By William Fisher
In the unlikely event that our senators and congresspersons come together to pass an immigration bill sometime in this century, it is virtually certain to overlook a heartbreakingly simple humanitarian issue: battered women seeking asylum.
This is far from a new issue. It has been kicking around for years - and it has been kicked around for years.
Kicked from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS) within the wildly dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security. And to compound this bureaucratic nightmare, BCIS now shares jurisdiction with the Justice Department (DOJ) for preparation of new guidelines that would cover this category of asylum seeker.
Rewind to 1995, when the INS actually produced some acceptable guidelines concerning women's issues. There was only one problem: the INS failed to follow its own guidelines.
That little lapse resulted in the bizarre case of Rodi Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence by her husband, who broke her jaw, kicked her when she was pregnant, wielded a machete and threatened that if she tried to escape he would leave her wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
In 1995, Mrs. Alvarado did escape -- to the United States, which granted her asylum. But this decision was immediately appealed by the INS and overturned by the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals in 1999.
The Board claimed she was not seeking asylum due to membership in a social group, political opinion, race, religion or nationality. They claimed she needed to show a nexus between the beatings and her political opinion or membership in a social group.
She was allowed to remain in the U.S. pending an appeal of the appeal. And she's still here, living in California and working in a convent.
Near the end of the Clinton Administration, Attorney General Janet Reno proposed regulations to expand the ability of victims of domestic violence (and other gender-related human rights abuses like trafficking, sexual slavery and honor killing) to seek asylum in the United States.
But those regulations were never implemented. And when John Ashcroft became attorney general, he failed to recommend that the regulations be adopted. Instead, he re-certified Ms. Alvarado's case to himself in order to review it, since the Attorney General has authority to make decisions on any immigration case.
But Ashcroft left office in 2004 without making a decision. He said the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security should agree on a set of guidelines covering women's issues, including domestic violence.
Since then, both agencies continue to claim they are working on these guidelines. Despite the fact that proposed regulations were drawn up back in December 2000, nothing has been finalized in more than five years.
According to Rodi Alvarado's lawyer, Karen Musalo of the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, "The complication, as we understand it, is that now both DHS and DOJ have jurisdiction over the regulations because of the reorganization of the INS, and there has not been consensus between the two agencies on how to proceed."
One has to wonder about how hard these two taxpayer-funded behemoths are working to solve the problem.
Meantime, Mrs. Alvarado - and others in her predicament - remains in legal limbo.
The current immigration debate has rekindled interest in cases like that of Mrs. Alvarado. But a coalition of refugee and human rights groups is taking a new approach: it is urging congress to examine the "root causes" of population movements.
Responding to the claim by some congresspersons that easing asylum restrictions would "open the floodgates" to still more undocumented aliens, a report by one of the members of the coalition, The Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California at Hastings, argues that "the solution is not to deny protection, but to look at the root causes of refugee flows, and to craft foreign policy responses to address them."
And it is taking its case not to immigration agencies but to a few key members of congress who, they hope, will help them to take their message to the State Department.
The reason they want State involved is that there is credible evidence that domestic violence is part of a larger and even more deadly phenomenon: Femicide. And the State Department is a major funder of programs to strengthen the judiciary and other rule of law institutions in Guatemala and elsewhere around the world.
For example, in Mrs. Alvarado's country, Guatemala, the coalition says "there is violence and murder of women with total impunity - with more than 2,200 women
killed since 2100, and perhaps 10 or 11 prosecutions and convictions. Local media has largely ignored the issue.
Femicide is also a problem elsewhere in Latin America. Earlier this year, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala sent a delegation of activists to the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington to focus attention on Femicide.
Incomplete murder rates presented to the Commission cite 373 known murders of women in Bolivia from 2003 to 2004, 143 in Peru during 2003, and more than 2,000 in Guatemala. In Colombia, a woman is reportedly killed every six days by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua City, Mexico, two cities where the Femicide trend was first widely noticed, have suffered the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993, according to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing.
Globally, the problem is no less severe. In many parts of South Asia and the Middle East, for example, so-called "honor killings" usually go unpunished.
Leading the Femicide campaign are four non-governmental organizations -- the Washington Office on Latin America, Amnesty International USA, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission.
Three members of congress - California Democrats Barbara Lee, Tom Lantos, and Hilda Solis - are drafting a letter to the State Department, which they hope will be signed by most of their colleagues, regardless of party. The letter will urge State to provide funding and personnel to examine the Femicide issue as well as the murder of human rights activists.
It would be tough to think of two issues less controversial than Femicide and asylum for battered women. They are not immigration issues - they are issues of compassion, justice and basic fairness. Congressmen like James Sensenbrenner and Tom Tancredo ought to be able to sign on in a heartbeat.
But, given the incredible rancor generated by the immigration issue, I'm not holding my breath.
Friday, April 28, 2006
“THE WORST OF THE WORST”
By William Fisher
In 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously referred to Guantanamo prisoners as “the worst of the worst”.
As recently as June 2005, he said, despite massive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
And Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in, “They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba.”
"These are the people that don't know any moral values," he said, adding that
” the threat they pose is real -- at least 12 former detainees have been killed or captured on the battlefield after their release.”
If that be true, how do we explain why, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the military has previously released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
Or why it is now proposing to release 141 more prisoners -- about a third of those still left at GITMO? Have they been rehabilitated?
No, the Pentagon says they no longer have any further intelligence value.
So they were “the worst of the worst”, but they have now told us everything we wanted to know, so we are letting them go, presumably to terrorize us another day?
Or is it that the military doesn’t have enough on these people to try them, even before its own tribunals, which have a much lower threshold of evidence than our courts?
Or is it that it we are planning to turn some of these released prisoners over to law enforcement authorities in their home countries? A kind of slightly more transparent rendition.
Or is it that the military simply can’t abide the idea of admitting that it, too, makes mistakes?
There may be some truth in all of the above. Yet, the Bush Administration seems hell-bent on continuing to shoot itself in the foot by clinging to the fading perception of its own hundred per cent righteousness.
