By William Fisher
A senior U.S. military commander has branded as ‘propaganda’ a new report from a major human rights advocacy group charging that of the 98 detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, 34 are suspected or confirmed homicides, another 11 suggest that death was a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions, but only 12 deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official.
The remark was made by Brigadier General Mark Kimmett, the Central Command deputy commander for planning and strategy in Iraq, regarding a report by Human Rights First, which charged that in close to half the deaths surveyed by the organization, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
The report, entitled “Command’s Responsibility”, says that of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half.
While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, no CIA agent has faced a criminal charge, the report says, adding, “Among the worst cases -- detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment and the harshest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death has been five months in jail.”
The exchange with Gen. Kimmett occurred at a press conference in Iraq. The question was:
“General Kimmett, there's a human rights organization today in the States called Human Rights First. They said that around 100 detainees from Afghanistan and Iraq have died in the prisons. What's your comment on this?”
The response from Gen. Kimmett was: Well, my comment is that's propaganda; it's not correct.”
Gen. Kimmett went on to say, “I would defer to the Department of Defense, who would more than happy to give you all the information regarding the number of situations inside the detention centers in which people have died and for whatever reason.”
HRF reports that Admiral John Hutson has sent Kimmett a personal letter with a copy of the report, urging that he rethink his public remarks
Among the report’s other findings: Commanders have failed to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, reported the deaths only after a period of days and sometimes weeks, or actively interfered in efforts to pursue investigations; investigators have failed to interview key witnesses, collect useable evidence, or maintain evidence that could be used for any subsequent prosecution; record keeping has been inadequate, further undermining chances for effective investigation or appropriate prosecution; overlapping criminal and administrative investigations have compromised chances for accountability; overbroad classification of information and other investigation restrictions have left CIA and Special Forces essentially immune from accountability; agencies have failed to disclose critical information, including the cause or circumstance of death, in close to half the cases examined; effective punishment has been too little and too late.
Charging that there is an “accountability gap”, HRF says closing it will require “a zero-tolerance approach to commanders who fail to take steps to provide clear guidance, and who allow unlawful conduct to persist on their watch.”
The report recommends that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, “move immediately to fully implement the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (known as the McCain Amendment) passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on December 30, 2005”.
It also demands that “the President, the U.S. military, and relevant intelligence agencies should take immediate steps to make clear that all acts of torture and abuse are taken seriously – not from the moment a crime becomes public, but from the moment the United States sends troops and agents into the field”.
Congress, the report suggests, “should at long last establish an independent, bipartisan commission to review the scope of U.S. detention and interrogation operations worldwide in the ‘war on terror’. Such a commission could investigate and identify the systemic causes of failures that lead to torture, abuse, and wrongful death, and chart a detailed and specific path going forward to make sure those mistakes never happen again. The proposal for a commission has been endorsed by a wide range of distinguished Americans from Republican and Democratic members of Congress to former presidents to leaders in the U.S. military. Human Rights First urges Congress to act without further delay.”
In response to our question, Deborah Pearlstein, Director of HRF’s U.S. Law and Security Program, said the Pentagon’s detention policies have repeatedly been criticized by military lawyers and health officials, but their objections have largely been ignored.
Most recently, it was revealed that one of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution.
Mora's campaign underscores how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.
"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive
interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without
profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the
Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, in a 22-page memorandum.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on specific assertions in Mr. Mora's memorandum.
"Detainee operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope, from all different angles," a spokesperson said. "It was found that it was not a Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture."
The HRF report notes that “It is difficult to assess the systemic adequacy of punishment when so few have been punished, and when the deliberations of juries and commanders are largely unknown. Nonetheless, two patterns clearly emerge and are documented in Command’s Responsibility: (1) because of investigative and evidentiary failures, accountability for wrongdoing has been limited at best, and almost non-existent for command; and (2) commanders have played a key role in undermining chances for full accountability.”
It adds, “In dozens of cases documented in the report, grossly inadequate reporting, investigation, and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths. Commanders have failed both to provide troops clear guidance, and to take crimes seriously by insisting on vigorous investigations. And command responsibility itself – the law that requires commanders to be held liable for the unlawful acts of their subordinates about which they knew or should have known – has been all but forgotten.”
After dozens of cases of prisoner abuse over the past several years, including the deaths HRF is reporting, the Pentagon must be totally tone-deaf to think it can dismiss all these claims as “propaganda” and maintain any credibility whatever.
This is not just more spin. It is the Kabuki theater of the absurd.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Bush, Jews and Hamas
By William Fisher
On the heels of the surprise victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary election, President George W. Bush is discovering just how difficult it is to try to herd a bunch of cats.
Some members of his ordinarily supportive Jewish-American pro-Israel constituency are distinctly unhappy that Bush insisted on holding on-time elections, producing what they consider to be disastrous results. Others are suspicious that, despite his rhetorical assurances not to have anything to do with terrorists, he has left the door a bit ajar and may be pressured by his European and Arab allies into resorting to realpolitik. Mirroring the sentiments of the Israeli right-wing, powerful groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC) want that door slammed shut until Hamas agrees to recognize Israel’s right exist and renounces violence.
And U.S. fundamentalist groups on the Christian right, which have been strong supporters of Israel of late, take pretty much the same view as their more hawkish Jewish-American counterparts.
These groups are vital constituencies in Bush’s base. Both have lots of influence in the White House and in the House and Senate and, with Congressional elections due next November, could make the President’s life almost as complicated as dealing with Hamas.
A further complication is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is far from homogenous. As in Israel, American Jewry has a smaller, less well financed, but increasingly vocal left wing.
Emblematic of this faction is Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace. This national organization of American Jews is headed by Marcia Freedman, a former member of the Knesset. It is committed to a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It says many American Jews share this perspective, but are reluctant to express themselves for fear they may bring harm to Israel and the Jewish people. And it has rejected the knee-jerk “no play-no pay” approach of the U.S. House of Representatives.
While saying it is “deeply troubled” by the Hamas victory because its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its resort to terror and violence that target innocent civilians, it is urging the Bush Administration “to maintain a cautious approach to the new Palestinian government, so as to preserve the future possibility of bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.”
.
In a letter to President Bush signed by, at last count, 100 prominent rabbis, the group points out that the Palestinians conducted a free, fair, and democratic election, “something that is still too rare in this region”. It calls on Hamas to
"recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism, and work for lasting peace", but also calls on Bush to embark upon “constructive engagement” with the new Palestinian government, to encourage “moderates such as President Mahmoud Abbas and sustain the ceasefire that has allowed for relative calm over the past year”.
The rabbis caution that deterioration in the plight of Palestinians “only increases support for extremism, which, in turn, endangers Israel.” They urge “continued funding for indirect assistance to the Palestinian people via NGOs, with the appropriate conditions to ensure that it does not reach the hands of terrorists.” They exhort the President “to leave open the door for those Palestinians who are committed to working for a negotiated, two-state resolution of this conflict.”
The nightmare scenario for this branch of American Jewry is that if the U.S. and the E.U. shut off funding for the Palestinian Authority, the PA will turn to Iran and to other anti-Israel Muslim states for resources.
At a time when Bush is preparing to start broadcasting into Iran, reaching out to Iranian students to come to the U.S., and planning financial support for Iranian pro-democracy NGOs, the emergence of an Iranian hegemon in Palestine looms as a major migraine.
The Bush Administration is also concerned that rejecting a freely-elected Hamas government will confirm the widely held perception that the U.S. is all for elections, providing they produce the result it wants. That would do further damage to the credibility of America’s crusade to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East – already in dangerously parlous condition in Iraq and elsewhere in the neighborhood. It is also likely to enhance the influence of Islamist political movements throughout the region and constrain America’s allies in the “Global War on Terror.”
The Bush Administration, along with the even more generous European supporters of “a new, improved” Palestinian Authority, clearly misread the temperature of Palestinian voters. But whether Palestinians voted for “terror” or for “change” is now irrelevant. The West is stuck with the facts on the ground. The election of Hamas was another stick in the eye of the Bush agenda.
Now, the so-called Quartet can move cautiously toward engagement or it can open the door for Iran to plant its flag deeply into Palestinian consciousness.
Which leaves the U.S. and its European friends with no good options at all. To implement a policy of “trust but verify”, Bush desperately needs all of American Jewry, plus the pro-Israel right-wing Christians, to present a supportive united front. This constituency is a major influence on the Government of Israel.
But, given the fractious rivalry of ideologies between these groups, it is far from a slam-dunk to think he’ll get it.
On the heels of the surprise victory of Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary election, President George W. Bush is discovering just how difficult it is to try to herd a bunch of cats.
Some members of his ordinarily supportive Jewish-American pro-Israel constituency are distinctly unhappy that Bush insisted on holding on-time elections, producing what they consider to be disastrous results. Others are suspicious that, despite his rhetorical assurances not to have anything to do with terrorists, he has left the door a bit ajar and may be pressured by his European and Arab allies into resorting to realpolitik. Mirroring the sentiments of the Israeli right-wing, powerful groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC) want that door slammed shut until Hamas agrees to recognize Israel’s right exist and renounces violence.
And U.S. fundamentalist groups on the Christian right, which have been strong supporters of Israel of late, take pretty much the same view as their more hawkish Jewish-American counterparts.
These groups are vital constituencies in Bush’s base. Both have lots of influence in the White House and in the House and Senate and, with Congressional elections due next November, could make the President’s life almost as complicated as dealing with Hamas.
A further complication is that the Jewish community in the U.S. is far from homogenous. As in Israel, American Jewry has a smaller, less well financed, but increasingly vocal left wing.
Emblematic of this faction is Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace. This national organization of American Jews is headed by Marcia Freedman, a former member of the Knesset. It is committed to a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It says many American Jews share this perspective, but are reluctant to express themselves for fear they may bring harm to Israel and the Jewish people. And it has rejected the knee-jerk “no play-no pay” approach of the U.S. House of Representatives.
While saying it is “deeply troubled” by the Hamas victory because its charter calls for the destruction of Israel, and its resort to terror and violence that target innocent civilians, it is urging the Bush Administration “to maintain a cautious approach to the new Palestinian government, so as to preserve the future possibility of bringing Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.”
.
In a letter to President Bush signed by, at last count, 100 prominent rabbis, the group points out that the Palestinians conducted a free, fair, and democratic election, “something that is still too rare in this region”. It calls on Hamas to
"recognize Israel, disarm, reject terrorism, and work for lasting peace", but also calls on Bush to embark upon “constructive engagement” with the new Palestinian government, to encourage “moderates such as President Mahmoud Abbas and sustain the ceasefire that has allowed for relative calm over the past year”.
The rabbis caution that deterioration in the plight of Palestinians “only increases support for extremism, which, in turn, endangers Israel.” They urge “continued funding for indirect assistance to the Palestinian people via NGOs, with the appropriate conditions to ensure that it does not reach the hands of terrorists.” They exhort the President “to leave open the door for those Palestinians who are committed to working for a negotiated, two-state resolution of this conflict.”
The nightmare scenario for this branch of American Jewry is that if the U.S. and the E.U. shut off funding for the Palestinian Authority, the PA will turn to Iran and to other anti-Israel Muslim states for resources.
At a time when Bush is preparing to start broadcasting into Iran, reaching out to Iranian students to come to the U.S., and planning financial support for Iranian pro-democracy NGOs, the emergence of an Iranian hegemon in Palestine looms as a major migraine.
The Bush Administration is also concerned that rejecting a freely-elected Hamas government will confirm the widely held perception that the U.S. is all for elections, providing they produce the result it wants. That would do further damage to the credibility of America’s crusade to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East – already in dangerously parlous condition in Iraq and elsewhere in the neighborhood. It is also likely to enhance the influence of Islamist political movements throughout the region and constrain America’s allies in the “Global War on Terror.”
The Bush Administration, along with the even more generous European supporters of “a new, improved” Palestinian Authority, clearly misread the temperature of Palestinian voters. But whether Palestinians voted for “terror” or for “change” is now irrelevant. The West is stuck with the facts on the ground. The election of Hamas was another stick in the eye of the Bush agenda.
Now, the so-called Quartet can move cautiously toward engagement or it can open the door for Iran to plant its flag deeply into Palestinian consciousness.
Which leaves the U.S. and its European friends with no good options at all. To implement a policy of “trust but verify”, Bush desperately needs all of American Jewry, plus the pro-Israel right-wing Christians, to present a supportive united front. This constituency is a major influence on the Government of Israel.
But, given the fractious rivalry of ideologies between these groups, it is far from a slam-dunk to think he’ll get it.
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Shed Your Addiction: Beyond Mere Survival in the American Dystopia
By Jason Miller
1984 has come to pass, both chronologically and in the Orwellian sense. Americans are “liberators” in Iraq. Opponents of this “peace initiative” are “doubleplusungood”. Unchecked by the judiciary, the NSA electronically trolls for perpetrators of “crimethink”. Pundits and the “liberal media” (owned by a handful of monolithic corporations despised by people with the values which many define as liberal) have become the Ministry of Truth for the Party.
I recently witnessed Bill O’Reilly as he delivered a blistering verbal castigation to his “guest” because the man opposed America’s imperial occupations and war crimes in the Middle East. In the next breath, O’Reilly expressed his sympathy and compassion for the victims of 9/11. Ironically, the victim of O’Reilly’s abusive tirade had lost his father in the collapse of the WTC. Outfoxed, the source of this nauseating display of hatred and hypocrisy, has indeed portrayed an extremely dangerous entity. What truly scares me is that Fox News is only a symptom of a much greater malignancy.
Via Fox, the Bush Regime streams steady doses of its “opiate to the masses” via a distribution network reaching 85 million cable subscribers. Fox and most other mainstream media entities are the syringes mainlining the mind-altering, psychosis-inducing propaganda munificently showered upon Americans by the Party. Social Darwinists comprising the Party, including major corporate shareholders and executives, Israeli interests, the military industrial complex, plutocrats, the power players of the Religious Right, and intellectual elites hold the Great Beast (us “commoners”) at bay with a powerfully addictive state of being called the American Dream.
It is indeed a Brave New World. As many Americans somnambulate through their existence, they are virtually oblivious and indifferent to the profound human misery which must occur in order for a tiny fraction of humanity to experience the American Dream. When (or if) their Soma fix finally wears off, I suspect they will be ready to chew off their own arms to escape the disease-ridden whores with whom they have unwittingly climbed into bed. Mirroring Hitler’s Germany, this nation of “decent, God-fearing” people is pledging allegiance to a murderous regime. Are the comfort of conformity and the safety of loyalty to the Empire worth the price of one’s soul?
America’s ruling class has created a scintillating facade to hide its dystopia, assuring the Great Beast that we all have the right and the means to attain the looks of a Victoria's Secret model, the money of a Donald Trump, and the athletic ability of a Michael Vick. Infomercials, work from home schemes, plastic surgery, hypnosis, and myriad other avenues to instant success and immediate gratification abound amongst the virtually infinite number of hollow pursuits littering the spiritually barren landscape of the United States. Those who fall short of the “American ideal” simply need to continue upping their dose American Soma. If that fails and they fall victim to the ravages of unbridled addiction, spiritual emptiness, poverty, despair, self-hatred, or anorexia, they can simply end their misery with a drug overdose or a shotgun blast to the face. America’s predator class, the pushers of the opiate of the masses, is not concerned with the suffering they inflict. In their zeal to appease the triumvirate they worship (power, money, and narcissistic desires), the “chosen ones” of our society do not hesitate to sacrifice the rights, dignity, sanity and even lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings. After all, if they come from amongst the rabble of the Great Beast, how can they be truly human and why would their anguish or death matter?
