The Sick Logic of the CIA Memos: Abuse Isn't Torture If a Doctor Is There

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AlterNet

Perhaps the most chilling aspect is that medical professionals apparently conducted a form of research on the detainees, without their consent.
Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was fond of saying that when it came to handling high-value terror suspects, he would play in fair territory, but with "chalk dust on my cleats." Four legal memos released by the Obama administration make it clear that the referee role in CIA interrogations was played by its medical and psychological personnel.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a "system of medical and psychological monitoring" of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn't cause "serious or permanent harm" and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture.
The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it: "The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain."
In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.
The memos provide official confirmation of both much-reported and previously unknown roles of doctors, psychologists, physician assistants and other medical personnel with the CIA's Office of Medical Services (OMS). The government's lawyers characterized these medical roles as "safeguards" for detainees.
Medical oversight was present from the beginning of the special interrogation program following the 9/11 attacks and appears to have grown more formalized over the program's existence. The earliest of the four memos, from August 2002, states that a medical expert with experience in the military's Survival Evasion Resistance, Escape (SERE) training would be present during waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah and would put a stop to procedures "if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe medical or physical harm to Zubaydah." (All interrogation techniques, the memos said, were "imported" from SERE.)
Later, OMS personnel were involved in "designing safeguards for, and in monitoring implementation of, the procedures" used on other high-value detainees. In December 2004, the OMS produced a set of "Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention," a still-secret document that is heavily quoted from in three legal memos that were written the following year.
The CIA declined our request to comment further on the OMS' role in detainee treatment. The OMS employs physicians, psychologists and other medical professionals to care for CIA employees and their families.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. "In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented," one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also "if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled ... and how the subject looked between each treatment." Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and "regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees" was required.
The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of "medical research" during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.
The memos also draw heavily on the advice of psychologists that interrogation techniques would not be expected to cause lasting harm. At times this advice sounds contradictory. While calling waterboarding "medically acceptable," the OMS also deemed it "the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques."
The fact that traumatic events have the potential to cause long-lasting post-traumatic stress syndrome has been well documented. Physicians for Human Rights, in interviews with eleven former detainees held in Iraq and Afghanistan, found "severe, long-term physical and psychological consequences." "All the individuals we evaluated were ultimately released without ever being charged," said Dr. Allen Keller, medical director of the Bellevue/New York University School of Medicine Program for Survivors of Torture.
The memos describe the techniques in highly precise and clinical detail, befitting a medical textbook. During waterboarding, in which a physician and psychologist were to be present at all times, "the detainee is monitored to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress. If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose and nasopharynx." Side effects including vomiting, aspiration and throat spasm that could cut off breathing were each addressed: "In the event of such spasms ... if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy."
While physician assistants could be present when most "enhanced" techniques were applied, "use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician," one memo said, quoting the OMS guidelines.
Doctors were also described as having vetted the practices for safety. Certain limits on waterboarding were created "with extensive input from OMS." One memo states that OMS "doctors and psychologists" confirmed that combining the various techniques "would not operate in a different manner from the way they do individually, so as to cause severe pain."
Medical and psychological personnel were required to observe whenever interrogators came into physical contact with detainees, including slapping them and pushing them into flexible walls ("walling"). Whenever a detainee was doused with cold water, a medical officer had to be on hand to monitor for signs of hypothermia. Confining prisoners to cramped boxes required "continuing consultation between the interrogators and OMS officers." Prisoners made to stand for long periods to prevent sleep were to carefully monitor detainees for swelling of the legs and other dangerous conditions, and at least three times early in the program were switched, on medical advice, to "horizontal sleep deprivation."
This was one example of how medical personnel could, according to the CIA, help prevent "severe physical or mental pain or suffering" on the part of the detainees. However, the memos show that the OMS' role was not merely to limit the medical impact of interrogations, but also to consult on the effectiveness of interrogations. A May 30, 2005, memo quotes the OMS suggesting that cramped confinement was "not ... particularly effective" because it provides "a safe haven offering respite from interrogation."
Some medical professionals are calling for their colleagues to be investigated and sanctioned for participating in practices that professional medical and psychological organizations and officials in the Justice Department now call torture. "We stand ready to adjudicate these issues," said American Psychological Association spokesperson Rhea Farberman.
But finding out which professionals were involved in designing, monitoring and implementing the interrogation techniques may be difficult. The four memos were released almost in their entirety. The few redactions concerned mainly the names of the personnel involved.

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Thousands of immigrants held in US in violation of international law