Many of the Pentagon’s “mistakes” have been held for close to five years, without charges and without trials. Some were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East. Many were “sold” to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It is clear that many others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal magazine reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of (Guantanamo prisoners) was not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
Nevertheless, all were categorized as “enemy combatants” with ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other groups that support terrorism. The Pentagon undoubtedly has evidence that some of the prisoners at Guantanamo were Al-Qaeda operatives out to kill as many Americans as possible. But in many other cases, the “evidence” is based on second, third and fourth-hand hearsay. In still others, it is clear that admissions of guilt have been obtained through cruel and inhumane interrogations that many say amount to torture.
Examples of Pentagon mistakes are not difficult to find. For example:
There is a man named Saddiq who has been behind razor wire for more than four years. In a rare display of candor, the military acknowledged last year
that he was not an enemy combatant. But he remains imprisoned. His lawyer says his opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.
Then there are the Chinese Uighur Muslims who had fled persecution in China, some of who are still being held at Guantanamo, officially because they would not be safe if returned to their native country.
Then there are the “Bosnian Six” -- six Algerians seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002 and flown to Guantanamo after the Bosnian Supreme Court dismissed charges against them of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
Said one of them: "I've been here for three years and these accusations were just told to me…Nobody or any interrogator ever mentioned any of these accusations you are talking about now. Not even one mentioned the embassy thing, the terrorist organization, the Algerian Islamic organization. It's weird how this just came up now."
Then there are at least three children, ages 13 to 15.
Then there is the Casio watch caper reported by the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal. According to the Defense Department’s own files, a watch worn by one prisoner was similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world. And the detainee’s Casio model hasn't been manufactured for years.
Then there is Murat Kurnaz, a Turk the government plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on a single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Then there are the British men who were detained for nearly three years and who have sued the U.S. government, alleging torture and other human rights violations. In a 115-page dossier, the men allege that they were beaten, stripped, shackled and deprived of sleep during their detention. They charge that guards threw prisoners’ Korans into toilets and attempted to force them to give up their religious faith. There say detainees were forcibly injected with unidentified drugs and intimidated with military dogs. And they claim they were subjected to abuse and beatings during their detention.
Each said they eventually gave false confessions that they appeared in a video with al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, despite the fact that they could prove they were in Britain when the video was made.
After they were freed last March, the men were questioned by British police but quickly released without charge.
These are just a few of the Pentagon’s mistakes – much of the evidence coming from the Defense Department’s own files.
Not even the CIA bought into Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst” riff. Michael Scheuer, who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004, said, ”By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives…Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism."
Presumably, these are the 141 prisoners now being released.
Those who remain will be judged through a legal process that most lawyers familiar with military prosecutions say ignores the due process protections found in, say, garden-variety courts martial.
But, if past is prologue, the Pentagon – and the President – will continue to defend the indefensible.
In 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld famously referred to Guantanamo prisoners as “the worst of the worst”.
As recently as June 2005, he said, despite massive and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, "If you think of the people down there, these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden's] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
And Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in, “They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba.”
"These are the people that don't know any moral values," he said, adding that
” the threat they pose is real -- at least 12 former detainees have been killed or captured on the battlefield after their release.”
If that be true, how do we explain why, of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the military has previously released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
Or why it is now proposing to release 141 more prisoners -- about a third of those still left at GITMO? Have they been rehabilitated?
No, the Pentagon says they no longer have any further intelligence value.
So they were “the worst of the worst”, but they have now told us everything we wanted to know, so we are letting them go, presumably to terrorize us another day?
Or is it that the military doesn’t have enough on these people to try them, even before its own tribunals, which have a much lower threshold of evidence than our courts?
Or is it that it we are planning to turn some of these released prisoners over to law enforcement authorities in their home countries? A kind of slightly more transparent rendition.
Or is it that the military simply can’t abide the idea of admitting that it, too, makes mistakes?
There may be some truth in all of the above. Yet, the Bush Administration seems hell-bent on continuing to shoot itself in the foot by clinging to the fading perception of its own hundred per cent righteousness.
Many of the Pentagon’s “mistakes” have been held for close to five years, without charges and without trials. Some were not captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but kidnapped off the streets of Europe and various locations in the Middle East. Many were “sold” to U.S. authorities in Afghanistan and Pakistan for bounties. It is clear that many others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal magazine reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of (Guantanamo prisoners) was not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
Nevertheless, all were categorized as “enemy combatants” with ties to the Taliban, Al Qaeda, or other groups that support terrorism. The Pentagon undoubtedly has evidence that some of the prisoners at Guantanamo were Al-Qaeda operatives out to kill as many Americans as possible. But in many other cases, the “evidence” is based on second, third and fourth-hand hearsay. In still others, it is clear that admissions of guilt have been obtained through cruel and inhumane interrogations that many say amount to torture.
Examples of Pentagon mistakes are not difficult to find. For example:
There is a man named Saddiq who has been behind razor wire for more than four years. In a rare display of candor, the military acknowledged last year
that he was not an enemy combatant. But he remains imprisoned. His lawyer says his opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.
Then there are the Chinese Uighur Muslims who had fled persecution in China, some of who are still being held at Guantanamo, officially because they would not be safe if returned to their native country.
Then there are the “Bosnian Six” -- six Algerians seized in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2002 and flown to Guantanamo after the Bosnian Supreme Court dismissed charges against them of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
Said one of them: "I've been here for three years and these accusations were just told to me…Nobody or any interrogator ever mentioned any of these accusations you are talking about now. Not even one mentioned the embassy thing, the terrorist organization, the Algerian Islamic organization. It's weird how this just came up now."
Then there are at least three children, ages 13 to 15.
Then there is the Casio watch caper reported by the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal. According to the Defense Department’s own files, a watch worn by one prisoner was similar to another Casio model that has a circuit board that Al Qaeda used for making bombs. The United States is using the Qaeda-favored Casio wristwatch as evidence against at least nine detainees. But the offending model is sold in sidewalk stands around the world. And the detainee’s Casio model hasn't been manufactured for years.