Huxley’s Soma had "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." The Soma dispensed by the ruling class in the United States is a noxious concoction comprised of many ingredients, including Christianity and alcohol. From birth, Americans begin receiving daily hits of Ameri-Soma from their parents, teachers, Scoutmasters, pastors, and other adults who have themselves been seduced by the alluring power of the American Illusion. Pledging allegiance to the flag, praying to the "one true god" of Christianity, and genuflecting to embodiments of "real men" like John Wayne, Americans are socially conditioned to believe in the righteousness of their masters’ cause. Our nobles desperately need the majority of their serfs to believe that the United States manifests the human pinnacle of democratic ideals, morality, courage, and leadership. And to deal with external skeptics (internal doubters will likely be in the cross-hairs soon), the power brokers of America spend $600 billion a year to maintain a military force bristling with sufficient weaponry to destroy the Earth many times over. Plutocrats and Neocons are not interested in humanitarian spending or saddling themselves with the mere mortal constraint of living within their means. Global hegemony for themselves (and their masters in Israel) is their ultimate goal, regardless of the cost in lives or public money.
Further insulating America’s ruling elites from the conflagration which would ignite were the masses to awaken is the insatiable American compulsion to shop and consume conspicuously. With the advent of easy credit, ubiquitous super stores open 24 hours, and pay day loans, “buy now and pay later” has become as American as baseball and apple pie.
Alcohol, gambling, cigarettes, and pornography are but a few of the legal and readily available vehicles Americans use to self-medicate. For those wanting something more intense, a plethora of street drugs are within easy reach, providing the ruling class the opportunity to keep the black male population in check and to perpetuate their increasingly profitable prison industrial complex.
Television is the portal into which the Great Beast can gaze to experience the American Dream vicariously without lifting a finger (beyond the one changing the channels). Twenty four hour entertainment, “companionship”, and “news” from the Ministry of Truth are readily at our disposal. A marvel of modern technology has become the nexus of the components of Ameri-Soma, the uber-drug that keeps the Great Beast submissive, tame, and intellectually stunted.
Perhaps it is human nature for a few to hoard power and resources to the detriment of the many. Once can witness a consistent pattern of such behavior throughout history, at least in the "more advanced" cultures. Yet as Scott Peck so aptly noted in The Road Less Traveled, defecating in one's pants and the absence of dental hygiene are aspects of human nature at birth, but most people learn the unnatural acts of utilizing toilets and toothbrushes. One of the most beautiful aspects of humanity is that unlike animals, people are not enslaved by their nature. Human beings can evolve. However, most of humanity has chosen to readily accept the shackles of the ruling class. Historically, the Great Beast has been domesticated, tamed and manipulated in a variety of ways. Brute military force, manipulation by religious entities and institutions, propaganda, and careful restriction of knowledge are but a few of the tactics employed by monarchies, tyrants, Popes, and generals throughout history.
At first blush, the United States appears to be the haven for freedom and human rights portrayed in legend, lore, and the propaganda of its school textbooks and media. However, if one can awaken from the drunken stupor induced by America-Soma, or if one happens to be a resident of another nation besides Israel or Great Britain (the only two nations still deluded enough to truly ally themselves with the United States), the many headed hydra of the American Dystopia reveals its truly abhorrent nature. Lord Acton conveyed truth when he wrote that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Despite its cleverly constructed image of a benevolent super-power, those ruling the United States are more corrupt than the power elite of any nation, including those in Bush's alleged "Axis of Evil". Due to its power, military might, and rogue leadership, the United States has also become the world's most significant threat to the perpetuation of life on Earth.
Most Americans still do not realize that they are enslaved to the ruling elite, a group with a savage, relentless devotion to avarice, the blind pursuit of money, and the domination of Earth's people and resources. Under the Bush Regime, the mask of civility, morality, and democracy has slipped to the point that the hideous visage of raw capitalism and imperialistic ambition is almost completely exposed. Yet somehow, as over a hundred thousand lie dead in Iraq, the Patriot Act strips our civil liberties, the wealth gap widens to a chasm, Big Brother has been caught watching (and is unrepentant), billions of dollars are wasted on occupations of sovereign nations, habeas corpus disappears, America engages in torture regularly, property rights precede human rights, and a major city lays in ruins due to the willful neglect of a government charged by the Constitution with promoting the general welfare, many Americans still cannot, or will not, dare to even glimpse at the lurid countenance of evil leering at them from Washington.
Like a swarm of locusts, Social Darwinists have descended upon our nation and are rapidly devouring the fruits of our labor. Resembling leeches, these parasites drain the life-blood of America and return nothing. Acting as virulent strains of previously undiscovered illnesses, these pathogens have infected a nation filled with the promise and potential envisioned by Thomas Paine. The resulting disease has reduced the United States to a wheezing, gasping tyrant nearly on economic life support. This once admirable nation flails almost blindly as it wields the only real power it has left like a bludgeon, dispatching its awesome military on imperial errands and acts of revenge (against the wrong people) under the pretense of humanitarian intervention. Employing quick sound bites, propaganda packaged as gospel, tantalizing distractions, the lure of easy money, and a highly insular environment, these sociopathic plunderers have hijacked America. Their reckless piloting is destined to result in a disaster of Biblical proportions. America’s rulers view the world as their playground. Recess is in session and the schoolyard bullies have seized control. They kidnapped the school-yard monitor, have stolen the lunch money, are taunting and beating the weak, and are playing kickball with the class misfit’s head.
This doesn’t have to stand. America has exhibited true greatness in the past. Think of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. This is the nation that spawned the Abolitionist Movement. The powerful Labor Movement arose in the Twentieth Century and claimed unprecedented rights and protections for the working class. The Civil Rights Movement made powerful gains for minorities and the oppressed. Women won the right to vote. Populists made strides for farmers and the working class. Anti-war protestors broke the will of the military industrial complex to continue their genocidal “pacification” of the Vietnamese. Progressives have been a significant force for social changes to benefit humanity since the 1890’s. There are still champions for the oppressed in America and spiritually enlightened values are woven into the fabric of our culture.
We the People have a choice. We can bend to the will of the hectors who have stolen the soul of our nation or we can follow the example of our predecessors and work vigorously to reclaim our humanity. Borrowing the words of a blue blood of American aristocrats, Nancy Reagan, I say it is time to “just say no” to Ameri-Soma. Actually, Lady Nancy’s statement was grossly over-simplified. In addition to saying no, one also needs to replace the behaviors associated with the addiction. Might I be so bold as to make some suggestions to counter the effects of withdrawal from this powerful drug, and to propose some means of coping with the loss of the false feeling of security it imbues?
Join or support an NGO like the Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Boycott dehumanizing corporations like Wal-Mart. Conserve resources, recycle, and drive as economical a car as you can afford. Support and vote for individuals who have genuine concern for humanity, like Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich (assuming they do not die under “mysterious circumstances” like Paul Wellstone). If you choose to support a specific political party, explore those outside the corrupt Duopoly, both of which represent the interests of the ruling class. Refuse to enable the ruling elite’s addiction to war by declining to join the military, hence depriving them of additional cannon fodder.
Embody the Golden Rule to the extent that it is humanly possible. Embrace cultural, racial, sexual, and religious diversity. Read some books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn to cleanse your mind of the elite’s polluted version of historical, social and political issues. Educate yourself and your children beyond the warped world perspective portrayed by the media and our public education system. Participate in your child’s education by teaching them to think critically and dig far beneath the surface. Live within your means and avoid credit card debt like the plague. Demand and support justice for the oppressed; peace will follow justice. Donate your time and money to truly compassionate and humane causes (as much and as often as you are able). Take personal responsibility and act as honestly as humanly possible in your affairs. Through non-violent action, press for social justice, human rights, dignity and peace.
In the end, the prognostications of martial law, “re-education” camps for dissidents, the collapse of the American economy triggered by crushing debt and the Iranian oil bourse, massive unemployment, the successful elimination of the remains of our Constitutional republic, and the relegation of the Great Beast in the United States to Third World conditions may ring true. So as you pour sugar in the tank of the engine powering the American Empire by refusing your daily dose of Ameri-Soma, do not relinquish your Second Amendment rights. Someday, the members of the Great Beast may need to exercise our inalienable right to self preservation. If it comes to this, there will be activity in the streets, but it will not be dancing.
In the future, I may be writing to you from behind concertina wire, or I might meet you there. Who can truly predict? However, if we happen to meet under those circumstances, at least our souls will be at rest knowing that we pursued social justice and human rights in the face of abject evil.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
1984 has come to pass, both chronologically and in the Orwellian sense. Americans are “liberators” in Iraq. Opponents of this “peace initiative” are “doubleplusungood”. Unchecked by the judiciary, the NSA electronically trolls for perpetrators of “crimethink”. Pundits and the “liberal media” (owned by a handful of monolithic corporations despised by people with the values which many define as liberal) have become the Ministry of Truth for the Party.
I recently witnessed Bill O’Reilly as he delivered a blistering verbal castigation to his “guest” because the man opposed America’s imperial occupations and war crimes in the Middle East. In the next breath, O’Reilly expressed his sympathy and compassion for the victims of 9/11. Ironically, the victim of O’Reilly’s abusive tirade had lost his father in the collapse of the WTC. Outfoxed, the source of this nauseating display of hatred and hypocrisy, has indeed portrayed an extremely dangerous entity. What truly scares me is that Fox News is only a symptom of a much greater malignancy.
Via Fox, the Bush Regime streams steady doses of its “opiate to the masses” via a distribution network reaching 85 million cable subscribers. Fox and most other mainstream media entities are the syringes mainlining the mind-altering, psychosis-inducing propaganda munificently showered upon Americans by the Party. Social Darwinists comprising the Party, including major corporate shareholders and executives, Israeli interests, the military industrial complex, plutocrats, the power players of the Religious Right, and intellectual elites hold the Great Beast (us “commoners”) at bay with a powerfully addictive state of being called the American Dream.
It is indeed a Brave New World. As many Americans somnambulate through their existence, they are virtually oblivious and indifferent to the profound human misery which must occur in order for a tiny fraction of humanity to experience the American Dream. When (or if) their Soma fix finally wears off, I suspect they will be ready to chew off their own arms to escape the disease-ridden whores with whom they have unwittingly climbed into bed. Mirroring Hitler’s Germany, this nation of “decent, God-fearing” people is pledging allegiance to a murderous regime. Are the comfort of conformity and the safety of loyalty to the Empire worth the price of one’s soul?
America’s ruling class has created a scintillating facade to hide its dystopia, assuring the Great Beast that we all have the right and the means to attain the looks of a Victoria's Secret model, the money of a Donald Trump, and the athletic ability of a Michael Vick. Infomercials, work from home schemes, plastic surgery, hypnosis, and myriad other avenues to instant success and immediate gratification abound amongst the virtually infinite number of hollow pursuits littering the spiritually barren landscape of the United States. Those who fall short of the “American ideal” simply need to continue upping their dose American Soma. If that fails and they fall victim to the ravages of unbridled addiction, spiritual emptiness, poverty, despair, self-hatred, or anorexia, they can simply end their misery with a drug overdose or a shotgun blast to the face. America’s predator class, the pushers of the opiate of the masses, is not concerned with the suffering they inflict. In their zeal to appease the triumvirate they worship (power, money, and narcissistic desires), the “chosen ones” of our society do not hesitate to sacrifice the rights, dignity, sanity and even lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings. After all, if they come from amongst the rabble of the Great Beast, how can they be truly human and why would their anguish or death matter?
Huxley’s Soma had "all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects." The Soma dispensed by the ruling class in the United States is a noxious concoction comprised of many ingredients, including Christianity and alcohol. From birth, Americans begin receiving daily hits of Ameri-Soma from their parents, teachers, Scoutmasters, pastors, and other adults who have themselves been seduced by the alluring power of the American Illusion. Pledging allegiance to the flag, praying to the "one true god" of Christianity, and genuflecting to embodiments of "real men" like John Wayne, Americans are socially conditioned to believe in the righteousness of their masters’ cause. Our nobles desperately need the majority of their serfs to believe that the United States manifests the human pinnacle of democratic ideals, morality, courage, and leadership. And to deal with external skeptics (internal doubters will likely be in the cross-hairs soon), the power brokers of America spend $600 billion a year to maintain a military force bristling with sufficient weaponry to destroy the Earth many times over. Plutocrats and Neocons are not interested in humanitarian spending or saddling themselves with the mere mortal constraint of living within their means. Global hegemony for themselves (and their masters in Israel) is their ultimate goal, regardless of the cost in lives or public money.
Further insulating America’s ruling elites from the conflagration which would ignite were the masses to awaken is the insatiable American compulsion to shop and consume conspicuously. With the advent of easy credit, ubiquitous super stores open 24 hours, and pay day loans, “buy now and pay later” has become as American as baseball and apple pie.
Alcohol, gambling, cigarettes, and pornography are but a few of the legal and readily available vehicles Americans use to self-medicate. For those wanting something more intense, a plethora of street drugs are within easy reach, providing the ruling class the opportunity to keep the black male population in check and to perpetuate their increasingly profitable prison industrial complex.
Television is the portal into which the Great Beast can gaze to experience the American Dream vicariously without lifting a finger (beyond the one changing the channels). Twenty four hour entertainment, “companionship”, and “news” from the Ministry of Truth are readily at our disposal. A marvel of modern technology has become the nexus of the components of Ameri-Soma, the uber-drug that keeps the Great Beast submissive, tame, and intellectually stunted.
Perhaps it is human nature for a few to hoard power and resources to the detriment of the many. Once can witness a consistent pattern of such behavior throughout history, at least in the "more advanced" cultures. Yet as Scott Peck so aptly noted in The Road Less Traveled, defecating in one's pants and the absence of dental hygiene are aspects of human nature at birth, but most people learn the unnatural acts of utilizing toilets and toothbrushes. One of the most beautiful aspects of humanity is that unlike animals, people are not enslaved by their nature. Human beings can evolve. However, most of humanity has chosen to readily accept the shackles of the ruling class. Historically, the Great Beast has been domesticated, tamed and manipulated in a variety of ways. Brute military force, manipulation by religious entities and institutions, propaganda, and careful restriction of knowledge are but a few of the tactics employed by monarchies, tyrants, Popes, and generals throughout history.
At first blush, the United States appears to be the haven for freedom and human rights portrayed in legend, lore, and the propaganda of its school textbooks and media. However, if one can awaken from the drunken stupor induced by America-Soma, or if one happens to be a resident of another nation besides Israel or Great Britain (the only two nations still deluded enough to truly ally themselves with the United States), the many headed hydra of the American Dystopia reveals its truly abhorrent nature. Lord Acton conveyed truth when he wrote that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Despite its cleverly constructed image of a benevolent super-power, those ruling the United States are more corrupt than the power elite of any nation, including those in Bush's alleged "Axis of Evil". Due to its power, military might, and rogue leadership, the United States has also become the world's most significant threat to the perpetuation of life on Earth.