Minnesota Independent

A comprehensive report issued by Amnesty International USA Wednesday finds that tens of thousands of immigrants -- and, in one case, a Minnesota-born citizen -- have been held in detention in the United States, many in violation of international law.
Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants - including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens - without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.
One case highlighted in the Amnesty report tells of "Mr. W," a Minnesota-born U.S. citizen who says he has never set foot outside of the country. He was placed in immigration detention in Florence, Arizona, and because he couldn't access his birth certificate, he had to work work in the prison kitchen for a dollar a day to raise the $30 needed to order a copy of his birth certificate. He was released after more than a month in lockup.
"America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders," said Larry Cox, executive director of AIUSA, in a statement released with the report. "Officials are locking up thousands of human beings without due process and holding them in a system that is impossible to navigate. . . . The U.S. government must ensure that every person in immigration detention has a hearing to determine whether that detention is necessary."
Such arbitrary detentions violate international standards such as the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, says Amnesty. The group calls on Congress to amend the immigration laws to eliminate arbitrary detention, use alternatives to detention where possible and improve detention conditions.
[..]
Meanwhile, advocates for restrictive immigration policies claim that detention is necessary to ensure that immigrants show up to their immigration hearings.
"The reason they detain people is because if you let them go, they disappear," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform. "So they detain them for very good reason. You have people who have no apparent claim for entry into the [United States], and if you let them out on the streets you're never going to see them again."
In fact, the Amnesty report notes that there are effective and far less costly alternatives to detention, most of which takes place in jails run by private companies under contract with the U.S. government. The average cost of detaining a migrant is $95 per person, per day -- approximately $2,850 per month. Alternatives to detention, such as regular reporting to authorities, cost as little as $12 a day. A study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that such alternatives to detention are generally effective - in approximately 91 percent of cases, the immigrants shows up for their hearings.
Meanwhile, detaining immigrants is getting more and more expensive as the numbers of detainees in the U.S. has soared, from 10,000 in 1996, reports Amnesty, to more than 30,000 in 2008. Of the more than 300,000 men, women and children taken into custody by US immigration authorities each year, many are asylum seekers, torture survivors, human trafficking victims, lawful permanent residents and parents of U.S. citizen children, Amnesty reports.
Take, for example, the case of a 26-year-old Chinese woman who told Amnesty researchers that she fled to the United States after she and her mother were beaten in China for handing out religious fliers. She arrived in the United States seeking asylum in 2008 and was detained at the airport, then transferred to a county jail. No one told her why she was being held. Without explanation, an ICE Field Office Director ordered her to remain in detention unless she could pay $50,000 bond. But neither her relatives in the United States nor her family in China was able to raise the money. Finally, after almost a year in detention, they were able to post the bond and win her release.
Although in the past asylum seekers who could establish community ties could be released, in November 2007 ICE issued new guidelines that restricted asylum seeker's ability to receive parole. And the Justice Department does not have authority to review decisions made by ICE field office directors involving migrants stopped at the border.
[..]
The result is that whether or not someone is detained or released pending an asylum determination is often arbitrary. Only 4 percent of those seeking asylum in Newark, New Jersey were granted it, reports Amnesty, while 98 percent were released in Harlingen, Texas.
Although ICE reported an average detention stay of 37 days in 2007, Amnesty found that immigrants and asylum seekers were often detained for months or even years before anyone determined whether they're actually allowed to remain in the United States.
And according to a 2003 study, asylum seekers who were eventually granted asylum spent an average of 10 months in detention; at least one was detained for as long as three and a half years. An Associated Press investigation recently found, similarly, that nearly 10,000 immigrants had been in custody longer than the average length of detention that ICE cites.
Immigrants arrested at the border don't even have a right to have their detention reviewed by an immigration judge. And although technically those arrested inside the United States do have a right to review before a judge, Amnesty's researchers found that those reviews often do not take place. Those ordered deported to countries that refuse to take them back, meanwhile, may remain in detention indefinitely -- violating both domestic and international legal standards, Amnesty claims.
Adding to immigrants' troubles is that unlike in criminal proceedings, they have no right to a lawyer in immigration proceedings. Those who manage to retain one at their own expense often fall prey to incompetent and unlicensed attorneys, or notarios, as the Washington Independent has reported.
[..]
According to ICE, 74 people have died while in immigration detention between 2004 and July 2008. Amnesty's report describes several incidents where severe illness or injury were overlooked by immigration officials, resulting in death, such as the case of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. While in detention, other detainees report that he collapsed and hit his head on the floor. Instead of receiving medical treatment, he was shackled to the floor and placed in solitary confinement for "behavioral problems." More than 13 hours later, during which he was unresponsive and foaming at the mouth, he was taken for emergency surgery for a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. He slipped into a coma and died four months later.
Lawful residents and even U.S. citizens, unable to prove their legal status, may also get caught in the immigration system's snare. Amnesty International "has identified more than a hundred cases in the past ten years in which US citizens and lawful permanent residents have incorrectly been placed into removal proceedings."
The Washington Independent previously reported on the case of a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen living in Los Angeles who was deported to Mexico because he could not produce his passport. He was left homeless in Mexico until his family found him in Tijuana three months later.

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Thousands of immigrants held in US in violation of international law

Minnesota Independent

A comprehensive report issued by Amnesty International USA Wednesday finds that tens of thousands of immigrants -- and, in one case, a Minnesota-born citizen -- have been held in detention in the United States, many in violation of international law.
Conducted by Amnesty researchers based on interviews over the course of a year with immigration lawyers and judges, asylum seekers, government officials and non-governmental organizations, the report finds that U.S. immigration policy has increasingly detained immigrants - including lawful residents and even some U.S. citizens - without a meaningful ability to challenge their detentions in an objective judicial proceeding, without access to a lawyer to help them determine their legal status, and often in inhumane conditions, commingled with criminals and denied access to minimal health care.
One case highlighted in the Amnesty report tells of "Mr. W," a Minnesota-born U.S. citizen who says he has never set foot outside of the country. He was placed in immigration detention in Florence, Arizona, and because he couldn't access his birth certificate, he had to work work in the prison kitchen for a dollar a day to raise the $30 needed to order a copy of his birth certificate. He was released after more than a month in lockup.
"America should be outraged by the scale of human rights abuses occurring within its own borders," said Larry Cox, executive director of AIUSA, in a statement released with the report. "Officials are locking up thousands of human beings without due process and holding them in a system that is impossible to navigate. . . . The U.S. government must ensure that every person in immigration detention has a hearing to determine whether that detention is necessary."
Such arbitrary detentions violate international standards such as the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, says Amnesty. The group calls on Congress to amend the immigration laws to eliminate arbitrary detention, use alternatives to detention where possible and improve detention conditions.
[..]
Meanwhile, advocates for restrictive immigration policies claim that detention is necessary to ensure that immigrants show up to their immigration hearings.
"The reason they detain people is because if you let them go, they disappear," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for Immigration Reform. "So they detain them for very good reason. You have people who have no apparent claim for entry into the [United States], and if you let them out on the streets you're never going to see them again."
In fact, the Amnesty report notes that there are effective and far less costly alternatives to detention, most of which takes place in jails run by private companies under contract with the U.S. government. The average cost of detaining a migrant is $95 per person, per day -- approximately $2,850 per month. Alternatives to detention, such as regular reporting to authorities, cost as little as $12 a day. A study by the Vera Institute of Justice found that such alternatives to detention are generally effective - in approximately 91 percent of cases, the immigrants shows up for their hearings.
Meanwhile, detaining immigrants is getting more and more expensive as the numbers of detainees in the U.S. has soared, from 10,000 in 1996, reports Amnesty, to more than 30,000 in 2008. Of the more than 300,000 men, women and children taken into custody by US immigration authorities each year, many are asylum seekers, torture survivors, human trafficking victims, lawful permanent residents and parents of U.S. citizen children, Amnesty reports.
Take, for example, the case of a 26-year-old Chinese woman who told Amnesty researchers that she fled to the United States after she and her mother were beaten in China for handing out religious fliers. She arrived in the United States seeking asylum in 2008 and was detained at the airport, then transferred to a county jail. No one told her why she was being held. Without explanation, an ICE Field Office Director ordered her to remain in detention unless she could pay $50,000 bond. But neither her relatives in the United States nor her family in China was able to raise the money. Finally, after almost a year in detention, they were able to post the bond and win her release.
Although in the past asylum seekers who could establish community ties could be released, in November 2007 ICE issued new guidelines that restricted asylum seeker's ability to receive parole. And the Justice Department does not have authority to review decisions made by ICE field office directors involving migrants stopped at the border.
[..]
The result is that whether or not someone is detained or released pending an asylum determination is often arbitrary. Only 4 percent of those seeking asylum in Newark, New Jersey were granted it, reports Amnesty, while 98 percent were released in Harlingen, Texas.
Although ICE reported an average detention stay of 37 days in 2007, Amnesty found that immigrants and asylum seekers were often detained for months or even years before anyone determined whether they're actually allowed to remain in the United States.
And according to a 2003 study, asylum seekers who were eventually granted asylum spent an average of 10 months in detention; at least one was detained for as long as three and a half years. An Associated Press investigation recently found, similarly, that nearly 10,000 immigrants had been in custody longer than the average length of detention that ICE cites.
Immigrants arrested at the border don't even have a right to have their detention reviewed by an immigration judge. And although technically those arrested inside the United States do have a right to review before a judge, Amnesty's researchers found that those reviews often do not take place. Those ordered deported to countries that refuse to take them back, meanwhile, may remain in detention indefinitely -- violating both domestic and international legal standards, Amnesty claims.
Adding to immigrants' troubles is that unlike in criminal proceedings, they have no right to a lawyer in immigration proceedings. Those who manage to retain one at their own expense often fall prey to incompetent and unlicensed attorneys, or notarios, as the Washington Independent has reported.
[..]
According to ICE, 74 people have died while in immigration detention between 2004 and July 2008. Amnesty's report describes several incidents where severe illness or injury were overlooked by immigration officials, resulting in death, such as the case of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. While in detention, other detainees report that he collapsed and hit his head on the floor. Instead of receiving medical treatment, he was shackled to the floor and placed in solitary confinement for "behavioral problems." More than 13 hours later, during which he was unresponsive and foaming at the mouth, he was taken for emergency surgery for a skull fracture and brain hemorrhage. He slipped into a coma and died four months later.
Lawful residents and even U.S. citizens, unable to prove their legal status, may also get caught in the immigration system's snare. Amnesty International "has identified more than a hundred cases in the past ten years in which US citizens and lawful permanent residents have incorrectly been placed into removal proceedings."
The Washington Independent previously reported on the case of a developmentally disabled U.S. citizen living in Los Angeles who was deported to Mexico because he could not produce his passport. He was left homeless in Mexico until his family found him in Tijuana three months later.

