By William Fisher
Because mainstream media covers fewer and fewer civil liberties stories by the day, I do what I can to report on this critical subject. Given what the Bush Administration did to trash our Constitution over the past eight years, most of what I write is depressing. And my friends are constantly asking me: Can’t you find something cheerful to write about?
So once or twice a year, I search for enough positive information to write a “good news” column.
This is my first of 2009.
Every once in a while, I go to the web to read stories from the newspaper that, in 1950, suspended its good judgment and hired me as a cub reporter. Later, the Daytona Beach (Florida) News-Journal sent me to the county seat, a little town called DeLand, to run their bureau there.
Now, DeLand was familiar territory to me. I did my undergraduate work at Stetson University in that town.
The Stetson I knew was populated by a combination of Southern Baptist fundamentalists and uninformed and uninterested sons and daughters of the rich -- Bubbas and wannabe Southern Belles. How fundamentalist? Well, when I got to be editor of the college weekly newspaper, I was summoned to the office of the Dean of Students and told that I couldn’t print the word “dance,” because dancing led to pregnancy (we compromised on “frolic”).
When I arrived in DeLand to begin my studies, I was “rushed” by most of the many fraternities on campus – until they found out I was Jewish. Suddenly, the attention dried up. It was like turning off a light-switch!
So for four years, I remained the only Jew in the school (there were also three Catholics, out of total enrollment of some 1,500 students). Many of the students had never seen a Jew before I appeared, and I believe they were expecting a menacing creature with horns.
The DeLand I knew was, like most Southern towns of that era, thoroughly Jim Crow -- a combination of Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. The civil rights movement hadn’t caught anyone’s attention yet, and that was still the case when I came back to this central Florida redneck town to cover the cops and the courts.
My most vivid memories of that time were watching the local sheriff and his deputies carrying out their Saturday night raids into “colored town.” Their mission was to arrest anything moving that was black. The sheriff and his merry men had a great incentive: They were on the so-called “fee system” in which their paychecks were determined mostly by the cash bonds posted by the people they arrested. The more folks arrested, the more bonds got posted, and the more money they got. The ones who couldn’t post bonds were sent to jail.
I got into a heap of trouble writing about these “Saturday Night Raids” for the News-Journal (like get-out-of-town-or-else threats). But my old paper had the courage to publish them, often on page one.
I give you all this ancient background so that you might be able to understand my total disbelief when I read this headline in News-Journal Online:
“Stetson Students Re-create Freedom Rides.”
Here are the salient parts of the story I read, written by staff writer John Bozzo.
Following in the path of the 1961 civil rights Freedom Rides was an eye-opening experience for Stetson University student Rebecca Hallum.
"It really changes your perspective," said the 21-year-old political science-psychology major, one of 19 students from Stetson and its College of Law who re-created the bus ride last July.
"For me, it's hard to ever understand being treated with any sort of inequality because I'm a white middle-class female," Hallum said. "To see what these people had to go through simply to ride a bus was inspiring."
During the weeklong civil rights seminar, students followed the road traveled by the 1961 Freedom Riders, who rode buses in the South challenging segregation on interstate transportation.
Students met with civil rights activists including Allen Cason, a native of Orlando who participated in the Freedom Ride 48 years ago.
"He had an incredible story," Hallum said. "He was actually imprisoned after the ride. He was in solitary confinement for about a month and lived basically on bread and water."
The students also visited important sites, such as the National Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala.
Many of the original Freedom Riders made out their wills before their rides. Riders were attacked in Birmingham and Montgomery bus stations.
Hallum saw a small marker outside Anniston, Ala., where a mob burned one of the first Freedom Ride buses. More should be done to commemorate the site, she said.
"It was overwhelming," said Hallum, who is looking forward to seeing the documentary. "It's hard to think that we take these small things for granted. To think they had to go through this incredible effort and go through so much violence."
Hallum said she was impressed how the former Freedom Riders were humble about their experiences.
"None of them were bitter," she said. "They knew they were doing the right thing."
When I was working in DeLand, it would be another decade before Earl Warren’s 1960 Supreme Court would ban segregation in interstate travel facilities – at bus stations and restaurants as well as on buses. A year later, the first Freedom Riders set off on journeys that would change our history.
And at the Stetson I knew, students being even the slightest bit interested in the situation of their black brothers and sisters would have been unthinkable. Their fellow students would have been outraged. Ostracism – even death threats – would surely have followed.
But here were kids from my alma mater re-creating one of the truly transformative events in American history.
True, only 19 students participated. But half a century ago, there wouldn’t have been one – and the notion of a weeklong civil rights seminar would have been considered delusional.
Today, Stetson has not only changed and adapted, it has actually enrolled minority students – 105 non-resident aliens, 336 Hispanics, 72 Asians, and 190 African-Americans – out of a total enrollment of just over 3,000.
That’s 190 African-Americans!
So my first “good news” of 2009 is that positive change is still alive and well – even in redneck central Florida.
I wonder how the Stetson kids feel about our new President?
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
OBAMA’S OTHER MIGRAINE
By William Fisher
Human rights lawyers are proving to be a major headache for the new administration of President Barack Obama by stepping up their court challenges on issues of prisoner abuse to test the reality of the president’s pledge to create a “an unprecedented level of openness” in government.
A series of current court challenges illustrates the point.
Five years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request that the Department of Defense release photos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan that the public had never seen. The government refused.
Five years later, in September 2008, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the George W. Bush administration to release the photos. But, as of today, the government has not complied with the court’s order. The only record the government has released to date is a set of media talking points used by the State Department.
In early March, the DOD asked for a hearing by the full appeals court. That request was denied. The government then asked for a 30-day stay of the court’s mandate.
That prompted ACLU lawyers to write to the Defense Department, asking the government to reconsider its position and release the photos in light of President Barack Obama’s executive order. The Defense Department has not yet replied.
Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told us, "The Obama administration's commitment to transparency is commendable. "We want to make sure that this rhetoric becomes reality."
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, who argued the case in court, added, "The American public has the right to view these images to know what was
done in its name.”
“Release of the photos would send a powerful message that the new administration truly intends to break from the unaccountability of the Bush years," she said.
The government refusal to disclose these images is based on its attempt to radically expand the exemptions allowed under the FOIA for withholding records. The government also claimed that the public disclosure of such evidence would generate outrage and would violate U.S. obligations towards detainees under the Geneva Conventions.
However, the appeals court panel rejected the government's attempt to use exemptions to the FOIA as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and recognized the "significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs" in light of government misconduct. The court also recognized that releasing the photographs is likely to prevent "further abuse of prisoners."
Much of what the public knows about U.S. treatment of prisoners has been learned from the more than 100,000 pages of government documents obtained in response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit.
Attorney General Eric Holder recently issued comprehensive new FOIA guidelines that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.
In another case, in 2003, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, filed a FOIA request to the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA, to immediately process and release all records relating to treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
When the government failed to respond, the organizations filed a lawsuit charging that these government agencies illegally withheld records concerning the abuse of detainees in American military custody.
Their complaint noted, "Photographs and videos leaked to the press have established beyond any doubt that detainees held in Iraq have been subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. The government has conceded that numerous detainees have died in custody; at least sixteen of these deaths have been classified as homicides. There is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not aberrational but systemic, that in some cases the abuse amounted to torture and resulted in death, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it."
In 2005, a federal district court judge ordered the government to release 74 photos and three videos. The DOD and the Army appealed the district court’s decision. A year later, the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision, dismissing the government’s appeal. But the government still has not released the photos and videos.
In other cases, human rights lawyers have filed two court challenges against the Obama administration's treatment of Guantanamo detainees and its future plans for the men, most of whom have been held for years without trial.
One motion was filed on behalf of Chinese Uighur, Huzaifat Parhat. He was among 17 Uighurs ordered released by a U.S. court last June, seven years after their arrest, but who remain in detention at Guantanamo Bay.
Lawyers filed a motion of contempt against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates denouncing his "continued refusal to comply with a final order" by the appeals court to release Parhat, the document said.
The lawyers also demanded that a new court ruling should include "a threat of sanctions" in order to ensure Gates complies with the order to release Parhat.
Yet another lawsuit filed by about 15 Guantanamo inmates took issue with new rules laid down by the administration of President Obama earlier this month justifying the state's right to hold terror suspects.
On March 13, the Justice Department said it was dropping the "enemy combatant" designation for terror suspects and vowed to apply international law to its detention policies. It said only those who "substantially supported" the Al-Qaeda network, Taliban Islamic militants or "associated forces" would be held under such laws.
But the detainees' lawyers minimized the new policy as only a "partial retreat" from the positions held under the previous administration of former president Bush.
"The conceptual approach they now advance has not greatly changed," they argued in the court filing.
They also lashed out at the government for justifying detaining suspects without charge or trial solely on the basis of a congressional decision authorizing the U.S.-led "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The political decision to hold suspects indefinitely without charge because they are deemed too dangerous to be free is a policy choice that under the US Constitution "must be resolved by Congress, not by the executive branch," they wrote.
In a fourth case, lawyers for 30 Guantanamo detainees filed a motion accusing the Obama administration of violating the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of the estimated 240 prisoners remaining at the controversial prison camp.
Obama has vowed to close the camp within the next 12 months, and has ordered individual reviews of the cases against each of the remaining prisoners.
Civil libertarians are perplexed by some of the early actions the Obama administration has taken in court. In two recent cases, lawyers for the Obama Justice Department have invoked the same “state secrets” defense used by President Bush’s administration.
They are also disappointed by the lack of media interest in issues of prisoner detention and treatment. Based on questions asked of President Obama during many interviews and during his two recent press conferences, the mainstream press appears to have little interest in these issues. So these questions are likely to be resolved in the courtroom.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/111, the judicial branch has rebuffed many of the policies and practices of the Bush Administration. But with a large proportion of Bush appointees now sitting as federal judges, how their future decisions will impact the Obama Administration remains unclear.
Human rights lawyers are proving to be a major headache for the new administration of President Barack Obama by stepping up their court challenges on issues of prisoner abuse to test the reality of the president’s pledge to create a “an unprecedented level of openness” in government.
A series of current court challenges illustrates the point.
Five years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request that the Department of Defense release photos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan that the public had never seen. The government refused.
Five years later, in September 2008, a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the George W. Bush administration to release the photos. But, as of today, the government has not complied with the court’s order. The only record the government has released to date is a set of media talking points used by the State Department.
In early March, the DOD asked for a hearing by the full appeals court. That request was denied. The government then asked for a 30-day stay of the court’s mandate.
That prompted ACLU lawyers to write to the Defense Department, asking the government to reconsider its position and release the photos in light of President Barack Obama’s executive order. The Defense Department has not yet replied.
Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told us, "The Obama administration's commitment to transparency is commendable. "We want to make sure that this rhetoric becomes reality."
ACLU attorney Amrit Singh, who argued the case in court, added, "The American public has the right to view these images to know what was
done in its name.”
“Release of the photos would send a powerful message that the new administration truly intends to break from the unaccountability of the Bush years," she said.
The government refusal to disclose these images is based on its attempt to radically expand the exemptions allowed under the FOIA for withholding records. The government also claimed that the public disclosure of such evidence would generate outrage and would violate U.S. obligations towards detainees under the Geneva Conventions.
However, the appeals court panel rejected the government's attempt to use exemptions to the FOIA as "an all-purpose damper on global controversy" and recognized the "significant public interest in the disclosure of these photographs" in light of government misconduct. The court also recognized that releasing the photographs is likely to prevent "further abuse of prisoners."
Much of what the public knows about U.S. treatment of prisoners has been learned from the more than 100,000 pages of government documents obtained in response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit.
Attorney General Eric Holder recently issued comprehensive new FOIA guidelines that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.
In another case, in 2003, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, filed a FOIA request to the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice, as well as the CIA, to immediately process and release all records relating to treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
When the government failed to respond, the organizations filed a lawsuit charging that these government agencies illegally withheld records concerning the abuse of detainees in American military custody.
Their complaint noted, "Photographs and videos leaked to the press have established beyond any doubt that detainees held in Iraq have been subjected to humiliating and degrading treatment. The government has conceded that numerous detainees have died in custody; at least sixteen of these deaths have been classified as homicides. There is growing evidence that the abuse of detainees was not aberrational but systemic, that in some cases the abuse amounted to torture and resulted in death, and that senior officials either approved of the abuse or were deliberately indifferent to it."
In 2005, a federal district court judge ordered the government to release 74 photos and three videos. The DOD and the Army appealed the district court’s decision. A year later, the Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision, dismissing the government’s appeal. But the government still has not released the photos and videos.
In other cases, human rights lawyers have filed two court challenges against the Obama administration's treatment of Guantanamo detainees and its future plans for the men, most of whom have been held for years without trial.
One motion was filed on behalf of Chinese Uighur, Huzaifat Parhat. He was among 17 Uighurs ordered released by a U.S. court last June, seven years after their arrest, but who remain in detention at Guantanamo Bay.
Lawyers filed a motion of contempt against Secretary of Defense Robert Gates denouncing his "continued refusal to comply with a final order" by the appeals court to release Parhat, the document said.
The lawyers also demanded that a new court ruling should include "a threat of sanctions" in order to ensure Gates complies with the order to release Parhat.
Yet another lawsuit filed by about 15 Guantanamo inmates took issue with new rules laid down by the administration of President Obama earlier this month justifying the state's right to hold terror suspects.
On March 13, the Justice Department said it was dropping the "enemy combatant" designation for terror suspects and vowed to apply international law to its detention policies. It said only those who "substantially supported" the Al-Qaeda network, Taliban Islamic militants or "associated forces" would be held under such laws.
But the detainees' lawyers minimized the new policy as only a "partial retreat" from the positions held under the previous administration of former president Bush.
"The conceptual approach they now advance has not greatly changed," they argued in the court filing.
They also lashed out at the government for justifying detaining suspects without charge or trial solely on the basis of a congressional decision authorizing the U.S.-led "war on terror" after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The political decision to hold suspects indefinitely without charge because they are deemed too dangerous to be free is a policy choice that under the US Constitution "must be resolved by Congress, not by the executive branch," they wrote.
In a fourth case, lawyers for 30 Guantanamo detainees filed a motion accusing the Obama administration of violating the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of the estimated 240 prisoners remaining at the controversial prison camp.
Obama has vowed to close the camp within the next 12 months, and has ordered individual reviews of the cases against each of the remaining prisoners.