Then there is Murat Kurnaz, a Turk the government plucked off a bus in Pakistan and subsequently accused of being friends with a suicide bomber. The government did not tell Kurnaz's tribunal that his friend is alive and therefore could not be the referenced suicide bomber. In January 2005, a federal judge singled out Kurnaz's case as evidence of the lack of due process in the Guantanamo tribunals. The judge said that his tribunal had ignored exculpatory evidence and relied instead on a single anonymous memo that was not credible.
Then there are the British men who were detained for nearly three years and who have sued the U.S. government, alleging torture and other human rights violations. In a 115-page dossier, the men allege that they were beaten, stripped, shackled and deprived of sleep during their detention. They charge that guards threw prisoners’ Korans into toilets and attempted to force them to give up their religious faith. There say detainees were forcibly injected with unidentified drugs and intimidated with military dogs. And they claim they were subjected to abuse and beatings during their detention.
Each said they eventually gave false confessions that they appeared in a video with al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11 hijackers, despite the fact that they could prove they were in Britain when the video was made.
After they were freed last March, the men were questioned by British police but quickly released without charge.
These are just a few of the Pentagon’s mistakes – much of the evidence coming from the Defense Department’s own files.
Not even the CIA bought into Rumsfeld’s “worst of the worst” riff. Michael Scheuer, who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004, said, ”By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives…Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism."
Presumably, these are the 141 prisoners now being released.
Those who remain will be judged through a legal process that most lawyers familiar with military prosecutions say ignores the due process protections found in, say, garden-variety courts martial.
But, if past is prologue, the Pentagon – and the President – will continue to defend the indefensible.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Someone Does Not Mean Anyone
By William Fisher
The trial of Zakarias Moussaoui has all the makings of a soap opera. If Kafka wrote soap operas, that is.
Consider the cast of characters:
A defendant who alternately proclaimed his innocence and boasted of his guilt.
A prosecution that magnified the importance of a bit player in the 9/11 terrorist plot, and put the death penalty on the table despite charging him not with doing anything, but only with conspiring to do something.
A government that claimed that if only Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI, they could have prevented the attacks of 9/11, even though on 9/11 Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail, while FBI headquarters was minimizing repeated alarms from its Minneapolis field office about Moussaoui's flight training.
A heart-wrenching chorus of survivors of 9/11 victims, unified in their view that the defendant was guilty of committing a crime, but divided about whether to exact retribution by executing him (thus conferring the martyrdom he says he welcomes), or jailing him for life (so that he will have to look in the mirror every morning and hate himself for the terror he wrought). Except that he didn't actually commit any act of terrorism. And, judging from his testimony, if he hated himself for anything it would be for not killing any American infidels.
Psychiatrists who painted the defendant as a paranoid schizophrenic, prompting some of us to label him "crazy" and others to decide he's "crazy as a fox."
A media that slavishly focused on the defendant's bizarre courtroom rantings and portrayed the trial as some kind of 21st century passion play about retribution vs. forgiveness, good vs. evil.
But there remains a major issue this trial has ignored. As lawyer David Cole wrote me, "There is something fundamentally wrong with trying to execute Moussaoui, an admittedly marginal figure who was not himself even involved in the planning of 9/11, when we have detained the mastermind of the attack, and the alleged 20th hijacker, but have brought no charges against them -- and probably never will, because our torture of them effectively immunizes them from prosecution."
The reputed mastermind of 9/11 is, of course, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who was arrested by the Pakistani government in a safehouse outside Islamabad in March 2003. President Bush characterized the arrest as "fantastic" evidence of the success of his crusade to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to "justice", and immediately had Khalid whisked off to an undisclosed location in the custody of undisclosed persons who doubtless interrogated him using undisclosed techniques.
The so-called "20th hijacker" is said to be Mohammad al-Qahtani, who has been held in Guantanamo and is touted by the U.S. military as a major informant.
Moussaoui's trial heard from neither, because evidence obtained through torture would probably still be inadmissible in a U.S. court.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, though during the trial he denied that he was part of the 9/11 plan, but rather part of a separate plan to fly a plane into the White House. He signed his guilty plea "the 20th hijacker," implying that he was supposed to be on Flight 93, which had only four terrorists, and which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. But Zakarias Moussaoui and Mohammad al-Qahtani can't both be the 20th hijacker.
Moreover, information garnered from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad portrays Moussaoui as a bit player, a fringe figure who was never in contact with the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, on 9/11, Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail. A month before the 9/11 attacks, Minnesota FBI agent Harry Samit warned his superiors that Moussaoui was dangerous, and that his flight training could be part of a terrorist plot. Samit told the Moussaoui jury he sent Washington about seventy fruitless warning messages about Moussaoui. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the government had enough information to "join the dots."
So what has truly given this trial its Kafkaesque quality is that it is trial by proxy. It is a surrogate for the trials of those we'll never hear from, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and Mohammad al-Qahtani, and those who are still at large, like Osama Bin Laden.
Even among those who oppose capital punishment, it is not difficult to understand why America would want to punish someone for 9/11. But someone does not mean anyone.
If the jury votes to execute Zakarias Moussaoui, it will be elevating this bit player to above-the-marquee prominence, and he will be laughing all the way to Paradise.
The trial of Zakarias Moussaoui has all the makings of a soap opera. If Kafka wrote soap operas, that is.
Consider the cast of characters:
A defendant who alternately proclaimed his innocence and boasted of his guilt.
A prosecution that magnified the importance of a bit player in the 9/11 terrorist plot, and put the death penalty on the table despite charging him not with doing anything, but only with conspiring to do something.
A government that claimed that if only Moussaoui had not lied to the FBI, they could have prevented the attacks of 9/11, even though on 9/11 Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail, while FBI headquarters was minimizing repeated alarms from its Minneapolis field office about Moussaoui's flight training.