Most Americans still do not realize that they are enslaved to the ruling elite, a group with a savage, relentless devotion to avarice, the blind pursuit of money, and the domination of Earth's people and resources. Under the Bush Regime, the mask of civility, morality, and democracy has slipped to the point that the hideous visage of raw capitalism and imperialistic ambition is almost completely exposed. Yet somehow, as over a hundred thousand lie dead in Iraq, the Patriot Act strips our civil liberties, the wealth gap widens to a chasm, Big Brother has been caught watching (and is unrepentant), billions of dollars are wasted on occupations of sovereign nations, habeas corpus disappears, America engages in torture regularly, property rights precede human rights, and a major city lays in ruins due to the willful neglect of a government charged by the Constitution with promoting the general welfare, many Americans still cannot, or will not, dare to even glimpse at the lurid countenance of evil leering at them from Washington.
Like a swarm of locusts, Social Darwinists have descended upon our nation and are rapidly devouring the fruits of our labor. Resembling leeches, these parasites drain the life-blood of America and return nothing. Acting as virulent strains of previously undiscovered illnesses, these pathogens have infected a nation filled with the promise and potential envisioned by Thomas Paine. The resulting disease has reduced the United States to a wheezing, gasping tyrant nearly on economic life support. This once admirable nation flails almost blindly as it wields the only real power it has left like a bludgeon, dispatching its awesome military on imperial errands and acts of revenge (against the wrong people) under the pretense of humanitarian intervention. Employing quick sound bites, propaganda packaged as gospel, tantalizing distractions, the lure of easy money, and a highly insular environment, these sociopathic plunderers have hijacked America. Their reckless piloting is destined to result in a disaster of Biblical proportions. America’s rulers view the world as their playground. Recess is in session and the schoolyard bullies have seized control. They kidnapped the school-yard monitor, have stolen the lunch money, are taunting and beating the weak, and are playing kickball with the class misfit’s head.
This doesn’t have to stand. America has exhibited true greatness in the past. Think of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. This is the nation that spawned the Abolitionist Movement. The powerful Labor Movement arose in the Twentieth Century and claimed unprecedented rights and protections for the working class. The Civil Rights Movement made powerful gains for minorities and the oppressed. Women won the right to vote. Populists made strides for farmers and the working class. Anti-war protestors broke the will of the military industrial complex to continue their genocidal “pacification” of the Vietnamese. Progressives have been a significant force for social changes to benefit humanity since the 1890’s. There are still champions for the oppressed in America and spiritually enlightened values are woven into the fabric of our culture.
We the People have a choice. We can bend to the will of the hectors who have stolen the soul of our nation or we can follow the example of our predecessors and work vigorously to reclaim our humanity. Borrowing the words of a blue blood of American aristocrats, Nancy Reagan, I say it is time to “just say no” to Ameri-Soma. Actually, Lady Nancy’s statement was grossly over-simplified. In addition to saying no, one also needs to replace the behaviors associated with the addiction. Might I be so bold as to make some suggestions to counter the effects of withdrawal from this powerful drug, and to propose some means of coping with the loss of the false feeling of security it imbues?
Join or support an NGO like the Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. Boycott dehumanizing corporations like Wal-Mart. Conserve resources, recycle, and drive as economical a car as you can afford. Support and vote for individuals who have genuine concern for humanity, like Lynn Woolsey, John Conyers, Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich (assuming they do not die under “mysterious circumstances” like Paul Wellstone). If you choose to support a specific political party, explore those outside the corrupt Duopoly, both of which represent the interests of the ruling class. Refuse to enable the ruling elite’s addiction to war by declining to join the military, hence depriving them of additional cannon fodder.
Embody the Golden Rule to the extent that it is humanly possible. Embrace cultural, racial, sexual, and religious diversity. Read some books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn to cleanse your mind of the elite’s polluted version of historical, social and political issues. Educate yourself and your children beyond the warped world perspective portrayed by the media and our public education system. Participate in your child’s education by teaching them to think critically and dig far beneath the surface. Live within your means and avoid credit card debt like the plague. Demand and support justice for the oppressed; peace will follow justice. Donate your time and money to truly compassionate and humane causes (as much and as often as you are able). Take personal responsibility and act as honestly as humanly possible in your affairs. Through non-violent action, press for social justice, human rights, dignity and peace.
In the end, the prognostications of martial law, “re-education” camps for dissidents, the collapse of the American economy triggered by crushing debt and the Iranian oil bourse, massive unemployment, the successful elimination of the remains of our Constitutional republic, and the relegation of the Great Beast in the United States to Third World conditions may ring true. So as you pour sugar in the tank of the engine powering the American Empire by refusing your daily dose of Ameri-Soma, do not relinquish your Second Amendment rights. Someday, the members of the Great Beast may need to exercise our inalienable right to self preservation. If it comes to this, there will be activity in the streets, but it will not be dancing.
In the future, I may be writing to you from behind concertina wire, or I might meet you there. Who can truly predict? However, if we happen to meet under those circumstances, at least our souls will be at rest knowing that we pursued social justice and human rights in the face of abject evil.
Jason Miller is a 39 year old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.
Check Your Conscience at the Door: We're Building an Empire
By Jason Miller
Blaring its typical jarringly cacophonous morning radio jabber, the suddenly welcome sound of my alarm rescued me from the maelstrom of a nightmarish Neocon world spawned within my unconscious mind. As consciousness flooded my being, I had an epiphany. My breed of human being is a pariah in the American Empire. In the minds of the Regime's loyal foot soldiers (the Neo-Tories of the Twenty First Century) American society is waging a domestic war between those they define as liberals and those they qualify as conservatives. Since 9/11, Fox News and the Bush Regime have brain-washed them into believing that terrorists and their sympathizers are lurking around every corner, poised to infect them with a lethal virus, slice them with box cutters or obliterate them with a suicide bomb. In the black and white perspective of the Neo-Tories, you are with us or against us. If you do not fit into their narrow and misguided notion of conservatism, you must be a "liberal". The American media/propaganda machine (which the Empire's power moguls have brilliantly portrayed as "liberal" to obfuscate the fact that six corporate conglomerates own 90% of the mainstream media market) has sharply defined the “treasonous”, “ineffectual” nature of "liberals", portraying them as soft on crime, sympathetic to those demonic terrorists, Socialists and Communists, immoral, and militarily weak.
Masters of delusion
To their credit, Israel, AIPAC, the Bush Regime, powerful families (with names like Koch), the numerous multi-millionaires in Congress, powerful lobbyists, think tanks, major corporations, and the 1% of Americans who harbor 38% of the nation's wealth have done a phenomenal job of convincing a majority of the poor and working class that they are fortunate to have the privilege of fighting over the remaining crumbs of the economic pie after the ruling elite gorge themselves. Despite the 13% of Americans living in poverty, 46 million without health insurance, and approximately 3 million homeless wandering our streets, the gallimaufry ruling the United States according to the Golden Rule (he that hath the gold maketh the rules) has artfully convinced "Main Street" that it "doesn't get any better than this". The Empire's Neo-Tories boast that capitalism and the free market are "kicking ass" while Communism and Socialism have been relegated to the dustbin of history. (Obviously they have not been paying much attention to South America lately). With "free market" think tanks like Cato Institute (funded by “humanitarian-environmentalists” like Charles Koch) to provide the propaganda (sorry, I meant to say research), there is virtually no end to the "evidence" supporting the "benefits" of government deregulation of businesses and corporations.
Unfortunately, I was born with a social conscience and a powerful aversion to tyranny. My strong support of universal human rights and dignity, social justice, equality, peace, and protection of the environment has led me to dissent vehemently against the American Empire. My strenuous objections to the widening wealth gap, the state terrorism committed by the United States and Israel, corporate abuse of consumers, employees and the environment, egregious violation of international law by the US (including torture on a wide scale), obscene hypocrisy concerning nuclear capacities, rapidly diminishing civil liberties, insane expenditure of our tax dollars for military purposes, and the rapid consolidation of power into the Executive Branch have earned me the brand of "liberal".
Now is the time for the Neo-Tories to make the sign of the cross, reach for their garlic, brandish their vile of holy water, and invoke incantations from Ann Coulter. In so doing, they are certain to vanquish the lot of us weaklings who stand in the way of the true “progress” which will only occur once the Empire dedicates itself fully to the concept of survival of the fittest. Remember, Hitler eradicated the Socialist/Communist scourge as he rose to provide us with a viable sociopolitical model encompassing gross intolerance, cruel injustice, imperial conquest, genocide, and overt concentration of power in the hands of the elites.
In my poignant moment of clarity, I decided it was time for me (and others like me) to surrender our fatuous devotion to childish notions of fairness and equality. The Neocons and their Neo-Tory bootlicks possess an unwavering commitment to domination that will enable them to lead the American Empire (unfettered by weaknesses like compassion and empathy) to its true destiny: global hegemony. How could I have been so blind to the truth that the many must suffer so the few can prosper? It is an inescapable aspect of the human condition. Only 250,000 Iraqi civilian have died for the noble cause of spreading freedom and democracy (wink, wink; nudge, nudge). In the process, we have also taught those filthy Middle Easterners that we will not tolerate them selling their oil for Euros and we have established the 52nd state of the union (to complement the 51st state formed through the genocide of the Palestinians). Never mind that the Machiavellian and illegitimate Bush Regime has reduced the value of the Constitution to that of toilet paper (albeit it would probably be too rough even for that purpose).
Bury the efforts and sacrifices of Women's Suffragists, Populists, Progressives, organized labor and civil rights activists! Join the Neo-Tories in a Twenty First Century renewal of fealty to King George! William Kristol, Robert Kagan and the Empire-building signatories of the PNAC had the cajones to announce America's intentions to dominate the world. We owe it to them to make their wet dream a reality....
Imagine a nation unfettered by the silly constraints of conscience, the rule of law (over the whims of individual rulers), humanity, and justice! My mind is reeling in orgasmic delight at the virtually infinite array of possibilities. America has the potential to become an empire like no other. Envision endless hedonistic orgies, mountains of blood-drenched cash harvested from the Neo-colonies, uninhibited rape and plunder of the world’s resources, obscene exploitation of the billions of human beings not fortunate enough to inhabit the “Empire proper”, and military domination by air, sea, land and space. Sign me up to help make it happen!
In the wake of my startling realizations, I finally began seeing the light as I envisioned the American Empire as it should be. Thankfully, I have come to my senses and will cease my frivolous pursuit of inane ideals that don’t create wealth, advance technology, dominate other human beings, provide immediate gratification, or satiate carnal desires.
This is America, baby! Shut up and swear allegiance to the Flag, the Dollar, the Corporatocracy, and to the Regime.
Taking off the mask (and the gloves)
It has become too cumbersome to carry on the charade of democracy. Staging two consecutive fraudulent presidential elections, maintaining a Congress which has evolved into a rubber-stamp for the Regime, and giving the populace access to a court system packed with ideologues who eagerly await the opportunity to endorse the Empire's edicts have effectively enabled tyranny under the guise of democracy. However, these unnecessary hindrances have become obsolete. Besides, if we are to rescue Scott McClellan from eternity in Malebolge, it is time that the Bush Regime comes out of the closet and simply issues its own version of the Enabling Act.
As President-elect George Bush stated on 12/18/00:
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
Let's not keep him waiting any longer! Stop haranguing him about wire-tapping without FISA approval. Implement Patriot Act II. Embrace torture as an acceptable and necessary means of expanding the Empire by breaking its alleged enemies and dissenters. Habeas corpus and Posse Comitatus are antiquated impediments to domestic tranquility. They must be eliminated.
One of my co-workers recently asserted that everyone who disagrees with the policies of the Regime needs to be rounded up and shot. I agree. We need to implement a nation-wide dragnet to capture subversives, dissidents, liberals, war protesters, and the remaining scum whose treasonous activities retard the Empire's progress. A bullet is a hell of a lot cheaper than a prison cell. We have plenty of bullets; let's put them to use.
The Business of America is Business
Calvin Coolidge, a visionary president who recognized the necessity of laissez-faire economic policies, knew what America was about. It is time we got back to our roots by removing quaint ethical, legal, and moral constraints on businesses. American society reached the peak of its evolution during the Gilded Age. Let's reclaim that glory.
Corporations and business magnates have been hamstrung by archaic laws long enough. Let's truly free the free market. Unshackle the movers and shakers of our capitalist economy and the American Empire will blow the doors off the rest of the world. We are only consuming 25% of the world's resources now. America needs to buckle down and significantly increase its share of the world's bounty. Since the other 97% of the world's population is comprised of terrorists, savages, Socialists, non-Christians, and non-Caucasians, they need to yield to the moral imperative of the Christian God and further enrich the American Empire.
Minimum wages, Child Labor Laws, mandatory extra pay for so-called "overtime", legislation prohibiting discriminatory hiring practices and sexual harassment, and ridiculous protections for the disabled need to go. Our children have too much free time on their hands; idle hands do the work of the devil. Blacks and other minorities need to buck up and deal with it if Whites feel uncomfortable hiring them. Women need to develop a thicker skin and realize that sometimes keeping their job requires a little "extra effort". If someone is blind or wheelchair-bound, we have no obligation to accommodate their weaknesses.
Clean air and water are luxuries Americans can no longer afford. Endangered species need to go the way of the Dodo if they can't hack it anymore. The Bible clearly defines man's dominion over this planet. If Mother Earth has a problem with the way we are treating her, she can take it up with the Man Upstairs.
End the Gravy Train
Entitlements are a waste of our precious resources. Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, food stamps and the rest of those nauseating Socialistic programs must go. If someone doesn't have money, it is time they got a job. Those of us who work and pay taxes owe the lazy and weak nothing. Can't find a job or the money you need for basic necessities? Tough. If God had intended for you to survive, he would have given you the attributes and resources to do so.
Shedding our puerile concerns for the plight of the poor, the elderly, and the disabled will enable us to focus more of our resources where they belong. The $600 billion a year we spend on defense represents a mere 60% of world military expenditures. What self-respecting imperial entity would settle for such a miniscule piece of the pie? Exempting the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the other offices of the Executive Branch necessary to rule the Empire, it is time to follow Grover Norquist's brilliant advice and start running the bath water.
Like the one in Jericho, this wall must come down...
A crucial aspect the American Empire lacks is the marriage of church and state. A tyrannical Bush Regime wedded with the powerful elements of the Religious Right and Dominionists would empower the "iron men" to rid our society of harlots and sinners like Hester Prynne.
We are a Christian nation. Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans and other followers of unenlightened religions need to convert or face harsh consequences, including crucifixion, stoning, or if we are feeling lenient, simple expulsion from our nation. Homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, and atheism will be punishable by death. Blasphemy will result in surgical removal of the tongue. Adultery will be grounds for severe torture involving the genitals. Women and children will again subjugate themselves to the masters of our nation, their husbands and fathers.
Religion will return to the public square. Those who refuse to say Merry Christmas will be flogged until they lose consciousness. Prayer will be mandatory at all public events and non-participants will receive severe beatings. Failure to attend church on a consistent basis will result in assignment to re-education centers. A government entity analogous to the IRS will oversee the collection of mandatory tithes. Those caught cheating the Church will have their hands severed. A Ministry of Decency will monitor all forms of media and stage mass public bonfires to eliminate profane, pornographic, and blasphemous materials.
The Church of the Empire will be jointly administered by members of the Bush Regime and such Christian luminaries as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye. To prevent the Empire's bounty from going to waste in a heavily tithed society with Puritanical laws, the segments of the populace comprising the ruling elite (including the Church leadership) will be exempt from their own edicts. "Do as I say and not as I do" will be the order of the day.