Civil libertarians are perplexed by some of the early actions the Obama administration has taken in court. In two recent cases, lawyers for the Obama Justice Department have invoked the same “state secrets” defense used by President Bush’s administration.
They are also disappointed by the lack of media interest in issues of prisoner detention and treatment. Based on questions asked of President Obama during many interviews and during his two recent press conferences, the mainstream press appears to have little interest in these issues. So these questions are likely to be resolved in the courtroom.
Since the terrorist attacks of 9/111, the judicial branch has rebuffed many of the policies and practices of the Bush Administration. But with a large proportion of Bush appointees now sitting as federal judges, how their future decisions will impact the Obama Administration remains unclear.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
ACLU CHARGES “IDEOLOGICAL DISCRIMINATION”
By William Fisher
A leading legal rights group charged today that the Obama Justice Department is using immigration law to censor debate by selectively barring U.S. entry to foreign scholars.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appeared in a federal appeals court in New York City today to argue that a Swiss professor and leading Muslim scholar was denied entry to the U.S. based on his political views.
The ACLU argued that the government’s exclusion of Professor Tariq Ramadan is illegal and was motivated not by anything he did but by his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, the lead lawyer in the case, told us, "It is disappointing to see the lawyers from the Obama Justice Department taking exactly the same positions as their predecessors during the Bush era. "
He added, "Our position is that the government should not be using immigration law to limit free speech within the U.S. By denying visas to prominent foreign scholars and writers simply because they were critical of United States foreign policy, the Bush administration used immigration laws to skew and stifle political debate inside the U.S.”
“The Bush administration was wrong to revive this Cold War practice, and the Obama administration should not defend it," he said.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.
The position of the government during the George W. Bush presidency was that the courts have no jurisdiction over immigration matters. Obama lawyers reiterated that position in court today.
Ramadan was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004. The U.S. government first granted but then suddenly revoked his visa, citing a statute that applies to those who have “endorsed or espoused” terrorism. After the ACLU filed suit, the government abandoned its claim that Ramadan had endorsed terrorism, but it continued to exclude him because he made small donations to a Swiss charity that the government alleges had given money to Hamas.
In January 2006, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging Professor Ramadan's exclusion from the U.S. on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN American Center. A federal judge upheld Ramadan’s exclusion in December 2007. Today’s court action was an appeal of that ruling.
The lawsuit was originally brought against then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It is now called Academy of Religion v. Napolitano. Janet Napolitano is Obama’s new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The ACLU noted that, during the Cold War, the U.S. “used ideological exclusion to bar artists who were vocal critics of U.S. policy,” including Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and British novelist Doris Lessing.
“Over the last eight years, the Bush administration revived the practice, barring dozens of prominent intellectuals from assuming teaching posts at U.S. universities, fulfilling speaking engagements with U.S. audiences and attending academic conferences,” the ACLU said.
“Ideological exclusion is ineffective as a matter of security policy and inconsistent with the ideals that make this country worth defending,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The U.S. should evaluate applicants for admission to the United States on the basis of their actions rather than their political beliefs and associations.”
The ACLU and other human rights groups are urging the courts to revisit several specific cases of ideological exclusion, including those of Haluk Gerger, a Turkish journalist; Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan human rights activist; Adam Habib, a South African political commentator; in addition to Prof. Ramadan. Ramadan is a Swiss Islamic scholar who now teaches at Oxford University in the U.K.
The ACLU and other U.S. organizations have also brought lawsuits to challenge the exclusion of Professor Habib. The challenge to his exclusion is currently pending before a federal district court in Boston.
Last week, dozens of the nation’s leading academic, free speech and civil rights organizations sent a letter to high-level U.S. officials today urging them to end the practice of refusing visas to foreign scholars, writers, artists and activists on the basis of their political views and associations.
In the letter, groups including the ACLU, the National Education Association, and the Rutherford Institute, called on Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, to put an end to the Cold War-era practice of “ideological exclusion.”
The ACLU’s Jaffer said, “Ideological exclusion impoverishes academic and political debate inside the United States, and it sends the message to the world that the United States is more interested in silencing its critics than engaging them. Ideological exclusion is a petty and misguided practice that the Obama administration should retire immediately.”
The government’s assertion that the criminal justice system lacks jurisdiction in immigration cases has recently been the centerpiece of two other cases. Several months ago, a federal district judge ordered 17 Uighurs released from imprisonment at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and permitted to enter the U.S. A federal appeals court ruled that the judge could order the prisoners released, but could not order them to be admitted to the U.S., since that was a matter of immigration law.
Earlier, another court ruled that it had no jurisdiction to adjudicate the case of Maher Arar, who was detained by U.S. authorities at JKF International Airport enroute to his home in Canada from a vacation in North Africa. He was held by the U.S. for two weeks, then flown to Jordan and later to his country of birth, Syria. In Syrian custody, Arar says he was held incommunicado, without charges or access to a lawyer, and tortured. The Syrians released him after ten months, without charges. He later received an apology and $10 million from the Canadian Government. The U.S. never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his case.
A leading legal rights group charged today that the Obama Justice Department is using immigration law to censor debate by selectively barring U.S. entry to foreign scholars.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appeared in a federal appeals court in New York City today to argue that a Swiss professor and leading Muslim scholar was denied entry to the U.S. based on his political views.
The ACLU argued that the government’s exclusion of Professor Tariq Ramadan is illegal and was motivated not by anything he did but by his vocal criticism of U.S. foreign policy.
Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU, the lead lawyer in the case, told us, "It is disappointing to see the lawyers from the Obama Justice Department taking exactly the same positions as their predecessors during the Bush era. "
He added, "Our position is that the government should not be using immigration law to limit free speech within the U.S. By denying visas to prominent foreign scholars and writers simply because they were critical of United States foreign policy, the Bush administration used immigration laws to skew and stifle political debate inside the U.S.”
“The Bush administration was wrong to revive this Cold War practice, and the Obama administration should not defend it," he said.
The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.
The position of the government during the George W. Bush presidency was that the courts have no jurisdiction over immigration matters. Obama lawyers reiterated that position in court today.
Ramadan was invited to teach at the University of Notre Dame in 2004. The U.S. government first granted but then suddenly revoked his visa, citing a statute that applies to those who have “endorsed or espoused” terrorism. After the ACLU filed suit, the government abandoned its claim that Ramadan had endorsed terrorism, but it continued to exclude him because he made small donations to a Swiss charity that the government alleges had given money to Hamas.
In January 2006, the ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging Professor Ramadan's exclusion from the U.S. on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and the PEN American Center. A federal judge upheld Ramadan’s exclusion in December 2007. Today’s court action was an appeal of that ruling.
The lawsuit was originally brought against then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It is now called Academy of Religion v. Napolitano. Janet Napolitano is Obama’s new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The ACLU noted that, during the Cold War, the U.S. “used ideological exclusion to bar artists who were vocal critics of U.S. policy,” including Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and British novelist Doris Lessing.
“Over the last eight years, the Bush administration revived the practice, barring dozens of prominent intellectuals from assuming teaching posts at U.S. universities, fulfilling speaking engagements with U.S. audiences and attending academic conferences,” the ACLU said.
“Ideological exclusion is ineffective as a matter of security policy and inconsistent with the ideals that make this country worth defending,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The U.S. should evaluate applicants for admission to the United States on the basis of their actions rather than their political beliefs and associations.”
The ACLU and other human rights groups are urging the courts to revisit several specific cases of ideological exclusion, including those of Haluk Gerger, a Turkish journalist; Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan human rights activist; Adam Habib, a South African political commentator; in addition to Prof. Ramadan. Ramadan is a Swiss Islamic scholar who now teaches at Oxford University in the U.K.
The ACLU and other U.S. organizations have also brought lawsuits to challenge the exclusion of Professor Habib. The challenge to his exclusion is currently pending before a federal district court in Boston.
Last week, dozens of the nation’s leading academic, free speech and civil rights organizations sent a letter to high-level U.S. officials today urging them to end the practice of refusing visas to foreign scholars, writers, artists and activists on the basis of their political views and associations.
In the letter, groups including the ACLU, the National Education Association, and the Rutherford Institute, called on Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, to put an end to the Cold War-era practice of “ideological exclusion.”
The ACLU’s Jaffer said, “Ideological exclusion impoverishes academic and political debate inside the United States, and it sends the message to the world that the United States is more interested in silencing its critics than engaging them. Ideological exclusion is a petty and misguided practice that the Obama administration should retire immediately.”
The government’s assertion that the criminal justice system lacks jurisdiction in immigration cases has recently been the centerpiece of two other cases. Several months ago, a federal district judge ordered 17 Uighurs released from imprisonment at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and permitted to enter the U.S. A federal appeals court ruled that the judge could order the prisoners released, but could not order them to be admitted to the U.S., since that was a matter of immigration law.
Earlier, another court ruled that it had no jurisdiction to adjudicate the case of Maher Arar, who was detained by U.S. authorities at JKF International Airport enroute to his home in Canada from a vacation in North Africa. He was held by the U.S. for two weeks, then flown to Jordan and later to his country of birth, Syria. In Syrian custody, Arar says he was held incommunicado, without charges or access to a lawyer, and tortured. The Syrians released him after ten months, without charges. He later received an apology and $10 million from the Canadian Government. The U.S. never acknowledged any wrongdoing in his case.
GITMO PLEA DEAL REVEALED
By William Fisher
A British court ruled yesterday that U.S. authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture in exchange for his freedom.
A ruling by two British High Court judges said the U.S. offered Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain deal in October. Mohamed refused the deal and the U.S. dropped all charges against him later last year.
Mohamed is an Ethiopian who moved to Britain when he was a teenager. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and claims he was tortured both there and in Morocco. He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2004. He was finally returned to the U.K. in late February 2009, with no charges against him.
He is suing the British Government, charging that its intelligence services were complicit with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in facilitating his “extraordinary rendition” and torture while in custody.
The court said the plea bargain also asked Mohamed to plead guilty to two charges and agree not to speak publicly about his ordeal.
Zachary Katznelson, Legal Director of Reprieve, a legal action charity that has represented Mohamed for four years, told us, “In Binyam Mohamed’s case, the United States clearly prized secrecy over justice. It simply did not want the truth to get out.”
He added, “That has nothing to do with national security, but everything to do with the potential for national embarrassment. If we are to truly combat terrorism, we must use the tools of democracy – openness, fairness, justice – not abandon them, then desperately try to cover up our wrongs.”
In their ruling yesterday, the British judges revealed how the U.S. government tried to get Mohamed to sign an agreement stating that he had never been tortured, to promise not to speak with the media upon his release, and to plead guilty as a condition of his release back to Britain – all without his lawyers being allowed access to evidence that would help prove his innocence.
This annex of the British ruling was previously kept confidential by the British court because of the American military commission rules, which forbade making the materials public.
The British judges said the U.S. military also wanted Mohamed to assign any rights he might have to compensation to the U.S. government. They insisted that he accept a minimum sentence of ten years – despite the fact that the U.S. military had not told him what the charges were to be.
Mohamed was also required to waive any claim he might have to seeing any exculpatory evidence identified by the British judges. “If Mr. Mohamed was to ask to see this exculpatory evidence, the ‘deal’ would be off,” a Reprieve spokesperson said.
“The facts revealed reflect the way the US government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed’s torture,” said Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith. “He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment.”
During his time in Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. military tried to prosecute him through the military commissions, which were characterized by the British former Lord Justice Steyn as “kangaroo courts.”
Reprieve said, “This proposal discussed by the British courts was made by the U.S. military at a time when he was not charged with anything. It also came after a long history of efforts to make Mohamed plead guilty to crimes he insisted that he did not commit. He had always been willing to enter a plea of “no contest,” -- which essentially means you deny your guilt, but enter a plea because you recognize it is the only way to resolve the case -- on the condition that he would be sentenced to time served, and immediately released back to Britain.”
By early 2009, Reprieve charges, “The U.S. military was still trying to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something – anything – in order to save face. The final ‘offer’ was that this man, originally alleged to be a most dangerous terrorist, should plead guilty and receive a sentence of only ten days in prison, less than one might expect for many driving offences. Mohamed rejected this offer, as he continued to insist that he was not guilty.”
"Offering a man who is protesting his innocence freedom on the condition that he pleads guilty to something and serves a 10-day sentence is face-saving on an horrific scale,” said Reprieve Executive Director Clare Algar.
The case has also caused a furor in the U.K. and a problem for the U.S. State Department. Britain’s High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion, saying that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohamed. The court said it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the U.S. to reconsider sharing intelligence with the U.K.
But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy “governed by the rule of law” would seek to suppress evidence
“relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,
politically embarrassing though it might be.”
The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the
Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position. The British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, denied that there was any threat from the U.S.
After Mohamed was captured, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohamed, and last October all charges against him were dropped.
Mohamed is currently appealing a separate U.S. case, on behalf of himself and four other terror suspects. In that case, government lawyers from the Obama Administration sought a decision not to reinstate a case that was thrown out by a lower court last year because government lawyers argued successfully that allowing the case to go forward would jeopardize U.S. national security.
In opposing reinstatement of the case, Obama’s lawyers used the same “state secrets” privilege used by Bush lawyers in the original case. The appeals court has not yet ruled in the case, which charges that a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen Dataplan, knowingly provided aircraft and logistical services to facilitate the Central Intelligence Agency’s rendition of Mohamed to overseas prisons.
A British court ruled yesterday that U.S. authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture in exchange for his freedom.
A ruling by two British High Court judges said the U.S. offered Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain deal in October. Mohamed refused the deal and the U.S. dropped all charges against him later last year.
Mohamed is an Ethiopian who moved to Britain when he was a teenager. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and claims he was tortured both there and in Morocco. He was transferred to Guantanamo in 2004. He was finally returned to the U.K. in late February 2009, with no charges against him.
He is suing the British Government, charging that its intelligence services were complicit with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in facilitating his “extraordinary rendition” and torture while in custody.
The court said the plea bargain also asked Mohamed to plead guilty to two charges and agree not to speak publicly about his ordeal.
Zachary Katznelson, Legal Director of Reprieve, a legal action charity that has represented Mohamed for four years, told us, “In Binyam Mohamed’s case, the United States clearly prized secrecy over justice. It simply did not want the truth to get out.”
He added, “That has nothing to do with national security, but everything to do with the potential for national embarrassment. If we are to truly combat terrorism, we must use the tools of democracy – openness, fairness, justice – not abandon them, then desperately try to cover up our wrongs.”
