By William Fisher
Amnesty International is calling on the US justice system to stop sentencing young men and women to “life in prison without the possibility of release” for crimes they committed when were under 18 years old. More than 2,500 prisoners are currently serving such sentences in US prisons today.
In a new report, “'This is where I’m going to be when I die': Children facing life imprisonment without the possibility of release in the United States,” Amnesty charges that children as young as 11 at the time of the crime have faced life imprisonment without parole in the United States – the only country in the world to impose this sentence on children.
The report says, "Sentencing children to die in prison flouts a principle of international human rights law recognized and respected across the world, except by the USA. No other country is currently known to impose life imprisonment” without the possibility of parole for crimes, however serious, committed when they were children.
"In the United States, people under 18 cannot vote, buy alcohol or lottery tickets or consent to most forms of medical treatment, but they can be sentenced to die in prison for their actions. This needs to change,” says Natacha Mension, U. S. campaigner at Amnesty International (AI).
In the United States, life without parole can be imposed on juvenile offenders as a mandatory punishment – without consideration of mitigating factors such as history of abuse or trauma, degree of involvement in the crime, mental health status, or amenability to rehabilitation.
"We are not excusing crimes committed by children or minimizing their consequences, but the simple reality is that these sentences ignore the special potential for rehabilitation and change that young offenders have," said Mension.
In May 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court said life without parole is "an especially harsh punishment for a juvenile," as the young offender will serve, on average, more years and a greater percentage of his life in prison than an older offender. "A 16-year-old and a 75-year-old each sentenced to life without parole receive the same punishment in name only," the Court said.
Eighteen months after prohibiting this sentence for non-homicide crimes committed by under-18-year-olds, on November 8, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to consider this issue in relation to crimes involving murder. It will not issue a decision until the second quarter of 2012 at the earliest.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which entered into force more than two decades ago, expressly prohibits the imposition of life imprisonment without the possibility of release for offenses, however serious, committed by people under 18 years old. All countries except the United States and Somalia have ratified the Convention.
"It is long past time for the United States to ratify the Convention without reservations or other limiting conditions and to fully implement its prohibition on the use of life imprisonment without release against children, including in relation to the cases of those already sentenced," said Mension.
But the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which the USA did ratify in 1992, acknowledges the need for special treatment of children in the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of procedures that take account of their age and facilitate their rehabilitation
The report says this international prohibition “does not stem from any inclination to excuse crimes committed by children or to minimize the consequences of such crimes for the victims and their families. It stems, rather, from recognition that children, who are still developing, are not fully mature, and hence not fully responsible for their actions.”
These "offenders have a special potential for rehabilitation and change. It is not that young people should not be held accountable for their actions. It is that this accountability must be achieved in ways that reflect the offender’s young age and his or her is utterly incompatible with basic principles of juvenile justice."
Amnesty International’s 34-page report illustrates the issue through the stories of Christi Cheramie, Jacqueline Montanez and David Young.
On November 30, Christi Cheramie, who is serving life without parole in Louisiana, will submit an application for executive clemency with the state Board of Pardons. Christi was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release in 1994, when she was 16 years old for the killing of her 18-year-old fiancé’s great aunt.
She pleaded guilty just before her trial in adult court began, fearing she could be sentenced to death if the trial went ahead. Her guilty plea prevents her from directly appealing her conviction or sentence.
A psychiatrist who saw Christi prior to her trial said that she was a "depressed, dependent, and insecure" 16-year-old who "seems to have been fearful of crossing" her fiancé, who she maintains committed the crime. Christi’s childhood was marked by sexual abuse. At the age of 13, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic after trying to commit suicide on at least two occasions.
After spending half of her life in prison, Christi believes she has changed in many ways. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma, a degree in agricultural studies, and teaches a number of classes at the prison. A warden has stated that she is "worthy of a second chance."
A clemency campaign is also pending for a second person whose case is profiled in AI’s report. Jacqueline Montanez is the only woman in Illinois serving a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a crime committed as a child. A victim of child abuse, Jacqueline began abusing drugs and alcohol at the age of nine. Jacqueline’s abuser was her step-father, a gang leader, who also involved her in the drug trade as a very young child and groomed her to be his “little soldier.” After running away from home and joining a rival gang, she and two older women shot and killed two adult male members of her step-father’s gang.
