacted, and the remaining portions make no direct reference to specific CIA or Defense Department objections.
A senior Bush administration policymaker confirmed in an interview last week, however, that the existence of the CIA prisons and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the Defense Department has held hundreds of suspected terrorists without initially disclosing their names, was "a complicating factor" in U.S. deliberations on the treaty.
"Our negotiators were certainly aware that there was this program where people were being held, and were not in touch with people, and they had to be careful to ensure that there was room" for that program to continue, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deliberations. He added that the treaty's proposed definition of "enforced disappearances" was only one of several problems Washington had with the draft.
"As with a number of previous human rights treaties, the language was just so broad that . . . we were not going to be able to sign," he said.
The treaty requires member countries to enact domestic criminal penalties for state-orchestrated disappearances and to compensate victims, but it has not taken legal effect because it has not been ratified by at least 20 nations, the minimum required. That leaves U.N. investigations of such cases in the hands of a five-member group chaired by a South African, which last year sent 1,203 new allegations of enforced disappearances to officials in the 28 countries said to be involved. A total of 42,393 alleged such disappearances in 79 countries remain unresolved by the group, according to its most recent annual report.
The U.N. group complained to the Bush administration last year about reports of the "enforced disappearance for a certain period of time" of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric who was abducted by the CIA from a Milan street in 2003 and sent to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. When the State Department responded that U.S. policy bars such renditions if torture is anticipated, the U.N. group highlighted the gulf between the global treaty's view of "intentionality" and the Bush administration's view.
"Intentionality is essentially irrelevant," the group said in its response to Washington, "in the sense that any act of enforced disappearance has the consequence of placing the persons subjected thereto outside the protection of the law, regardless of the pursued purposes." U.S. negotiators had argued to the contrary in 2006 -- that proving intent is "an essential ingredient of the crime."
During the negotiations, China and a few other countries joined the United States in repeatedly attempting to slow the pace of the drafting, citing the complexity of the underlying issues. But a February 2004 State Department cable described the United States as "isolated" in urging that the text include language allowing those participating in enforced disappearances to be exempt from prosecution if they thought they were following lawful orders.
The documents also spell out how the Bush administration was "virtually alone" in objecting to a treaty provision stipulating that anyone "with a legitimate interest," such as a relative, be given an explanation and accounting of an individual's detention by the government as well as information on the person's whereabouts and health. U.S. negotiators called that provision unacceptable in a 2004 document, saying it "could impair national security, law enforcement, or privacy interests."
David Kaye, a State Department lawyer from 1999 to 2002 who directs the International Human Rights Program at UCLA Law School, said after reviewing the documents that "it's clear that the 'right to know' was at the heart of the effort to draft this new instrument." In that context, he said, "the failure to come up with a creative way to solve the American problem with this language plainly looks like the Bush administration objected to the purpose of the treaty itself -- and that our allies roundly rejected the U.S. position."
He added: "I think a lot of the 'problems' in the text could be resolved and that the United States should consider joining this treaty."
Allen Weiner, another former State Department lawyer who is co-director of the Program in International Law at Stanford Law School, similarly said that many of the apparent U.S. concerns were "solvable" or could have been addressed in legal "reservations," whereby the U.S. government spelled out its plans to implement the treaty's language.
The senior Bush administration official noted, however, that Washington's ability to gain concessions from others was undermined by public revelation of the CIA prisons in 2005. "I doubt that other countries would have been pushing quite so hard on this particular convention at this time were they not trying to cause problems for the administration," he said.
The context, he said, enabled "both the Europeans and the Latins" to "join forces" in arguing against the U.S. proposals.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Bush White House Sought to Shield Those Running Secret CIA Prisons
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/07/AR2009090702225.html?hpid=topnews
From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.
The aim of the global treaty, long supported by the United States, was to end official kidnappings, detentions and killings like those that plagued Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, and that allegedly still occur in Russia, China, Iran, Colombia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere. But the documents suggest that initial U.S. support for the negotiations collided head-on with the then-undisclosed goal of seizing suspected terrorists anywhere in the world for questioning by CIA interrogators or indefinite detention by the U.S. military at foreign sites.
Instead of embracing a far-reaching ban on arrests, detentions and abductions of people without disclosing their fate or whereabouts or ensuring "the protection of the law," the United States pressed in 2004 for a more limited prohibition on intentionally placing detainees outside legal protections for "a prolonged period of time." At the time, the CIA was secretly holding about a dozen prisoners.