In their ruling yesterday, the British judges revealed how the U.S. government tried to get Mohamed to sign an agreement stating that he had never been tortured, to promise not to speak with the media upon his release, and to plead guilty as a condition of his release back to Britain – all without his lawyers being allowed access to evidence that would help prove his innocence.
This annex of the British ruling was previously kept confidential by the British court because of the American military commission rules, which forbade making the materials public.
The British judges said the U.S. military also wanted Mohamed to assign any rights he might have to compensation to the U.S. government. They insisted that he accept a minimum sentence of ten years – despite the fact that the U.S. military had not told him what the charges were to be.
Mohamed was also required to waive any claim he might have to seeing any exculpatory evidence identified by the British judges. “If Mr. Mohamed was to ask to see this exculpatory evidence, the ‘deal’ would be off,” a Reprieve spokesperson said.
“The facts revealed reflect the way the US government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed’s torture,” said Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith. “He was being told he would never leave Guantánamo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment.”
During his time in Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. military tried to prosecute him through the military commissions, which were characterized by the British former Lord Justice Steyn as “kangaroo courts.”
Reprieve said, “This proposal discussed by the British courts was made by the U.S. military at a time when he was not charged with anything. It also came after a long history of efforts to make Mohamed plead guilty to crimes he insisted that he did not commit. He had always been willing to enter a plea of “no contest,” -- which essentially means you deny your guilt, but enter a plea because you recognize it is the only way to resolve the case -- on the condition that he would be sentenced to time served, and immediately released back to Britain.”
By early 2009, Reprieve charges, “The U.S. military was still trying to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something – anything – in order to save face. The final ‘offer’ was that this man, originally alleged to be a most dangerous terrorist, should plead guilty and receive a sentence of only ten days in prison, less than one might expect for many driving offences. Mohamed rejected this offer, as he continued to insist that he was not guilty.”
"Offering a man who is protesting his innocence freedom on the condition that he pleads guilty to something and serves a 10-day sentence is face-saving on an horrific scale,” said Reprieve Executive Director Clare Algar.
The case has also caused a furor in the U.K. and a problem for the U.S. State Department. Britain’s High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion, saying that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohamed. The court said it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the U.S. to reconsider sharing intelligence with the U.K.
But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy “governed by the rule of law” would seek to suppress evidence
“relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,
politically embarrassing though it might be.”
The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the
Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position. The British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, denied that there was any threat from the U.S.
After Mohamed was captured, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohamed, and last October all charges against him were dropped.
Mohamed is currently appealing a separate U.S. case, on behalf of himself and four other terror suspects. In that case, government lawyers from the Obama Administration sought a decision not to reinstate a case that was thrown out by a lower court last year because government lawyers argued successfully that allowing the case to go forward would jeopardize U.S. national security.
In opposing reinstatement of the case, Obama’s lawyers used the same “state secrets” privilege used by Bush lawyers in the original case. The appeals court has not yet ruled in the case, which charges that a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen Dataplan, knowingly provided aircraft and logistical services to facilitate the Central Intelligence Agency’s rendition of Mohamed to overseas prisons.
Monday, March 23, 2009
A New Era of Openness Coming?
By William Fisher
As President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice issued sweeping new guidelines to reverse the secrecy policies of former president George W. Bush, Congress weighed in with proposed new legislation to liberalize the Freedom of Information Act, and a federal judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to produce unedited summaries of some 3,000 documents related to its admitted destruction of 92 videotapes of prisoners being subjected to extremely harsh interrogation techniques.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder issued comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.
The new guidelines, announced in a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies, build on the principles announced by President Obama on his first full day in office when he issued a presidential memorandum on the FOIA that called on agencies to "usher in a new era of open government."
One of the first tests of the Obama Administration’s new approach came in
Federal Court, where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal judge to order the CIA to produce full and unedited copies of the 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to the interrogation videotapes they destroyed.
When the CIA refused to publicly disclose the list -- and the names of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes – Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered an independent but non-public review of that material next week to determine whether it should be publicly disclosed.
“The government is still needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA's use of torture is well known,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “Full disclosure of the CIA's illegal interrogation methods is long overdue and the agency must be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”
Meanwhile, Congress is taking action to end the Bush Administration’s government-wide efforts to increase the classification of documents to thwart citizens’ requests for information under the FOIA.
The House of Representatives approved a measure to end what its sponsor calls pseudoclassification – creation of many new and ambiguous classification terms. According to the bill’s sponsor, Representative Steve Driehaus, a Democrat from Ohio, the bill would not only be a boon for the public, but an attempt to promote “a common language within government.”
In an editorial, The New York Times noted that “Official use only” has been “slapped wholesale on documents, even though there’s no common standard for what that means. The House measure would correct that by having the national archivist prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public.”
Rep. Driehaus says there were 362,000 FOIA requests last year, and almost a third of them still remain to be processed because of overclassification. The bill requires classifiers to be trained for the task and to put their names on what they deem out of bounds, subject to review by the Inspectors General of the various departments.
And in the Senate, lawmakers also signaled their intention to improve government transparency. Senators Patrick Leahy, a liberal Vermont Democrat and conservative Texas Republican John Cornyn – frequently legislative adversaries -- introduced the “Open FOIA” Act, mandating that government agencies comply swiftly and thoroughly with FOIA requests.
The New York Times editorial charged that “By last count, the federal government employs 107 different categories of restricted information — one off-limits category zanily pronounces, ‘sensitive but unclassified’. This muddle of mislabeling seems designed not to protect legitimate secrets but to empower bureaucrats. The end result has been to greatly blunt the Freedom of Information Act’s mandate to let the public in on the business of government, plain and simple.”
The new FOIA guidelines issued by Attorney General Holder rescind the guidelines issued in 2001 by President Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft.
"By restoring the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information Act, we are making a critical change that will restore the public’s ability to access information in a timely manner," Holder said. "The American people have the right to information about their government’s activities, and these new guidelines will ensure they are able to obtain that information under principles of openness and transparency."
The new FOIA guidelines address both application of the presumption of
disclosure and the effective administration of the FOIA across the government.
As to the presumption of disclosure, the Attorney General directs agencies not to withhold records simply because they can technically do so. In his memo, the Attorney General encourages agencies to make discretionary disclosures of records and to release records in part whenever they cannot be released in full.
The Attorney General also establishes a new standard for the defense of agency decisions to withhold records in response to a FOIA request. Now, the Department will defend a denial only if the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or disclosure is prohibited by law.
The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the U.S. Government.
In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU. That motion is still pending.
The agency's latest submission came in response to an August 20, 2008 court order issued in the context of the contempt motion. That order required the agency to produce "a list of any summaries, transcripts, or memoranda regarding the [destroyed tapes] and of any reconstruction of the records' contents" as well as a list of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes or retained custody of the videotapes before their destruction. The CIA will provide these lists to the court for in camera review on March 26, 2009.
Earlier this month, the CIA acknowledged it destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations. The tapes, some of which show CIA operatives subjecting suspects to extremely harsh interrogation methods, should have been identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its Freedom of Information Act request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.
The tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, appointed by former President Bush and Congress, which had formally requested that the CIA hand over transcripts and recordings documenting the interrogation of CIA prisoners.
As President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice issued sweeping new guidelines to reverse the secrecy policies of former president George W. Bush, Congress weighed in with proposed new legislation to liberalize the Freedom of Information Act, and a federal judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to produce unedited summaries of some 3,000 documents related to its admitted destruction of 92 videotapes of prisoners being subjected to extremely harsh interrogation techniques.
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder issued comprehensive new Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines that direct all executive branch departments and agencies to apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.
The new guidelines, announced in a memo to heads of executive departments and agencies, build on the principles announced by President Obama on his first full day in office when he issued a presidential memorandum on the FOIA that called on agencies to "usher in a new era of open government."
One of the first tests of the Obama Administration’s new approach came in
Federal Court, where the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked a federal judge to order the CIA to produce full and unedited copies of the 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to the interrogation videotapes they destroyed.
When the CIA refused to publicly disclose the list -- and the names of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes – Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ordered an independent but non-public review of that material next week to determine whether it should be publicly disclosed.
“The government is still needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA's use of torture is well known,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “Full disclosure of the CIA's illegal interrogation methods is long overdue and the agency must be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”
Meanwhile, Congress is taking action to end the Bush Administration’s government-wide efforts to increase the classification of documents to thwart citizens’ requests for information under the FOIA.
The House of Representatives approved a measure to end what its sponsor calls pseudoclassification – creation of many new and ambiguous classification terms. According to the bill’s sponsor, Representative Steve Driehaus, a Democrat from Ohio, the bill would not only be a boon for the public, but an attempt to promote “a common language within government.”
In an editorial, The New York Times noted that “Official use only” has been “slapped wholesale on documents, even though there’s no common standard for what that means. The House measure would correct that by having the national archivist prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public.”
Rep. Driehaus says there were 362,000 FOIA requests last year, and almost a third of them still remain to be processed because of overclassification. The bill requires classifiers to be trained for the task and to put their names on what they deem out of bounds, subject to review by the Inspectors General of the various departments.
And in the Senate, lawmakers also signaled their intention to improve government transparency. Senators Patrick Leahy, a liberal Vermont Democrat and conservative Texas Republican John Cornyn – frequently legislative adversaries -- introduced the “Open FOIA” Act, mandating that government agencies comply swiftly and thoroughly with FOIA requests.
The New York Times editorial charged that “By last count, the federal government employs 107 different categories of restricted information — one off-limits category zanily pronounces, ‘sensitive but unclassified’. This muddle of mislabeling seems designed not to protect legitimate secrets but to empower bureaucrats. The end result has been to greatly blunt the Freedom of Information Act’s mandate to let the public in on the business of government, plain and simple.”
The new FOIA guidelines issued by Attorney General Holder rescind the guidelines issued in 2001 by President Bush’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft.
"By restoring the presumption of disclosure that is at the heart of the Freedom of Information Act, we are making a critical change that will restore the public’s ability to access information in a timely manner," Holder said. "The American people have the right to information about their government’s activities, and these new guidelines will ensure they are able to obtain that information under principles of openness and transparency."
The new FOIA guidelines address both application of the presumption of
disclosure and the effective administration of the FOIA across the government.
As to the presumption of disclosure, the Attorney General directs agencies not to withhold records simply because they can technically do so. In his memo, the Attorney General encourages agencies to make discretionary disclosures of records and to release records in part whenever they cannot be released in full.
The Attorney General also establishes a new standard for the defense of agency decisions to withhold records in response to a FOIA request. Now, the Department will defend a denial only if the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or disclosure is prohibited by law.
The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the U.S. Government.
In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU. That motion is still pending.
The agency's latest submission came in response to an August 20, 2008 court order issued in the context of the contempt motion. That order required the agency to produce "a list of any summaries, transcripts, or memoranda regarding the [destroyed tapes] and of any reconstruction of the records' contents" as well as a list of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes or retained custody of the videotapes before their destruction. The CIA will provide these lists to the court for in camera review on March 26, 2009.
Earlier this month, the CIA acknowledged it destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations. The tapes, some of which show CIA operatives subjecting suspects to extremely harsh interrogation methods, should have been identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its Freedom of Information Act request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.
The tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, appointed by former President Bush and Congress, which had formally requested that the CIA hand over transcripts and recordings documenting the interrogation of CIA prisoners.
The Spirit of America: What Were They Thinking?
By William Fisher
What with the financial meltdown, two wars, and a myriad of other problems, even news-junkies can be forgiven for missing this story. So let me help you catch up.
Earlier this month, the great state of Mississippi celebrated “The Spirit of America Day” to commemorate the achievements of its outstanding male high school athletes.
“The Spirit of America Day” was blessed – as it has been for more than a generation -- by a resolution from the Mississippi state legislature (on a voice vote).
Seven teenagers were selected on the basis of their athleticism, leadership and citizenship.
“The endeavors of these individual students to be productive and contributing members of society provide the model example for other students to pattern themselves after, in efforts of becoming notable and model citizens for future generations to come,” said the resolution adopted by the House.
Well, why not? These kids probably worked their butts off to win. They’re role models, no? Why not recognize their achievement? Sounds like a good cause, right?
Wrong. No, there’s nothing wrong with the kids. They deserved to be honored. So what’s the problem?
Here’s the back-story:
“The Spirit of America Day” events are hosted by one Richard Barrett, a lawyer in Learned, Miss. Mr. Barrett is chairman of the board of America’s Foundation, a Mississippi sports organization that sponsors “The Spirit of America Day.”
He’s also the head of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist organization that advocates striking down civil rights laws and organizes white power events nationwide.
Hatewatch, the authoritative publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reports that Barrett, 65, has long denigrated minorities. In his 1982 autobiography, “The Commission,” he called for resettling non-white Americans to “Puerto Rico, Mexico, Israel, the Orient and Africa,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. He also argued that “the Negro race … possess[es] no creativity of its own [and] pulls the vitality away from civilization.” And he favored sterilization and abortions of those deemed “unfit.”
There’s more. Barrett marched on Martin Luther King Day last year in Jena, La., to deride King and the six black teenagers subjected to unusually harsh prosecutions for an attack on a white student. Nationalist Movement members and supporters chanted slogans such as, “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right.”
Last fall, he planned a Louisville rally in support of James Forde Seale, who was convicted of facilitating the Klan murder of two black teenagers. (The conviction was later overturned on a technicality by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Barrett has also campaigned on behalf of other 1960s-era racist killers. After Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in 1994 of assassinating civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Barrett circulated a petition and led a march seeking a pardon from the Mississippi governor.
Although Barrett told the AP that he doesn’t share his racist views at “Spirit of America” events, the Anti Defamation League tells us that the “Spirit of America” isn’t Barrett’s only youth outreach effort. In 1988, he invited skinheads to his home for a weekend of paramilitary training. The few teenagers who attended tried to hit a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. during target practice, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported.
Barrett currently runs an online forum for skinheads, where he recently referred to President Obama as “Chimpanzee-in-Chief.” Hatewatch says his racist message is a hit with the young men who post there. ”No matter how many laws you pass a white woman will always be the ultimate prize and target of black men,” reads one recent post. “Long live you my brave brothers and thank God for this forum and the wise words of Richard Barrett.”
Now, exactly how does this kind of stuff happen in a state that now has the second highest number of elected black legislators in the South (after Georgia)? In the Mississippi House, African-Americans occupy 35 of the 122 seats; in the Senate, 11 of 52.