A heart-wrenching chorus of survivors of 9/11 victims, unified in their view that the defendant was guilty of committing a crime, but divided about whether to exact retribution by executing him (thus conferring the martyrdom he says he welcomes), or jailing him for life (so that he will have to look in the mirror every morning and hate himself for the terror he wrought). Except that he didn't actually commit any act of terrorism. And, judging from his testimony, if he hated himself for anything it would be for not killing any American infidels.
Psychiatrists who painted the defendant as a paranoid schizophrenic, prompting some of us to label him "crazy" and others to decide he's "crazy as a fox."
A media that slavishly focused on the defendant's bizarre courtroom rantings and portrayed the trial as some kind of 21st century passion play about retribution vs. forgiveness, good vs. evil.
But there remains a major issue this trial has ignored. As lawyer David Cole wrote me, "There is something fundamentally wrong with trying to execute Moussaoui, an admittedly marginal figure who was not himself even involved in the planning of 9/11, when we have detained the mastermind of the attack, and the alleged 20th hijacker, but have brought no charges against them -- and probably never will, because our torture of them effectively immunizes them from prosecution."
The reputed mastermind of 9/11 is, of course, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who was arrested by the Pakistani government in a safehouse outside Islamabad in March 2003. President Bush characterized the arrest as "fantastic" evidence of the success of his crusade to bring the perpetrators of 9/11 to "justice", and immediately had Khalid whisked off to an undisclosed location in the custody of undisclosed persons who doubtless interrogated him using undisclosed techniques.
The so-called "20th hijacker" is said to be Mohammad al-Qahtani, who has been held in Guantanamo and is touted by the U.S. military as a major informant.
Moussaoui's trial heard from neither, because evidence obtained through torture would probably still be inadmissible in a U.S. court.
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, though during the trial he denied that he was part of the 9/11 plan, but rather part of a separate plan to fly a plane into the White House. He signed his guilty plea "the 20th hijacker," implying that he was supposed to be on Flight 93, which had only four terrorists, and which crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. But Zakarias Moussaoui and Mohammad al-Qahtani can't both be the 20th hijacker.
Moreover, information garnered from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad portrays Moussaoui as a bit player, a fringe figure who was never in contact with the 9/11 hijackers.
In fact, on 9/11, Moussaoui was in a Minnesota jail. A month before the 9/11 attacks, Minnesota FBI agent Harry Samit warned his superiors that Moussaoui was dangerous, and that his flight training could be part of a terrorist plot. Samit told the Moussaoui jury he sent Washington about seventy fruitless warning messages about Moussaoui. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the government had enough information to "join the dots."
So what has truly given this trial its Kafkaesque quality is that it is trial by proxy. It is a surrogate for the trials of those we'll never hear from, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and Mohammad al-Qahtani, and those who are still at large, like Osama Bin Laden.
Even among those who oppose capital punishment, it is not difficult to understand why America would want to punish someone for 9/11. But someone does not mean anyone.
If the jury votes to execute Zakarias Moussaoui, it will be elevating this bit player to above-the-marquee prominence, and he will be laughing all the way to Paradise.
WHISTLEBLOWING PAST THE GRAVEYARD
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Friday, April 21, 2006
GETTING CLOSER TO THE TOP?
By William Fisher
In less than a month, we may finally get to hear from the army general who ordered commanders at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to "get dogs".
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who ran the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then was sent to Iraq to "Gitmo-ize" that prison, has been silent on his role in introducing cruel and degrading interrogation techniques to Abu Ghraib.
Originally, Gen. Miller invoked his military rights not to incriminate himself. But last week, a military judge ordered prosecutors to produce him on May 17 as a witness for the defense in the trial of a military dog handler accused of abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib.
Defense lawyers have said it was Miller who first told intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib to "get dogs" to exploit Arab fears of the animals.
As reported by The Washington Post, Miller's appearance "will give defense attorneys a chance to question Miller about the use of dogs in security and interrogation operations at Guantanamo and in Iraq. It also means lawyers could use Miller's testimony to attempt to draw connections between the alleged abuse and the policies developed by top Pentagon officials, who had regular contact with Miller when he was the commander at Guantanamo."
Witnesses in other cases have testified that Miller went to Iraq at the request of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Tactics used on detainees in Iraq -- including dogs, a dog leash and placing women's underwear on their heads - were the same as those used on one Guantanamo Bay detainee in 2002.
So, it seems, we inch closer to the top - to the White House and Pentagon policy makers who sliced and diced the Geneva Conventions to redefine torture, and left the grunts who followed orders to pay the price.
Miller would be the first general and the highest-ranking officer to testify in any case connected to the now infamous abuses at Abu Ghraib. Lawyers for Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, 31, are the first to be successful in persuading a judge that his involvement could shed light on how dogs came to be used to threaten high-value detainees during interrogations in Iraq in late 2003.
One of Cardona's lawyers said he plans to question Miller about the Rumsfeld-inspired trip he made to Iraq to advise U.S. officials on how to get better intelligence.
Prosecutors contend that Miller was not actively involved in the operations in Iraq until he was transferred to the country to work full-time in April 2004.
But shortly after Miller was ordered to go to Iraq on temporary duty in September 2003, military working dogs were shipped to Abu Ghraib and approved for use in interrogations.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, formerly the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, has testified that Miller and his team recommended using dogs. As a result, Pappas said, he approved the use of dogs for interrogations of one
high-value detainee after Miller's visit.
But shortly after the now infamous photos of abuse were turned over to Army investigators, Pappas urged an end to the use of dogs and recommended that charges not be brought against the dog handlers. Pappas has made a deal with military lawyers granting him immunity from prosecution.
Last year, a team of military investigators looked into allegations by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who said they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. The FBI allegations were contained in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The chief investigator into Guantanamo practices, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, told a Senate panel of the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Al-Qahtani was thought to be involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Schmidt said interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra and wear a thong on his head, told him he was a homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women, and to wear a leash and act like a dog.
These techniques were reportedly approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use on al-Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - and were used at Guantanamo in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking him down.
Members of the team that conducted the three-month investigation told the Senate Armed Services Committee they recommended that Gen. Miller be reprimanded, but their recommendation was overruled by his superior, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command.