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Judge Orders 17 Detainees at Guantánamo Freed

NYTimes.com

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to release 17 detainees at Guantánamo Bay by the end of the week, the first such ruling in nearly seven years of legal disputes over the administration's detention policies.
The judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court, ordered that the 17 men be brought to his courtroom on Friday from the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they have been held since 2002. He indicated that he would release the men, members of the restive Uighur Muslim minority in western China, into the care of supporters in the United States, initially in the Washington area.
"I think the moment has arrived for the court to shine the light of constitutionality on the reasons for detention," Judge Urbina said.
Saying the men had never fought the United States and were not a security threat, he tersely rejected Bush administration claims that he lacked the power to order the men set free in the United States and government requests that he stay his order to permit an immediate appeal.
The ruling was a sharp setback for the administration, which has waged a long legal battle to defend its policies of detention at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, arguing a broad executive power in waging war. Federal courts up to the Supreme Court have waded through detention questions and in several major cases the courts have rejected administration contentions.
The government recently conceded that it would no longer try to prove that the Uighurs were enemy combatants, the classification it uses to detain people at Guantánamo, where 255 men are now held. But it has fought efforts by lawyers for the men to have them released into the United States, saying the Uighurs admitted to receiving weapons training in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said the administration was "deeply concerned by, and strongly disagrees with" the decision. She added that the ruling, "if allowed to stand, could be used as precedent for other detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, including sworn enemies of the United States suspected of planning the attacks of 9/11, who may also seek release into our country."
Justice Department lawyers said they were filing an emergency application on Tuesday night for a stay from the federal appeals court in Washington.
Judge Urbina's decision came in a habeas corpus lawsuit authorized by a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June that gave detainees the right to have federal judges review the reason for their detention. Speaking from the bench in a courtroom crowded with Uighur supporters of the detainees, Judge Urbina suggested that the government was seeking a stay as a tactic to keep the men imprisoned.
"All of this means more delay," he said with evident impatience, "and delay is the name of the game up until this point." The centuries-old doctrine of habeas corpus permits a judge to demand production of a prisoner, a power Judge Urbina sought to exercise with his order that the men be brought to him.
"I want to see the individuals," he said.
The Uighurs have long been at the center of contentious legal cases because they said they were swept into detention in Afghanistan in 2001 by mistake. They said they were in Afghanistan to seek refuge from China, where the Uighurs, Turkic Muslims, often bridle at Han Chinese rule.
The Bush administration has fought the Uighurs in court for years, contending that their encampment in Afghanistan had ties to a Uighur terror group. Last summer, a federal appeals court ridiculed as inadequate the government's secret evidence for holding one of the men. In the months since, the government has said that it would "serve no useful purpose" to continue to try to prove that any of these 17 men were enemy combatants.
Lawyers for the Uighurs said the men would be persecuted or killed if they were returned to China. The administration said that since transferring five Uighur detainees to Albania in 2006, it had been unable to persuade governments to accept the other 17. Diplomats say many governments fear reprisal by China, which considers Uighur separatist groups terrorists.
The administration insisted during arguments on Tuesday that the courts did not have the power to release the men into the United States.
Judge Urbina, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, underscored the significance of his ruling with repeated references to the constitutional separation of powers and the judiciary's role.
He rejected Justice Department arguments as assertions of executive power to detain people indefinitely without court review. He said that "is not in keeping with our system of government."
More than 40 Uighurs, a few in native dress that included sequined velvet caps, watched in anxious silence. Only when the judge rose to leave the bench did they break into applause.