Where, you might ask, were these 46 lawmakers when this resolution passed on a voice vote?
Mostly A.W.O.L., it seems.
But not altogether. According to Hatewatch, Democratic Rep. Robert Johnson, one of the African-American legislators, told his fellow representatives that Barrett was “an avowed racist,” according to the Associated Press. “He’s not ashamed of it; he doesn’t apologize for it,” Johnson said.
Some lawmakers seemed to feel that the resolution was acceptable because it honored the students rather than Barrett. “I’m not concerned about this individual,” veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Warren told the AP. “I’m concerned about these young people being honored by this.”
Nonetheless, the resolution passed. And in an interview with the AP, Barrett sounded pleased about that. “I think that’s a good lesson of how patriotism and Americanism depend on majority rule,” he said. “It’s a great lesson in democracy that we’re learning.”
Right on. A great lesson indeed.
Remember when incoming U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told the audience at Strom Thurmond’s farewell birthday party that the United States would have avoided "all these problems" if the racist Thurmond had been elected president in 1948?
Lott was forced from office. But not by the State of Mississippi.
Dixie willing, Barrett will be around to sponsor the “Spirit of America” next year.
What with the financial meltdown, two wars, and a myriad of other problems, even news-junkies can be forgiven for missing this story. So let me help you catch up.
Earlier this month, the great state of Mississippi celebrated “The Spirit of America Day” to commemorate the achievements of its outstanding male high school athletes.
“The Spirit of America Day” was blessed – as it has been for more than a generation -- by a resolution from the Mississippi state legislature (on a voice vote).
Seven teenagers were selected on the basis of their athleticism, leadership and citizenship.
“The endeavors of these individual students to be productive and contributing members of society provide the model example for other students to pattern themselves after, in efforts of becoming notable and model citizens for future generations to come,” said the resolution adopted by the House.
Well, why not? These kids probably worked their butts off to win. They’re role models, no? Why not recognize their achievement? Sounds like a good cause, right?
Wrong. No, there’s nothing wrong with the kids. They deserved to be honored. So what’s the problem?
Here’s the back-story:
“The Spirit of America Day” events are hosted by one Richard Barrett, a lawyer in Learned, Miss. Mr. Barrett is chairman of the board of America’s Foundation, a Mississippi sports organization that sponsors “The Spirit of America Day.”
He’s also the head of the Nationalist Movement, a white supremacist organization that advocates striking down civil rights laws and organizes white power events nationwide.
Hatewatch, the authoritative publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, reports that Barrett, 65, has long denigrated minorities. In his 1982 autobiography, “The Commission,” he called for resettling non-white Americans to “Puerto Rico, Mexico, Israel, the Orient and Africa,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. He also argued that “the Negro race … possess[es] no creativity of its own [and] pulls the vitality away from civilization.” And he favored sterilization and abortions of those deemed “unfit.”
There’s more. Barrett marched on Martin Luther King Day last year in Jena, La., to deride King and the six black teenagers subjected to unusually harsh prosecutions for an attack on a white student. Nationalist Movement members and supporters chanted slogans such as, “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right.”
Last fall, he planned a Louisville rally in support of James Forde Seale, who was convicted of facilitating the Klan murder of two black teenagers. (The conviction was later overturned on a technicality by a panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.)
Barrett has also campaigned on behalf of other 1960s-era racist killers. After Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in 1994 of assassinating civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Barrett circulated a petition and led a march seeking a pardon from the Mississippi governor.
Although Barrett told the AP that he doesn’t share his racist views at “Spirit of America” events, the Anti Defamation League tells us that the “Spirit of America” isn’t Barrett’s only youth outreach effort. In 1988, he invited skinheads to his home for a weekend of paramilitary training. The few teenagers who attended tried to hit a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. during target practice, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger reported.
Barrett currently runs an online forum for skinheads, where he recently referred to President Obama as “Chimpanzee-in-Chief.” Hatewatch says his racist message is a hit with the young men who post there. ”No matter how many laws you pass a white woman will always be the ultimate prize and target of black men,” reads one recent post. “Long live you my brave brothers and thank God for this forum and the wise words of Richard Barrett.”
Now, exactly how does this kind of stuff happen in a state that now has the second highest number of elected black legislators in the South (after Georgia)? In the Mississippi House, African-Americans occupy 35 of the 122 seats; in the Senate, 11 of 52.
Where, you might ask, were these 46 lawmakers when this resolution passed on a voice vote?
Mostly A.W.O.L., it seems.
But not altogether. According to Hatewatch, Democratic Rep. Robert Johnson, one of the African-American legislators, told his fellow representatives that Barrett was “an avowed racist,” according to the Associated Press. “He’s not ashamed of it; he doesn’t apologize for it,” Johnson said.
Some lawmakers seemed to feel that the resolution was acceptable because it honored the students rather than Barrett. “I’m not concerned about this individual,” veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Warren told the AP. “I’m concerned about these young people being honored by this.”
Nonetheless, the resolution passed. And in an interview with the AP, Barrett sounded pleased about that. “I think that’s a good lesson of how patriotism and Americanism depend on majority rule,” he said. “It’s a great lesson in democracy that we’re learning.”
Right on. A great lesson indeed.
Remember when incoming U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told the audience at Strom Thurmond’s farewell birthday party that the United States would have avoided "all these problems" if the racist Thurmond had been elected president in 1948?
Lott was forced from office. But not by the State of Mississippi.
Dixie willing, Barrett will be around to sponsor the “Spirit of America” next year.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Religious Leaders Support Commission of Inquiry
By William Fisher
A leaked Red Cross report, detailing chilling accounts of prisoner torture in “black sites” run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have underlined the need for an independent commission of inquiry into possible war crimes committed by senior officials during the presidency of George W. Bush, according to a statement by 25 prominent clergymen and women.
Linda Gustitus, president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), said, "The release of the report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treatment of US-held detainees in CIA secret prisons makes the need for a Commission of Inquiry into US detention and interrogation practices even more compelling.”
“Our country cannot turn a blind eye to these findings; we must determine and make public all the facts with respect to this conduct, and we must hold the leaders who ordered these acts accountable," she said.
Rev. Rich Kilmer, NRCAT executive director, told IPS, “We need to understand fully what happened so that we can effectively develop those safeguards. Investigating the past will help produce a future where the U.S. no longer engages in torture.”
Kilmer said, “Such a Commission would not preclude a simultaneous investigation by the Department of Justice or by a special prosecutor. Where sufficient evidence exists that laws may have been broken, justice dictates that no one is above the law and prosecutions should be launched.”
He added that the Commission of Inquiry could be appointed by the President or by Congress.
Details of the leaked report were first published on the Web site of the New York Review of Books in an extensive article by Mark Danner, a journalism professor. The report, compiled from interviews with numerous U.S. detainees, describes acts of brutalization and sensory deprivation employed by American agents. The report concluded: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Danner writes that all the torture techniques "had to have the approval of the CIA’s deputy director for operations." He wrote that CIA officers "briefed high-level officials" in the National Security Council's Principals Committee,' including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, 'who then signed off on the interrogation plan.'" The briefings about these techniques were so "detailed and frequent that some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed."
The CIA’s secret "global internment system" was set up at the direction of President George W. Bush less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Danner asserts.
But during a press conference in August 2007, a reporter asked President Bush if he "had read" another highly confidential report alleging CIA prisoner mistreatment. "Haven't seen it; we don't torture," Bush answered, quickly moving on to another question.
After the Washington Post later uncovered and published details of the CIA’s global network of “black site” – secret – prisons, President Bush acknowledged that he had authorized interrogations using an "alternative set of procedures." These procedures included extended "sleep deprivation," prolonged forced nudity, bombarding detainees with noise and light, repeated immersion in cold water, prolonged standing, sometimes for many days, beatings of various kinds, and "waterboarding" -- or, as the report's authors phrase it, "suffocation by water."
According to the ICRC report, "in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program...constituted torture."
Its report continues: "In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
Both torture and "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" are forbidden by many treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.
The accounts of the detainees themselves, including the most prominent captured in the “War on Terror”, describe their detention from the time they were secretly brought to the “black sites" -- secret prisons around the world, including in Thailand, Afghanistan, and Poland, through the interrogations using "waterboarding." beatings, and other techniques.
The ICRC interviewed 14 "high-value detainees" over many days for the report, including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and Walid bin Attash. These 14 remain imprisoned in Guantánamo.
The ICRC is the appointed legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and the body appointed to supervise the treatment of prisoners of war. Its reports are delivered to signatory governments on a highly confidential basis. The ICRC expressed dismay at the leaking of one of its reports.
Accounts of the report were subsequently published in most of America’s major newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post. So compelling were its details that it gained endorsement from some commentators whose political views customarily lean to the right. For example, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote:
“That crimes were committed is no longer in doubt…The horror of the CIA interrogation tactics in these places lies not in their scale but in the doggedness with which they defied American and international law...These 14 men were not tortured as part of an ordinary and accepted routine, in other words, but according to special rules and procedures, set up at the highest level of government, by people who surely knew that they were illegal; otherwise, they would not have limited them so carefully.”
NRCAT has joined many legal advocacy and human rights organizations in calling for an impartial, nonpartisan, and independent “Commission of Inquiry” to investigate U.S.-sponsored torture and to ascertain the extent to which Bush administration interrogation practices constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
NRCAT’S statement was signed by more than two dozen prominent religious leaders, representing denominations from a wide range of religions, including Protestant and Catholic Christians, Muslims, orthodox and reformed Jews, Sikhs and Hindus.
Their statement says, “The United States must never again engage in torture. Torture is immoral, illegal and counterproductive. It causes profound and lasting harm, especially to its victims but also to its perpetrators. It contradicts our nation’s deepest values and corrupts the moral fabric of our society.”
“As people of faith, we know that brokenness can be healed – both in individual lives and in the life of the nation. All religions believe that redemption is possible. Learning the truth can set us on a path toward national healing and renewal,” the statement says.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is exploring the possibility of establishing a “Truth” Commission. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, is proposing a similar body. Others in and outside Congress are supporting the appointment of an independent prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice. All would carry out comprehensive investigations into the approval of and use of torture by the U.S. government.
Thus far, President Barack Obama has appeared cool to the idea of a special commission of inquiry. At a recent press conference, he said his inclination was to look forward, not backward. However, he added, “ no one is above the law.”
A leaked Red Cross report, detailing chilling accounts of prisoner torture in “black sites” run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency have underlined the need for an independent commission of inquiry into possible war crimes committed by senior officials during the presidency of George W. Bush, according to a statement by 25 prominent clergymen and women.
Linda Gustitus, president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), said, "The release of the report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on the treatment of US-held detainees in CIA secret prisons makes the need for a Commission of Inquiry into US detention and interrogation practices even more compelling.”
“Our country cannot turn a blind eye to these findings; we must determine and make public all the facts with respect to this conduct, and we must hold the leaders who ordered these acts accountable," she said.
Rev. Rich Kilmer, NRCAT executive director, told IPS, “We need to understand fully what happened so that we can effectively develop those safeguards. Investigating the past will help produce a future where the U.S. no longer engages in torture.”
Kilmer said, “Such a Commission would not preclude a simultaneous investigation by the Department of Justice or by a special prosecutor. Where sufficient evidence exists that laws may have been broken, justice dictates that no one is above the law and prosecutions should be launched.”
He added that the Commission of Inquiry could be appointed by the President or by Congress.
Details of the leaked report were first published on the Web site of the New York Review of Books in an extensive article by Mark Danner, a journalism professor. The report, compiled from interviews with numerous U.S. detainees, describes acts of brutalization and sensory deprivation employed by American agents. The report concluded: “The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
Danner writes that all the torture techniques "had to have the approval of the CIA’s deputy director for operations." He wrote that CIA officers "briefed high-level officials" in the National Security Council's Principals Committee,' including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, 'who then signed off on the interrogation plan.'" The briefings about these techniques were so "detailed and frequent that some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed."
The CIA’s secret "global internment system" was set up at the direction of President George W. Bush less than a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Danner asserts.
But during a press conference in August 2007, a reporter asked President Bush if he "had read" another highly confidential report alleging CIA prisoner mistreatment. "Haven't seen it; we don't torture," Bush answered, quickly moving on to another question.
After the Washington Post later uncovered and published details of the CIA’s global network of “black site” – secret – prisons, President Bush acknowledged that he had authorized interrogations using an "alternative set of procedures." These procedures included extended "sleep deprivation," prolonged forced nudity, bombarding detainees with noise and light, repeated immersion in cold water, prolonged standing, sometimes for many days, beatings of various kinds, and "waterboarding" -- or, as the report's authors phrase it, "suffocation by water."
According to the ICRC report, "in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program...constituted torture."
Its report continues: "In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment."
Both torture and "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" are forbidden by many treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory, including the Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions.
The accounts of the detainees themselves, including the most prominent captured in the “War on Terror”, describe their detention from the time they were secretly brought to the “black sites" -- secret prisons around the world, including in Thailand, Afghanistan, and Poland, through the interrogations using "waterboarding." beatings, and other techniques.
The ICRC interviewed 14 "high-value detainees" over many days for the report, including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaik Mohammed, and Walid bin Attash. These 14 remain imprisoned in Guantánamo.
The ICRC is the appointed legal guardian of the Geneva Conventions and the body appointed to supervise the treatment of prisoners of war. Its reports are delivered to signatory governments on a highly confidential basis. The ICRC expressed dismay at the leaking of one of its reports.
Accounts of the report were subsequently published in most of America’s major newspapers, including The New York Times and the Washington Post. So compelling were its details that it gained endorsement from some commentators whose political views customarily lean to the right. For example, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote:
“That crimes were committed is no longer in doubt…The horror of the CIA interrogation tactics in these places lies not in their scale but in the doggedness with which they defied American and international law...These 14 men were not tortured as part of an ordinary and accepted routine, in other words, but according to special rules and procedures, set up at the highest level of government, by people who surely knew that they were illegal; otherwise, they would not have limited them so carefully.”
NRCAT has joined many legal advocacy and human rights organizations in calling for an impartial, nonpartisan, and independent “Commission of Inquiry” to investigate U.S.-sponsored torture and to ascertain the extent to which Bush administration interrogation practices constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
NRCAT’S statement was signed by more than two dozen prominent religious leaders, representing denominations from a wide range of religions, including Protestant and Catholic Christians, Muslims, orthodox and reformed Jews, Sikhs and Hindus.