The Miller inquiry appears to strongly support the contention that Gen. Miller was the constant in the prisoner treatment equation, first at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, where similar interrogation techniques were employed.
Gen. Craddock said that Gen. Miller had used "creative" and "aggressive" tactics, but did not practice torture or violate law or Pentagon policy. He concluded that Miller's techniques did not rise to the level of torture, and referred the matter to the Army's Inspector General.
Whether Miller will actually testify remains to be seen. If he does, his testimony will be limited to the dog issue, the judge has ruled. If he can't find a way out of testifying altogether, will his testimony link any prisoner abuse to policies promulgated by the Secretary of Defense, the Justice Department or the While House?
It would be, to say the least, unexpected. The Bush Administration has endlessly proclaimed prisoner abuses to be the work of "a few bad apples", most of who have already been punished. And, more than most organizations, the military has a long tradition of taking care of (and sometimes overlooking) its own mistakes and not hanging its dirty laundry in public.
But in light of the ongoing "revolt of the generals," who can really predict how all this will end? Stay tuned.
In less than a month, we may finally get to hear from the army general who ordered commanders at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to "get dogs".
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who ran the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then was sent to Iraq to "Gitmo-ize" that prison, has been silent on his role in introducing cruel and degrading interrogation techniques to Abu Ghraib.
Originally, Gen. Miller invoked his military rights not to incriminate himself. But last week, a military judge ordered prosecutors to produce him on May 17 as a witness for the defense in the trial of a military dog handler accused of abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib.
Defense lawyers have said it was Miller who first told intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib to "get dogs" to exploit Arab fears of the animals.
As reported by The Washington Post, Miller's appearance "will give defense attorneys a chance to question Miller about the use of dogs in security and interrogation operations at Guantanamo and in Iraq. It also means lawyers could use Miller's testimony to attempt to draw connections between the alleged abuse and the policies developed by top Pentagon officials, who had regular contact with Miller when he was the commander at Guantanamo."
Witnesses in other cases have testified that Miller went to Iraq at the request of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib. Tactics used on detainees in Iraq -- including dogs, a dog leash and placing women's underwear on their heads - were the same as those used on one Guantanamo Bay detainee in 2002.
So, it seems, we inch closer to the top - to the White House and Pentagon policy makers who sliced and diced the Geneva Conventions to redefine torture, and left the grunts who followed orders to pay the price.
Miller would be the first general and the highest-ranking officer to testify in any case connected to the now infamous abuses at Abu Ghraib. Lawyers for Sgt. Santos A. Cardona, 31, are the first to be successful in persuading a judge that his involvement could shed light on how dogs came to be used to threaten high-value detainees during interrogations in Iraq in late 2003.
One of Cardona's lawyers said he plans to question Miller about the Rumsfeld-inspired trip he made to Iraq to advise U.S. officials on how to get better intelligence.
Prosecutors contend that Miller was not actively involved in the operations in Iraq until he was transferred to the country to work full-time in April 2004.
But shortly after Miller was ordered to go to Iraq on temporary duty in September 2003, military working dogs were shipped to Abu Ghraib and approved for use in interrogations.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, formerly the senior military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, has testified that Miller and his team recommended using dogs. As a result, Pappas said, he approved the use of dogs for interrogations of one
high-value detainee after Miller's visit.
But shortly after the now infamous photos of abuse were turned over to Army investigators, Pappas urged an end to the use of dogs and recommended that charges not be brought against the dog handlers. Pappas has made a deal with military lawyers granting him immunity from prosecution.
Last year, a team of military investigators looked into allegations by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), who said they witnessed abusive interrogation techniques at Guantanamo. The FBI allegations were contained in documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
The chief investigator into Guantanamo practices, Air Force Lt. Gen. Randall M. Schmidt, told a Senate panel of the interrogation techniques used on Mohamed al-Qahtani, a Saudi who was captured in December 2001 along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Al-Qahtani was thought to be involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Schmidt said interrogators told him his mother and sisters were whores, forced him to wear a bra and wear a thong on his head, told him he was a homosexual and said that other prisoners knew it. They also forced him to dance with a male interrogator and subjected him to strip searches with no security value, threatened him with dogs, forced him to stand naked in front of women, and to wear a leash and act like a dog.
These techniques were reportedly approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use on al-Qahtani -- the alleged "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - and were used at Guantanamo in late 2002 as part of a special interrogation plan aimed at breaking him down.
Members of the team that conducted the three-month investigation told the Senate Armed Services Committee they recommended that Gen. Miller be reprimanded, but their recommendation was overruled by his superior, Gen. Bantz J. Craddock, commander of U.S. Southern Command.
The Miller inquiry appears to strongly support the contention that Gen. Miller was the constant in the prisoner treatment equation, first at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and later at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, where similar interrogation techniques were employed.
Gen. Craddock said that Gen. Miller had used "creative" and "aggressive" tactics, but did not practice torture or violate law or Pentagon policy. He concluded that Miller's techniques did not rise to the level of torture, and referred the matter to the Army's Inspector General.
Whether Miller will actually testify remains to be seen. If he does, his testimony will be limited to the dog issue, the judge has ruled. If he can't find a way out of testifying altogether, will his testimony link any prisoner abuse to policies promulgated by the Secretary of Defense, the Justice Department or the While House?
It would be, to say the least, unexpected. The Bush Administration has endlessly proclaimed prisoner abuses to be the work of "a few bad apples", most of who have already been punished. And, more than most organizations, the military has a long tradition of taking care of (and sometimes overlooking) its own mistakes and not hanging its dirty laundry in public.
But in light of the ongoing "revolt of the generals," who can really predict how all this will end? Stay tuned.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
ANTI-TERRORISM FINANCING LAWS
By William Fisher
A major government watchdog organization is charging that Muslim charities are being summarily shut down for supporting terrorist causes while giant firms such as Halliburton are receiving the full protections of American law for allegedly breaking U.S. government sanctions against doing business with Iran – a country designated as a sponsor of terrorism.