Police State RNC: A Nun and Eight Others Swept into Unmarked Van by Cops in Minnesota

Image via Wikipedia

Alternet.org

The 6 activists arrested during police raids in advance of the Republican National Convention are being held without charge by the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, the Minnesota Independent reports.
The arrestees are being held on probable cause holds. These holds give the authorities 36 hours to charge them or let them go. Holds are typically used to give investigators more time to gather evidence before filing formal charges.
Holds allow police to charge first and ask questions later. Sometimes that's a good thing. Arrest opportunities are unpredictable. A suspect could slip away in the time it takes to turn a solid suspicion into sufficient evidence to file charges. A probable cause hold buys the police some time to dot the i's and cross the t's.
However, it doesn't take a genius to see how the power to detain people without charge can be abused. For example, unethical police officers have been known to use frivolous holds as quickie jail terms. Piss off the police, spend 3 days in jail--no trial required.
In Minnesota, a probable cause hold can be issued by an officer without review by a judge or a prosecutor. The 36-hour window doesn't include weekends and holidays. So the protesters arrested over the long weekend could be locked up until Wednesday.
The National Lawyers Guild is asking a judge to review these detentions in the hopes of getting the arrestees out sooner.
Imagine if the police could hold these protesters as long as they wanted.
The United States is holding suspects without charge at Guantanamo--many of whom were apprehended without anything approaching probable cause. Of course, Bush administration asserts the right to put off their trials forever.
Scenarios like these illustrate why habeas corpus is vital to the rule of law.
UPDATE (12:34 PDT):: One of the 9 protesters arrested was a nun, seen being loaded into an unmarked blue van. The 9 were apparently trying to climb a fence near a church.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: ColdSnap is reporting 9 arrests downtown near the Excel center and police massing all over the downtown core.
The National Lawyers Guild and Communities United Against Police Brutality have filed an emergency motion to stop the seizure of cell phones and cameras during the RNC.
The groups will hold a joint press conference at Hennepin County Government Plaza to discuss their application for an emergency injunction, according to a tweet issued by the ColdSnap Legal Collective.

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Nine Reasons to Investigate War Crimes Now

AlterNet

1. World peace cannot be achieved without human rights and accountability.

According to Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals, "The ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible to law." Moving in that direction will be impossible unless such responsibility applies to the statesmen of the world's most powerful countries, and above all the world's sole superpower. U.S. support for the war crimes charges like those just brought by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir will represent little more than hypocrisy if U.S. Presidents are not held to the same standard.
2. The rule of law is central to our democracy.
Most Americans believe that even the highest officials are bound by law. If we send mentally-disabled juveniles to prison as adults, but let government officials who authorize torture and launch illegal wars go scot-free, we destroy the very basis of the rule of law.
3. We must not allow precedents to be set that promote war crimes.
Executive action unchallenged by Congress changes the way our law is interpreted. According to Robert Borosage, writing for Huffington Post, "If Bush's extreme assertions of power are not challenged by the Congress, they end up not simply creating new law, they could end up rewriting the Constitution itself."
4. We must restore the principles of democracy to our government.
The claim that the President, as commander-in-chief, can exercise the unlimited powers of a king or dictator strikes at the very heart of our democracy. As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson put it, we, as citizens, would "submit ourselves to rules only if under rules." Countries like Chile can attest that the restoration of democracy and the rule of law requires more than voting a new party into office -- it requires a rejection of impunity for the criminal acts of government officials.
5. We must forestall an imperialist resurgence.
When they are out of office, the advocates of imperial expansion and global domination have proven brilliant at lying in wait to undermine and destroy their opponents.
They did it to destroy the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. They'll do it again to an Obama Administration unless their machinations are exposed and discredited first.
6. We must have national consensus on the real reasons for the Bush Administration's failures.
Republicans are preparing to dominate future decades of American politics by blaming the failure of the Iraq war on those who "sent a signal" that the U.S. would not "stay the course" whatever the cost. Establishing the real reasons for the failure of the U.S. in Iraq -- the criminal and anti-democratic character of the war -- is the necessary condition for defeating that effort.
7. We must restore America's damaged reputation abroad.
The world has watched as the United States -- the self-proclaimed steward of democracy -- has systematically broken the letter and spirit of its Constitution, violated international treaties, and ignored basic moral tenets of humanity. As former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora recently pointed out to the Senate Armed Services Committee, our nation's "policy of cruelty" has violated our "overarching foreign policy interests and our national security." To establish international legitimacy, we must demonstrate that we are capable of holding our leaders to account.
8. We must lay the basis for major change in U.S. foreign policy.
Real security in the era of global warming and nuclear proliferation must be based on international cooperation. But genuine cooperation requires that the U.S. entirely repudiate the course of the past eight years. The American people must understand why international cooperation rather than pursuit of global domination is necessary to their own security. And other countries must be convinced that we really mean it.
9. We must deter future U.S. war crimes.
The specter of more war crimes haunts our future. Rumors continue to circulate about an American or American-backed Israeli attack on Iran. A recently introduced House resolution promoted by AIPAC "demands" that the President initiate what is effectively a blockade against Iran -- an act seen by some as tantamount to a declaration of war. Nothing could provide a greater deterrent to such future war crimes than establishing accountability for those of the past.
Holding war criminals accountable will require placing the long-term well-being of our country and the world ahead of short-term political advantage. As Rep. Wexler put it, "We owe it to the American people and history to pursue the wrongdoing of this Administration whether or not it helps us politically or in the next election. Our actions will properly define the Bush Administration in the eyes of history and that is the true test."

Government May Have Massive Surveillance Program for Use in National Emergency

AlterNet

“Main Core,” a program that authorizes “computer searches through massive [unspecified] electronic databases” in order to discover “potential threats” in the event of a “national emergency”:

According to a senior government official…”There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” … One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

These so-called “Continuity of Governance” plans, Radar notes, “are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts.” “Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets,” said a former military operative. Furthermore, the NSA domestic surveillance program reportedly “suppl[ies] data to Main Core.”


According to Radar, a “number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations” say Main Core is strikingly similar to what Comey refused to authorize at Ashcroft’s bedside:

[T]he program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government’s data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,” said constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability.”

Bush Administration Still Denying Justice for Sami Al-Arian

AlterNet

Dr. Sami Amin Al-Arian, who has spent the past four years in jail despite a jury's failure to return a single guilty verdict against him, has been called before a third grand jury, despite the fact that Al-Arian signed a "no-cooperation" agreement with the government providing that he would not be required to appear before any grand jury. The announcement came on March 3rd, one month before his scheduled release.