Their statement says, “The United States must never again engage in torture. Torture is immoral, illegal and counterproductive. It causes profound and lasting harm, especially to its victims but also to its perpetrators. It contradicts our nation’s deepest values and corrupts the moral fabric of our society.”
“As people of faith, we know that brokenness can be healed – both in individual lives and in the life of the nation. All religions believe that redemption is possible. Learning the truth can set us on a path toward national healing and renewal,” the statement says.
Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is exploring the possibility of establishing a “Truth” Commission. In the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan, is proposing a similar body. Others in and outside Congress are supporting the appointment of an independent prosecutor appointed by the Department of Justice. All would carry out comprehensive investigations into the approval of and use of torture by the U.S. government.
Thus far, President Barack Obama has appeared cool to the idea of a special commission of inquiry. At a recent press conference, he said his inclination was to look forward, not backward. However, he added, “ no one is above the law.”
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Human Rights Groups Ask: Is this the Change We Can Believe In?
By William Fisher
Human rights activists and Constitutional law experts were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the positions taken on prisoner detention and treatment in Federal Court last week by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which one group described as “a case of old wine in new bottles.”
While the DOJ announced it would no longer use the term “enemy combatants” – one of the Bush Administration’s signature phrases – and distanced itself from Bush-era claims of unlimited Presidential power, government lawyers urged the court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by four former Guantanamo detainees because “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”
The former detainees, who are British citizens or residents, are suing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several senior military officials for authorizing and carrying out torture and depriving them of their religious rights while the Britons were in captivity. The case is known as Rasul v. Rumsfeld.
The government’s court brief called for a blanket ban on such lawsuits.
Allowing them “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it told the District of Columbia Circuit Court, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”
Human rights advocates were quick to respond.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided lawyers to defend many Guantanamo prisoners, said the Obama Administration has “adopted almost the same standard the Bush administration used to detain people without charge.”
It called the government’s position “a case of old wine in new bottles,” adding, “It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released.”
Anthony Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he found it “deeply troubling that the Justice Department continues to use an overly broad interpretation of the laws of war that would permit military detention of individuals who were picked up far from an actual battlefield or who didn't engage in hostilities against the United States.”
“Once again,” he said, “the Obama administration has taken a half-step in the right direction. The Justice Department's filing leaves the door open to modifying the government's position; it is critical that the administration promptly narrow the category for individuals who can be held in military detention so that the U.S. truly comports with the laws of war and rejects the unlawful detention power of the past eight years."
Brian J. Foley, Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Boston University law school, told us, “The Obama Administration should stop this prison program, which is actually harmful to U.S. intelligence-gathering.”
“Imprisoning people on flimsy evidence means we are interrogating, sometimes harshly and sometimes with torture, people who are not terrorists. These people will tell interrogators anything to stop the pain. That means they give us false leads and send our investigators scurrying around like chickens with their heads cut off, chasing imaginary monsters. This waste of time keeps our investigators from developing real leads. It's a policy based on fear -- "What if there is actually a real terrorist among the hundreds of innocents - we better not let anyone go!" -- that is counterproductive and shameful,” he said.
Elisa Massimino, CEO and Executive Director of Human Rights First, said "The Justice Department was right to recognize that it should not be holding prisoners as 'enemy combatants.' But the new definition of persons who may be held without charge does not differ in any fundamental respects from the old one, and it significantly distorts important traditional Law of War distinctions between international and non-international armed conflict.”
“The concept of indefinite detention without criminal charge continues, and the class of persons to be detained remains ill-defined and overly broad. The Administration left open the door to reconsider the definition during ongoing interagency reviews and we certainly hope it will use that opportunity to narrow the authority and make a clean break from the policies of the past."
Jonathan Turley, an internationally recognized Constitutional scholar and a professor at George Washington University law school, said, “The (Obama) Administration is still arguing that it can hold these individuals without federal charges and it is still trying to quash lawsuits filed by their counsel.”
“The biggest danger,” he said, “is that it is an effort to make Obama look principled on international law before he blocks any criminal investigation of war crimes by his predecessor.”
Human Rights Watch took a similar view. Joanne Mariner, HRW’s terrorism and counterterrorism program director said, “The Obama administration’s take on detainees is essentially the Bush standard with a new name. The Obama administration's newly issued position on Guantanamo detainees is a disappointment. Rather than rejecting the Bush administration's ill-conceived notion of a ‘war on terror, ’ the Obama administration's position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form.”
"We urge the Obama administration to reconsider its views," Mariner said. "The administration should be prosecuting terror suspects in the federal courts, not looking for ways to circumvent the criminal justice system."
And Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who is currently defending several former Guantanamno detainees in a lawsuit against a subsidiary of the Boeing Company for its alleged involvement in their “extraordinary rendition,” told us:
“The new administration is interpreting the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) largely as the Bush administration did: As giving the president broad powers to detain indefinitely individuals without charges or trial based on suspected terrorist activities.”
The Obama legal team “remains locked into the same misguided and illegal approach to fighting terrorism. The dropping of the ‘enemy combatant’ labels appears at this point more symbol than substance,” he said.
The AUMF resolution was passed by Congress on September 18, 2001, immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It authorized President George W. Bush to use the U.S. Armed Forces to pursue those responsible.
But not all Constitutional experts agreed with the statements of human rights groups. For example, Prof. Peter Shane of the University of Ohio law school took a somewhat more nuanced view. He told us, “If the Obama Administration is abandoning the position that the President has exclusive and virtually unlimited authority to guide foreign and military affairs unilaterally, that may signal a willingness to collaborate with Congress in the development of future initiatives, which, in turn, could well have a moderating impact on American adventurism abroad.”
The Rasul case has had a difficult history in U.S. courts. The U.S. Circuit Court, in a ruling in January of last year, decided that Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they are “aliens without property or presence in the U.S.” It dismissed the case.
But in December of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case. The high court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for further consideration.
The “further consideration” was triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision nine months ago in a case known as “Boumediene,” which established that Guantanamo detainees do have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. It returned the Rasul case for a second look by the Circuit Court.
While President Obama has ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay to be closed by next January, government lawyers have taken positions in several current detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change from that taken by the Bush Administration. It has also invoked the so-called “state secrets” privilege to prevent cases from ever being heard in courts, on the grounds that public disclosure would jeopardize national security.
Human rights activists and Constitutional law experts were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the positions taken on prisoner detention and treatment in Federal Court last week by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which one group described as “a case of old wine in new bottles.”
While the DOJ announced it would no longer use the term “enemy combatants” – one of the Bush Administration’s signature phrases – and distanced itself from Bush-era claims of unlimited Presidential power, government lawyers urged the court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by four former Guantanamo detainees because “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”
The former detainees, who are British citizens or residents, are suing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several senior military officials for authorizing and carrying out torture and depriving them of their religious rights while the Britons were in captivity. The case is known as Rasul v. Rumsfeld.
The government’s court brief called for a blanket ban on such lawsuits.
Allowing them “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it told the District of Columbia Circuit Court, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”
Human rights advocates were quick to respond.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided lawyers to defend many Guantanamo prisoners, said the Obama Administration has “adopted almost the same standard the Bush administration used to detain people without charge.”
It called the government’s position “a case of old wine in new bottles,” adding, “It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released.”
Anthony Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he found it “deeply troubling that the Justice Department continues to use an overly broad interpretation of the laws of war that would permit military detention of individuals who were picked up far from an actual battlefield or who didn't engage in hostilities against the United States.”
“Once again,” he said, “the Obama administration has taken a half-step in the right direction. The Justice Department's filing leaves the door open to modifying the government's position; it is critical that the administration promptly narrow the category for individuals who can be held in military detention so that the U.S. truly comports with the laws of war and rejects the unlawful detention power of the past eight years."
Brian J. Foley, Visiting Associate Professor of Law at Boston University law school, told us, “The Obama Administration should stop this prison program, which is actually harmful to U.S. intelligence-gathering.”
“Imprisoning people on flimsy evidence means we are interrogating, sometimes harshly and sometimes with torture, people who are not terrorists. These people will tell interrogators anything to stop the pain. That means they give us false leads and send our investigators scurrying around like chickens with their heads cut off, chasing imaginary monsters. This waste of time keeps our investigators from developing real leads. It's a policy based on fear -- "What if there is actually a real terrorist among the hundreds of innocents - we better not let anyone go!" -- that is counterproductive and shameful,” he said.
Elisa Massimino, CEO and Executive Director of Human Rights First, said "The Justice Department was right to recognize that it should not be holding prisoners as 'enemy combatants.' But the new definition of persons who may be held without charge does not differ in any fundamental respects from the old one, and it significantly distorts important traditional Law of War distinctions between international and non-international armed conflict.”
“The concept of indefinite detention without criminal charge continues, and the class of persons to be detained remains ill-defined and overly broad. The Administration left open the door to reconsider the definition during ongoing interagency reviews and we certainly hope it will use that opportunity to narrow the authority and make a clean break from the policies of the past."
Jonathan Turley, an internationally recognized Constitutional scholar and a professor at George Washington University law school, said, “The (Obama) Administration is still arguing that it can hold these individuals without federal charges and it is still trying to quash lawsuits filed by their counsel.”
“The biggest danger,” he said, “is that it is an effort to make Obama look principled on international law before he blocks any criminal investigation of war crimes by his predecessor.”
Human Rights Watch took a similar view. Joanne Mariner, HRW’s terrorism and counterterrorism program director said, “The Obama administration’s take on detainees is essentially the Bush standard with a new name. The Obama administration's newly issued position on Guantanamo detainees is a disappointment. Rather than rejecting the Bush administration's ill-conceived notion of a ‘war on terror, ’ the Obama administration's position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form.”
"We urge the Obama administration to reconsider its views," Mariner said. "The administration should be prosecuting terror suspects in the federal courts, not looking for ways to circumvent the criminal justice system."
And Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who is currently defending several former Guantanamno detainees in a lawsuit against a subsidiary of the Boeing Company for its alleged involvement in their “extraordinary rendition,” told us:
“The new administration is interpreting the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) largely as the Bush administration did: As giving the president broad powers to detain indefinitely individuals without charges or trial based on suspected terrorist activities.”
The Obama legal team “remains locked into the same misguided and illegal approach to fighting terrorism. The dropping of the ‘enemy combatant’ labels appears at this point more symbol than substance,” he said.
The AUMF resolution was passed by Congress on September 18, 2001, immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It authorized President George W. Bush to use the U.S. Armed Forces to pursue those responsible.
But not all Constitutional experts agreed with the statements of human rights groups. For example, Prof. Peter Shane of the University of Ohio law school took a somewhat more nuanced view. He told us, “If the Obama Administration is abandoning the position that the President has exclusive and virtually unlimited authority to guide foreign and military affairs unilaterally, that may signal a willingness to collaborate with Congress in the development of future initiatives, which, in turn, could well have a moderating impact on American adventurism abroad.”
The Rasul case has had a difficult history in U.S. courts. The U.S. Circuit Court, in a ruling in January of last year, decided that Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they are “aliens without property or presence in the U.S.” It dismissed the case.
But in December of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case. The high court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for further consideration.
The “further consideration” was triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision nine months ago in a case known as “Boumediene,” which established that Guantanamo detainees do have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. It returned the Rasul case for a second look by the Circuit Court.
While President Obama has ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay to be closed by next January, government lawyers have taken positions in several current detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change from that taken by the Bush Administration. It has also invoked the so-called “state secrets” privilege to prevent cases from ever being heard in courts, on the grounds that public disclosure would jeopardize national security.
Monday, March 09, 2009
The Spies Who Came in from the Mosque
By William Fisher
Ever since John Ashcroft began indiscriminately rounding up “Middle-Eastern-looking” folks in the U.S. and holding them incommunicado following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American Muslim community has been trying to mobilize public support against knee-jerk racial and ethnic profiling.
But their success has been, to be kind, limited. Muslim- and Arab-American organizations lack the resources enjoyed by many other influential lobbying groups in Washington and elsewhere.
They’re also trying to take on a Sisyphus-like mission. Now, a new poll by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies finds that only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans say they wouldn't want to have Muslims as a neighbor. Predictably, the poll also found that American Muslims experience emotional turbulence due to the stereotypes and suspicion of Islam since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
But now, two gaffes by the Federal Government may be making their objective a tad more achievable.
On the heels of the recent poll, two major Muslim-American organizations issued scathing indictments of the tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) said the recent revelation that the FBI used paid informants and agent provocateurs in U.S. mosques that have participated in law enforcement outreach efforts “undermines the decade-long relationship that American Muslims built with law enforcement.”
And another major advocacy group, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), filed a complaint charging that the Department of Homeland Security unfairly targeted Arab and Muslim communities.
The FBI’s covert surveillance of mosques “sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities,” MPAC said in a statement.
MPAC Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati urged greater transparency by the FBI in their dealings with the Muslim community. “Clearly, law enforcement has a crucial job to do in keeping our country safe. The American Muslim community and its national organizations have demonstrated time and again their consistent commitment to developing solutions that can protect America while also upholding privacy and civil liberties,” he said.
Prof. David Cole of Georgetown University, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars, agrees. He told this reporter, “Nearly eight years after 9/11, there is little evidence of support for al Qaeda or terrorism among Muslims in the United States. Paid informants are a highly intrusive form of surveillance, and should be restricted to instances where there are grounds for suspecting serious criminal activity. If the FBI is seen to be infiltrating mosques it will only breed distrust and make relations with the Muslim communities that much more difficult.”
MPAC said, “It is now up to the FBI and law enforcement agencies to build once again the trust and respect necessary to re-engage with the American Muslim community.” The organization said it will “continue to raise these community concerns with federal law enforcement officials in its efforts to help form policies that preserve civil liberties while also protecting our nation.”
Al-Marayati pointed out what he termed the “irony” in a speech given by FBI Director Robert Meuller to the Council on Foreign Relations in the same week as the surveillance revelations became public.
Meuller’s speech said, "Too often, we run up against a wall between law enforcement and the community -- a wall based on myth and misperception of the work we do... Oftentimes, the communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts.”
“The simple truth is that we cannot do our jobs without the trust of the American people. And we cannot build that trust without reaching out to say, 'We are on your side. We stand ready to help’," Meuller said.
The FBI’s tactics surfaced last week in the case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, California. According to MPAC, in 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual.
Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life "a living hell." Niazi was arrested last week on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was released yesterday on $500,000 bail.
MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.
In its complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security, the ADC asked for “a full and comprehensive investigation” into a program known as 'Operation Frontline,' run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS.
ADC said Operation Frontline was ostensibly designed to prevent terrorist activity around the 2004 Presidential election, but it primarily targeted men from Muslim-majority countries without links to any national security-related activity. ADC filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gain access to data on the nationalities and religions of those detained and deported. It says these requests were not addressed by DHS. ADC then filed a separate FOIA request and lawsuit against DHS and its ICE component to compel them to release the data.
As a result, a sample of 300 Operation Frontline investigation files data was released as part of a court settlement.
ADC says analysis of this data shows that Operation Frontline targeted foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries. For example, 79% of the foreign nationals targeted by Operation Frontline were from Muslim-majority countries; deportable foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by Operation Frontline than were similar individuals from other countries; Operation Frontline investigations included in the sample released by ICE led to no charges and no convictions for national-security related crimes.
These developments seem to add credibility to results of the new poll. "Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center, which is a nonpartisan research center affiliated with the Gallup polling organization.
Despite the fact that millions of Muslims have been living in the U.S. for generations, the poll presents a portrait of an often-misunderstood community -- one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.
And though the report states that while Muslim Americans are more likely than the general public to hold a professional job, they expressed less satisfaction with their standard of living and community.
The disparity is a sign of the alienation some Muslim Americans may feel,
experts say. Ahmed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, said some Muslim Americans feel a sense of "otherness" created by outside perceptions of their religion and a lack of involvement in their larger community.
The poll numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans -- they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation's most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as "thriving."
Muslim Americans ranked highest among American religious groups who believed their communities were getting worse. Muslim Americans ages 18 to 29 in particular reported discontent with their jobs and communities. Approximately 35 percent of American Muslims are African-American.
And contrary to conventional beliefs – largely based on overseas models – American Muslim women enjoy a high degree of equality with men.
The poll results are based on a sample of 941 Americans who identified themselves as Muslim in a survey of more than 300,000 Americans over the course of 2008.
So the question is: Will ordinary Americans pay any attention to the poll results, much less the transgressions of the FBI and the DHS? Will they even know about law enforcement’s totally avoidable errors?
Well, if they read the so-called Mainstream Press, the likelihood is less than nil. For years, the American Muslim community has been one of the most under-reported groups in the U.S. For most cable news channels, the subject has become one of the third rails of American journalism since 9/11. And the print media’s silence on this issue began long before circulation and ad revenue began to fall off a cliff and the print media started decimating their newsrooms to cut costs.
And if American voters don’t care about the outrageously clumsy performance of their law enforcement agencies, neither will Congress.
Meanwhile, the CIA will doubtless continue its expensive efforts to polish its image so that it can try to recruit more language-savvy Arab- and other Muslim American agents and analysts.
Didn’t it ever occur to the FBI and ICE that they’re sabotaging the CIA?
Which brings me back to Bob Mueller’s speech. “The communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts,” is what he said.
Well, spying on mosques hardly meets that test. Good luck, Bob.
Ever since John Ashcroft began indiscriminately rounding up “Middle-Eastern-looking” folks in the U.S. and holding them incommunicado following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American Muslim community has been trying to mobilize public support against knee-jerk racial and ethnic profiling.
But their success has been, to be kind, limited. Muslim- and Arab-American organizations lack the resources enjoyed by many other influential lobbying groups in Washington and elsewhere.
They’re also trying to take on a Sisyphus-like mission. Now, a new poll by the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies finds that only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans say they wouldn't want to have Muslims as a neighbor. Predictably, the poll also found that American Muslims experience emotional turbulence due to the stereotypes and suspicion of Islam since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
But now, two gaffes by the Federal Government may be making their objective a tad more achievable.
On the heels of the recent poll, two major Muslim-American organizations issued scathing indictments of the tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) said the recent revelation that the FBI used paid informants and agent provocateurs in U.S. mosques that have participated in law enforcement outreach efforts “undermines the decade-long relationship that American Muslims built with law enforcement.”
And another major advocacy group, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), filed a complaint charging that the Department of Homeland Security unfairly targeted Arab and Muslim communities.
The FBI’s covert surveillance of mosques “sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities,” MPAC said in a statement.
MPAC Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati urged greater transparency by the FBI in their dealings with the Muslim community. “Clearly, law enforcement has a crucial job to do in keeping our country safe. The American Muslim community and its national organizations have demonstrated time and again their consistent commitment to developing solutions that can protect America while also upholding privacy and civil liberties,” he said.
Prof. David Cole of Georgetown University, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars, agrees. He told this reporter, “Nearly eight years after 9/11, there is little evidence of support for al Qaeda or terrorism among Muslims in the United States. Paid informants are a highly intrusive form of surveillance, and should be restricted to instances where there are grounds for suspecting serious criminal activity. If the FBI is seen to be infiltrating mosques it will only breed distrust and make relations with the Muslim communities that much more difficult.”
MPAC said, “It is now up to the FBI and law enforcement agencies to build once again the trust and respect necessary to re-engage with the American Muslim community.” The organization said it will “continue to raise these community concerns with federal law enforcement officials in its efforts to help form policies that preserve civil liberties while also protecting our nation.”
Al-Marayati pointed out what he termed the “irony” in a speech given by FBI Director Robert Meuller to the Council on Foreign Relations in the same week as the surveillance revelations became public.
Meuller’s speech said, "Too often, we run up against a wall between law enforcement and the community -- a wall based on myth and misperception of the work we do... Oftentimes, the communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts.”
“The simple truth is that we cannot do our jobs without the trust of the American people. And we cannot build that trust without reaching out to say, 'We are on your side. We stand ready to help’," Meuller said.
The FBI’s tactics surfaced last week in the case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, California. According to MPAC, in 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual.
Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life "a living hell." Niazi was arrested last week on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was released yesterday on $500,000 bail.
MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.
In its complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security, the ADC asked for “a full and comprehensive investigation” into a program known as 'Operation Frontline,' run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS.
ADC said Operation Frontline was ostensibly designed to prevent terrorist activity around the 2004 Presidential election, but it primarily targeted men from Muslim-majority countries without links to any national security-related activity. ADC filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gain access to data on the nationalities and religions of those detained and deported. It says these requests were not addressed by DHS. ADC then filed a separate FOIA request and lawsuit against DHS and its ICE component to compel them to release the data.
As a result, a sample of 300 Operation Frontline investigation files data was released as part of a court settlement.
ADC says analysis of this data shows that Operation Frontline targeted foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries. For example, 79% of the foreign nationals targeted by Operation Frontline were from Muslim-majority countries; deportable foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by Operation Frontline than were similar individuals from other countries; Operation Frontline investigations included in the sample released by ICE led to no charges and no convictions for national-security related crimes.
These developments seem to add credibility to results of the new poll. "Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center, which is a nonpartisan research center affiliated with the Gallup polling organization.
Despite the fact that millions of Muslims have been living in the U.S. for generations, the poll presents a portrait of an often-misunderstood community -- one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.
And though the report states that while Muslim Americans are more likely than the general public to hold a professional job, they expressed less satisfaction with their standard of living and community.
The disparity is a sign of the alienation some Muslim Americans may feel,
experts say. Ahmed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, said some Muslim Americans feel a sense of "otherness" created by outside perceptions of their religion and a lack of involvement in their larger community.
The poll numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans -- they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation's most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as "thriving."
Muslim Americans ranked highest among American religious groups who believed their communities were getting worse. Muslim Americans ages 18 to 29 in particular reported discontent with their jobs and communities. Approximately 35 percent of American Muslims are African-American.
And contrary to conventional beliefs – largely based on overseas models – American Muslim women enjoy a high degree of equality with men.
The poll results are based on a sample of 941 Americans who identified themselves as Muslim in a survey of more than 300,000 Americans over the course of 2008.
So the question is: Will ordinary Americans pay any attention to the poll results, much less the transgressions of the FBI and the DHS? Will they even know about law enforcement’s totally avoidable errors?
Well, if they read the so-called Mainstream Press, the likelihood is less than nil. For years, the American Muslim community has been one of the most under-reported groups in the U.S. For most cable news channels, the subject has become one of the third rails of American journalism since 9/11. And the print media’s silence on this issue began long before circulation and ad revenue began to fall off a cliff and the print media started decimating their newsrooms to cut costs.
And if American voters don’t care about the outrageously clumsy performance of their law enforcement agencies, neither will Congress.
Meanwhile, the CIA will doubtless continue its expensive efforts to polish its image so that it can try to recruit more language-savvy Arab- and other Muslim American agents and analysts.
Didn’t it ever occur to the FBI and ICE that they’re sabotaging the CIA?
Which brings me back to Bob Mueller’s speech. “The communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts,” is what he said.
Well, spying on mosques hardly meets that test. Good luck, Bob.
AMERICAN MUSLIMS CHARGE FBI, DHS
By William Fisher
On the heels of a recent poll that found that American Muslims experience emotional turbulence due to the stereotypes and suspicion of Islam since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, two major Muslim-American organizations issued scathing indictments of the tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) said the recent revelation that the FBI used paid informants and agent provocateurs in U.S. mosques that have participated in law enforcement outreach efforts “undermines the decade-long relationship that American Muslims built with law enforcement.”
And another major advocacy group, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), filed a complaint charging that the Department of Homeland Security unfairly targeted Arab and Muslim communities.
The FBI’s covert surveillance of mosques “sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities,” MPAC said in a statement.
MPAC Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati urged greater transparency by the FBI in their dealings with the Muslim community. “Clearly, law enforcement has a crucial job to do in keeping our country safe. The American Muslim community and its national organizations have demonstrated time and again their consistent commitment to developing solutions that can protect America while also upholding privacy and civil liberties,” he said.
Prof. David Cole of Georgetown University, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars, agrees. He told us: “Nearly eight years after 9/11, there is little evidence of support for al Qaeda or terrorism among Muslims in the United States. Paid informants are a highly intrusive form of surveillance, and should be restricted to instances where there are grounds for suspecting serious criminal activity. If the FBI is seen to be infiltrating mosques it will only breed distrust and make relations with the Muslim communities that much more difficult.”
MPAC said, “It is now up to the FBI and law enforcement agencies to build once again the trust and respect necessary to re-engage with the American Muslim community.” The organization said it will “continue to raise these community concerns with federal law enforcement officials in its efforts to help form policies that preserve civil liberties while also protecting our nation.”
Al-Marayati pointed out what he termed the “irony” in a speech given by FBI Director Robert Meuller to the Council on Foreign Relations in the same week as the surveillance revelations became public.
Meuller’s speech said, "Too often, we run up against a wall between law enforcement and the community -- a wall based on myth and misperception of the work we do... Oftentimes, the communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts.”
“The simple truth is that we cannot do our jobs without the trust of the American people. And we cannot build that trust without reaching out to say, 'We are on your side. We stand ready to help’," Meuller said.
The FBI’s tactics surfaced last week in the case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, California. According to MPAC, in 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual.
Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life "a living hell." Niazi was arrested last week on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was released yesterday on $500,000 bail.
MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.
In its complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security, the ADC asked for “a full and comprehensive investigation” into a program known as 'Operation Frontline,' run by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS.
ADC said Operation Frontline was ostensibly designed to prevent "terrorist" activity around the 2004 Presidential election, but primarily targeted men from Muslim-majority countries without links to any national security-related activity. ADC said it filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in order to gain access to data on the nationalities and religions of those detained and deported. It says these requests were not addressed by DHS. ADC then filed a separate FOIA request and lawsuit against DHS and its ICE component to compel them to release the data.
As a result, a sample of 300 Operation Frontline investigation files data was released as part of a court settlement.
ADC says analysis of this data shows that Operation Frontline targeted foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries. For example, 79% of the foreign nationals targeted by Operation Frontline were from Muslim-majority countries; deportable foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by Operation Frontline than were similar individuals from other countries; Operation Frontline investigations included in the sample released by ICE led to no charges and no convictions for national-security related crimes.
These developments seem to add credibility to results of a new poll of Muslim Americans. "Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research center affiliated with the Gallup polling organization.
"Only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn't want to have Muslims as a neighbor," she said.
The poll presents a portrait of an often-misunderstood community -- one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.
And though the report states that while Muslim Americans are more likely than the general public to hold a professional job, they expressed less satisfaction with their standard of living and community.
The disparity is a sign of the alienation some Muslim Americans may feel,
experts say. Ahmed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, said some Muslim Americans feel a sense of "otherness" created by outside perceptions of their religion and a lack of involvement in their larger community.
The poll numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans -- they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation's most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as "thriving."
Muslim Americans ranked highest among American religious groups who believed their communities were getting worse. Muslim Americans ages 18 to 29 in particular reported discontent with their jobs and communities. Approximately 35 percent of American Muslims are African-American.
And contrary to conventional beliefs – largely based on overseas models – American Muslim women enjoy a high degree of equality with men.
The poll results are based on a sample of 941 Americans who identified themselves as Muslim in a survey of more than 300,000 Americans over the course of 2008.
On the heels of a recent poll that found that American Muslims experience emotional turbulence due to the stereotypes and suspicion of Islam since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, two major Muslim-American organizations issued scathing indictments of the tactics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) said the recent revelation that the FBI used paid informants and agent provocateurs in U.S. mosques that have participated in law enforcement outreach efforts “undermines the decade-long relationship that American Muslims built with law enforcement.”
And another major advocacy group, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), filed a complaint charging that the Department of Homeland Security unfairly targeted Arab and Muslim communities.
The FBI’s covert surveillance of mosques “sends a devastating message to community leaders and imams who have worked diligently to foster greater understanding between law enforcement and their communities,” MPAC said in a statement.
MPAC Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati urged greater transparency by the FBI in their dealings with the Muslim community. “Clearly, law enforcement has a crucial job to do in keeping our country safe. The American Muslim community and its national organizations have demonstrated time and again their consistent commitment to developing solutions that can protect America while also upholding privacy and civil liberties,” he said.
Prof. David Cole of Georgetown University, one of the nation’s preeminent constitutional scholars, agrees. He told us: “Nearly eight years after 9/11, there is little evidence of support for al Qaeda or terrorism among Muslims in the United States. Paid informants are a highly intrusive form of surveillance, and should be restricted to instances where there are grounds for suspecting serious criminal activity. If the FBI is seen to be infiltrating mosques it will only breed distrust and make relations with the Muslim communities that much more difficult.”