It is time for the "Culture of Life" to prevail in the United States.
Whoring girls and women who become pregnant out of wedlock deserve to be butchered at the hands of back-alley abortionists. And as for the abandoned or abused children arising from unwanted pregnancies, they will provide a ready supply of cheap labor once we eliminate those hopelessly idealistic Child Labor Laws.
Perpetual war to expand our sphere of influence is the only way to ensure American dominance over the rest of the world. To hell with concern for the murder of innocent civilians. Those individuals are merely "collateral damage" for which we cannot be held responsible. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Better luck next time. Besides, when we murder, we are morally and legally justified because our terrorism is committed in uniform and for the cause of “freedom”. Hopefully Hamas will not discover our secret and start putting uniforms on their freedom fighters.
The Empire's work in Iraq is only beginning. Permanent military base completion, generous dispensation of depleted uranium and white phosphorus, murder, mayhem, and environmental devastation will keep us busy for a few more years. Once we have secured Iraq and the precious oil, we can take a serious look at Iran. While there are several compelling reasons to refrain from attacking Iran today, once we bring the nation of Iraq to its knees (regardless of the cost), we can set our sights on another member of the Axis of Evil. In the interim, we will further solidify our strategic position in the Middle East through our unflinching support of Israeli genocide against the malevolent Palestinians. They made their bed by electing Hamas. Now they must lie in it. Unless Hamas quietly acquiesces to the ongoing rape of its people, we will teach them obedience. We will not rest until the vermin infesting the West Bank and Gaza are servile or dead.
We can stem the tide of the ongoing threat from our subhuman black population by stepping up implementation of the death penalty. Since public lynchings are no longer an option, state murders need to become public events once again. We know that black males in particular have natural criminal inclinations, so we need this powerful deterrent to keep their savage tendencies in check.
Embryonic stem cell research must not take place. Blastocysts are human lives, whether they have been implanted in a womb or not. We need to appropriate federal funding for funerals and proper burials for those tiny human beings discarded by fertility clinics. God mandates that we deter the murderers who want to use these precious little children for their evil scientific experiments.
Finally, to keep the citizens of the Empire complacent and fulfilled, we will continue to burnish unbridled consumption into their psyches. Alluring advertising from Madison Avenue, easy credit, and the commercialization of virtually every aspect of our culture (we will even have to desecrate our sacred Christianity a bit, but such is the nature of an imperial dynasty) will prompt consumers to power the engine of America's economy.
Mirroring our spiritual bankruptcy, our people and our government will revel in false riches derived from borrowed money we can never hope to repay. But who will challenge the most powerful nation on the planet? If China calls our notes due, we will simply incinerate them with the space weapons we will have developed.
You think the American Empire is hubristic, xenophobic, cruel, avaricious, and murderous? You're right. As Aldous Huxley wrote:
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
Many Americans forgot that many other sets of people were human long ago. They checked their consciences at the door and are building an empire. Join me in letting go of the delusional belief that you can stop them. Resistance if futile. Accept your fate and surrender gracefully.
To the glory of Washington!
Excuse me now while I wretch and vomit profusely. Once I purge the toxins of imperial fantasy from my being, I will resume my dissent. In spite of my tenacious efforts, I was unable to divorce myself from my conscience. It looks like I won’t be swearing allegiance to the American Empire any time soon.
Jason Miller is a 39-year-old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner.
Blaring its typical jarringly cacophonous morning radio jabber, the suddenly welcome sound of my alarm rescued me from the maelstrom of a nightmarish Neocon world spawned within my unconscious mind. As consciousness flooded my being, I had an epiphany. My breed of human being is a pariah in the American Empire. In the minds of the Regime's loyal foot soldiers (the Neo-Tories of the Twenty First Century) American society is waging a domestic war between those they define as liberals and those they qualify as conservatives. Since 9/11, Fox News and the Bush Regime have brain-washed them into believing that terrorists and their sympathizers are lurking around every corner, poised to infect them with a lethal virus, slice them with box cutters or obliterate them with a suicide bomb. In the black and white perspective of the Neo-Tories, you are with us or against us. If you do not fit into their narrow and misguided notion of conservatism, you must be a "liberal". The American media/propaganda machine (which the Empire's power moguls have brilliantly portrayed as "liberal" to obfuscate the fact that six corporate conglomerates own 90% of the mainstream media market) has sharply defined the “treasonous”, “ineffectual” nature of "liberals", portraying them as soft on crime, sympathetic to those demonic terrorists, Socialists and Communists, immoral, and militarily weak.
Masters of delusion
To their credit, Israel, AIPAC, the Bush Regime, powerful families (with names like Koch), the numerous multi-millionaires in Congress, powerful lobbyists, think tanks, major corporations, and the 1% of Americans who harbor 38% of the nation's wealth have done a phenomenal job of convincing a majority of the poor and working class that they are fortunate to have the privilege of fighting over the remaining crumbs of the economic pie after the ruling elite gorge themselves. Despite the 13% of Americans living in poverty, 46 million without health insurance, and approximately 3 million homeless wandering our streets, the gallimaufry ruling the United States according to the Golden Rule (he that hath the gold maketh the rules) has artfully convinced "Main Street" that it "doesn't get any better than this". The Empire's Neo-Tories boast that capitalism and the free market are "kicking ass" while Communism and Socialism have been relegated to the dustbin of history. (Obviously they have not been paying much attention to South America lately). With "free market" think tanks like Cato Institute (funded by “humanitarian-environmentalists” like Charles Koch) to provide the propaganda (sorry, I meant to say research), there is virtually no end to the "evidence" supporting the "benefits" of government deregulation of businesses and corporations.
Unfortunately, I was born with a social conscience and a powerful aversion to tyranny. My strong support of universal human rights and dignity, social justice, equality, peace, and protection of the environment has led me to dissent vehemently against the American Empire. My strenuous objections to the widening wealth gap, the state terrorism committed by the United States and Israel, corporate abuse of consumers, employees and the environment, egregious violation of international law by the US (including torture on a wide scale), obscene hypocrisy concerning nuclear capacities, rapidly diminishing civil liberties, insane expenditure of our tax dollars for military purposes, and the rapid consolidation of power into the Executive Branch have earned me the brand of "liberal".
Now is the time for the Neo-Tories to make the sign of the cross, reach for their garlic, brandish their vile of holy water, and invoke incantations from Ann Coulter. In so doing, they are certain to vanquish the lot of us weaklings who stand in the way of the true “progress” which will only occur once the Empire dedicates itself fully to the concept of survival of the fittest. Remember, Hitler eradicated the Socialist/Communist scourge as he rose to provide us with a viable sociopolitical model encompassing gross intolerance, cruel injustice, imperial conquest, genocide, and overt concentration of power in the hands of the elites.
In my poignant moment of clarity, I decided it was time for me (and others like me) to surrender our fatuous devotion to childish notions of fairness and equality. The Neocons and their Neo-Tory bootlicks possess an unwavering commitment to domination that will enable them to lead the American Empire (unfettered by weaknesses like compassion and empathy) to its true destiny: global hegemony. How could I have been so blind to the truth that the many must suffer so the few can prosper? It is an inescapable aspect of the human condition. Only 250,000 Iraqi civilian have died for the noble cause of spreading freedom and democracy (wink, wink; nudge, nudge). In the process, we have also taught those filthy Middle Easterners that we will not tolerate them selling their oil for Euros and we have established the 52nd state of the union (to complement the 51st state formed through the genocide of the Palestinians). Never mind that the Machiavellian and illegitimate Bush Regime has reduced the value of the Constitution to that of toilet paper (albeit it would probably be too rough even for that purpose).
Bury the efforts and sacrifices of Women's Suffragists, Populists, Progressives, organized labor and civil rights activists! Join the Neo-Tories in a Twenty First Century renewal of fealty to King George! William Kristol, Robert Kagan and the Empire-building signatories of the PNAC had the cajones to announce America's intentions to dominate the world. We owe it to them to make their wet dream a reality....
Imagine a nation unfettered by the silly constraints of conscience, the rule of law (over the whims of individual rulers), humanity, and justice! My mind is reeling in orgasmic delight at the virtually infinite array of possibilities. America has the potential to become an empire like no other. Envision endless hedonistic orgies, mountains of blood-drenched cash harvested from the Neo-colonies, uninhibited rape and plunder of the world’s resources, obscene exploitation of the billions of human beings not fortunate enough to inhabit the “Empire proper”, and military domination by air, sea, land and space. Sign me up to help make it happen!
In the wake of my startling realizations, I finally began seeing the light as I envisioned the American Empire as it should be. Thankfully, I have come to my senses and will cease my frivolous pursuit of inane ideals that don’t create wealth, advance technology, dominate other human beings, provide immediate gratification, or satiate carnal desires.
This is America, baby! Shut up and swear allegiance to the Flag, the Dollar, the Corporatocracy, and to the Regime.
Taking off the mask (and the gloves)
It has become too cumbersome to carry on the charade of democracy. Staging two consecutive fraudulent presidential elections, maintaining a Congress which has evolved into a rubber-stamp for the Regime, and giving the populace access to a court system packed with ideologues who eagerly await the opportunity to endorse the Empire's edicts have effectively enabled tyranny under the guise of democracy. However, these unnecessary hindrances have become obsolete. Besides, if we are to rescue Scott McClellan from eternity in Malebolge, it is time that the Bush Regime comes out of the closet and simply issues its own version of the Enabling Act.
As President-elect George Bush stated on 12/18/00:
"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."
Let's not keep him waiting any longer! Stop haranguing him about wire-tapping without FISA approval. Implement Patriot Act II. Embrace torture as an acceptable and necessary means of expanding the Empire by breaking its alleged enemies and dissenters. Habeas corpus and Posse Comitatus are antiquated impediments to domestic tranquility. They must be eliminated.
One of my co-workers recently asserted that everyone who disagrees with the policies of the Regime needs to be rounded up and shot. I agree. We need to implement a nation-wide dragnet to capture subversives, dissidents, liberals, war protesters, and the remaining scum whose treasonous activities retard the Empire's progress. A bullet is a hell of a lot cheaper than a prison cell. We have plenty of bullets; let's put them to use.
The Business of America is Business
Calvin Coolidge, a visionary president who recognized the necessity of laissez-faire economic policies, knew what America was about. It is time we got back to our roots by removing quaint ethical, legal, and moral constraints on businesses. American society reached the peak of its evolution during the Gilded Age. Let's reclaim that glory.
Corporations and business magnates have been hamstrung by archaic laws long enough. Let's truly free the free market. Unshackle the movers and shakers of our capitalist economy and the American Empire will blow the doors off the rest of the world. We are only consuming 25% of the world's resources now. America needs to buckle down and significantly increase its share of the world's bounty. Since the other 97% of the world's population is comprised of terrorists, savages, Socialists, non-Christians, and non-Caucasians, they need to yield to the moral imperative of the Christian God and further enrich the American Empire.
Minimum wages, Child Labor Laws, mandatory extra pay for so-called "overtime", legislation prohibiting discriminatory hiring practices and sexual harassment, and ridiculous protections for the disabled need to go. Our children have too much free time on their hands; idle hands do the work of the devil. Blacks and other minorities need to buck up and deal with it if Whites feel uncomfortable hiring them. Women need to develop a thicker skin and realize that sometimes keeping their job requires a little "extra effort". If someone is blind or wheelchair-bound, we have no obligation to accommodate their weaknesses.
Clean air and water are luxuries Americans can no longer afford. Endangered species need to go the way of the Dodo if they can't hack it anymore. The Bible clearly defines man's dominion over this planet. If Mother Earth has a problem with the way we are treating her, she can take it up with the Man Upstairs.
End the Gravy Train
Entitlements are a waste of our precious resources. Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, food stamps and the rest of those nauseating Socialistic programs must go. If someone doesn't have money, it is time they got a job. Those of us who work and pay taxes owe the lazy and weak nothing. Can't find a job or the money you need for basic necessities? Tough. If God had intended for you to survive, he would have given you the attributes and resources to do so.
Shedding our puerile concerns for the plight of the poor, the elderly, and the disabled will enable us to focus more of our resources where they belong. The $600 billion a year we spend on defense represents a mere 60% of world military expenditures. What self-respecting imperial entity would settle for such a miniscule piece of the pie? Exempting the military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the other offices of the Executive Branch necessary to rule the Empire, it is time to follow Grover Norquist's brilliant advice and start running the bath water.
Like the one in Jericho, this wall must come down...
A crucial aspect the American Empire lacks is the marriage of church and state. A tyrannical Bush Regime wedded with the powerful elements of the Religious Right and Dominionists would empower the "iron men" to rid our society of harlots and sinners like Hester Prynne.
We are a Christian nation. Muslims, Hindus, Wiccans and other followers of unenlightened religions need to convert or face harsh consequences, including crucifixion, stoning, or if we are feeling lenient, simple expulsion from our nation. Homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, and atheism will be punishable by death. Blasphemy will result in surgical removal of the tongue. Adultery will be grounds for severe torture involving the genitals. Women and children will again subjugate themselves to the masters of our nation, their husbands and fathers.
Religion will return to the public square. Those who refuse to say Merry Christmas will be flogged until they lose consciousness. Prayer will be mandatory at all public events and non-participants will receive severe beatings. Failure to attend church on a consistent basis will result in assignment to re-education centers. A government entity analogous to the IRS will oversee the collection of mandatory tithes. Those caught cheating the Church will have their hands severed. A Ministry of Decency will monitor all forms of media and stage mass public bonfires to eliminate profane, pornographic, and blasphemous materials.
The Church of the Empire will be jointly administered by members of the Bush Regime and such Christian luminaries as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and Tim LaHaye. To prevent the Empire's bounty from going to waste in a heavily tithed society with Puritanical laws, the segments of the populace comprising the ruling elite (including the Church leadership) will be exempt from their own edicts. "Do as I say and not as I do" will be the order of the day.
It is time for the "Culture of Life" to prevail in the United States.
Whoring girls and women who become pregnant out of wedlock deserve to be butchered at the hands of back-alley abortionists. And as for the abandoned or abused children arising from unwanted pregnancies, they will provide a ready supply of cheap labor once we eliminate those hopelessly idealistic Child Labor Laws.
Perpetual war to expand our sphere of influence is the only way to ensure American dominance over the rest of the world. To hell with concern for the murder of innocent civilians. Those individuals are merely "collateral damage" for which we cannot be held responsible. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Better luck next time. Besides, when we murder, we are morally and legally justified because our terrorism is committed in uniform and for the cause of “freedom”. Hopefully Hamas will not discover our secret and start putting uniforms on their freedom fighters.
The Empire's work in Iraq is only beginning. Permanent military base completion, generous dispensation of depleted uranium and white phosphorus, murder, mayhem, and environmental devastation will keep us busy for a few more years. Once we have secured Iraq and the precious oil, we can take a serious look at Iran. While there are several compelling reasons to refrain from attacking Iran today, once we bring the nation of Iraq to its knees (regardless of the cost), we can set our sights on another member of the Axis of Evil. In the interim, we will further solidify our strategic position in the Middle East through our unflinching support of Israeli genocide against the malevolent Palestinians. They made their bed by electing Hamas. Now they must lie in it. Unless Hamas quietly acquiesces to the ongoing rape of its people, we will teach them obedience. We will not rest until the vermin infesting the West Bank and Gaza are servile or dead.