Because she was 15 at the time of the crime and charged with first degree murder, she was automatically tried in adult criminal court. This denied the court system the opportunity of conducting a transfer hearing to determine whether her case ought to have been tried in juvenile court where factors such as her young age, home environment or amenability to rehabilitation would have been considered. Jacqueline was also automatically sentenced to life without parole due to her conviction; the sentencing court had no discretion to consider her history, her age, the circumstances of the offense or her potential for rehabilitation.
Now 35 years old, she expresses deep remorse for her actions and believes that she has grown into a very different person. She has obtained a high school equivalency diploma and has become a certified trainer of service dogs for disabled people. She grieves for her victims and the pain that their families have suffered.
In Illinois, 80 percent of children in prison for life without parole received mandatory sentences; about 82 percent are prisoners of color. That number is even higher in Cook County, where the Montanez case originated. These findings were published by the Illinois Coalition on the Fair Sentencing of Children in its 2008 report, “Categorically Less Culpable, Children Sentenced to Life Without Parole in Illinois.” http://www.law.northwestern.edu/cfjc/jlwop/documents/JLWOP_Report.pdf
Jacqueline’s petition for executive clemency will be submitted to the Illinois governor and the Prisoner Review Board in January 2012.
David Young is one of two teenagers arrested and charged for the murder of Charles Welch in 1997. He was automatically charged in adult criminal court as required by North Carolina law for any criminal offense committed by anyone age 16 or older. Young’s co-defendant, who shot the victim, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 19 to 23 years in prison. David was convicted of first-degree felony murder and was sentenced to life without parole.
Young grew up in a hostile community environment where his parents abused drugs and his stepfather physically abused him and his mother. Now 32 years old, Young obtained his high school equivalency diploma and is in solitary confinement after being stabbed by two prisoners.
Friday, December 02, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Human Rights Group Says Army Rulers “Worse Than Mubarak”
By William Fisher
Nassary Hassan is an Egyptian citizen living in Germany. Last March, he was in Egypt and, during a visit to Hurghada – a resort town on the Red Sea -- he saw piles of garbage in the streets. He carried a banner reading, “The people want to clean Hurghada,” heading towards the City Council. He was asked to leave by one of the military police officers.
When he refused, he was beaten and verbally abused by him and his soldiers, until he lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital. Moreover, after he awakened, he requested a doctor to write a report about his injuries; but unfortunately, the doctor refused after he knew that he was assaulted by the military police.
Later on, Hassan was able to obtain the Military Governor’s phone number, whom he called and told him about what happened. However, the Military Governor told him to go back to the City Council and meet him at his office there, and when he did, he found a large number of police officers waiting for him, beating and verbally abusing him.
They took him to the military prosecution location that maltreated him and participated in fabricating charges of libel and slander of Armed Forces and a military officer. He was referred to the Military Court at Qena; which sentenced him to 3 years imprisonment and a 5 thousand LE fine on 24 March. However, in May, an appeal was filed against the ruling, and after consideration of the appeal, the court decided to alleviate the sentence to 6 months imprisonment, a fine of 5000 LE.
An appeal was submitted by the Arabic Network For Human Rights Information (ANHRI) defense team. It was successful in being able to alleviate the unjust sentence of imprisonment and the fine issued by the exceptional Military Tribunal against Hassan.
ANHRI claims the charges were fabricated by military police officers and the military governor of Hurghada, as a result of [Hasan’s] “civilized and peaceful way of expressing his views.”
The sentence by the military court in Qena was amended to be six months imprisonment instead of three years, and a fine of 5000 Egyptian pounds. Since last March, he spent more than 8 months in prison -- more than the allotted prison sentence.
Hasan was finally released Nov. 30.
ANHRI says this is one of thousands of cases where Egypt’s “temporary” rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have performed “even worse than Mubarak,” referring to the country’s dictator of thirty years who was overthrown February 11 in a people’s revolution that took only 18 days.
There are some 12,000 men and women in Egyptian military prisons, sent there after perfunctory military trials, some of which took less than five minutes. Their crimes were largely peacefully demonstrating, carrying placards listing their demands, and expressing themselves through blogs and social networks.
The “no more military trials” movement has become a powerful rallying cry against the army, which is said to be considering how it can free these prisoners without losing face completely.
Meantime, the Associated Press reports that Amnesty International says Egypt's military rulers have "completely failed" to fulfill their promises to protect human rights.