Foreign governments criticized the U.S.-preferred wording, calling it vague and saying that proving intent would be hard and should not be necessary.
In the end, the Bush administration declined to endorse the treaty's broadly worded ban, which at least 81 countries have now signed, including all members of the European Union and many nations with checkered human rights records, such as Algeria, Argentina, Cuba and Guatemala.
A White House official said the Obama administration is reviewing the previous U.S. stance on the treaty as part of a wider look at international human rights accords that Washington has not signed. The official did not say when a decision might be made.
The administration has already reversed its predecessor's decision to shun the U.N. Human Rights Council, which is monitoring the treaty's implementation. But it has also said it will retain the ability to capture and transfer suspects to third countries, a practice known as rendition, while stressing that it will not do so if detainees are at risk of torture.
The documents detailing U.S. proposals to loosen some of the treaty's key language were released last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request made by Amnesty International, but many passages were redacted, and the remaining portions make no direct reference to specific CIA or Defense Department objections.
A senior Bush administration policymaker confirmed in an interview last week, however, that the existence of the CIA prisons and the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the Defense Department has held hundreds of suspected terrorists without initially disclosing their names, was "a complicating factor" in U.S. deliberations on the treaty.
"Our negotiators were certainly aware that there was this program where people were being held, and were not in touch with people, and they had to be careful to ensure that there was room" for that program to continue, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deliberations. He added that the treaty's proposed definition of "enforced disappearances" was only one of several problems Washington had with the draft.
"As with a number of previous human rights treaties, the language was just so broad that . . . we were not going to be able to sign," he said.
The treaty requires member countries to enact domestic criminal penalties for state-orchestrated disappearances and to compensate victims, but it has not taken legal effect because it has not been ratified by at least 20 nations, the minimum required. That leaves U.N. investigations of such cases in the hands of a five-member group chaired by a South African, which last year sent 1,203 new allegations of enforced disappearances to officials in the 28 countries said to be involved. A total of 42,393 alleged such disappearances in 79 countries remain unresolved by the group, according to its most recent annual report.
The U.N. group complained to the Bush administration last year about reports of the "enforced disappearance for a certain period of time" of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric who was abducted by the CIA from a Milan street in 2003 and sent to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. When the State Department responded that U.S. policy bars such renditions if torture is anticipated, the U.N. group highlighted the gulf between the global treaty's view of "intentionality" and the Bush administration's view.
"Intentionality is essentially irrelevant," the group said in its response to Washington, "in the sense that any act of enforced disappearance has the consequence of placing the persons subjected thereto outside the protection of the law, regardless of the pursued purposes." U.S. negotiators had argued to the contrary in 2006 -- that proving intent is "an essential ingredient of the crime."
During the negotiations, China and a few other countries joined the United States in repeatedly attempting to slow the pace of the drafting, citing the complexity of the underlying issues. But a February 2004 State Department cable described the United States as "isolated" in urging that the text include language allowing those participating in enforced disappearances to be exempt from prosecution if they thought they were following lawful orders.
The documents also spell out how the Bush administration was "virtually alone" in objecting to a treaty provision stipulating that anyone "with a legitimate interest," such as a relative, be given an explanation and accounting of an individual's detention by the government as well as information on the person's whereabouts and health. U.S. negotiators called that provision unacceptable in a 2004 document, saying it "could impair national security, law enforcement, or privacy interests."
David Kaye, a State Department lawyer from 1999 to 2002 who directs the International Human Rights Program at UCLA Law School, said after reviewing the documents that "it's clear that the 'right to know' was at the heart of the effort to draft this new instrument." In that context, he said, "the failure to come up with a creative way to solve the American problem with this language plainly looks like the Bush administration objected to the purpose of the treaty itself -- and that our allies roundly rejected the U.S. position."
He added: "I think a lot of the 'problems' in the text could be resolved and that the United States should consider joining this treaty."
Allen Weiner, another former State Department lawyer who is co-director of the Program in International Law at Stanford Law School, similarly said that many of the apparent U.S. concerns were "solvable" or could have been addressed in legal "reservations," whereby the U.S. government spelled out its plans to implement the treaty's language.
The senior Bush administration official noted, however, that Washington's ability to gain concessions from others was undermined by public revelation of the CIA prisons in 2005. "I doubt that other countries would have been pushing quite so hard on this particular convention at this time were they not trying to cause problems for the administration," he said.