“There is unequal enforcement of anti-terrorist financing laws,” says OMB Watch.
The organization says the USA Patriot Act gives the government “largely unchecked power to designate any group as a terrorist organization”. Once a charitable organization is so designated, all of its materials and property may be seized and its assets frozen. The charity is unable to see the government’s evidence and thus understand the basis for the charges. Since its assets are frozen, it lacks resources to mount a defense. And it has only limited right of appeal to the courts. So the government can target a charity, seize its assets, shut it down, obtain indictments against its leaders, but then delay a trial almost indefinitely.
Thus far, OMB Watch says, the effort has resulted in the government shutting down five charities that support humanitarian aid in Muslim areas without disclosing any official finding that they were aiding terrorist organizations. But there has only been one indictment, no trials, and no convictions. “Only one official criminal charge has been brought against a Muslim organization for support of terrorism, and that case has not yet made it to trial.”
According to OMB Watch, dozens of charitable groups have been investigated since 2001. The organizations shut down were not on any government watch list before their assets were frozen, the group adds.
The organization says the result is that Muslims have no way of knowing which groups the government suspects of ties to terrorism. “Organizations and individuals suspected of supporting terrorism are guilty until proven innocent,” it says.
To support its claim that the government is applying the law unevenly and targeting Muslim-American groups, OMB Watch cites the government’s “velvet glove” treatment of the Halliburton Corporation, a giant defense contractor.
Halliburton has been under investigation by the Treasury Department – which oversees the terror-financing campaign – and the Department of Justice since 2001 for doing business with Iran, which is listed as a sponsor of terrorism.
But, says OMB Watch, rather than seizing and freezing assets “pending an investigation,” Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Justice Department sent an inquiry to Halliburton requesting “information with regard to compliance.”
Halliburton sent a written response explaining why they felt they were in compliance with the law. Halliburton’s defense seemed to rest on the fact that its dealings with Iran were done through a Cayman Islands subsidiary,not its U.S.-based entity.
Over two years later, in January 2004, OFAC sent a follow-up letter requesting additional information, to which Halliburton responded that March. In July of that year, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas sent a grand jury
subpoena requesting documents and the case was referred to the Justice Department.
On Sept. 22, 2005, the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives
wrote to President George W. Bush, asking that Halliburton be suspended from hurricane relief contracts for a host of reasons, including “dealing with nations that sponsor terrorism.”
The White House took no action and Halliburton received no-bid contracts valued currently at $61.3 million, and growing, to provide clean-up, rebuilding and logistical assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Last year, an organization called Halliburton-Watch charged that the handling of the case against the company raises serious legal questions: For example, “if Halliburton were a charity would its assets have been frozen like the U.S.-based Muslim charities; even though little is known about the evidence OFAC relied on to freeze and seize assets of Muslim charities, it appears there is much stronger evidence against Halliburton -- what legal distinction is OFAC making; if U.S. charities formed Cayman Island subsidiaries could they avoid the USA PATRIOT Act, IEEPA, and Executive Order restrictions on dealings with groups or countries linked to terrorism?”
Halliburton has also become the poster child for waste, fraud and abuse among U.S. contractors in Iraq. To date, it has received more than $12 billion in contracts there, many of them on a no-bid basis. According to Pentagon reports, the company failed to account for 43 percent of its Middle East expenses, with $1 billion of those being considered "unreasonable" and another nearly half-billion in the "unsupported" category, according to Defense Department auditors.
Critics of the government say the government’s anti-terror financing campaign is a product of the paranoid Islamophobia that has gripped the U.S. since 9/11. They also say is has had its desired effect: to scare Muslim-Americans into abandoning one of the premier tenets of Islam -- giving to those in need.
The government denies these charges; it says it is merely trying to cut off funding to a wide variety of so-called charitable organizations that funnel it to groups that practice terrorist tactics. The Treasury Department cites President Bush’s pledge to ensure “that Arab Americans and American Muslims feel comfortable maintaining their tradition of charitable giving”.
Meanwhile, Muslim charities report a precipitous decline in contributions. Contributions that do arrive come increasingly in cash from anonymous givers. And donors who happen to be Muslim are increasingly turning to the large household names like Oxfam and Save the Children, which may conduct programs in predominantly Muslim areas abroad.
Kay Guinane, OMB Watch’s Director of Nonprofit Speech Rights, told IPS, "The real tragedy behind closure of Muslim charities is the fate of people in need of humanitarian assistance, who are doing without because the funds have been frozen by the U.S. and sit in the bank, benefiting no one”. She suggested, “The U.S. government could demonstrate its good faith by releasing these funds to other charities or aid agencies."
Leaders of the Muslim charitable community in the U.S. have had numerous meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, and together developed a set of “guidelines” for charitable organizations and their donors. But these guidelines lack any specificity regarding Muslim philanthropy and could be applied to any charitable organization. They also provide no safe harbor from being shut down. OMB Watch told IPS, “A group could comply 100% and still be shut down ‘pending an investigation’."
Leaders of the Muslim philanthropic community in New Jersey asked the Treasury Department at the start of Ramadan in 2004 to issue a “white list” of “approved” charities. But the request was denied. The government claimed it was impossible to fulfill. “Our role is to prosecute violations of criminal law,” a spokesman said, adding, “We’re not in a position to put out lists of any kind, particularly of any organizations that are good or bad”
But government critics also claim that Treasury’s campaign is reminiscent of the activities of John Ashcroft’s Justice Department in the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The government then launched its “Global War on Terror” by rounding up thousands of “Middle Eastern-looking” men and women, sending them to jail without charges or access to lawyers, holding many in solitary confinement, but accusing none of them with terror-related crimes, convicting no one, and ending up deporting some for non-criminal immigration violations.
A major government watchdog organization is charging that Muslim charities are being summarily shut down for supporting terrorist causes while giant firms such as Halliburton are receiving the full protections of American law for allegedly breaking U.S. government sanctions against doing business with Iran – a country designated as a sponsor of terrorism.
“There is unequal enforcement of anti-terrorist financing laws,” says OMB Watch.