In a report released Tuesday, Amnesty accuses Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of adopting oppressive tactics used by the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, including targeting critics, banning critical media coverage and torturing protesters.
The military council took control after Mubarak's fall in February.
The report comes after three days of clashes between security forces and
protesters calling for a transition to civilian rule. More than 40 people have
been killed and thousands injured.
The group called on the military council to repeal the Mubarak-era "emergency laws," and protect human rights.
Egyptian human rights organizations claim to refer interior leadership and military police to criminal trials. Five Egyptian human rights organizations said that the brutal attacks, by security forces of the Ministry of Interior and the military police under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, over the past three days against the protestors in Cairo, Alexandria , Suez, Ismailia, Assiut and other few cities , are criminal offences. They demanded that perpetrators be referred for criminal prosecution.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Nadim Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of violence and ANHRI , pledged to continue working on listing the names of civilian and military officials involved in the killing of demonstrators or bursting their eyes or breaking their bones , according to what was followed up or documented by them or media over the past few days.
Moreover, the organizations stated that the list of officials being prosecuted has so far skipped a number of high ranking military men, mostly from the Interior Ministry. The dreaded security police operate under the authority of the Interior Ministry, which has a long and bloody history of repression, torture and death in detention.
In recent days, it has become clear that the SCAF is not in control of the Interior Ministry’s police forces. Last week, with protestors closing in on the Ministry headquarters, and armed security forces standing on the front steps
with their rifles pointed at the protestors, SCAF actually had to ship in large concrete blast walls and lay them down the middle of the street to keep police and protestors apart..
The Human Rights groups condemned the “false statements made by military officials to the media. These claimed that the role of the military police has been limited to securing the Ministry of Interior building without exposure to the demonstrators. They also affirmed that their delegates had seen military police forces storming Tahrir Square at about five o’clock on November 20th brutally assaulting the demonstrators with batons.
“That was before setting protestors’ tents and belongings and a number of motorcycles, on fire. Moreover, the video clips broadcast from the sites of the newspapers and television stations Masry Al-Youm and Al Jazeera Mubasher MISR, show the attack of members of the military and civilian police on unarmed demonstrators in three sides to Tahrir Square, using tanks, tear gas and batons. It shows also the demonstrators being hit several times on the head with sticks and military forces feet after falling on the ground and stopped moving.”
In the two most recent days of demonstrations, there have been 17 attacks against journalists, including shooting, arrests and beatings while in detention by unidentified security agents. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned these attacks, demanding the Egyptian authorities to end them immediately.
“Journalists should be allowed to do their job without being attacked. Moreover, there is an obligation on prosecutors to investigate allegations of abuses committed by the army and police against journalists” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa of the committee to protect journalists.
Since Saturday, Tahrir Square in Cairo was occupied by protestors, demanding an end to military rule. The security Forces fired live and rubber bullets at them threw grenades, tear gas and attacked dozens of people according to news report. By Monday, several media reported the number of people killed was at least 33 people in addition to thousands of people injured as a result of the clashes.
The IPS news service, reporting from Cairo, quotes rights activist Sherif Azer, as saying, “The military council is dealing with the Egyptian people as if it is running a military camp. It took decades for enough anger to build up against Mubarak for a revolution; it has only taken nine months to have another."
Nassary Hassan is an Egyptian citizen living in Germany. Last March, he was in Egypt and, during a visit to Hurghada – a resort town on the Red Sea -- he saw piles of garbage in the streets. He carried a banner reading, “The people want to clean Hurghada,” heading towards the City Council. He was asked to leave by one of the military police officers.
When he refused, he was beaten and verbally abused by him and his soldiers, until he lost consciousness and was taken to the hospital. Moreover, after he awakened, he requested a doctor to write a report about his injuries; but unfortunately, the doctor refused after he knew that he was assaulted by the military police.
Later on, Hassan was able to obtain the Military Governor’s phone number, whom he called and told him about what happened. However, the Military Governor told him to go back to the City Council and meet him at his office there, and when he did, he found a large number of police officers waiting for him, beating and verbally abusing him.
They took him to the military prosecution location that maltreated him and participated in fabricating charges of libel and slander of Armed Forces and a military officer. He was referred to the Military Court at Qena; which sentenced him to 3 years imprisonment and a 5 thousand LE fine on 24 March. However, in May, an appeal was filed against the ruling, and after consideration of the appeal, the court decided to alleviate the sentence to 6 months imprisonment, a fine of 5000 LE.