MPAC said, “It is now up to the FBI and law enforcement agencies to build once again the trust and respect necessary to re-engage with the American Muslim community.” The organization said it will “continue to raise these community concerns with federal law enforcement officials in its efforts to help form policies that preserve civil liberties while also protecting our nation.”
Al-Marayati pointed out what he termed the “irony” in a speech given by FBI Director Robert Meuller to the Council on Foreign Relations in the same week as the surveillance revelations became public.
Meuller’s speech said, "Too often, we run up against a wall between law enforcement and the community -- a wall based on myth and misperception of the work we do... Oftentimes, the communities from which we need the most help are those who trust us the least. But it is in these communities that we must re-double our efforts.”
“The simple truth is that we cannot do our jobs without the trust of the American people. And we cannot build that trust without reaching out to say, 'We are on your side. We stand ready to help’," Meuller said.
The FBI’s tactics surfaced last week in the case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, California. According to MPAC, in 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual.
Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life "a living hell." Niazi was arrested last week on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was released yesterday on $500,000 bail.
MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.
In its complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security, the ADC asked for “a full and comprehensive investigation” into a program known as 'Operation Frontline,' run by Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS.
ADC said Operation Frontline was ostensibly designed to prevent "terrorist" activity around the 2004 Presidential election, but primarily targeted men from Muslim-majority countries without links to any national security-related activity. ADC said it filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in order to gain access to data on the nationalities and religions of those detained and deported. It says these requests were not addressed by DHS. ADC then filed a separate FOIA request and lawsuit against DHS and its ICE component to compel them to release the data.
As a result, a sample of 300 Operation Frontline investigation files data was released as part of a court settlement.
ADC says analysis of this data shows that Operation Frontline targeted foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries. For example, 79% of the foreign nationals targeted by Operation Frontline were from Muslim-majority countries; deportable foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by Operation Frontline than were similar individuals from other countries; Operation Frontline investigations included in the sample released by ICE led to no charges and no convictions for national-security related crimes.
These developments seem to add credibility to results of a new poll of Muslim Americans. "Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research center affiliated with the Gallup polling organization.
"Only 45 percent of Americans consider Muslims in the country as loyal and 25 percent of Americans said they wouldn't want to have Muslims as a neighbor," she said.
The poll presents a portrait of an often-misunderstood community -- one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.
And though the report states that while Muslim Americans are more likely than the general public to hold a professional job, they expressed less satisfaction with their standard of living and community.
The disparity is a sign of the alienation some Muslim Americans may feel,
experts say. Ahmed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, said some Muslim Americans feel a sense of "otherness" created by outside perceptions of their religion and a lack of involvement in their larger community.
The poll numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans -- they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation's most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as "thriving."
Muslim Americans ranked highest among American religious groups who believed their communities were getting worse. Muslim Americans ages 18 to 29 in particular reported discontent with their jobs and communities. Approximately 35 percent of American Muslims are African-American.
And contrary to conventional beliefs – largely based on overseas models – American Muslim women enjoy a high degree of equality with men.
The poll results are based on a sample of 941 Americans who identified themselves as Muslim in a survey of more than 300,000 Americans over the course of 2008.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
TRUTH COMMISSION PROPOSAL REVEALS DEEP DIVISIONS
By William Fisher
In a preview of the heated divisions likely be triggered by the formation of a “truth commission” to investigate detainee interrogation, warrantless wiretapping and other alleged violations during the administration of President George W. Bush, witnesses before a Senate committee today characterized such a body as either a “profoundly bad idea” or “critically important” to avoiding the mistakes of the past.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was the first held in Congress to explore the “truth commission” proposal put forth by committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont.
One of the witnesses, former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who also served as Undersecretary of State during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, told the senators, “It’s not enough to say we’re going to look ahead. We need to know where we’ve been, what happened, and the implications for the nation and our foreign policy.”
He added that the nation must “take stock” in order to “neutralize the narrative of our adversaries” and “restore our reputation in the world.”
But another witness, David Rifkin, a senior Justice Department official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, told the Committee that Congress has no authority to “outsource criminal investigations” to another body. In response to a comment from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Rifkin said he thought the “real idea behind a truth commission is to target a small number of Bush Administration officials.”
The Department of Justice should do that,” he added.
The testimony before the committee mirrors the country’s diversity of opinion about the wisdom of a “truth commission” among legal scholars, human rights and religious advocacy groups, as well as between Democrats and Republicans.
A Gallup poll, released last month, found that on the issue of detainee torture, 38 percent favored a criminal investigation while 24 percent favored an inquiry by an independent panel; thirty-four percent of those polled said they did not support additional investigation of Bush’s policies.
President Barack Obama has approached the “truth commission” proposal with caution. He told a recent press conference that his inclination was to look forward, not backward, but that “no one is above the law.”
The views of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, appear to have changed over time. She refused to hold impeachment hearings when George W. Bush was President, but now prefers a “blue-ribbon panel” to probe the Bush administration. She also wants the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor.
Such a panel has been proposed in the House by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.
Human rights and religious groups have also been divided on the “truth commission” issue.
One religious group, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) has called for an impartial, nonpartisan, and independent “Commission of Inquiry” to investigate U.S.-sponsored torture and to ascertain the extent to which Bush administration interrogation practices constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Their statement was signed by nearly two dozen prominent religious leaders, representing a broad array of religious denominations.
The American Civil Liberties Union has urged the establishment of a Select Committee to work in conjunction with Senator Leahy’s commission, believing that the combination of both committees would be an effective format for congressional review of Bush administration policies.
Another prominent human rights organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, believes that the issue should be resolved by the Obama Justice Department.
“A full investigation and prosecution of these actions by the Bush administration is necessary for the Obama administration to meaningfully reassert the rule of law in the United States. Government officials are not above the law, and their actions impact the lives of millions of people around the world. Prosecuting these officials for their activities is, in fact, a meaningful mechanism for securing justice for the victims and the survivors of torture and war crimes, as well as for deterring future government officials from repeating this conduct.”
Another witness before Leahy’s committee, Jeremy Rabkin, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law, told senators that simply being called to testify before a “truth commission” would imply guilt. He said the commission would be a violation of the witnesses’ civil rights, since “witnesses would not be able to defend themselves” as they would in a criminal prosecution in court.
But another witness, retired Admiral Lee Gunn, former Inspector General for the Navy, endorsed the “truth commission” idea and was highly critical of the detainee treatment practices of both the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. He said the guidance given by U.S. military and civilian leaders regarding the custody and interrogation of prisoners was “unclear, ambiguous, or just plain wrong.”
“We have failed American service men and women over the past eight years,” he declared, adding, “We have damaged the reputations of people who are trying to win hearts and minds” abroad.
Witness John Farmer, who served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, expressed support for an independent commission to examine Bush administration detainee and interrogation policies and practices. He told the committee that our torture of detainees has been counter-productive.
“Our tactics have prevented us from prosecuting” people involved in the 9/11 conspiracy, citing the case of the alleged 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani.
The hearing’s intensity was heightened by the release earlier this week of a number of memoranda from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the unit that advises the president on major legal matters. Some of these memos told former President George W. Bush that, in wartime, he could send troops to arrest and detain people within the U.S. as “enemy combatants,” suspend the Constitutional rights of free speech and press, and surveille U.S. citizens without a warrant or showing of probable cause.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the committee, said, “the OLC opinions are "shocking."
Near the top of the agenda for senators and witnesses was the issue of whether any kind of immunity from prosecution should be granted to those who testify before a “truth commission.”
Sen. Leahy said he was not interested in having the Justice Department prosecute low-level people and would consider granting them immunity. He said the work of a “truth commission” would be fact-finding and that evidence of criminal violations would be referred to the DOJ.
In a preview of the heated divisions likely be triggered by the formation of a “truth commission” to investigate detainee interrogation, warrantless wiretapping and other alleged violations during the administration of President George W. Bush, witnesses before a Senate committee today characterized such a body as either a “profoundly bad idea” or “critically important” to avoiding the mistakes of the past.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was the first held in Congress to explore the “truth commission” proposal put forth by committee chairman Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont.
One of the witnesses, former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, who also served as Undersecretary of State during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, told the senators, “It’s not enough to say we’re going to look ahead. We need to know where we’ve been, what happened, and the implications for the nation and our foreign policy.”
He added that the nation must “take stock” in order to “neutralize the narrative of our adversaries” and “restore our reputation in the world.”
But another witness, David Rifkin, a senior Justice Department official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, told the Committee that Congress has no authority to “outsource criminal investigations” to another body. In response to a comment from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, Rifkin said he thought the “real idea behind a truth commission is to target a small number of Bush Administration officials.”
The Department of Justice should do that,” he added.
The testimony before the committee mirrors the country’s diversity of opinion about the wisdom of a “truth commission” among legal scholars, human rights and religious advocacy groups, as well as between Democrats and Republicans.
A Gallup poll, released last month, found that on the issue of detainee torture, 38 percent favored a criminal investigation while 24 percent favored an inquiry by an independent panel; thirty-four percent of those polled said they did not support additional investigation of Bush’s policies.
President Barack Obama has approached the “truth commission” proposal with caution. He told a recent press conference that his inclination was to look forward, not backward, but that “no one is above the law.”
The views of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, appear to have changed over time. She refused to hold impeachment hearings when George W. Bush was President, but now prefers a “blue-ribbon panel” to probe the Bush administration. She also wants the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor.
Such a panel has been proposed in the House by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat.
Human rights and religious groups have also been divided on the “truth commission” issue.
One religious group, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) has called for an impartial, nonpartisan, and independent “Commission of Inquiry” to investigate U.S.-sponsored torture and to ascertain the extent to which Bush administration interrogation practices constituted "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Their statement was signed by nearly two dozen prominent religious leaders, representing a broad array of religious denominations.
The American Civil Liberties Union has urged the establishment of a Select Committee to work in conjunction with Senator Leahy’s commission, believing that the combination of both committees would be an effective format for congressional review of Bush administration policies.
Another prominent human rights organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, believes that the issue should be resolved by the Obama Justice Department.
“A full investigation and prosecution of these actions by the Bush administration is necessary for the Obama administration to meaningfully reassert the rule of law in the United States. Government officials are not above the law, and their actions impact the lives of millions of people around the world. Prosecuting these officials for their activities is, in fact, a meaningful mechanism for securing justice for the victims and the survivors of torture and war crimes, as well as for deterring future government officials from repeating this conduct.”
Another witness before Leahy’s committee, Jeremy Rabkin, a law professor at the George Mason University School of Law, told senators that simply being called to testify before a “truth commission” would imply guilt. He said the commission would be a violation of the witnesses’ civil rights, since “witnesses would not be able to defend themselves” as they would in a criminal prosecution in court.
But another witness, retired Admiral Lee Gunn, former Inspector General for the Navy, endorsed the “truth commission” idea and was highly critical of the detainee treatment practices of both the military and the Central Intelligence Agency. He said the guidance given by U.S. military and civilian leaders regarding the custody and interrogation of prisoners was “unclear, ambiguous, or just plain wrong.”
“We have failed American service men and women over the past eight years,” he declared, adding, “We have damaged the reputations of people who are trying to win hearts and minds” abroad.
Witness John Farmer, who served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission, expressed support for an independent commission to examine Bush administration detainee and interrogation policies and practices. He told the committee that our torture of detainees has been counter-productive.
“Our tactics have prevented us from prosecuting” people involved in the 9/11 conspiracy, citing the case of the alleged 20th hijacker, Mohammad al-Qahtani.
The hearing’s intensity was heightened by the release earlier this week of a number of memoranda from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the unit that advises the president on major legal matters. Some of these memos told former President George W. Bush that, in wartime, he could send troops to arrest and detain people within the U.S. as “enemy combatants,” suspend the Constitutional rights of free speech and press, and surveille U.S. citizens without a warrant or showing of probable cause.
Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the senior Republican on the committee, said, “the OLC opinions are "shocking."
Near the top of the agenda for senators and witnesses was the issue of whether any kind of immunity from prosecution should be granted to those who testify before a “truth commission.”
Sen. Leahy said he was not interested in having the Justice Department prosecute low-level people and would consider granting them immunity. He said the work of a “truth commission” would be fact-finding and that evidence of criminal violations would be referred to the DOJ.
Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Something Obama Can Do. Now.
By William Fisher
President Obama apparently had a successful first meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper. Obviously, their main – perhaps only – subject was the current economic meltdown.
But event disappointed many of the president’s supporters. These are the folks who are confused by what they see as the Administration’s ambivalence about the nexus between national security and civil and human rights.
In his first week in office, the president signed executive orders to shut down Guantanamo within a year, review all the cases there within 120 days, ban “enhanced interrogation” techniques, and bring a new era of openness and transparency to his government.
Before his first month was out, Obama’s Justice Department released some of those famous memos written by John Yoo and other Bush lawyers, justifying virtually infinite presidential power. And the CIA disclosed that it destroyed not two, but ninety-two, interrogation tapes.
But while all that was going on, Obama’s DOJ lawyers were in court, twice choosing to follow the same tired road so frequently traveled by George W. Bush: Invoking the so-called “state secrets privilege” to keep cases from ever getting heard in court.
In one case, the government’s lawyers used the “state secrets” defense to get a federal court to throw out a case against a Boeing subsidiary called Jeppesen Dataplan, in which four Guantanamo prisoners alleged that they were victims of “extraordinary rendition,” and that Jeppesen provided the CIA with the logistical support for their flights into foreign torture chambers.
In another case, Obama’s DOJ used “state secrets” in an attempt to halt a lawsuit charging that the government’s evidence was obtained through Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Maybe most of us can accept that all governments have secrets and have to have a way to keep their secrets secret – although the two cases cited above would not seem to be particularly great candidates for that inclusion in that category. Unless these cases somehow make it to court, we’ll never know. Unless someone leaks the facts to media.
But there’s one case the government refuses to talk about, despite that fact that all the evidence has been public for years.
That, of course, is the case of Maher Arar. Arar is the Canadian citizen who was stopped by immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, while he was in transit back to Canada. He was detained for two weeks, denied a lawyer, and then shipped off first to Jordan and then to Syria. In Syria, he was held incommunicado in a cell the size of a grave and tortured for ten months before the Syrians released him without charges.