Past National Lawyers Guild President Peter Erlinder, Al-Arian's counsel in 4th Circuit and 11th Circuit appeals, on the "acquitted conduct" Supreme Court cert petition said, "The duplicity of the Justice Department and the failure of the courts to recognize basic contract-law principles in this case is an example of how politically-motivated "war on terror" prosecutions are distorting the American legal system. In the Al-Arian case, the Justice Department and the courts have made a mockery of the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial which should outrage all Americans as deeply as the Tampa jury that acquitted Dr. Al-Arian more than two years ago."


It is now likely that when Dr. Al-Arian again refuses to testify because of the "no-cooperation" agreement, he will be charged with obstruction of justice and could receive several additional years in prison. If he testifies, he faces a "perjury" trap based on Assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg's past practice with other acquitted Palestinian defendants.


When he was arrested in February 2003, Dr. Sami Al-Arian was a prominent Palestinian academic and a leading member of the Muslim community in south Florida and one of the most prominent Palestinian academics and activists in the United States. He was acquitted on eight of 17 charges against him December 2005 after a six-month trial with three co-defendants. In April 2006 he pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy, involving assisting his brother-in-law in his immigration matters and denying to a reporter that he knew of a colleague's association with Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In return, federal prosecutors agreed to drop the remaining eight charges on which the jury had "hung" 10-2 for acquittal and to recommend a time-served sentence with release and deportation in May 2006. The Tampa AUSA admitted, on the record, that the usual "cooperation clause" was removed from the plea agreement because Dr. Al-Arian and his lawyers would not agree to any form of cooperation.


At sentencing on May 1, 2007, Tampa Federal Judge James Moody gave him the constitutional maximum sentence of an additional year, citing the very offenses of which the jury had acquitted him. Despite the "no-cooperation" agreement, and while the appeal of his acquitted conduct sentence was pending on appeal, Al-Arian was found in civil contempt in January 2007. In December 2007, a federal judge in lifted the civil contempt and Al-Arian's new release date was April 2008.

Rigged Trials at Gitmo

The Nation

According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.


Colonel Davis's criticism of the commissions has been escalating since he resigned in October, telling the Washington Post that he had been pressured by politically appointed senior Defense officials to pursue cases deemed "sexy" and of "high interest" (such as the 9/11 cases now being pursued) in the run-up to the 2008 elections. Davis, once a staunch defender of the commissions process, elaborated on his reasons in a December 10, 2007, Los Angeles Times op-ed. "I concluded that full, fair and open trials were not possible under the current system," he wrote. "I felt that the system had become deeply politicized and that I could no longer do my job effectively."


Then, in an interview with The Nation in February after the six Guantánamo detainees were charged, Davis offered the most damning evidence of the military commissions' bias--a revelation that speaks to fundamental flaws in the Bush Administration's conduct of statecraft: its contempt for the rule of law and its pursuit of political objectives above all else.


When asked if he thought the men at Guantánamo could receive a fair trial, Davis provided the following account of an August 2005 meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes--the man who now oversees the tribunal process for the Defense Department.


"[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," recalled Davis, referring to the Nazi tribunals in 1945, considered the model of procedural rights in the prosecution of war crimes. In response, Davis said he noted that at Nuremberg there had been some acquittals, which had lent great credibility to the proceedings.


"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis continued. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we can't have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can't have acquittals. We've got to have convictions.'"


Davis submitted his resignation on October 4, 2007, just hours after he was informed that Haynes had been put above him in the commissions' chain of command. "Everyone has opinions," Davis says. "But when he was put above me, his opinions became orders."


Reached for comment, Defense Department spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said, "The Department of Defense disputes the assertions made by Colonel Davis in this statement regarding acquittals."


"The fact that [Haynes] said there can be no acquittals will stain the entire [tribunal] process," says Scott Horton, who teaches law at Columbia University Law School and has written extensively about Haynes's conflicts with the Judge Advocate General's (JAG) corps, the judicial arm of the armed forces, which is charged with implementing the military commissions. According to Horton, Haynes tried to cut the JAG corps out of internal debates over the detention and prosecution of detainees, knowing it was critical of the Administration's views. In private memos and in public Senate testimony, high-ranking officers of the corps have repeatedly expressed concerns about the Administration's justification of "extreme interrogation techniques."


"The JAG corps consists of a group of rigorous professionals, but Haynes never trusted them to do their job," says Horton. "His clashes have always had the same subtext--they want to be independent; he wants them to do political dirty work."


Haynes, a political appointee and chief legal adviser to Defense secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates, was nominated in 2006 by the Bush Administration for a lifetime seat as a judge in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But his nomination never got out of committee, primarily because of the opposition of Republican Senator (and former military lawyer) Lindsey Graham and other members alarmed over Haynes's role in writing, or supervising the writing of, Pentagon memos advocating the use of harsh interrogation techniques the Geneva Conventions classify as torture.


Currently, in his capacity as Pentagon general counsel, Haynes oversees both the prosecution and the defense for the Guantánamo commissions.


"You would think a person in that position wouldn't be favoring one side," says Colonel Davis.


Told of Davis's story about Haynes, Clive Stafford Smith, a defense attorney who has represented more than seventy Guantánamo clients, said, "Hearing it makes me think I'm back in Mississippi representing a black man in front of an all-white jury."


He adds, "It confirms what people close to the system have always said," noting that when three prosecutors--Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr and Capt. Carrie Wolf--requested to be transferred out of the Office of Military Commissions in 2004, they said they'd been told the process was rigged. In an e-mail to his supervisors, Preston had said that there was thin evidence against the accused. "But they were told by the chief prosecutor at the time that they didn't need evidence to get convictions," says Stafford Smith.

U.S. agents eye secret prisons in Ethiopia

Our president has not kept his promise to back off the torture or extra-legal renditions. They've just found a patsy to do it for him. Ethiopia is Bush's new Christian country joined in the "war against terror." The Ethiopians have been long known for their use of torture and extra-legal detentions. They have taken the war to Somalia at the bidding of the Bush Administration and are holding accused terrorists from Somalia, Kenya, and Nigeria as well as I'm sure many other locations.
But of course, since they are Christians, that makes it ok.
MSNBC.com

CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.
Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.


The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.


Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.


Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.


U.S. government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.


The prisoners were never in American custody, said an FBI spokesman, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said U.S. agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism work.

Twelve Year Old is Unlawful Combatant at Gitmo

The blog the talking dog has an interview with James Yee, the Muslim Caplain charged with espionage then released with an honorable discharge and commendations. He's wrote a book!
It seems that Bush has twelve year olds at Gitmo as well as Abu Ghraib. Just where does this guy get off?