An appeal was submitted by the Arabic Network For Human Rights Information (ANHRI) defense team. It was successful in being able to alleviate the unjust sentence of imprisonment and the fine issued by the exceptional Military Tribunal against Hassan.
ANHRI claims the charges were fabricated by military police officers and the military governor of Hurghada, as a result of [Hasan’s] “civilized and peaceful way of expressing his views.”
The sentence by the military court in Qena was amended to be six months imprisonment instead of three years, and a fine of 5000 Egyptian pounds. Since last March, he spent more than 8 months in prison -- more than the allotted prison sentence.
Hasan was finally released Nov. 30.
ANHRI says this is one of thousands of cases where Egypt’s “temporary” rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have performed “even worse than Mubarak,” referring to the country’s dictator of thirty years who was overthrown February 11 in a people’s revolution that took only 18 days.
There are some 12,000 men and women in Egyptian military prisons, sent there after perfunctory military trials, some of which took less than five minutes. Their crimes were largely peacefully demonstrating, carrying placards listing their demands, and expressing themselves through blogs and social networks.
The “no more military trials” movement has become a powerful rallying cry against the army, which is said to be considering how it can free these prisoners without losing face completely.
Meantime, the Associated Press reports that Amnesty International says Egypt's military rulers have "completely failed" to fulfill their promises to protect human rights.
In a report released Tuesday, Amnesty accuses Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of adopting oppressive tactics used by the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, including targeting critics, banning critical media coverage and torturing protesters.
The military council took control after Mubarak's fall in February.
The report comes after three days of clashes between security forces and
protesters calling for a transition to civilian rule. More than 40 people have
been killed and thousands injured.
The group called on the military council to repeal the Mubarak-era "emergency laws," and protect human rights.
Egyptian human rights organizations claim to refer interior leadership and military police to criminal trials. Five Egyptian human rights organizations said that the brutal attacks, by security forces of the Ministry of Interior and the military police under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, over the past three days against the protestors in Cairo, Alexandria , Suez, Ismailia, Assiut and other few cities , are criminal offences. They demanded that perpetrators be referred for criminal prosecution.
The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, the Hisham Mubarak Center for Law and the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, the Nadim Center for Rehabilitation of Victims of violence and ANHRI , pledged to continue working on listing the names of civilian and military officials involved in the killing of demonstrators or bursting their eyes or breaking their bones , according to what was followed up or documented by them or media over the past few days.
Moreover, the organizations stated that the list of officials being prosecuted has so far skipped a number of high ranking military men, mostly from the Interior Ministry. The dreaded security police operate under the authority of the Interior Ministry, which has a long and bloody history of repression, torture and death in detention.
In recent days, it has become clear that the SCAF is not in control of the Interior Ministry’s police forces. Last week, with protestors closing in on the Ministry headquarters, and armed security forces standing on the front steps
with their rifles pointed at the protestors, SCAF actually had to ship in large concrete blast walls and lay them down the middle of the street to keep police and protestors apart..
The Human Rights groups condemned the “false statements made by military officials to the media. These claimed that the role of the military police has been limited to securing the Ministry of Interior building without exposure to the demonstrators. They also affirmed that their delegates had seen military police forces storming Tahrir Square at about five o’clock on November 20th brutally assaulting the demonstrators with batons.
“That was before setting protestors’ tents and belongings and a number of motorcycles, on fire. Moreover, the video clips broadcast from the sites of the newspapers and television stations Masry Al-Youm and Al Jazeera Mubasher MISR, show the attack of members of the military and civilian police on unarmed demonstrators in three sides to Tahrir Square, using tanks, tear gas and batons. It shows also the demonstrators being hit several times on the head with sticks and military forces feet after falling on the ground and stopped moving.”
In the two most recent days of demonstrations, there have been 17 attacks against journalists, including shooting, arrests and beatings while in detention by unidentified security agents. The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned these attacks, demanding the Egyptian authorities to end them immediately.
“Journalists should be allowed to do their job without being attacked. Moreover, there is an obligation on prosecutors to investigate allegations of abuses committed by the army and police against journalists” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, program coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa of the committee to protect journalists.