We can stem the tide of the ongoing threat from our subhuman black population by stepping up implementation of the death penalty. Since public lynchings are no longer an option, state murders need to become public events once again. We know that black males in particular have natural criminal inclinations, so we need this powerful deterrent to keep their savage tendencies in check.
Embryonic stem cell research must not take place. Blastocysts are human lives, whether they have been implanted in a womb or not. We need to appropriate federal funding for funerals and proper burials for those tiny human beings discarded by fertility clinics. God mandates that we deter the murderers who want to use these precious little children for their evil scientific experiments.
Finally, to keep the citizens of the Empire complacent and fulfilled, we will continue to burnish unbridled consumption into their psyches. Alluring advertising from Madison Avenue, easy credit, and the commercialization of virtually every aspect of our culture (we will even have to desecrate our sacred Christianity a bit, but such is the nature of an imperial dynasty) will prompt consumers to power the engine of America's economy.
Mirroring our spiritual bankruptcy, our people and our government will revel in false riches derived from borrowed money we can never hope to repay. But who will challenge the most powerful nation on the planet? If China calls our notes due, we will simply incinerate them with the space weapons we will have developed.
You think the American Empire is hubristic, xenophobic, cruel, avaricious, and murderous? You're right. As Aldous Huxley wrote:
"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
Many Americans forgot that many other sets of people were human long ago. They checked their consciences at the door and are building an empire. Join me in letting go of the delusional belief that you can stop them. Resistance if futile. Accept your fate and surrender gracefully.
To the glory of Washington!
Excuse me now while I wretch and vomit profusely. Once I purge the toxins of imperial fantasy from my being, I will resume my dissent. In spite of my tenacious efforts, I was unable to divorce myself from my conscience. It looks like I won’t be swearing allegiance to the American Empire any time soon.
Jason Miller is a 39-year-old activist writer with a degree in liberal arts. When he is not spending time with his wife and three sons, researching, or writing, he is working as a loan counselor. He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner.
Friday, February 24, 2006
DEATH IN U.S. CUSTODY
By William Fisher
A major human rights advocacy group is charging that of the 98 detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, 34 are suspected or confirmed homicides, another 11 suggest that death was a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions, but only 12 deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official.
In close to half the deaths surveyed in a new report by Human Rights First, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
The report, entitled “Command’s Responsibility”. says that of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half.
While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, no CIA agent has faced a criminal charge, the report says, adding, “Among the worst cases -- detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment and the harshest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death has been five months in jail.”
Among the report’s other findings: Commanders have failed to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, reported the deaths only after a period of days and sometimes weeks, or actively interfered in efforts to pursue investigations; investigators have failed to interview key witnesses, collect useable evidence, or maintain evidence that could be used for any subsequent prosecution; record keeping has been inadequate, further undermining chances for effective investigation or appropriate prosecution; overlapping criminal and administrative investigations have compromised chances for accountability; overbroad classification of information and other investigation restrictions have left CIA and Special Forces essentially immune from accountability; agencies have failed to disclose critical information, including the cause or circumstance of death, in close to half the cases examined; effective punishment has been too little and too late.
Charging that there is an “accountability gap”, HRF says closing it will require “a zero-tolerance approach to commanders who fail to take steps to provide clear guidance, and who allow unlawful conduct to persist on their watch.”
The report recommends that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, “move immediately to fully implement the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (known as the McCain Amendment) passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on December 30, 2005”.
It also demands that “the President, the U.S. military, and relevant intelligence agencies should take immediate steps to make clear that all acts of torture and abuse are taken seriously – not from the moment a crime becomes public, but from the moment the United States sends troops and agents into the field”.
Congress, the report suggests, “should at long last establish an independent, bipartisan commission to review the scope of U.S. detention and interrogation operations worldwide in the ‘war on terror’. Such a commission could investigate and identify the systemic causes of failures that lead to torture, abuse, and wrongful death, and chart a detailed and specific path going forward to make sure those mistakes never happen again. The proposal for a commission has been endorsed by a wide range of distinguished Americans from Republican and Democratic members of Congress to former presidents to leaders in the U.S. military. Human Rights First urges Congress to act without further delay.”
In response to a question from IPS, Deborah Pearlstein, Director of HRF’s U.S. Law and Security Program, said the Pentagon’s detention policies have repeatedly been criticized by military lawyers and health officials, but their objections have largely been ignored.
Most recently, it was revealed that one of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution.
Mora's campaign underscores how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.
"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive
interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without
profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the
Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, in a 22-page memorandum.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on specific assertions in Mr. Mora's memorandum.
"Detainee operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope, from all different angles," a spokesperson said. "It was found that it was not a Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture."
The HRF report notes that “It is difficult to assess the systemic adequacy of punishment when so few have been punished, and when the deliberations of juries and commanders are largely unknown. Nonetheless, two patterns clearly emerge and are documented in Command’s Responsibility: (1) because of investigative and evidentiary failures, accountability for wrongdoing has been limited at best, and almost non-existent for command; and (2) commanders have played a key role in undermining chances for full accountability.”
It adds, “In dozens of cases documented in the report, grossly inadequate reporting, investigation, and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths. Commanders have failed both to provide troops clear guidance, and to take crimes seriously by insisting on vigorous investigations. And command responsibility itself – the law that requires commanders to be held liable for the unlawful acts of their subordinates about which they knew or should have known – has been all but forgotten.”
Which reminds me that “Command Responsibility” ought to begin with the Commander-in-Chief.
A major human rights advocacy group is charging that of the 98 detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, 34 are suspected or confirmed homicides, another 11 suggest that death was a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions, but only 12 deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official.
In close to half the deaths surveyed in a new report by Human Rights First, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
The report, entitled “Command’s Responsibility”. says that of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half.
While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, no CIA agent has faced a criminal charge, the report says, adding, “Among the worst cases -- detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment and the harshest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death has been five months in jail.”
Among the report’s other findings: Commanders have failed to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, reported the deaths only after a period of days and sometimes weeks, or actively interfered in efforts to pursue investigations; investigators have failed to interview key witnesses, collect useable evidence, or maintain evidence that could be used for any subsequent prosecution; record keeping has been inadequate, further undermining chances for effective investigation or appropriate prosecution; overlapping criminal and administrative investigations have compromised chances for accountability; overbroad classification of information and other investigation restrictions have left CIA and Special Forces essentially immune from accountability; agencies have failed to disclose critical information, including the cause or circumstance of death, in close to half the cases examined; effective punishment has been too little and too late.
Charging that there is an “accountability gap”, HRF says closing it will require “a zero-tolerance approach to commanders who fail to take steps to provide clear guidance, and who allow unlawful conduct to persist on their watch.”
The report recommends that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, “move immediately to fully implement the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (known as the McCain Amendment) passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on December 30, 2005”.
It also demands that “the President, the U.S. military, and relevant intelligence agencies should take immediate steps to make clear that all acts of torture and abuse are taken seriously – not from the moment a crime becomes public, but from the moment the United States sends troops and agents into the field”.
Congress, the report suggests, “should at long last establish an independent, bipartisan commission to review the scope of U.S. detention and interrogation operations worldwide in the ‘war on terror’. Such a commission could investigate and identify the systemic causes of failures that lead to torture, abuse, and wrongful death, and chart a detailed and specific path going forward to make sure those mistakes never happen again. The proposal for a commission has been endorsed by a wide range of distinguished Americans from Republican and Democratic members of Congress to former presidents to leaders in the U.S. military. Human Rights First urges Congress to act without further delay.”
In response to a question from IPS, Deborah Pearlstein, Director of HRF’s U.S. Law and Security Program, said the Pentagon’s detention policies have repeatedly been criticized by military lawyers and health officials, but their objections have largely been ignored.
Most recently, it was revealed that one of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution.
Mora's campaign underscores how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.
"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive
interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without
profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the
Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, in a 22-page memorandum.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on specific assertions in Mr. Mora's memorandum.
"Detainee operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope, from all different angles," a spokesperson said. "It was found that it was not a Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture."
The HRF report notes that “It is difficult to assess the systemic adequacy of punishment when so few have been punished, and when the deliberations of juries and commanders are largely unknown. Nonetheless, two patterns clearly emerge and are documented in Command’s Responsibility: (1) because of investigative and evidentiary failures, accountability for wrongdoing has been limited at best, and almost non-existent for command; and (2) commanders have played a key role in undermining chances for full accountability.”
It adds, “In dozens of cases documented in the report, grossly inadequate reporting, investigation, and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths. Commanders have failed both to provide troops clear guidance, and to take crimes seriously by insisting on vigorous investigations. And command responsibility itself – the law that requires commanders to be held liable for the unlawful acts of their subordinates about which they knew or should have known – has been all but forgotten.”
Which reminds me that “Command Responsibility” ought to begin with the Commander-in-Chief.
REMEMBER RENDITION?
By William Fisher
A few months ago – particularly after The Washington Post broke the story of secret U.S. “black sites” in Eastern Europe – it would have been difficult to pick up a newspaper or watch television without hearing the words “extreme rendition”.
Then, almost as suddenly as the issue appeared, it vanished. The world’s press stopped focusing on the U.S. practice of sending detainees to countries where they would likely be tortured or abused.
Last week, the rendition issue was back, but not in a way likely to please its opponents.
Rendition returned when a U.S. federal court dismissed a lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist during a stopover in New York as he returned from a vacation in September 2002. He was held virtually incommunicado by U.S. officials, and then sent to Syria, where he said he was tortured and held in a tiny cell he likened to a "grave" for nearly a year. He was never charged before Syria returned him to Canada.
Brooklyn District Court Judge David Trager cited the need for national security and secrecy in making his decision, but also raised the possibility of Canadian complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria.
As in other recent cases, the U.S. government asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing the lawsuit must be dismissed because allowing it to proceed would necessarily involve the disclosure of sensitive information that would threaten national security or diplomatic relations if made public.
"The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted," Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."
Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said Justice Dennis O'Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge's comments.
Arar also vowed he would never give up his quest to reverse the "evil'' done against him. "If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration? Where do we go? The United Nations? We — me and others who have been subjected to this — are normal citizens who have done no wrong.”
He said, "They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. The court system is what distinguishes the West from the Third World. When a court will not act because of `national security,' there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World." His lawyers said they would continue the fight.
In Canada, Justice O'Connor is expected to issue an interim report next month.
The Arar suit was the first court test of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition," a practice often referred to as the outsourcing of torture.
Critics of the practice said the U.S. court’s decision gives Washington a green light to continue its practice of sending terrorist suspects to third countries where they could be tortured.
Arar's is just one of a number of well-documented cases in which suspects have been shipped to third countries with dubious human rights records where interrogation methods outlawed in the U.S. can be used.
In his decision, Judge Trager acknowledged Arar's fears of torture in Syria were real and cited the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights abuses there.
But he said such decisions were beyond the realm of his court. "A judge who declares on his or her own ... authority that the policy of extraordinary rendition is under all circumstances unconstitutional must acknowledge that such a ruling can have the most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both," he wrote.
The U.S. and other countries that practice extreme rendition often hide behind what critics call “the fig leaf of diplomatic assurances”. This means the rendering government asks the receiving government to promise not to torture or abuse prisoners.
But, critics say, documented evidence shows such assurances to be a sham. According to Dr. Beau Grosscup, professor of international relations at California State University and an expert on terrorism, “Diplomatic assurances are trumped by the military, police and intelligence 'counter-insurgency' programs that the two Cold War superpowers instituted and still run in many of these countries that train police and military personnel in torture.” Grosscup says, “The real attitude driving the 'rendition' efforts is: ‘Having paid to train them in torture, why not get our monies worth’.”
Ron Daniels, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group based in New York which is helping in Arar’s defense, told IPS, “Torture is against the law in the United States. The Bush administration should not be attempting to avoid the laws of this country by sending people to be tortured over seas where other countries will do their dirty work out of the public eye. This is a barbaric practice with no place in the 21st Century.”
A Justice Department official said the ruling pleased the government.
At least one other rendition lawsuit has been filed in U.S. courts. Khaled Al-Masri, a German citizen born in Lebanon, took a bus from Germany to Macedonia, where Macedonian agents confiscated his passport and detained him for 23 days, without access to anyone, including his wife.
He says he was then put in a diaper, a belt with chains to his wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. He was put into a plane, his legs and arms spread-eagled and secured to the floor. He was drugged and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in solitary confinement for five months before being dropped off in a remote rural section of Albania. He claims it was a CIA-leased aircraft that flew him to Afghanistan, and CIA agents who were responsible for his rendition to Afghanistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the practice of rendition, saying it was a vital tool in the war on terror. But Ms. Rice said the U.S. does not "send anyone to a country to be tortured."
"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured," she said. "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."
However, on a trip to Europe shortly after making these comments, Secretary Rice admitted to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the rendition of Al-Masri was “a mistake”.
Does this mean renditions will not stop?
I wouldn't count on it!
A few months ago – particularly after The Washington Post broke the story of secret U.S. “black sites” in Eastern Europe – it would have been difficult to pick up a newspaper or watch television without hearing the words “extreme rendition”.
Then, almost as suddenly as the issue appeared, it vanished. The world’s press stopped focusing on the U.S. practice of sending detainees to countries where they would likely be tortured or abused.
Last week, the rendition issue was back, but not in a way likely to please its opponents.
Rendition returned when a U.S. federal court dismissed a lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist during a stopover in New York as he returned from a vacation in September 2002. He was held virtually incommunicado by U.S. officials, and then sent to Syria, where he said he was tortured and held in a tiny cell he likened to a "grave" for nearly a year. He was never charged before Syria returned him to Canada.
Brooklyn District Court Judge David Trager cited the need for national security and secrecy in making his decision, but also raised the possibility of Canadian complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria.
As in other recent cases, the U.S. government asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing the lawsuit must be dismissed because allowing it to proceed would necessarily involve the disclosure of sensitive information that would threaten national security or diplomatic relations if made public.
"The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted," Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."
Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said Justice Dennis O'Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge's comments.
Arar also vowed he would never give up his quest to reverse the "evil'' done against him. "If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration? Where do we go? The United Nations? We — me and others who have been subjected to this — are normal citizens who have done no wrong.”
He said, "They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. The court system is what distinguishes the West from the Third World. When a court will not act because of `national security,' there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World." His lawyers said they would continue the fight.
In Canada, Justice O'Connor is expected to issue an interim report next month.
The Arar suit was the first court test of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition," a practice often referred to as the outsourcing of torture.
Critics of the practice said the U.S. court’s decision gives Washington a green light to continue its practice of sending terrorist suspects to third countries where they could be tortured.
Arar's is just one of a number of well-documented cases in which suspects have been shipped to third countries with dubious human rights records where interrogation methods outlawed in the U.S. can be used.
In his decision, Judge Trager acknowledged Arar's fears of torture in Syria were real and cited the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights abuses there.
But he said such decisions were beyond the realm of his court. "A judge who declares on his or her own ... authority that the policy of extraordinary rendition is under all circumstances unconstitutional must acknowledge that such a ruling can have the most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both," he wrote.
The U.S. and other countries that practice extreme rendition often hide behind what critics call “the fig leaf of diplomatic assurances”. This means the rendering government asks the receiving government to promise not to torture or abuse prisoners.