The organization says the USA Patriot Act gives the government “largely unchecked power to designate any group as a terrorist organization”. Once a charitable organization is so designated, all of its materials and property may be seized and its assets frozen. The charity is unable to see the government’s evidence and thus understand the basis for the charges. Since its assets are frozen, it lacks resources to mount a defense. And it has only limited right of appeal to the courts. So the government can target a charity, seize its assets, shut it down, obtain indictments against its leaders, but then delay a trial almost indefinitely.
Thus far, OMB Watch says, the effort has resulted in the government shutting down five charities that support humanitarian aid in Muslim areas without disclosing any official finding that they were aiding terrorist organizations. But there has only been one indictment, no trials, and no convictions. “Only one official criminal charge has been brought against a Muslim organization for support of terrorism, and that case has not yet made it to trial.”
According to OMB Watch, dozens of charitable groups have been investigated since 2001. The organizations shut down were not on any government watch list before their assets were frozen, the group adds.
The organization says the result is that Muslims have no way of knowing which groups the government suspects of ties to terrorism. “Organizations and individuals suspected of supporting terrorism are guilty until proven innocent,” it says.
To support its claim that the government is applying the law unevenly and targeting Muslim-American groups, OMB Watch cites the government’s “velvet glove” treatment of the Halliburton Corporation, a giant defense contractor.
Halliburton has been under investigation by the Treasury Department – which oversees the terror-financing campaign – and the Department of Justice since 2001 for doing business with Iran, which is listed as a sponsor of terrorism.
But, says OMB Watch, rather than seizing and freezing assets “pending an investigation,” Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and the Justice Department sent an inquiry to Halliburton requesting “information with regard to compliance.”
Halliburton sent a written response explaining why they felt they were in compliance with the law. Halliburton’s defense seemed to rest on the fact that its dealings with Iran were done through a Cayman Islands subsidiary,not its U.S.-based entity.
Over two years later, in January 2004, OFAC sent a follow-up letter requesting additional information, to which Halliburton responded that March. In July of that year, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas sent a grand jury
subpoena requesting documents and the case was referred to the Justice Department.
On Sept. 22, 2005, the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives
wrote to President George W. Bush, asking that Halliburton be suspended from hurricane relief contracts for a host of reasons, including “dealing with nations that sponsor terrorism.”
The White House took no action and Halliburton received no-bid contracts valued currently at $61.3 million, and growing, to provide clean-up, rebuilding and logistical assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Last year, an organization called Halliburton-Watch charged that the handling of the case against the company raises serious legal questions: For example, “if Halliburton were a charity would its assets have been frozen like the U.S.-based Muslim charities; even though little is known about the evidence OFAC relied on to freeze and seize assets of Muslim charities, it appears there is much stronger evidence against Halliburton -- what legal distinction is OFAC making; if U.S. charities formed Cayman Island subsidiaries could they avoid the USA PATRIOT Act, IEEPA, and Executive Order restrictions on dealings with groups or countries linked to terrorism?”
Halliburton has also become the poster child for waste, fraud and abuse among U.S. contractors in Iraq. To date, it has received more than $12 billion in contracts there, many of them on a no-bid basis. According to Pentagon reports, the company failed to account for 43 percent of its Middle East expenses, with $1 billion of those being considered "unreasonable" and another nearly half-billion in the "unsupported" category, according to Defense Department auditors.
Critics of the government say the government’s anti-terror financing campaign is a product of the paranoid Islamophobia that has gripped the U.S. since 9/11. They also say is has had its desired effect: to scare Muslim-Americans into abandoning one of the premier tenets of Islam -- giving to those in need.
The government denies these charges; it says it is merely trying to cut off funding to a wide variety of so-called charitable organizations that funnel it to groups that practice terrorist tactics. The Treasury Department cites President Bush’s pledge to ensure “that Arab Americans and American Muslims feel comfortable maintaining their tradition of charitable giving”.
Meanwhile, Muslim charities report a precipitous decline in contributions. Contributions that do arrive come increasingly in cash from anonymous givers. And donors who happen to be Muslim are increasingly turning to the large household names like Oxfam and Save the Children, which may conduct programs in predominantly Muslim areas abroad.
Kay Guinane, OMB Watch’s Director of Nonprofit Speech Rights, told IPS, "The real tragedy behind closure of Muslim charities is the fate of people in need of humanitarian assistance, who are doing without because the funds have been frozen by the U.S. and sit in the bank, benefiting no one”. She suggested, “The U.S. government could demonstrate its good faith by releasing these funds to other charities or aid agencies."
Leaders of the Muslim charitable community in the U.S. have had numerous meetings with officials at the Treasury Department, and together developed a set of “guidelines” for charitable organizations and their donors. But these guidelines lack any specificity regarding Muslim philanthropy and could be applied to any charitable organization. They also provide no safe harbor from being shut down. OMB Watch told IPS, “A group could comply 100% and still be shut down ‘pending an investigation’."
Leaders of the Muslim philanthropic community in New Jersey asked the Treasury Department at the start of Ramadan in 2004 to issue a “white list” of “approved” charities. But the request was denied. The government claimed it was impossible to fulfill. “Our role is to prosecute violations of criminal law,” a spokesman said, adding, “We’re not in a position to put out lists of any kind, particularly of any organizations that are good or bad”
But government critics also claim that Treasury’s campaign is reminiscent of the activities of John Ashcroft’s Justice Department in the months following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The government then launched its “Global War on Terror” by rounding up thousands of “Middle Eastern-looking” men and women, sending them to jail without charges or access to lawyers, holding many in solitary confinement, but accusing none of them with terror-related crimes, convicting no one, and ending up deporting some for non-criminal immigration violations.
WORDS TO PONDER
By William Fisher
I recently e-mailed Neil Hicks, the director of international programs for Human Rights First, seeking his thoughts on a new poll of the U.S. public that shows rapidly declining support for President Bush's pledge to spread democracy throughout the world.