Since Saturday, Tahrir Square in Cairo was occupied by protestors, demanding an end to military rule. The security Forces fired live and rubber bullets at them threw grenades, tear gas and attacked dozens of people according to news report. By Monday, several media reported the number of people killed was at least 33 people in addition to thousands of people injured as a result of the clashes.
The IPS news service, reporting from Cairo, quotes rights activist Sherif Azer, as saying, “The military council is dealing with the Egyptian people as if it is running a military camp. It took decades for enough anger to build up against Mubarak for a revolution; it has only taken nine months to have another."
GITMO Forever? Looks That Way!
By William Fisher
The Congress that was so fearful that trying accused terrorists in civilian courts would hasten Armageddon is now proposing to go one mindless step further. It may soon vote to make indefinite detention and unfair military trials permanent.
Earlier this week, the Senate voted to increase the military’s role in the detention of those suspected of being members of Al Qaeda or its allies – even if the arrests are made in the U.S.
The Senate defeated, 61-37, an effort to strip a major military bill -- National Defense Authorization Act -- of a clutch of controversial provisions – for example, one requiring the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. And a related provision that would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens.
“These provisions stretch the law of war beyond all recognition, and threaten to dramatically undermine national security by taking civilian tools of justice off the table when dealing with suspected terrorists,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “Intelligence and military leaders have overwhelmingly condemned these provisions — they will make us less safe, imposing a blunt one-size-fits-all approach in an area where the executive branch most requires flexibility to do its job.”
In an editorial, the Washington Post noted that Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) praised the provisions as “an improvement over the originals, which were decried by the Obama administration and even former George W. Bush Defense Department officials as too heavyhanded.”
But the Post said, “The new proposals are as problematic as the old and should be scrapped.”
It continued: “Since President Obama took office, some lawmakers, including Democrats, have tried to force him to adopt their military-centric approach to fighting terrorism. The original Senate plan permanently banned use of defense funds to build or modify U.S. facilities to hold Guantanamo Bay detainees; ordered
military detention for terrorism suspects, including U.S. citizens, captured on
U.S. soil; and made it very difficult to transfer detainees deemed fit for
release to their homes or third countries. This approach, we have argued,
unacceptably limited the president’s flexibility to thwart attacks and react to
terrorism threats.”
Amnesty International (AI), in a statement, said, “We are facing one of the biggest crises at Guantanamo since “war on terror” detainees were first transferred there nearly 10 years ago: Congress may soon vote to make indefinite detention and unfair trials permanent. The 89 people there who are approved for release could remain forever. The 46 slated for detention without charge could be denied due process forever. The 36 referred for prosecution could only be tried in unfair kangaroo courts Military Commissions). Guantanamo would be permanent.”
The group urged its members to let their lawmakers know they ”oppose any legislation that would further entrench indefinite detention, denial of due process and military commissions—at Guantanamo, Bagram or any other US facilities—in US law and practice.”
The organization added, “Indefinite detention, denial of due process and the unfair military commissions are violations of human rights and contravene international law. There is a better way to ensure justice and security for all of us: either charge and fairly try Guantanamo detainees in US federal court, or release them immediately to countries where their human rights will be respected. The United States government should be protecting human rights, not violating them.”
When Barack Obama took office, he pledged on his very first day in the White House that he would close Guantanamo. Part of his plan was to try prisoners before our regular Article 111 civilian courts, where hundreds of accused terrorists had already been tried over a number of years.
But Congress had collective apoplexy. It hastily passed a law denying the president funds to move prisoners from Guantanamo to Federal Court in lower Manhattan. Lawmakers, including some of Congress’ leading so-called liberals, raved and ranted themselves into a frenzy. They went all-out stoking the flames of fear. A terror trial in lower Manhattan would provide terrorists with a readymade target to attack. Traffic would be tied up for days. Business would suffer. And if the defendant, heaven forefend, was acquitted, he would be “walking up and down Main Street and having coffee in the local diner.”
What? Not running for the School Board?
The first prospective trial was to have been KSM (Khalid Sheik Mohammed), the alleged mastermind of 9/11. But that never happened. And now it’s never going to happen. It’s unlikely that KSM will ever appear before a Military Commission. So he will be at GITMO until he dies. As a consequence, 45 other people will have been denied due process to petition for their release. And 89 prisoners scheduled to be released, won’t be.
And the world will continue to wonder how and why this happened in the country the world used to look to as safe harbor for civil liberties and human rights.