James Yee is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. In 2002 and 2003, he served as the Muslim Chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, with the rank of Captain in the United States Army. After ten months of deployment at Guantanamo, while traveling home for a two week leave, Captain Yee was arrested, and accused of espionage and spying, charges which carried the death penalty. He was then placed in solitary confinement in the Naval Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, under conditions resembling those in which Guantanamo detainees were kept, for 76 days. As the case against Yee fell apart, the military instead added criminal charges of adultery and having pornography on his computer, charges that were also eventually dropped. Captain Yee left the Army with an honorable discharge and service commendations. He is the author of For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.


As for the juveniles, there were at least three boys in Camp Iguana between 12 and 14 years old. There were at least 6 others, by the way, who were 15 or 16, definitely younger than 18, in general population. The three in Camp Iguana I met weekly. We were led to believe they were "hard core terrorists" but this was utterly ridiculous. The guards in charge of them would frequently discipline them with "time-outs" just as many American parents discipline their own children.


I spent a fair amount of time with the youngsters; they learned to throw footballs, and I watched them kick soccer balls- occasionally over the fence and into the ocean. These kids were not the hard-core super-terrorists capable of slitting anyone's throat, as we were led to believe, and as portrayed by our military and governmental officials. Nevertheless, it was no fun and games for these pre-teens boys. They were subjected to harsh interrogations just like the other prisoners. Several of these interrogations were taking place when I would come visit and thereby prevent me from accessing Camp Iguana.

A Day For Rule of Law: Germans Charge 13 CIA Operatives

News that will raise the hopes of Civil Libertarians around the world, German Courts join the Italians in challenging the Bush Administration claim to extraordinary rendition.
They are charging 13 CIA operatives for doing their masters bidding. Of course finding and trying a spook is not a likely outcome, Bush Administration officials and Intelligence services worldwide will now consider long and hard a policy that violates International Law, US law and English Common Law, upon which both US and British Law is based.
And it is notable, that one of the reasons this is happening is the man was tortured, saw no due process and then was dumped in Albania when they figured he was the wrong man.
washingtonpost.com

The CIA's clandestine program of abducting suspected terrorists and taking them to secret sites for interrogation unraveled further on Wednesday as German prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 agency operatives in the kidnapping of a German citizen in the Balkans in December 2003.


The case is the second in which European prosecutors have filed charges against CIA employees involved in counterterrorism operations. Italian prosecutors have charged 25 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force officer with kidnapping a radical cleric on a Milan street in 2003 and taking him to Cairo, where he says he was tortured.


European law enforcement authorities acknowledged that it is highly unlikely that any CIA officers -- most of whom work undercover, using false identities -- would be apprehended or extradited from the United States. But the arrest warrants, filed in Munich, mark yet another case in which CIA activities in Europe since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have strained diplomatic ties and underscored deep differences between the United States and its transatlantic allies over how to fight terrorism.


Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld, the chief prosecutor in Munich, said the 13 CIA operatives were wanted on suspicion of kidnapping and inflicting bodily harm on Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. Masri has said he was detained by border guards Dec. 31, 2003, while en route to a holiday in Macedonia, and handed over to the CIA, which took him to a secret prison in Afghanistan and interrogated him about his alleged ties to Islamic radicals in Germany.


After five months in detention -- during which, he said, he was physically abused -- Masri was flown back to the Balkans and dumped on a hillside in Albania after his captors apparently decided they had apprehended the wrong man. German prosecutors said they were skeptical when he came to them with his bizarre-sounding story but later corroborated many parts of his account.

DOD Official Calls for Retribution Against Guantanamo Attorneys

The Bush Administration has demonstrated to us once again that they are a bunch of fascists. The Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense Friday set up attorneys representing the Guantanamo detainees for retribution by their corporate customers. The Bush Administration has demonstrated time and time again that they have no respect for rule of law and wish to circumvent the constitution at every convenient opportunity.
New York Times

The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.


The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.


“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.


“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”


[...]The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”


In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantanamo detainees in federal court cases.


Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”


Karen J. Mathis, a Denver lawyer who is president of the American Bar Association, said: “Lawyers represent people in criminal cases to fulfill a core American value: the treatment of all people equally before the law. To impugn those who are doing this critical work — and doing it on a volunteer basis — is deeply offensive to members of the legal profession, and we hope to all Americans.”


[...]The role of major law firms agreeing to take on the cases of Guantanamo prisoners challenging their detentions in federal courts has hardly been a secret and has been the subject of many news articles that have generally cast their efforts in a favorable light. Michael Ratner, who heads the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based human rights group that is coordinating the legal representation for the Guantanamo detainees, said about 500 lawyers from about 120 law firms had volunteered their services to represent Guantanamo prisoners.

Who Is Really the Threat to Peace

Here is the video and a partial transcript of a powerful speech by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC Anchor of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”. AlterNet: Blogs has a more complete transcript.

We have lived… as people in fear.
And now -- our rights and our freedoms in peril -- we slowly awake to learn that we have been afraid… of the wrong thing.


Therefore, tonight, have we truly become, the inheritors of our American legacy. For, on this first full day that the Military Commissions Act is in force, we now face what our ancestors faced, at other times of exaggerated crisis and melodramatic fear-mongering: A government more dangerous to our liberty, than is the enemy it claims to protect us from.


We have been here before -- and we have been here before led here -- by men better and wiser and nobler than George W. Bush. We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use those Acts to jail newspaper editors. American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote, about America. We have been here, when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.


American public speakers, in American jail for things they said, about America.


And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9-0-6-6 was necessary to save American lives -- only to watch him use that Order to imprison and pauperize 110-thousand Americans… While his man-in-charge… General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen -- he is still a Japanese."


American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did -- but for the choices they or their ancestors had made, about coming to America.


Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons. And each, was a betrayal of that for which the President who advocated them, claimed to be fighting.


[...]Sadly -- of course -- the distance of history will recognize that the threat this generation of Americans needed to take seriously… was you. We have a long and painful history of ignoring the prophecy attributed to Benjamin Franklin that "those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But even within this history, we have not before codified, the poisoning of Habeas Corpus, that wellspring of protection from which all essential liberties flow.