The context, he said, enabled "both the Europeans and the Latins" to "join forces" in arguing against the U.S. proposals.
Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Urges American Psychological Association Act on Own Policies
Rapporteur Says Guantanamo Conditions Continue to Violate International Law
CONTACT: press@ccrjustice.org
http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/un-special-rapporteur-torture-urges-american-psychological-association-act-o
August 7, 2009, New York – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) responded today to a letter made public from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to the American Psychological Association (APA) stating that the conditions of the men held at Guantánamo violate international law and requesting that all psychologists be removed from the base and no longer participate actively or tacitly in interrogations.
The letter came the day after CCR and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) requested the Canadian Government open a war crimes investigation into Dr. Larry James, a former high-ranking psychologist at Guantánamo who is in Toronto for the annual APA convention.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, called attention to the fact that Guantanamo detainees are still arbitrarily detained, cruelly force-fed and isolated. He expressed his concern about the mental conditions of some of the long term detainees. The current conditions, combined with “the rough physical treatment and past practice of torture” led him to declare that the men and children detained in Guantanamo continue to be held “in violation of international law.”
Mr. Novak officially affirmed what CCR and its allies have been saying and the SASC report and OLC memos documented, that psychologists have been involved “in the design, supervision, implementation, and legitimization of a regime of physical and psychological torture at US military and intelligence facilities, including Guantánamo.”
Mr. Nowak urged the American Psychological Association to follow its own policies and requested the removal of all psychologists from Guantanamo and from all other detention sites where violations of human rights continue. The APA has seen internal strife and controversy these last years over the participation of some military and intelligence psychologists in torture and other abuses of detainees at U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Said Center for Constitutional Rights fellow Deborah Popowski, “We call on the APA to officially condemn the participation of its members in abusive interrogations in violation of their professional ethics. Psychologists were central to the design and implementation of abusive interrogation policies. When health professionals do harm, we all suffer.”
For more information on the involvement of health professionals in torture and abuse visit the Center for Constitutional Rights website www.whenhealersharm.org. CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last six years – sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA “ghost detainee” there. CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at Guantanamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. In addition, CCR has been working to resettle the approximately 60 men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture. www.ccrjustice.org.
Rapporteur Says Guantanamo Conditions Continue to Violate International Law
CONTACT: press@ccrjustice.org
http://ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/un-special-rapporteur-torture-urges-american-psychological-association-act-o
August 7, 2009, New York – The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) responded today to a letter made public from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture to the American Psychological Association (APA) stating that the conditions of the men held at Guantánamo violate international law and requesting that all psychologists be removed from the base and no longer participate actively or tacitly in interrogations.
The letter came the day after CCR and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) requested the Canadian Government open a war crimes investigation into Dr. Larry James, a former high-ranking psychologist at Guantánamo who is in Toronto for the annual APA convention.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, called attention to the fact that Guantanamo detainees are still arbitrarily detained, cruelly force-fed and isolated. He expressed his concern about the mental conditions of some of the long term detainees. The current conditions, combined with “the rough physical treatment and past practice of torture” led him to declare that the men and children detained in Guantanamo continue to be held “in violation of international law.”
Mr. Novak officially affirmed what CCR and its allies have been saying and the SASC report and OLC memos documented, that psychologists have been involved “in the design, supervision, implementation, and legitimization of a regime of physical and psychological torture at US military and intelligence facilities, including Guantánamo.”
Mr. Nowak urged the American Psychological Association to follow its own policies and requested the removal of all psychologists from Guantanamo and from all other detention sites where violations of human rights continue. The APA has seen internal strife and controversy these last years over the participation of some military and intelligence psychologists in torture and other abuses of detainees at U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
Said Center for Constitutional Rights fellow Deborah Popowski, “We call on the APA to officially condemn the participation of its members in abusive interrogations in violation of their professional ethics. Psychologists were central to the design and implementation of abusive interrogation policies. When health professionals do harm, we all suffer.”
For more information on the involvement of health professionals in torture and abuse visit the Center for Constitutional Rights website www.whenhealersharm.org. CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo for the last six years – sending the first ever habeas attorney to the base and sending the first attorney to meet with a former CIA “ghost detainee” there. CCR has been responsible for organizing and coordinating more than 500 pro bono lawyers across the country in order to represent the men at Guantanamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. In addition, CCR has been working to resettle the approximately 60 men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture. www.ccrjustice.org.
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