The Congress that was so fearful that trying accused terrorists in civilian courts would hasten Armageddon is now proposing to go one mindless step further. It may soon vote to make indefinite detention and unfair military trials permanent.
Earlier this week, the Senate voted to increase the military’s role in the detention of those suspected of being members of Al Qaeda or its allies – even if the arrests are made in the U.S.
The Senate defeated, 61-37, an effort to strip a major military bill -- National Defense Authorization Act -- of a clutch of controversial provisions – for example, one requiring the government to place into military custody any suspected member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies connected to a plot against the United States or its allies. And a related provision that would create a federal statute saying the government has the legal authority to keep people suspected of terrorism in military custody, indefinitely and without trial. It contains no exception for American citizens.
“These provisions stretch the law of war beyond all recognition, and threaten to dramatically undermine national security by taking civilian tools of justice off the table when dealing with suspected terrorists,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “Intelligence and military leaders have overwhelmingly condemned these provisions — they will make us less safe, imposing a blunt one-size-fits-all approach in an area where the executive branch most requires flexibility to do its job.”
In an editorial, the Washington Post noted that Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) praised the provisions as “an improvement over the originals, which were decried by the Obama administration and even former George W. Bush Defense Department officials as too heavyhanded.”
But the Post said, “The new proposals are as problematic as the old and should be scrapped.”
It continued: “Since President Obama took office, some lawmakers, including Democrats, have tried to force him to adopt their military-centric approach to fighting terrorism. The original Senate plan permanently banned use of defense funds to build or modify U.S. facilities to hold Guantanamo Bay detainees; ordered
military detention for terrorism suspects, including U.S. citizens, captured on
U.S. soil; and made it very difficult to transfer detainees deemed fit for
release to their homes or third countries. This approach, we have argued,
unacceptably limited the president’s flexibility to thwart attacks and react to
terrorism threats.”
Amnesty International (AI), in a statement, said, “We are facing one of the biggest crises at Guantanamo since “war on terror” detainees were first transferred there nearly 10 years ago: Congress may soon vote to make indefinite detention and unfair trials permanent. The 89 people there who are approved for release could remain forever. The 46 slated for detention without charge could be denied due process forever. The 36 referred for prosecution could only be tried in unfair kangaroo courts Military Commissions). Guantanamo would be permanent.”
The group urged its members to let their lawmakers know they ”oppose any legislation that would further entrench indefinite detention, denial of due process and military commissions—at Guantanamo, Bagram or any other US facilities—in US law and practice.”
The organization added, “Indefinite detention, denial of due process and the unfair military commissions are violations of human rights and contravene international law. There is a better way to ensure justice and security for all of us: either charge and fairly try Guantanamo detainees in US federal court, or release them immediately to countries where their human rights will be respected. The United States government should be protecting human rights, not violating them.”
When Barack Obama took office, he pledged on his very first day in the White House that he would close Guantanamo. Part of his plan was to try prisoners before our regular Article 111 civilian courts, where hundreds of accused terrorists had already been tried over a number of years.
But Congress had collective apoplexy. It hastily passed a law denying the president funds to move prisoners from Guantanamo to Federal Court in lower Manhattan. Lawmakers, including some of Congress’ leading so-called liberals, raved and ranted themselves into a frenzy. They went all-out stoking the flames of fear. A terror trial in lower Manhattan would provide terrorists with a readymade target to attack. Traffic would be tied up for days. Business would suffer. And if the defendant, heaven forefend, was acquitted, he would be “walking up and down Main Street and having coffee in the local diner.”
What? Not running for the School Board?
The first prospective trial was to have been KSM (Khalid Sheik Mohammed), the alleged mastermind of 9/11. But that never happened. And now it’s never going to happen. It’s unlikely that KSM will ever appear before a Military Commission. So he will be at GITMO until he dies. As a consequence, 45 other people will have been denied due process to petition for their release. And 89 prisoners scheduled to be released, won’t be.
And the world will continue to wonder how and why this happened in the country the world used to look to as safe harbor for civil liberties and human rights.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
The Part of Our Justice System No One Wants You to Know About
By William Fisher
Remember Mike Nifong? Sure. He’s the sleazebag former District Attorney in the Duke University lacrosse team’s stripper rape scandal back in 2006. He made himself a short-lived hero by agreeing to prosecute members of the Duke Lacrosse team for raping an Africa-American stripper and dancer the team had hired for a party.