Due Process Suffers a Blow; Ashcroft Is Denied Immunity in Case

It used to be that American justice was a beacon for world full of despotism, selective law enforcement, judicial and executive excess. Now any non-citizen can be kidnapped and held for life without chance of trial, appeal or even seeing the evidence against them. And we have the President's word he won't order them tortured. He's been torturing all along and lying about it. It's a sad day for America when foreigners anywhere are no longer entitled to America's due process laws about imprisonment without trial.
Meanwhile, former Attorney General Ashcroft may be the second Administration official to face a court over the War Powers excesses of the Bush Administration.
Truly this has been a sad time for American values.
washingtonpost.com

Congress approved landmark changes to the nation's system of interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects last night, preparing the ground for possible military trials for key al-Qaeda members under rules that critics say will draw stiff constitutional challenges.


The Senate joined the House in embracing President Bush's view that the battle against terrorism justifies the imposition of extraordinary limits on defendants' traditional rights in the courtroom. They include restrictions on a suspect's ability to challenge his detention, examine all evidence against him, and bar testimony allegedly acquired through coercion of witnesses.


[...]Democrats resisted both measures and nearly amended the detainee bill to allow foreigners designated as enemy combatants to challenge their captivity by filing habeas corpus appeals with the federal courts. But Republicans held fast, gambling that Democrats will fail in their bid to convince voters that the GOP is sacrificing the nation's traditions of justice and fairness in the name of battling terrorists and winning elections.

The only real hope is that the Supreme Court will strike down this law or the new 110th Congress appeals the law.
On a more positive note:
washingtonpost.com

A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that former attorney general John D. Ashcroft can be held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of a U.S. citizen arrested as a "material witness" in a terrorism case. U.S. District Judge Edward J. Lodge, in a ruling issued late Wednesday, dismissed claims by the Justice Department that Ashcroft and other officials should be granted immunity from claims by a former star college football player arrested at Dulles International Airport in 2003.


Attorneys for the plaintiff in the civil suit, Abdullah al-Kidd, said the decision raises the possibility that Ashcroft could be forced to testify or turn over records about the government's use of the material witness law, a cornerstone of its controversial legal strategy after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.


The law was intended to give authorities the power to detain witnesses they feared might flee before testifying. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the government used it to hold 70 men, nearly half of whom were never called to testify in court, according to a study by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch.


Kidd -- a Kansas native who was known as Lavoni T. Kidd before converting to Islam -- was arrested in March 2003 as he prepared to board a flight to Saudi Arabia, where he was planning to pursue a doctorate in Islamic studies. Federal prosecutors claimed he was a flight risk crucial to the prosecution of a fellow University of Idaho student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen. Kidd was imprisoned for 16 days in three states and then placed under restrictive court supervision for more than a year. But Kidd was never called to testify against Hussayen, who was eventually acquitted of computer-related terrorism charges.


While not deciding on the veracity of Kidd's claims, Lodge, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1989 by President George H.W. Bush, ruled that Ashcroft could be found personally liable in the case because of his role in establishing and enforcing the government's material-witness policies.

Rendition and It's Horrors

In 2002, an innocent Canadian man of Arab descent was plucked from a NY airport and wisked off to Syria to be tortured for his alleged ties to Al Qaeda. I wrote about his plight in August of 2005. A more complete story is available here in an article about the US torture prison in Afghanistan. Bush continues to claim he didn't know they were going to be tortured, yet his own troops and CIA officers did much the same in secret prisons all over the world. Now, just before a contested election, he wants to put them on trial!
This man has no business being president of the US.
washingtonpost.com

ACOUPLE of years ago, President Bush might well have counted Maher Arar as one of the success stories of the CIA's secret program for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 because he was on a watchlist; Canadian police said they believed he had connections to al-Qaeda. Rather than being returned to Canada, Mr. Arar disappeared into the CIA's secret system -- he was transported to Syria and handed over to its military intelligence service. For several weeks, Mr. Arar was tortured by his Syrian captors, who beat him with an electric cable. Eventually he broke and confessed that he had trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
The problem with this story, as an official Canadian investigation reported Monday, is that Mr. Arar was innocent. "Categorically there is no evidence" that Mr. Arar was a terrorist or posed a security threat, the report stated. He never traveled to Afghanistan. The Canadian police intelligence about him was simply wrong. But after his coerced confession, he was held in a Syrian dungeon for 10 months and suffered "devastating" mental and economic harm before finally being released in 2003.


[...]From early 2002 until this month the agency held some al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons and subjected them to harsh interrogation techniques that, though they don't include beatings with cables, violate the Geneva Conventions and current U.S. law. Others, like Mr. Arar, have been secretly handed over to foreign governments known to use torture in interrogations, including Egypt and Jordan as well as Syria -- a practice known as "rendition."


Mr. Bush claims that the renditions, secret detentions and harsh U.S. techniques -- which most of the world regards as torture -- have yielded important intelligence. But as the military commanders who oppose such methods have insistently and courageously pointed out, it is well known that the information they produce is unreliable. Many detainees, as Mr. Arar did, will falsely incriminate themselves or others to avoid abuse. Over time, better intelligence can be obtained by working within guidelines mandating humane treatment of detainees -- such as those in the new Army interrogation manual released this month.


Moreover, as Mr. Arar's case illustrates, cruel treatment of prisoners, even in secret, eventually becomes known and can badly damage the honor and influence of the United States and its relations with allies. The mistreatment of Mr. Arar has hurt U.S. relations with Canada and could impede cooperation with its police and security services in the future. Other cases of rendition have similarly upset U.S. intelligence relations with Italy, Germany and Sweden.


It's no wonder that two former Republican secretaries of state, Colin L. Powell and George P. Shultz, oppose Mr. Bush's attempt to modify U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions to permit future secret detentions and renditions by the CIA. Or that military leaders ranging from Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the senior serving uniformed lawyer in the Army, also oppose the president's initiative. They understand well what Mr. Bush refuses to see -- that the price of his policies is bad intelligence, the criminal mistreatment of some innocent people, and damage to U.S. prestige and alliances that the country can ill afford.

Bush In Full Retreat

Two of the most controversial practices of the Bush Administration has been it's "unlawful combatant" designation for Al Qaeda and Taliban captives to circumvent POW status and the exclusive contracts for Haliburton creating billions in profits and millions in over payments for an organization with political ties to Cheney, who was a past CEO.
In a full retreat from it's posturing in the past six years, it has complied with the Supreme Court decision striking down the military tribunals and calling for adherance to treaties and obligations.
Audits by the GAO found billions of dollars in questionable charges by Haliburton.
WaPo

The Bush administration has agreed to apply the Geneva Conventions to all terrorism suspects in U.S. custody, bowing to the Supreme Court's recent rejection of policies that have imprisoned hundreds for years without trials. The Pentagon announced yesterday that it has called on military officials to adhere to the conventions in dealing with al-Qaeda detainees. The administration also has decided that even prisoners held by the CIA in secret prisons abroad must be treated in accordance with international standards, an interpretation that would prohibit prisoners from being subjected to harsh treatment in interrogations, several U.S. officials said.