His response was more eloquent than any words of mine. Here it is:
"It is not surprising that there is growing skepticism among Americans about the goal of actively promoting democracy in other countries through U.S. policy. There are several reasons for this, in my view:
"First: the administration's democracy promotion strategy has been very broadly defined and yet invoked inconsistently from country to country. While the headline principles of freedom, women's empowerment and elections are proclaimed frequently, there is no consistent benchmark for implementation of democracy at the specific country level, which is the only place where the practical impact of the policy can be discerned. This leaves the actual content of the policy somewhat amorphous, and makes it easy for its critics to accuse the U.S. government of engaging in double standards and pursuing these goals selectively in its own interests.
"Second: the U.S. has undermined its credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights by its own practices in the Global War on Terrorism, including, as the U.S. public is increasingly aware, torture, deaths in custody and arbitrary detention.
"Third: the initial results of the policy have been complicated and troubling. While I am concerned that current difficulties -- in Iraq, where what is now portrayed as a war to bring democracy appears to be leading to a civil war, or the Palestinian territories, where a relatively free election produced a government that is opposed to U.S. policies, and whose commitment to democracy is questionable - should not result in the abandonment of a global U.S. posture that actively promotes democracy and human rights, such complications will inevitably sap public support.
"We are at a precarious moment where some are willing to jettison the Bush administration's championing of democracy promotion as an instrument of national security policy. This would be a shame. In my view the proper response is not to revert to the discredited old practices of accommodating dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
"I welcome the emphasis that President Bush and other senior administration officials have placed on the link between oppression and the absence of basic freedoms on the one hand and instability and global insecurity in the other. This diagnosis requires a sustained, results oriented approach to promoting human rights and democracy that applies consistent principles and standards to all countries, and is responsive to the varied particular contexts of each country situation."
There are many things I like about this statement. But high among them is that this is not your garden-variety Bush-bashing polemic. It credits the president with the right vision but suggests that we need a more thoughtful strategy for its implementation.
Development experts have disagreed with one another for years about whether "nation building" is a legitimate concept. But there are two parts of that discussion about which there is virtually no disagreement. First, democracy grows from within; it can not be imposed from outside. And, second, no democracy will ever emerge at the point of a spear.
Despite our flawed strategy and our many tactical mistakes over the past six years, the U.S. still has lots of lots of non-military carrots and sticks to apply. As Neil Hicks points out, we don't have to revert to supporting repressive and authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East (or anywhere else). And we don't have to reward those regimes just because they're such good partners in the "Global War on Terror". After all, getting rid of terrorists protects them as well as us.
What we ought to be spending our time thinking about is how to use our leverage and our aid dollars to help countries to build democratic institutions - civil societies, independent judiciaries, respect for the rule of law, law enforcement authorities who honor human rights and enforce penalties for corruption.
Because it is only such institutions that can give birth to transparency, good governance and, ultimately, democracy.
Just don't expect any overnight transformations. This kind of nation building is generational.
I recently e-mailed Neil Hicks, the director of international programs for Human Rights First, seeking his thoughts on a new poll of the U.S. public that shows rapidly declining support for President Bush's pledge to spread democracy throughout the world.
His response was more eloquent than any words of mine. Here it is:
"It is not surprising that there is growing skepticism among Americans about the goal of actively promoting democracy in other countries through U.S. policy. There are several reasons for this, in my view:
"First: the administration's democracy promotion strategy has been very broadly defined and yet invoked inconsistently from country to country. While the headline principles of freedom, women's empowerment and elections are proclaimed frequently, there is no consistent benchmark for implementation of democracy at the specific country level, which is the only place where the practical impact of the policy can be discerned. This leaves the actual content of the policy somewhat amorphous, and makes it easy for its critics to accuse the U.S. government of engaging in double standards and pursuing these goals selectively in its own interests.
"Second: the U.S. has undermined its credibility as a promoter of democracy and human rights by its own practices in the Global War on Terrorism, including, as the U.S. public is increasingly aware, torture, deaths in custody and arbitrary detention.
"Third: the initial results of the policy have been complicated and troubling. While I am concerned that current difficulties -- in Iraq, where what is now portrayed as a war to bring democracy appears to be leading to a civil war, or the Palestinian territories, where a relatively free election produced a government that is opposed to U.S. policies, and whose commitment to democracy is questionable - should not result in the abandonment of a global U.S. posture that actively promotes democracy and human rights, such complications will inevitably sap public support.
"We are at a precarious moment where some are willing to jettison the Bush administration's championing of democracy promotion as an instrument of national security policy. This would be a shame. In my view the proper response is not to revert to the discredited old practices of accommodating dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.
"I welcome the emphasis that President Bush and other senior administration officials have placed on the link between oppression and the absence of basic freedoms on the one hand and instability and global insecurity in the other. This diagnosis requires a sustained, results oriented approach to promoting human rights and democracy that applies consistent principles and standards to all countries, and is responsive to the varied particular contexts of each country situation."
There are many things I like about this statement. But high among them is that this is not your garden-variety Bush-bashing polemic. It credits the president with the right vision but suggests that we need a more thoughtful strategy for its implementation.
Development experts have disagreed with one another for years about whether "nation building" is a legitimate concept. But there are two parts of that discussion about which there is virtually no disagreement. First, democracy grows from within; it can not be imposed from outside. And, second, no democracy will ever emerge at the point of a spear.
Despite our flawed strategy and our many tactical mistakes over the past six years, the U.S. still has lots of lots of non-military carrots and sticks to apply. As Neil Hicks points out, we don't have to revert to supporting repressive and authoritarian dictatorships in the Middle East (or anywhere else). And we don't have to reward those regimes just because they're such good partners in the "Global War on Terror". After all, getting rid of terrorists protects them as well as us.
What we ought to be spending our time thinking about is how to use our leverage and our aid dollars to help countries to build democratic institutions - civil societies, independent judiciaries, respect for the rule of law, law enforcement authorities who honor human rights and enforce penalties for corruption.
Because it is only such institutions that can give birth to transparency, good governance and, ultimately, democracy.
Just don't expect any overnight transformations. This kind of nation building is generational.
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