The Canadian Government formed a special commission to review their citizen’s “extraordinary rendition.” After an exhaustive investigation, the body admitted that what happened to Arar was a result of faulty information the Canadian Royal Mounted Police gave to U.S. authorities. The head of the RCMP was forced to resign, and Canada gave Arar an official apology and ten million dollars.
This all happened on George Bush’s watch. But after incessant stonewalling about the issue, all that Secretary of State Condi Rice would say was that she thought the affair was not handled very well. And Maher Arar, for reasons no one will discuss, is somehow still on the U.S. “no-fly” list.
Which brings me back to Obama’s meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper.
Yes, the economic meltdown had to be top of both men’s agendas. But how difficult would it have been for our new president raise the Arar issue with Harper? Or vice versa?
As far as we’ve been told, nothing like that ever happened. And that’s an Obama opportunity lost.
But it’s not too late. An honest statement from the Obama Administration – and an apology to Arar – could still be of enormous help in reassuring those of us who believe in the rule of law that our new president is really committed to justice and transparency.
President Obama apparently had a successful first meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper. Obviously, their main – perhaps only – subject was the current economic meltdown.
But event disappointed many of the president’s supporters. These are the folks who are confused by what they see as the Administration’s ambivalence about the nexus between national security and civil and human rights.
In his first week in office, the president signed executive orders to shut down Guantanamo within a year, review all the cases there within 120 days, ban “enhanced interrogation” techniques, and bring a new era of openness and transparency to his government.
Before his first month was out, Obama’s Justice Department released some of those famous memos written by John Yoo and other Bush lawyers, justifying virtually infinite presidential power. And the CIA disclosed that it destroyed not two, but ninety-two, interrogation tapes.
But while all that was going on, Obama’s DOJ lawyers were in court, twice choosing to follow the same tired road so frequently traveled by George W. Bush: Invoking the so-called “state secrets privilege” to keep cases from ever getting heard in court.
In one case, the government’s lawyers used the “state secrets” defense to get a federal court to throw out a case against a Boeing subsidiary called Jeppesen Dataplan, in which four Guantanamo prisoners alleged that they were victims of “extraordinary rendition,” and that Jeppesen provided the CIA with the logistical support for their flights into foreign torture chambers.
In another case, Obama’s DOJ used “state secrets” in an attempt to halt a lawsuit charging that the government’s evidence was obtained through Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program.
Maybe most of us can accept that all governments have secrets and have to have a way to keep their secrets secret – although the two cases cited above would not seem to be particularly great candidates for that inclusion in that category. Unless these cases somehow make it to court, we’ll never know. Unless someone leaks the facts to media.
But there’s one case the government refuses to talk about, despite that fact that all the evidence has been public for years.
That, of course, is the case of Maher Arar. Arar is the Canadian citizen who was stopped by immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport in 2002, while he was in transit back to Canada. He was detained for two weeks, denied a lawyer, and then shipped off first to Jordan and then to Syria. In Syria, he was held incommunicado in a cell the size of a grave and tortured for ten months before the Syrians released him without charges.
The Canadian Government formed a special commission to review their citizen’s “extraordinary rendition.” After an exhaustive investigation, the body admitted that what happened to Arar was a result of faulty information the Canadian Royal Mounted Police gave to U.S. authorities. The head of the RCMP was forced to resign, and Canada gave Arar an official apology and ten million dollars.
This all happened on George Bush’s watch. But after incessant stonewalling about the issue, all that Secretary of State Condi Rice would say was that she thought the affair was not handled very well. And Maher Arar, for reasons no one will discuss, is somehow still on the U.S. “no-fly” list.
Which brings me back to Obama’s meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Harper.
Yes, the economic meltdown had to be top of both men’s agendas. But how difficult would it have been for our new president raise the Arar issue with Harper? Or vice versa?
As far as we’ve been told, nothing like that ever happened. And that’s an Obama opportunity lost.
But it’s not too late. An honest statement from the Obama Administration – and an apology to Arar – could still be of enormous help in reassuring those of us who believe in the rule of law that our new president is really committed to justice and transparency.
Courts to Test Executive Power, Secrecy
By William Fisher
In two court cases that could test the limits of the Obama Administration’s executive authority as well as its commitment to transparency, human rights lawyers are challenging the government’s right to use information obtained through warrantless wiretapping as evidence and to shut down charitable organizations without allowing them to defend themselves.
In one case, the government shut down the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity, in 2004, allegedly using information obtained though illegal wiretaps. In the other, also involving a Muslim-oriented charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging the constitutionality of government programs that designate organizations as “terrorists” and close them down without providing these groups a way to contest the decision in court.
In the Al Haramain case, the Bush Administration’s Treasury Department found that the group was funneling money to terrorists in Chechnya and shut it down. But the government inadvertently released a classified document to the group’s lawyers. Now the lawyers contend that this document revealed that the government had been wiretapping both the organization and its lawyers without a warrant.
The organization sued the Bush Administration. But when the case came to court, in 2006, the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege,” claiming that the case could not go forward because it would reveal information that would compromise national security.
But the judge in that case, Vaughn Walker of the federal district court in San Francisco, rejected the government’s claims. In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the judge said the government had to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which forbids it from obtaining evidence without first obtaining a warrant from the FISA court.
The president, the judge said, could not invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal the evidence and dismiss the case.
And when the Obama Administration filed an emergency appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last week, it hoped for a reversal of the lower court’s ruling. But the appeals court surprised government lawyers – and legal scholars – by rejecting their appeal, thus allowing the lower court decision to stand.
The decision was a significant victory for Al-Haramain’s lawyers, who said they needed the classified documents to represent their clients. They said they were surprised to see the Obama administration arguing so vigorously for the same expansive Bush-era view of executive power.
“I did not expect this from the Obama justice department,” said Jon Eisenberg, the Oakland, California, lawyer representing Al Haramain. “I anticipated that the Obama Department of Justice would take a more reasonable approach to moving forward with litigating this case in a manner that doesn’t jeopardize national security, which I think can be easily done.”
“They’re taking as hard a line as the Bush administration did on state secrets,” he said. “If anything, they’re being more aggressive about it.”
Eisenberg told us, “In three years of litigating this case, I'd come to expect this sort of thing from the Bush Department of Justice, but I'm astounded to see the new Obama DOJ continuing down the same path. So far, at least, we're not seeing any ‘change we can believe in’ regarding presidential abuse of the state secrets privilege.
The Al-Haramain case represented the second time the new administration had asserted “state secrets” to try to dismiss a challenge to a program of its predecessor that is widely believed to have been illegal.
In the first case, concerning the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects, the Obama administration said the program itself was a secret, so the claims of four victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA carry it out, had to be dismissed. There has not yet been a court decision in that case.
The Administration of George W. Bush invoked the state secrets doctrine more than any other government in U.S. history. In 2005, President George W. Bush admitted authorizing electronic surveillance of U.S. persons with first obtaining warrants from the FISA Court. President Bush said that he secretly ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans with suspected ties to terrorists because it was "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution."
In the second case, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze the funds and operations of another Muslim-oriented charity, KindHearts, three years ago. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing KindHearts, said the shut-down was carried out “without notice or a hearing, based simply on the assertion that the charity was ‘under investigation’." OFAC then threatened to designate KindHearts as a "specially designated global terrorist" (SDGT) based on classified evidence, “again without providing it with a reason or meaningful opportunity to defend itself.”
The ACLU is asking a federal court to block the government from blacklisting KindHearts without providing it due process, and to lift the freeze on the organization's assets.
"OFAC's unlimited authority to seize KindHearts' property and shut it down without giving the charity notice or an opportunity to defend itself is unconstitutional," Hina Shamsi, lead ACLU attorney on the case, told us.
"KindHearts has been in limbo for more than two and a half years and is asking for independent judicial scrutiny of what has been, until now, unilateral government action," she said.
KindHearts was founded in 2002 – after the government shut down a number of Muslim charities –to provide humanitarian aid abroad and at home in the U.S. in full compliance with the law. Shamsi said that “Despite the efforts KindHearts took to implement OFAC guidance and policies and otherwise exercise diligence, OFAC froze its assets in February 2006.”
In October 2008, a federal judge granted the ACLU's request for an emergency order blocking the government from designating KindHearts as an SDGT without further judicial review.
The ACLU’S Shamsi told us, “The government’s actions in KindHearts’ case show the extent to which the government has unconstitutional and unfettered authority. The government has shut the charity down based on secret evidence, without any notice of wrongdoing, any probable cause, and without providing KindHearts an opportunity to defend itself or any judicial review.”
“These violations of fundamental due process guarantees were committed against a humanitarian organization that sought to alleviate human suffering both at home and abroad. The government’s actions send a profoundly negative message to other U.S. non-profits and do nothing to serve this country’s security or its image in the eyes of the world,” she said.
She added, “We think that the entire regime is unconstitutional because it fails to provide constitutionally adequate substantive criteria or procedural safeguards.”
“The government’s unfettered authority to shut down KindHearts based on suspicion alone has not only left the charity unable to fulfill its humanitarian mission; it sends a profoundly negative message to other U.S.-based non-profits that seek to alleviate human suffering. At a time when the United States needs to restore its image in the eyes of the world, the government’s actions do not serve either this country’s security or its commitment to justice, ” she told us.
In two court cases that could test the limits of the Obama Administration’s executive authority as well as its commitment to transparency, human rights lawyers are challenging the government’s right to use information obtained through warrantless wiretapping as evidence and to shut down charitable organizations without allowing them to defend themselves.
In one case, the government shut down the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity, in 2004, allegedly using information obtained though illegal wiretaps. In the other, also involving a Muslim-oriented charity, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging the constitutionality of government programs that designate organizations as “terrorists” and close them down without providing these groups a way to contest the decision in court.
In the Al Haramain case, the Bush Administration’s Treasury Department found that the group was funneling money to terrorists in Chechnya and shut it down. But the government inadvertently released a classified document to the group’s lawyers. Now the lawyers contend that this document revealed that the government had been wiretapping both the organization and its lawyers without a warrant.
The organization sued the Bush Administration. But when the case came to court, in 2006, the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege,” claiming that the case could not go forward because it would reveal information that would compromise national security.
But the judge in that case, Vaughn Walker of the federal district court in San Francisco, rejected the government’s claims. In a first-of-its-kind ruling, the judge said the government had to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which forbids it from obtaining evidence without first obtaining a warrant from the FISA court.
The president, the judge said, could not invoke the state secrets privilege to conceal the evidence and dismiss the case.
And when the Obama Administration filed an emergency appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last week, it hoped for a reversal of the lower court’s ruling. But the appeals court surprised government lawyers – and legal scholars – by rejecting their appeal, thus allowing the lower court decision to stand.
The decision was a significant victory for Al-Haramain’s lawyers, who said they needed the classified documents to represent their clients. They said they were surprised to see the Obama administration arguing so vigorously for the same expansive Bush-era view of executive power.
“I did not expect this from the Obama justice department,” said Jon Eisenberg, the Oakland, California, lawyer representing Al Haramain. “I anticipated that the Obama Department of Justice would take a more reasonable approach to moving forward with litigating this case in a manner that doesn’t jeopardize national security, which I think can be easily done.”
“They’re taking as hard a line as the Bush administration did on state secrets,” he said. “If anything, they’re being more aggressive about it.”
Eisenberg told us, “In three years of litigating this case, I'd come to expect this sort of thing from the Bush Department of Justice, but I'm astounded to see the new Obama DOJ continuing down the same path. So far, at least, we're not seeing any ‘change we can believe in’ regarding presidential abuse of the state secrets privilege.
The Al-Haramain case represented the second time the new administration had asserted “state secrets” to try to dismiss a challenge to a program of its predecessor that is widely believed to have been illegal.
In the first case, concerning the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects, the Obama administration said the program itself was a secret, so the claims of four victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that helped the CIA carry it out, had to be dismissed. There has not yet been a court decision in that case.
The Administration of George W. Bush invoked the state secrets doctrine more than any other government in U.S. history. In 2005, President George W. Bush admitted authorizing electronic surveillance of U.S. persons with first obtaining warrants from the FISA Court. President Bush said that he secretly ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans with suspected ties to terrorists because it was "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution."
In the second case, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze the funds and operations of another Muslim-oriented charity, KindHearts, three years ago. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is representing KindHearts, said the shut-down was carried out “without notice or a hearing, based simply on the assertion that the charity was ‘under investigation’." OFAC then threatened to designate KindHearts as a "specially designated global terrorist" (SDGT) based on classified evidence, “again without providing it with a reason or meaningful opportunity to defend itself.”
The ACLU is asking a federal court to block the government from blacklisting KindHearts without providing it due process, and to lift the freeze on the organization's assets.
"OFAC's unlimited authority to seize KindHearts' property and shut it down without giving the charity notice or an opportunity to defend itself is unconstitutional," Hina Shamsi, lead ACLU attorney on the case, told us.
"KindHearts has been in limbo for more than two and a half years and is asking for independent judicial scrutiny of what has been, until now, unilateral government action," she said.
KindHearts was founded in 2002 – after the government shut down a number of Muslim charities –to provide humanitarian aid abroad and at home in the U.S. in full compliance with the law. Shamsi said that “Despite the efforts KindHearts took to implement OFAC guidance and policies and otherwise exercise diligence, OFAC froze its assets in February 2006.”
In October 2008, a federal judge granted the ACLU's request for an emergency order blocking the government from designating KindHearts as an SDGT without further judicial review.
The ACLU’S Shamsi told us, “The government’s actions in KindHearts’ case show the extent to which the government has unconstitutional and unfettered authority. The government has shut the charity down based on secret evidence, without any notice of wrongdoing, any probable cause, and without providing KindHearts an opportunity to defend itself or any judicial review.”
“These violations of fundamental due process guarantees were committed against a humanitarian organization that sought to alleviate human suffering both at home and abroad. The government’s actions send a profoundly negative message to other U.S. non-profits and do nothing to serve this country’s security or its image in the eyes of the world,” she said.
She added, “We think that the entire regime is unconstitutional because it fails to provide constitutionally adequate substantive criteria or procedural safeguards.”
“The government’s unfettered authority to shut down KindHearts based on suspicion alone has not only left the charity unable to fulfill its humanitarian mission; it sends a profoundly negative message to other U.S.-based non-profits that seek to alleviate human suffering. At a time when the United States needs to restore its image in the eyes of the world, the government’s actions do not serve either this country’s security or its commitment to justice, ” she told us.
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