But, critics say, documented evidence shows such assurances to be a sham. According to Dr. Beau Grosscup, professor of international relations at California State University and an expert on terrorism, “Diplomatic assurances are trumped by the military, police and intelligence 'counter-insurgency' programs that the two Cold War superpowers instituted and still run in many of these countries that train police and military personnel in torture.” Grosscup says, “The real attitude driving the 'rendition' efforts is: ‘Having paid to train them in torture, why not get our monies worth’.”
Ron Daniels, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group based in New York which is helping in Arar’s defense, told IPS, “Torture is against the law in the United States. The Bush administration should not be attempting to avoid the laws of this country by sending people to be tortured over seas where other countries will do their dirty work out of the public eye. This is a barbaric practice with no place in the 21st Century.”
A Justice Department official said the ruling pleased the government.
At least one other rendition lawsuit has been filed in U.S. courts. Khaled Al-Masri, a German citizen born in Lebanon, took a bus from Germany to Macedonia, where Macedonian agents confiscated his passport and detained him for 23 days, without access to anyone, including his wife.
He says he was then put in a diaper, a belt with chains to his wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. He was put into a plane, his legs and arms spread-eagled and secured to the floor. He was drugged and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in solitary confinement for five months before being dropped off in a remote rural section of Albania. He claims it was a CIA-leased aircraft that flew him to Afghanistan, and CIA agents who were responsible for his rendition to Afghanistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the practice of rendition, saying it was a vital tool in the war on terror. But Ms. Rice said the U.S. does not "send anyone to a country to be tortured."
"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured," she said. "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."
However, on a trip to Europe shortly after making these comments, Secretary Rice admitted to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the rendition of Al-Masri was “a mistake”.
Does this mean renditions will not stop?
I wouldn't count on it!
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
A TALE OF TWO GITMOS: WHERE WAS THE MSM?
By William Fisher
Last June 17, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "If you think of the people down there (at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Yet two recent reports, based on the Defense Department’s own documentation, reach conclusions that are dramatically different than Mr. Rumsfeld’s. And, amid the millions of words journalists have written about GITMO during the past few years, the mainstream press has largely ignored these new reports.
One report, prepared by a team headed by Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey – who is a lawyer for two of the Guantanamo detainees – found that more than half of the terror suspects being held have not been accused of committing hostile acts against the United States or its allies.
Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just eight percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just "associated with" terrorists.
The evaluations were completed as part of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted during 2004 to determine if the prisoners were being correctly held as enemy combatants. So far just 10 of the detainees have been formally charged with crimes and are headed for military tribunals.
According to the report, 55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of
committing a hostile act. But the DOD’s descriptions of their actions range from a
high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guesthouse or wore olive drab clothing.
The report also found that about one-third of the detainees were linked to
al-Qaida; 22 percent to the Taliban; 28 percent to both; and 7 percent to either
one or the other, but not specified.
Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press filed a story on the report on February 7, 2006. But few U.S. newspapers have run the story.
The DOD documents, which are publicly available, were declassified versions of
evaluations that contain additional information about each detainee. Those
additional details were not made public. The Pentagon had no comment on the report for the AP, which has filed a lawsuit seeking the release of the classified versions of the documents.
"The government has detained these individuals for more than four years, without
a trial or judicial hearing, and has had unfettered access to each detainee for
that time," said the Denbeaux report.
Of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the
military has released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
The second report, written by Corine Hegland for the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal (NJ), was based on a review conducted by the magazine of files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners.
Its conclusion: Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not “the worst of the worst” of the terrorist world.
“Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars,” the magazine said.
NJ reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
It added, “Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population”.
The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were terrorists, the NJ recounted. “They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
But, says the magazine, the CIA didn't see it that way. “By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004.”
According to Scheuer, “Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of the guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license, according to the magazine.
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense Department report leaked to the New York Times.
The report called the operations "tantamount to torture." Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism." And members of Congress were touting the prison’s excellent cuisine.
Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, told IPS, “If most of these guys are not al Qaeda, i.e., are vanilla flavored civilians or mere Taliban foot soldiers, then it gives the lie to the single mantra that the administration has left when attempting to defend itself against allegations of abuse in Gitmo: that the ‘terrorists’ are trained to make false allegations of abuse.”
Rona said it reminds him of a story he sees as emblematic of the legal process at Guantanamo. “The story is about a guy who, after relentless interrogation, finally admitted to knowing Osama --‘Yes, OK, I know him, I've seen him on Al Jazeera’ -- upon which basis the Combatant Status Review Tribunal was informed that ‘the individual admits to knowing bin Laden’. And upon this information, he was adjudicated an ‘enemy combatant’. "
Some reports disputing the Bush Administration’s versions of conditions at Guantanamo have received widespread coverage in the U.S. press. For example, Amnesty International created a media firestorm with a report in which it referred to the prison as a “Gulag”. Also widely covered was the recent report from investigators for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, recommending that Guantanamo be closed down. On the other side of the ledger, the recent report from a United Nations team of experts from the UN Human Rights Commission received relatively little attention in mainstream media. It recommended closure of the Guantanamo prison.
Similarly, the Seton Hall and National Journal reports found the media largely asleep. It may well be that local editors feel their readership is suffering from GITMO-overload.
Last June 17, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "If you think of the people down there (at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Yet two recent reports, based on the Defense Department’s own documentation, reach conclusions that are dramatically different than Mr. Rumsfeld’s. And, amid the millions of words journalists have written about GITMO during the past few years, the mainstream press has largely ignored these new reports.
One report, prepared by a team headed by Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey – who is a lawyer for two of the Guantanamo detainees – found that more than half of the terror suspects being held have not been accused of committing hostile acts against the United States or its allies.
Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just eight percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just "associated with" terrorists.
The evaluations were completed as part of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted during 2004 to determine if the prisoners were being correctly held as enemy combatants. So far just 10 of the detainees have been formally charged with crimes and are headed for military tribunals.
According to the report, 55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of
committing a hostile act. But the DOD’s descriptions of their actions range from a
high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guesthouse or wore olive drab clothing.
The report also found that about one-third of the detainees were linked to
al-Qaida; 22 percent to the Taliban; 28 percent to both; and 7 percent to either
one or the other, but not specified.
Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press filed a story on the report on February 7, 2006. But few U.S. newspapers have run the story.
The DOD documents, which are publicly available, were declassified versions of
evaluations that contain additional information about each detainee. Those
additional details were not made public. The Pentagon had no comment on the report for the AP, which has filed a lawsuit seeking the release of the classified versions of the documents.
"The government has detained these individuals for more than four years, without
a trial or judicial hearing, and has had unfettered access to each detainee for
that time," said the Denbeaux report.
Of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the
military has released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
The second report, written by Corine Hegland for the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal (NJ), was based on a review conducted by the magazine of files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners.
Its conclusion: Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not “the worst of the worst” of the terrorist world.
“Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars,” the magazine said.
NJ reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
It added, “Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population”.
The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were terrorists, the NJ recounted. “They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
But, says the magazine, the CIA didn't see it that way. “By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004.”
According to Scheuer, “Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of the guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license, according to the magazine.
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense Department report leaked to the New York Times.
The report called the operations "tantamount to torture." Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism." And members of Congress were touting the prison’s excellent cuisine.
Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, told IPS, “If most of these guys are not al Qaeda, i.e., are vanilla flavored civilians or mere Taliban foot soldiers, then it gives the lie to the single mantra that the administration has left when attempting to defend itself against allegations of abuse in Gitmo: that the ‘terrorists’ are trained to make false allegations of abuse.”
Rona said it reminds him of a story he sees as emblematic of the legal process at Guantanamo. “The story is about a guy who, after relentless interrogation, finally admitted to knowing Osama --‘Yes, OK, I know him, I've seen him on Al Jazeera’ -- upon which basis the Combatant Status Review Tribunal was informed that ‘the individual admits to knowing bin Laden’. And upon this information, he was adjudicated an ‘enemy combatant’. "
Some reports disputing the Bush Administration’s versions of conditions at Guantanamo have received widespread coverage in the U.S. press. For example, Amnesty International created a media firestorm with a report in which it referred to the prison as a “Gulag”. Also widely covered was the recent report from investigators for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, recommending that Guantanamo be closed down. On the other side of the ledger, the recent report from a United Nations team of experts from the UN Human Rights Commission received relatively little attention in mainstream media. It recommended closure of the Guantanamo prison.
Similarly, the Seton Hall and National Journal reports found the media largely asleep. It may well be that local editors feel their readership is suffering from GITMO-overload.
Monday, February 20, 2006
WHAT TO DO WITH THE PRISONERS?
By William Fisher
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with the United Nations report calling on the U.S. to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
And many of those interviewed by us were fearful that the George W. Bush administration would use the source of the report – the admittedly flawed United Nations Human Rights Commission -- to discredit its findings.
The report found that U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the U.S. to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation ordered by the Commission. The U.N. team was refused access to prisoners and did not visit the facility for that reason.
The human rights body has been widely criticized because its 53 members include representatives of countries with questionable human rights records. These include Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The U.S. has been among U.N. member states attempting to reform the Commission, denying membership to countries that are known to commit human rights abuses.
The report concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.”
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," said Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
Prof. Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the U.N.'s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament.
Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He told us, “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts' jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He told us, “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closure means the U.S. is going to open up its legal environment to respect international human rights norms not only at GITMO but in all its detention facilities worldwide, that would be a step forward. If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all. The U.S. needs to live up to its obligations under both U.S. and international law.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, Director Counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told us, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the U.S. decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantánamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the U.S. might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantánamo. For the many detainees who do not have this judicial protection in place (because until very recently we did not have identifying information for them and/or authorization to represent them) we have no way of ensuring that the men are not rendered to indefinite detention or torture either in their countries of birth or some third country. “
Prof. Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on U.S. Constitutional and international law, told us, “Closing Gitmo would be a welcomed change. However, it will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations. The problem is the underlying legal claims of the President and the continued failure of the government to comply with domestic and international law. The most important recommendation is that these individuals be given legitimate trials in federal court rather than the meaningless proceedings held at GITMO. The current proceedings have little resemblance to legal hearings. They are controlled by rules written by government prosecutors to guarantee conviction and stand as a fundamental affront to the most basic notions of the rule of law.”
Yale Richmond, a veteran of 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, believes that “As long as (GITMO) remains open, it will be used against us. Better to close it.” But, he told us, “That raises the question of whether the prisoners should be tried in US courts, and what Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush (in that order) would say if some of them were found ‘not guilty’."
Christopher J. Roederer, Associate Professor of Law at the Florida Coastal School of Law, told us, “I do think that GITMO should be closed, or fully opened up to full inspection and access. The main problem with the report in my view is that there was no visit and no access to the prisoners – but whose fault is that? Did we accept Saddam’s assurances that there were no WMDs on his say-so? Did we not hold his lack of full cooperation against him?”
Experts we interviewed think there is a good possibility that the Bush Administration will try to use the troubled composition of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to discredit or dismiss the findings of the report.
Patricia Kushlis, a retired U.S. Information Agency officer and a specialist in international politics, public diplomacy and national security, told us, “I suspect the Administration will try to use this as a rationale for questioning the report's veracity, or at least credibility. Whether it will stick, or not, is another question.”
Prof. Roederer told us, “I only think it hurts as a rhetorical matter. It may work rhetorically to defend our actions by pointing back at our accusers as coming from ‘bad’ places, but that retort misses the point of the allegation. If the merits disclose violations it is no answer to say that other states are violating human rights or even that members of the Committee are focusing on the U.S. to move the spotlight off of their own countries. The charge is still left intact - two or more wrongs do not make a right.”
CCR’s Olshansky said, “Although the full membership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission includes states with less than ideal human rights records, the report that we have seen is being issued by unimpeachable sources”. She noted that the five individuals who prepared the report are the “foremost authorities” on the issues addressed in the report. “They have no role or responsibility for the actions of their home governments.”
Gabor Rona of HRF agrees. He told us, “ The people who researched and wrote this report are among the world’s most distinguished human rights scholars. They are independent of the countries that are members of the Human Rights Commission. The Bush Administration should consider their findings carefully and not respond by attempting to shoot the messenger.”
In November, the Bush administration offered three of the five members of the U.N. team the same tour of the prison given to journalists and members of Congress. This tour prohibits direct contact with prisoners.
The report focuses on the U.S. government's legal basis for the detentions as described in its formal response to the U.N. inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States — and any other country engaged in combat — to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
But the U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
It also rejected the premise that "the war on terrorism" exempted the U.S. from international conventions on torture and civil and political rights.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Prof. Nowak also said the U.N. team was "particularly concerned" about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees said were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
Coming on the heels of the release of yet more photos of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, widely published photos of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the U.N. report has helped to make this a pretty uncomfortable week for the Bush Administration. White House press secretary Scott McClellan attempted to blow off the U.N. report by asserting that, since the investigative team did not visit GITMO, it told only one side of the story.
Yet there is virtual unanimity in the foreign affairs community that the so-called “torture issue” has greatly diminished America’s reputation abroad – and not only in the eyes of Arabs and other Muslims. Notably, it has been the issue on which the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, publicly disagreed with President Bush during her recent White House visit.
President Bush has dug his heels in on the Guantanamo issue. But his administration has a penchant for publicly exhorting the world to “stay the course” – and then privately changing the course. So there may yet be hope for a more rational policy.
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with the United Nations report calling on the U.S. to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
And many of those interviewed by us were fearful that the George W. Bush administration would use the source of the report – the admittedly flawed United Nations Human Rights Commission -- to discredit its findings.
The report found that U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the U.S. to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation ordered by the Commission. The U.N. team was refused access to prisoners and did not visit the facility for that reason.
The human rights body has been widely criticized because its 53 members include representatives of countries with questionable human rights records. These include Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The U.S. has been among U.N. member states attempting to reform the Commission, denying membership to countries that are known to commit human rights abuses.
The report concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.”
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," said Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
Prof. Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the U.N.'s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament.
Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He told us, “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts' jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He told us, “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closure means the U.S. is going to open up its legal environment to respect international human rights norms not only at GITMO but in all its detention facilities worldwide, that would be a step forward. If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all. The U.S. needs to live up to its obligations under both U.S. and international law.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, Director Counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told us, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the U.S. decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantánamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the U.S. might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantánamo. For the many detainees who do not have this judicial protection in place (because until very recently we did not have identifying information for them and/or authorization to represent them) we have no way of ensuring that the men are not rendered to indefinite detention or torture either in their countries of birth or some third country. “
Prof. Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on U.S. Constitutional and international law, told us, “Closing Gitmo would be a welcomed change. However, it will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations. The problem is the underlying legal claims of the President and the continued failure of the government to comply with domestic and international law. The most important recommendation is that these individuals be given legitimate trials in federal court rather than the meaningless proceedings held at GITMO. The current proceedings have little resemblance to legal hearings. They are controlled by rules written by government prosecutors to guarantee conviction and stand as a fundamental affront to the most basic notions of the rule of law.”
Yale Richmond, a veteran of 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, believes that “As long as (GITMO) remains open, it will be used against us. Better to close it.” But, he told us, “That raises the question of whether the prisoners should be tried in US courts, and what Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush (in that order) would say if some of them were found ‘not guilty’."