WaPo

The Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton Co. to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq. The choice comes after several years of attacks from critics who saw the contract as a symbol of politically connected corporations profiteering on the war. Under the deal, Halliburton had exclusive rights to provide the military with a wide range of work that included keeping soldiers around the world fed, sheltered and in communication with friends and family back home. Government audits turned up more than $1 billion in questionable costs. Whistle-blowers told how the company charged $45 per case of soda, double-billed on meals and allowed troops to bathe in contaminated water. Halliburton officials have denied the allegations strenuously.


Army officials yesterday defended the company's performance but also acknowledged that reliance on a single contractor left the government vulnerable. The Pentagon's new plan will split the work among three companies, to be chosen this fall, with a fourth firm hired to help monitor the performance of the other three. Halliburton will be eligible to bid on the work.

BREAKING: Supreme Court Strikes Down Tribunals

In a major victory for rule of law and containing the war powers of a President, the Supreme Court found the military tribunals set up in Gitmo violated military regulations and agreements on prisoners of war. This is a proud day for America. Despite Bush's attempt to stack the Court with cronies, he is not a dictator.
WaPo

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions are unconstitutional. In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized under U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion in the case, called Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. recused himself from the case.


[...]Congress entered the fray in December, passing the Detainee Treatment Act, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over Guantanamo detainees' habeas corpus petitions that were "pending on or after" the date of the law's enactment. The act also provided an alternative military process for reviewing the enemy combatant status of detainees and designated the D.C. Circuit appeals court as the sole venue for appeals of military commission verdicts.

BBC NEWS

In its ruling, the court said: "We conclude that the military commission convened to try Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate" agreements on prisoners of war, as well as US military rules. Five of the nine justices of the US Supreme Court supported the ruling. Three voted against. Chief Justice John Roberts did not vote because he had judged the case at an earlier stage before joining the Supreme Court.


One of the dissenters, Justice Clarence Thomas, took the unusual step of reading part of his opinion from the bench, saying the decision would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy".

CBS News

Pamela Falk, a law professor who has been to the Base, "because the rebuke was on international law and U.S. Law grounds and gives support to the Geneva Conventions in U.S. courts."


[...]Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito also filed dissents.


In his own opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer said, "Congress has not issued the executive a 'blank check.' Indeed, Congress has denied the president the legislative authority to create military commissions of the kind at issue here. Nothing prevents the president from returning to Congress to seek the authority he believes necessary," Breyer wrote.

Free the Innocent, Punish the Guilty

While I have resisted posting past claims by "enemy combatants" because of the evident propaganda value their statements made, this one provides only one plaintive cry from an apologetic young Muslim. "Free the Innocent, Punish the Guilty". Here is an except.
New York Times

I WAS released from the United States military's prison camp at Guantamo Bay, Cuba, in July 2004. As I was about to board a plane that would take me home to France, the last detainee I saw was a young Yemeni. He was overwhelmed by emotion. "In your country, Mourad, there are rights, human rights, and they mean something," he said. "In mine they mean nothing, and no one cares. So when you're free, don't forget what you've been through. Tell people that we are here."


I now know that this Yemeni was not among the three prisoners who committed suicide at Guantᮡmo last weekend, but since then his words have been echoing in my head. Although I'm now a free man, the shared pain endlessly takes me back to the camp.


In the early summer of 2001, when I was 19, I made the mistake of listening to my older brother and going to Afghanistan on what I thought was a dream vacation. His friends, he said, were going to look after me. They did — channeling me to what turned out to be a Qaeda training camp. For two months, I was there, trapped in the middle of the desert by fear and my own stupidity.


[...]I remember once an interrogator warming me up during several sessions for a polygraph test I was going to take, that was, according to him, infallible. After I took the test, I was left alone in the interrogation room; an hour later, the interrogator returned. "Congratulations," he said grimly. "You have passed the test." And he gave me a box of candy.


In the outside world, I thought, the difference between telling the truth and lying, between committing a crime and not committing it, is the difference between being in jail and being free. In Guantánamo, it is a box of candy.


I was eventually released and I will go on trial next month in Paris to face charges that I've never denied, that I spent two months in the Qaeda camp. I have a court date, I'm facing a judge, and I have a lawyer, unimaginable luxuries in Guantánamo. I didn't know the three detainees who died, but it is easy for me to see how this daily despair and uncertainty could lead to suicide.


[...]I am a quiet Muslim — I've never waged war, let alone an asymmetrical one. I wasn't anti-American before and, miraculously, I haven't become anti-American since. In Guantánamo, I did see some people for whom jihad is life itself, people whose minds are distorted by extremism and whose souls are full of hatred. But the huge majority of the faces I remember — the ones that haunt my nights — are of desperation, suffering, incomprehension turned into silent madness.


I believe that a small number of the detainees at Guantánamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the military's documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies. Even so, what I heard so many times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, "Free us, we are innocent!" but "Judge us for whatever we've done!" There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty. MORE

Three Suicides in Guantanamo

The sad thing is, we'll never know the truth. The Bush Administration has demonstrated to anyone whose watching that they will lie about anything and everything, whenever they wish, regardless of the importance of the truth.
WaPo

Three detainees at the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, hanged themselves in their cells yesterday morning, the first inmates to die at the remote island prison since it opened in early 2002, according to military officials.


Guards found the three men unresponsive and not breathing in their separate cells in Camp 1 shortly after midnight yesterday, according to Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, who heads the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, and Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., who commands the Guantanamo Bay prison. The detainees had apparently used their clothing and sheets to fashion makeshift nooses in what military officials believe was a coordinated suicide pact. All left suicide notes written in Arabic, the officers said.


Military officials were not releasing the names of the detainees yesterday, but said two were Saudi Arabian nationals and one was a Yemeni national. Harris described them as having close ties to terrorist organizations in the Middle East and said their suicides were "not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

So, if these guys were in fact carrying out a political attack by suicide, they have been empowered by the lack of credibility of the Bush Administration to be highly effective in their move.