Christopher J. Roederer, Associate Professor of Law at the Florida Coastal School of Law, told us, “I do think that GITMO should be closed, or fully opened up to full inspection and access. The main problem with the report in my view is that there was no visit and no access to the prisoners – but whose fault is that? Did we accept Saddam’s assurances that there were no WMDs on his say-so? Did we not hold his lack of full cooperation against him?”
Experts we interviewed think there is a good possibility that the Bush Administration will try to use the troubled composition of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to discredit or dismiss the findings of the report.
Patricia Kushlis, a retired U.S. Information Agency officer and a specialist in international politics, public diplomacy and national security, told us, “I suspect the Administration will try to use this as a rationale for questioning the report's veracity, or at least credibility. Whether it will stick, or not, is another question.”
Prof. Roederer told us, “I only think it hurts as a rhetorical matter. It may work rhetorically to defend our actions by pointing back at our accusers as coming from ‘bad’ places, but that retort misses the point of the allegation. If the merits disclose violations it is no answer to say that other states are violating human rights or even that members of the Committee are focusing on the U.S. to move the spotlight off of their own countries. The charge is still left intact - two or more wrongs do not make a right.”
CCR’s Olshansky said, “Although the full membership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission includes states with less than ideal human rights records, the report that we have seen is being issued by unimpeachable sources”. She noted that the five individuals who prepared the report are the “foremost authorities” on the issues addressed in the report. “They have no role or responsibility for the actions of their home governments.”
Gabor Rona of HRF agrees. He told us, “ The people who researched and wrote this report are among the world’s most distinguished human rights scholars. They are independent of the countries that are members of the Human Rights Commission. The Bush Administration should consider their findings carefully and not respond by attempting to shoot the messenger.”
In November, the Bush administration offered three of the five members of the U.N. team the same tour of the prison given to journalists and members of Congress. This tour prohibits direct contact with prisoners.
The report focuses on the U.S. government's legal basis for the detentions as described in its formal response to the U.N. inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States — and any other country engaged in combat — to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
But the U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
It also rejected the premise that "the war on terrorism" exempted the U.S. from international conventions on torture and civil and political rights.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Prof. Nowak also said the U.N. team was "particularly concerned" about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees said were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
Coming on the heels of the release of yet more photos of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, widely published photos of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the U.N. report has helped to make this a pretty uncomfortable week for the Bush Administration. White House press secretary Scott McClellan attempted to blow off the U.N. report by asserting that, since the investigative team did not visit GITMO, it told only one side of the story.
Yet there is virtual unanimity in the foreign affairs community that the so-called “torture issue” has greatly diminished America’s reputation abroad – and not only in the eyes of Arabs and other Muslims. Notably, it has been the issue on which the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, publicly disagreed with President Bush during her recent White House visit.
President Bush has dug his heels in on the Guantanamo issue. But his administration has a penchant for publicly exhorting the world to “stay the course” – and then privately changing the course. So there may yet be hope for a more rational policy.
THE PLIGHT OF NATIONAL SECURITY WHISTLEBLOWERS
By William Fisher
Find illegal activity in the U.S. national security agency you work for. Report it to your superiors. Get rewarded by being demoted or having your security clearance revoked -- tantamount to losing your career – while those whose conduct you’ve reported get promoted.
This was the picture painted to a House of Representatives committee last week, as its members heard from five soldiers and civilians who say their livelihoods and reputations have been destroyed or placed in serious jeopardy by their attempts to expose and correct waste, fraud or abuse in their workplaces.
They are known as “national security whistleblowers”. And, unlike whistleblowers in civilian agencies of the U.S. government, they have little legal protection against retaliation.
The House Committee is chaired by Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut. But, in a rare occurrence in the current contentious political climate in Washington, he is receiving virtually unanimous bipartisan support for efforts to develop legislation to fix the problem.
Shays and his colleagues listened to a litany of retaliations taken against people
who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping, and other alleged misconduct.
The litany came from current or former employees of the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, and the Energy Department. They told the committee that after they spoke out against alleged government misconduct or criminal activity, they "were retaliated against, in some cases by having their security clearances revoked or their careers ruined."
Specialist Samuel Provance said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib. He said he tried to tell the general “things he didn’t want to hear”, adding, "Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on". Provance lost his security clearance, was placed under a “gag order”, and is now stationed in Germany, where his responsibilities consist of "picking up trash and guard duty.”
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was among the first to disclose the Pentagon's “Able Danger” data-mining program. He said he believes that the program identified Mohammed Atta before he became the lead hijacker in the 2001 terrorist attacks, though a Pentagon review found no evidence to support that conclusion. Shaffer’s security clearance was revoked.
Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency (NSA), charged that there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the agency’s so-called ‘special-access programs’ but was advised that he could not discuss them even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session. He told the Committee the Defense Department’s harassment of him included spreading rumors that he suffers from bipolar disease.
Mike German resigned as an FBI agent after reporting that other agents and managers mishandled a major counterterrorism case in 2002 and falsified records. The Justice Department inspector general confirmed German's allegations, and that he was retaliated against – his security clearance was revoked.
Richard Levernier's job as a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist was to test how well prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He testified that the tests he supervised showed a 50 percent failure rate. When he reported this to his superiors, he was demoted and his security clearance revoked. He says he was forced into early retirement.
All these witnesses said they tried to follow the chain of command for reporting wrongdoing, but were rebuffed or stonewalled. Some started by going to their immediate supervisors; others went to the Inspector Generals of their agencies; a few eventually told their stories to congresspersons or to the media.
The defense of whistleblowers comes at a time when top Bush administration
officials are turning up the pressure to stop leaks of classified information.
Two news reports in recent months, an article in The New York Times on the
National Security Agency's surveillance program and a Washington Post article on secret CIA detention centers, have been referred for criminal investigation.
Sibel Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) told us, “National Security employees’ should not have to sacrifice their careers or financial security in doing what is right. Good employees are being chased out of jobs and fired by those who either are engaged in wrongful behavior or don’t want to hear about.”
She added, “A national security employee has to choose between career and conscience when confronted with agency wrongdoing. We need to adopt protections for employees that allow them to be secure in their jobs and encourage them to report waste, fraud, and abuse of power.”
Ms. Edmonds, arguably the best known of recent national security whistleblowers, began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. She was fired in the spring of 2002 after reporting concerns about sabotage, intimidation, corruption and incompetence to superiors. In October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller, then Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed a gag order on Ms. Edmonds, citing possible damage to diplomatic relations or national security. Ms. Edmonds sued and appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court agreed with lower courts that trying her case would compromise “state secrets”.
The NSWBC has drafted 'model legislation for whistleblowers’, which is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat. Edmonds’ group is also working on a House version of this bill.
At last week’s House hearing, Specialist Provance’s testimony drew extraordinary attention by Committee members, as it came only days after the release by an Australian television channel of new photos and videos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Investigation of the “Able Danger” datamining program of the National Security Agency has been championed by a powerful Republican, Rep. Kurt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on the subject. He claims that Lt. Col. Shaffer reported the program to the staff director of the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Philip Zelikow, when he and other staff members traveled to Afghanistan. Later, however, Commission staff told him they had all the information they required. The program was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s report.
Responding to a question from Congressman Weldon, Shaffer said he is convinced the Defense Department wants details of "Able Danger" buried to avoid embarrassment to defense officials. He also accused the Defense Department of conducting a “smear campaign” against him.
Shaffer was barred from testifying at an earlier Senate hearing on the program, but Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told that hearing that the Defense Department had found no evidence that a likeness of Mohammed Atta was ever obtained through the program.
Noting that current whistleblower protection laws do not cover employees of agencies involved in national security, Rep. Shays said, “Those with whom we trust the nation's secrets are too often treated like second-class citizens when it comes to asserting their rights to speak truth to power."
Find illegal activity in the U.S. national security agency you work for. Report it to your superiors. Get rewarded by being demoted or having your security clearance revoked -- tantamount to losing your career – while those whose conduct you’ve reported get promoted.
This was the picture painted to a House of Representatives committee last week, as its members heard from five soldiers and civilians who say their livelihoods and reputations have been destroyed or placed in serious jeopardy by their attempts to expose and correct waste, fraud or abuse in their workplaces.
They are known as “national security whistleblowers”. And, unlike whistleblowers in civilian agencies of the U.S. government, they have little legal protection against retaliation.
The House Committee is chaired by Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut. But, in a rare occurrence in the current contentious political climate in Washington, he is receiving virtually unanimous bipartisan support for efforts to develop legislation to fix the problem.
Shays and his colleagues listened to a litany of retaliations taken against people
who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping, and other alleged misconduct.
The litany came from current or former employees of the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, and the Energy Department. They told the committee that after they spoke out against alleged government misconduct or criminal activity, they "were retaliated against, in some cases by having their security clearances revoked or their careers ruined."
Specialist Samuel Provance said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib. He said he tried to tell the general “things he didn’t want to hear”, adding, "Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on". Provance lost his security clearance, was placed under a “gag order”, and is now stationed in Germany, where his responsibilities consist of "picking up trash and guard duty.”
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was among the first to disclose the Pentagon's “Able Danger” data-mining program. He said he believes that the program identified Mohammed Atta before he became the lead hijacker in the 2001 terrorist attacks, though a Pentagon review found no evidence to support that conclusion. Shaffer’s security clearance was revoked.
Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency (NSA), charged that there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the agency’s so-called ‘special-access programs’ but was advised that he could not discuss them even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session. He told the Committee the Defense Department’s harassment of him included spreading rumors that he suffers from bipolar disease.
Mike German resigned as an FBI agent after reporting that other agents and managers mishandled a major counterterrorism case in 2002 and falsified records. The Justice Department inspector general confirmed German's allegations, and that he was retaliated against – his security clearance was revoked.
Richard Levernier's job as a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist was to test how well prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He testified that the tests he supervised showed a 50 percent failure rate. When he reported this to his superiors, he was demoted and his security clearance revoked. He says he was forced into early retirement.
All these witnesses said they tried to follow the chain of command for reporting wrongdoing, but were rebuffed or stonewalled. Some started by going to their immediate supervisors; others went to the Inspector Generals of their agencies; a few eventually told their stories to congresspersons or to the media.
The defense of whistleblowers comes at a time when top Bush administration
officials are turning up the pressure to stop leaks of classified information.
Two news reports in recent months, an article in The New York Times on the
National Security Agency's surveillance program and a Washington Post article on secret CIA detention centers, have been referred for criminal investigation.
Sibel Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) told us, “National Security employees’ should not have to sacrifice their careers or financial security in doing what is right. Good employees are being chased out of jobs and fired by those who either are engaged in wrongful behavior or don’t want to hear about.”
She added, “A national security employee has to choose between career and conscience when confronted with agency wrongdoing. We need to adopt protections for employees that allow them to be secure in their jobs and encourage them to report waste, fraud, and abuse of power.”
Ms. Edmonds, arguably the best known of recent national security whistleblowers, began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. She was fired in the spring of 2002 after reporting concerns about sabotage, intimidation, corruption and incompetence to superiors. In October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller, then Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed a gag order on Ms. Edmonds, citing possible damage to diplomatic relations or national security. Ms. Edmonds sued and appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court agreed with lower courts that trying her case would compromise “state secrets”.
The NSWBC has drafted 'model legislation for whistleblowers’, which is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat. Edmonds’ group is also working on a House version of this bill.
At last week’s House hearing, Specialist Provance’s testimony drew extraordinary attention by Committee members, as it came only days after the release by an Australian television channel of new photos and videos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Investigation of the “Able Danger” datamining program of the National Security Agency has been championed by a powerful Republican, Rep. Kurt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on the subject. He claims that Lt. Col. Shaffer reported the program to the staff director of the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Philip Zelikow, when he and other staff members traveled to Afghanistan. Later, however, Commission staff told him they had all the information they required. The program was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s report.
Responding to a question from Congressman Weldon, Shaffer said he is convinced the Defense Department wants details of "Able Danger" buried to avoid embarrassment to defense officials. He also accused the Defense Department of conducting a “smear campaign” against him.
Shaffer was barred from testifying at an earlier Senate hearing on the program, but Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told that hearing that the Defense Department had found no evidence that a likeness of Mohammed Atta was ever obtained through the program.
Noting that current whistleblower protection laws do not cover employees of agencies involved in national security, Rep. Shays said, “Those with whom we trust the nation's secrets are too often treated like second-class citizens when it comes to asserting their rights to speak truth to power."
Friday, February 17, 2006
YOU’RE DOING A HECK OF A JOB, BILLY
By William Fisher
“Sir, have you no sense of decency?” asked the bow-tied pixyish lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, of Senator Joe McCarthy fifty years ago as he tried to defend an army officer accused by Joltin’ Joe of being a Communist.
I was reminded of Welch’s show-stopping words as I (reluctantly) watched Bill O’Reilly’s “O’Reilly Factor” on President Bush’s TV house organ, Fox News, a couple of weeks ago.
But I found myself wondering whether O’Reilly’s attack on former vice president Al Gore was a matter of ignorance -- or just Megamouth’s way of getting my adrenalin flowing.
Whatever his state of mind, his outrageous commentary sure succeeded in the adrenalin department. But my conclusion is that the Designated Dissembler must be living in some parallel universe.
The target of the Verminator’s wrath in this particular broadcast was Al Gore, and a speech he made in Saudi Arabia back in December.
O’Reilly quoted Gore as having said, "Arabs in the United States have been indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
“Wow. Quite a statement,” O’Reilly exclaimed.
But he went on. Ever-true to the investigative traditions of Ida Tarbell, Woodstein and Jeff Gannon (a.k.a.Guckert), Billyboy had his staff call Gore’s office for further information. They wanted to know “exactly where the unforgivable conditions are located and also to provide some names of Arabs who have been abused inside the USA”, adding, “If innocent Arabs are being abused on U.S. soil, we want to know about it.”
Fair and balanced to the end, O’Reilly conceded, “There were a few cases after 9/11 where Arabs were taken into custody by mistake, but just a few, as far as we can tell.”
Well, since Gore’s office wasn’t going to provide “backup”, I thought I’d help out.
In the days and months following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then Attorney General John (“Let the Eagle Soar”) Ashcroft, with the help of then Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (you’ll remember him from Hurricane Katrina) conducted two sweeps, rounding up some 5,000 – that’s 5,000, Bill -- Arabs and other Muslims, as well as many Sikhs. They were U.S. citizens, residents, visitors, students, and so forth. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t among them.
And here’s a summary of what the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report had to say about these detentions:
None of these detainees were charged with terrorist-related offenses…the decision to detain them was “extremely attenuated” from the 9/11 investigation...the Justice Department’s designation of detainees of interest to the 9/11 investigation was “indiscriminate and haphazard.” and did not adequately distinguish between terrorism suspects and other immigration detainees.
Detainees were subjected to harsh conditions of confinement, including cells that were illuminated 24 hours per day, and confinement to their cells for all but one hour per day. (There was) “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn) against some September 11 detainees….” Detainees were treated like prisoners, denied access to lawyers and contact with families.
And the terrorist convictions resulting from these manhunts? Zero. That’s zero, Bill. Zippo. Zilch.
A few hundred were deported, some accepting deportation just to escape from U.S. custody.
I hope this is the “backup” Al Gore’s people wouldn’t provide, Mr. O’Reilly. But, of course, a really simple Google search would have produced the same intelligence. It’s public record, presented to Congress, and was probably published in whatever newspaper you read. If you read, that is.
Undeterred by any of these pesky little facts, the Great Rating then uncorked his punchline issue.
Why is Al Gore “saying this stuff in the Middle East? Surely, Gore knows that his words will be used to fuel more Arab anger towards America… you would think he'd be more responsible. I mean, come on. The USA is fighting terrorists all over the world, and Gore is implying that we use terrorist methods against innocent Arabs on the home front?…In a time of war. That would be like an American politician traveling to Japan during World War II and saying FDR was interning Japanese-Americans, which he was.”
Pardon me, oh great drive-by character assassin, but where better to speak out than in the Middle East? After all, that’s where most of these detainees come from. And at what better time than when most of the world hates us?
Hell, even Karen Hughes – surely no hired gun for some vast left-wing conspiracy -- does exactly that when she goes on her “listening tours” of the Middle East and elsewhere.
She admits we’re not perfect. We’re human, which means we make mistakes. And she is fond of telling her audiences that the freedom of expression we enjoy as Americans includes the freedom to admit our mistakes, and try to correct them.
It’s one of the bigger things that separates us from them.
So I’m not concerned about what Al Gore chooses to say in the Middle East or anywhere else.
I’m a lot more concerned about what separates us from us. In that department, you’re doing a heck of a job, Billy!
“Sir, have you no sense of decency?” asked the bow-tied pixyish lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, of Senator Joe McCarthy fifty years ago as he tried to defend an army officer accused by Joltin’ Joe of being a Communist.
I was reminded of Welch’s show-stopping words as I (reluctantly) watched Bill O’Reilly’s “O’Reilly Factor” on President Bush’s TV house organ, Fox News, a couple of weeks ago.
But I found myself wondering whether O’Reilly’s attack on former vice president Al Gore was a matter of ignorance -- or just Megamouth’s way of getting my adrenalin flowing.
Whatever his state of mind, his outrageous commentary sure succeeded in the adrenalin department. But my conclusion is that the Designated Dissembler must be living in some parallel universe.
The target of the Verminator’s wrath in this particular broadcast was Al Gore, and a speech he made in Saudi Arabia back in December.
O’Reilly quoted Gore as having said, "Arabs in the United States have been indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
“Wow. Quite a statement,” O’Reilly exclaimed.
But he went on. Ever-true to the investigative traditions of Ida Tarbell, Woodstein and Jeff Gannon (a.k.a.Guckert), Billyboy had his staff call Gore’s office for further information. They wanted to know “exactly where the unforgivable conditions are located and also to provide some names of Arabs who have been abused inside the USA”, adding, “If innocent Arabs are being abused on U.S. soil, we want to know about it.”
Fair and balanced to the end, O’Reilly conceded, “There were a few cases after 9/11 where Arabs were taken into custody by mistake, but just a few, as far as we can tell.”
Well, since Gore’s office wasn’t going to provide “backup”, I thought I’d help out.
In the days and months following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then Attorney General John (“Let the Eagle Soar”) Ashcroft, with the help of then Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (you’ll remember him from Hurricane Katrina) conducted two sweeps, rounding up some 5,000 – that’s 5,000, Bill -- Arabs and other Muslims, as well as many Sikhs. They were U.S. citizens, residents, visitors, students, and so forth. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t among them.
And here’s a summary of what the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report had to say about these detentions:
None of these detainees were charged with terrorist-related offenses…the decision to detain them was “extremely attenuated” from the 9/11 investigation...the Justice Department’s designation of detainees of interest to the 9/11 investigation was “indiscriminate and haphazard.” and did not adequately distinguish between terrorism suspects and other immigration detainees.
Detainees were subjected to harsh conditions of confinement, including cells that were illuminated 24 hours per day, and confinement to their cells for all but one hour per day. (There was) “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn) against some September 11 detainees….” Detainees were treated like prisoners, denied access to lawyers and contact with families.
And the terrorist convictions resulting from these manhunts? Zero. That’s zero, Bill. Zippo. Zilch.
A few hundred were deported, some accepting deportation just to escape from U.S. custody.
I hope this is the “backup” Al Gore’s people wouldn’t provide, Mr. O’Reilly. But, of course, a really simple Google search would have produced the same intelligence. It’s public record, presented to Congress, and was probably published in whatever newspaper you read. If you read, that is.
Undeterred by any of these pesky little facts, the Great Rating then uncorked his punchline issue.
Why is Al Gore “saying this stuff in the Middle East? Surely, Gore knows that his words will be used to fuel more Arab anger towards America… you would think he'd be more responsible. I mean, come on. The USA is fighting terrorists all over the world, and Gore is implying that we use terrorist methods against innocent Arabs on the home front?…In a time of war. That would be like an American politician traveling to Japan during World War II and saying FDR was interning Japanese-Americans, which he was.”
Pardon me, oh great drive-by character assassin, but where better to speak out than in the Middle East? After all, that’s where most of these detainees come from. And at what better time than when most of the world hates us?
Hell, even Karen Hughes – surely no hired gun for some vast left-wing conspiracy -- does exactly that when she goes on her “listening tours” of the Middle East and elsewhere.
She admits we’re not perfect. We’re human, which means we make mistakes. And she is fond of telling her audiences that the freedom of expression we enjoy as Americans includes the freedom to admit our mistakes, and try to correct them.
It’s one of the bigger things that separates us from them.
So I’m not concerned about what Al Gore chooses to say in the Middle East or anywhere else.
I’m a lot more concerned about what separates us from us. In that department, you’re doing a heck of a job, Billy!
FEMA CAN’T CATCH A BREAK!
By William Fisher
If Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans today, the government would be no better prepared to cope with it than it was last August when it flooded the city, wrecked much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, and killed 1,400 people.
This is the consensus reached by three new government reports and testimony Monday before a Senate Committee.
The reports detail an almost total failure in planning for and dealing with the devastating impacts of the disaster, massive waste in government procurement practices, widespread fraud by recipients of relief and absence of systems to monitor it, price gouging, and questionable no-bid contracts by companies that often did little actual work.
And, in testimony before a Senate committee Monday, witnesses said that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – which has principal responsibility for disaster planning and relief – has taken some steps to improve, these are likely to fall far short of what is needed before the 2006 Hurricane Season begins.
Two of the reports, released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud and mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
These two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who
received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program -- which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees -- were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
The third report -- "A Failure of Initiative" -- expected to be issued this week by Republicans in the House of Representatives -- claims that Hurricane Katrina “exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.”
The 600-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council.
The report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because President George W. Bush alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
The report paints Chertoff, who took over the mammoth DHS six months before the storm, as detached from events. It contends he activated the Government’s emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all," delaying the flow of federal troops and materiel by as much as three days.
The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and
act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New
Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to
catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people. Some 1,400 people lost their lives in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.
And on the ground, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, who has since resigned, field commanders and the U.S. military's commanding general set up rival chains of command.
In testimony before Sen. Collins’s committee last week, Brown claimed he had kept senior White House aides, including the president’s chief and deputy chief of staff, fully informed about conditions on the ground, including the levee breaks.
He shifted blame for his agency’s performance to Chertoff who, Brown said, has chosen defense against terrorist attacks over protecting the homeland from natural disasters.
Chertoff on Monday rejected this criticism. "I want to tell you I unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters," he said in a speech.
The House Republican report says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached. The president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says. "If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a
terror attack. "Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for
prime time."
"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so
ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which
specific dire warnings had been issued for days," the report says. "This crisis
was not only predictable, it was predicted."
The homeland security secretary, the report says, should have moved two days before Hurricane Katrina hit — when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm — to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place ahead of the storm.
His department also should have done more to help evacuate the Gulf Coast, the
report says. The Homeland Security Department, the draft report says, "failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall."
The House Republican group as well as the Senate committee have charged that the White House failed to provide copies of e-mail messages or other
correspondence by senior advisers to the president.
The report’s criticism also extended to the administrations of Louisiana Governor
Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin, the report says, waited far too long to issue a mandatory evacuation
order. The city and the state also had no reliable system to ensure that people
in nursing homes or hospitals, or the estimated 100,000 residents without
transportation, could get out of harm's way.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination," it says, "then Katrina was a failure of initiative," the House report charges.
A report presented Monday to a Senate Committee by the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), found that “Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses.”
The report suggests that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud.
GAO’s examination of the Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the “significant fraud and abuse.
The report says that FEMA itself found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”
Even when FEMA’s automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments were at times still sent, says the testimony of Gregory Kutz, managing director of the GAO’s forensic audits unit.
The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure their own $2,000 relief check by using “falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories,” and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Testimony charged that much of the money disbursed by FEMA was inappropriately used – for such things as bail bonds, payment of prior traffic violations, driver’s license reinstatement, tattoos, massage parlors, alcoholic beverages, condoms, and adult erotica products.
Five dozen Web sites that either asked for money or sought to harvest personal
information for identity theft also have been shut down, the report said.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms
for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor's lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Fla., at $375 a night, according to the audits.
Almost $900 million was spent by FEMA for 25,000 mobile homes, according to the testimony of the DHS Inspector General (IG), Richard Skinner. But, he said, only about 1,200 have been able to be occupied because they are not suitable for use on a floodplain. The rest are largely standing empty in Hope, Arkansas, where many are deteriorating and others are being cannibalized for parts.
The IG reported that contracts for debris removal, reconstruction and housing, were often hurriedly executed without competitive bids or only limited bidding. He testified that his office is continuing to investigate instances of overcharging and charging for work not performed.
The audits, which are not yet complete, do not try to estimate a total dollar figure on abuse, but GAO auditor Kutz told senators it was "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."
The Senate Committee also heard testimony from the Justice Department (DOJ), whose spokesperson said that federal prosecutors have filed fraud, theft and other charges against 212 people accused of scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes. Forty people have pleaded guilty so far. Many defendants were
accused of trying to obtain emergency aid, typically a $2,000 debit card, issued
to hurricane victims by FEMA and the American Red Cross.
In the Justice Department probe, the largest investigation centered on a Red
Cross call center in Bakersfield, Calif., in which some employees schemed to
steal the emergency money for themselves and others, prosecutors said. Fifty-three people have been charged in this probe.
In a separate but related development, a federal judge ruled Monday that the government could drop some 12,000 families made homeless by the hurricanes from a program that has put them up at hotels. They will receive housing grants instead.
This is a story that's not going away any time soon. Not until the Gulf Coast gets rebuilt -- or until the next hurricane season, whichever comes first. Meanwhile, we continue to wait for Presidential leadership.
If Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans today, the government would be no better prepared to cope with it than it was last August when it flooded the city, wrecked much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, and killed 1,400 people.
This is the consensus reached by three new government reports and testimony Monday before a Senate Committee.
The reports detail an almost total failure in planning for and dealing with the devastating impacts of the disaster, massive waste in government procurement practices, widespread fraud by recipients of relief and absence of systems to monitor it, price gouging, and questionable no-bid contracts by companies that often did little actual work.
And, in testimony before a Senate committee Monday, witnesses said that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – which has principal responsibility for disaster planning and relief – has taken some steps to improve, these are likely to fall far short of what is needed before the 2006 Hurricane Season begins.
Two of the reports, released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud and mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
These two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who
received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program -- which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees -- were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
The third report -- "A Failure of Initiative" -- expected to be issued this week by Republicans in the House of Representatives -- claims that Hurricane Katrina “exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.”
The 600-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council.
The report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because President George W. Bush alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
The report paints Chertoff, who took over the mammoth DHS six months before the storm, as detached from events. It contends he activated the Government’s emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all," delaying the flow of federal troops and materiel by as much as three days.
The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and
act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New
Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to
catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people. Some 1,400 people lost their lives in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.
And on the ground, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, who has since resigned, field commanders and the U.S. military's commanding general set up rival chains of command.
In testimony before Sen. Collins’s committee last week, Brown claimed he had kept senior White House aides, including the president’s chief and deputy chief of staff, fully informed about conditions on the ground, including the levee breaks.
He shifted blame for his agency’s performance to Chertoff who, Brown said, has chosen defense against terrorist attacks over protecting the homeland from natural disasters.
Chertoff on Monday rejected this criticism. "I want to tell you I unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters," he said in a speech.
The House Republican report says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached. The president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says. "If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a
terror attack. "Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for
prime time."
"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so
ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which
specific dire warnings had been issued for days," the report says. "This crisis
was not only predictable, it was predicted."
The homeland security secretary, the report says, should have moved two days before Hurricane Katrina hit — when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm — to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place ahead of the storm.
His department also should have done more to help evacuate the Gulf Coast, the
report says. The Homeland Security Department, the draft report says, "failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall."
The House Republican group as well as the Senate committee have charged that the White House failed to provide copies of e-mail messages or other
correspondence by senior advisers to the president.
The report’s criticism also extended to the administrations of Louisiana Governor
Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin, the report says, waited far too long to issue a mandatory evacuation
order. The city and the state also had no reliable system to ensure that people
in nursing homes or hospitals, or the estimated 100,000 residents without
transportation, could get out of harm's way.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination," it says, "then Katrina was a failure of initiative," the House report charges.
A report presented Monday to a Senate Committee by the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), found that “Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses.”
The report suggests that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud.
GAO’s examination of the Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the “significant fraud and abuse.
The report says that FEMA itself found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”
Even when FEMA’s automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments were at times still sent, says the testimony of Gregory Kutz, managing director of the GAO’s forensic audits unit.
The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure their own $2,000 relief check by using “falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories,” and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Testimony charged that much of the money disbursed by FEMA was inappropriately used – for such things as bail bonds, payment of prior traffic violations, driver’s license reinstatement, tattoos, massage parlors, alcoholic beverages, condoms, and adult erotica products.
Five dozen Web sites that either asked for money or sought to harvest personal
information for identity theft also have been shut down, the report said.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms
for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor's lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Fla., at $375 a night, according to the audits.
Almost $900 million was spent by FEMA for 25,000 mobile homes, according to the testimony of the DHS Inspector General (IG), Richard Skinner. But, he said, only about 1,200 have been able to be occupied because they are not suitable for use on a floodplain. The rest are largely standing empty in Hope, Arkansas, where many are deteriorating and others are being cannibalized for parts.
The IG reported that contracts for debris removal, reconstruction and housing, were often hurriedly executed without competitive bids or only limited bidding. He testified that his office is continuing to investigate instances of overcharging and charging for work not performed.
The audits, which are not yet complete, do not try to estimate a total dollar figure on abuse, but GAO auditor Kutz told senators it was "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."
The Senate Committee also heard testimony from the Justice Department (DOJ), whose spokesperson said that federal prosecutors have filed fraud, theft and other charges against 212 people accused of scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes. Forty people have pleaded guilty so far. Many defendants were
accused of trying to obtain emergency aid, typically a $2,000 debit card, issued
to hurricane victims by FEMA and the American Red Cross.
In the Justice Department probe, the largest investigation centered on a Red
Cross call center in Bakersfield, Calif., in which some employees schemed to
steal the emergency money for themselves and others, prosecutors said. Fifty-three people have been charged in this probe.
In a separate but related development, a federal judge ruled Monday that the government could drop some 12,000 families made homeless by the hurricanes from a program that has put them up at hotels. They will receive housing grants instead.
This is a story that's not going away any time soon. Not until the Gulf Coast gets rebuilt -- or until the next hurricane season, whichever comes first. Meanwhile, we continue to wait for Presidential leadership.
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