But Nifong, hell bent on winning reelection, forgot that he was an officer of the Court. He went public with a series of accusations that later turned out to be untrue; he exaggerated and intensified racial tensions; he unduly influenced the Durham police investigation; he tried to manipulate potential witnesses; he refused to hear exculpatory evidence prior to indictment; that regulations on the conduct of an identification exercise were breached by failure to include "dummy" photographs; that he had never spoken directly to the alleged victim about the accusations; and that he made misleadingly incomplete presentations of various aspects of the evidence in the case (including DNA results).
He was dismissed from his job and later disbarred
Or how about federal prosecutor William Welch, and his deputy chief, Brenda Morris, who convicted Senator Ted Stevens -- and helped their own cause by withholding evidence from the defense that could have helped the defendant.
Or there’s Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the so-called Detroit Sleeper Cell terrorism case. He was removed from the case on suspicion that he allegedly failed to turn over photographic evidence to the defense and obtained evidence from witnesses, leading the judge and other attorneys to believe the photographs did not exist.
These acts and alleged acts by prosecutors all qualify as prosecutorial misconduct. There are hundreds of such cases in our justice system every year. Very few of them ever get such high visibility. In fact, most abuses of this kind probably go unnoticed and unreported. In the three cases referenced above, only Nifong lost his law license. The others did not.
But, since 9/11, there has been another kind of misconduct growing. It usually takes place outside the courtroom and is a favorite of politicians of both parties, especially if they are running for reelection.
This is the phenomenon of politicians and others with private agendas calling press conferences to launch inflammatory – and usually false or grossly exaggerated – claims about the importance of a given case to the national security of the United States.
Examples are legion. When Jose Padilla was arrested for what the press told us was an attempt to explode a “dirty bomb” (a nuclear device) in the middle of New York City, then Attorney General John Ashcroft was in Moscow.
He immediately reorganized his day and hurriedly called a press conference where he trumpeted Padilla’s apprehension in what TIME called a “fear-inducing video hookup.”
Ashcroft was surely on a roll that day. But is was not long before it began to be clear that, to quote TIME again, “[Padilla] is not the deadly, skilled operative Attorney General John Ashcroft seemed to be describing when he announced Padilla's arrest… In fact, history may judge the Administration's legal treatment of Padilla—locking him up indefinitely with no plan to try him—as more alarming than Padilla himself.”
When Padilla was finally arraigned in Federal Court, the “dirty bomb” charge was nowhere to be found.
Then there was the prosecution of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an oncologist from Manlius, NY, a community near Syracuse. Dhafir was arrested in February 2003 in a raid that drew nationwide media coverage. Long before his trial began, he was labeled “a terrorist” by then Attorney General Ashcroft and then New York Gov. George Pataki.
On the day of the arrest Ashcroft announced that “funders of terrorism” had been arrested. And just before Dhafir’s trial began in October 2004, Pataki described the case as a “money laundering case to help terrorist organizations … conduct horrible acts,” an announcement perfectly timed to reach potential jurors.
But no reference to terrorism or to Dhafir’s Muslim faith was permitted in court, and no terrorism charges were ever brought against him. His supporters claim he was “selectively prosecuted.”
Dhafir was convicted in February 2005 of 59 criminal counts, including money laundering, conspiracy to violate US sanctions against Iraq, misusing $2 million that donors contributed to his unlicensed charity, Help the Needy, spending $544,000 for his own purposes, defrauding Medicare out of $316,000, and evading $400,000 in federal income tax payments by writing off the illegal charity donations. No terrorism here.
Politicians outside the courtroom intentionally hyping the extreme dangers presented by defendants have become standard practice. This has occurred numerous times when it was clear that the alleged “terrorists” were pathetic down-and-outers who many believe had been entrapped by the FBI.
What politicians say at their press conferences is intended to achieve one objective only: to plant doubt in the minds of prospective jurors.
Independent activist Katherine Hughes adds that, “In Dr. Dhafir’s case, they also transformed his community image from a compassionate humanitarian into a crook and supporter of terrorists.”
And just a few days ago, we recall New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg convening a hastily organized press conference to announce the arrest of one Jose Pimentel.
Flanked by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Bloomberg said:
“Yesterday afternoon, New York City police officers arrested a 27-year-old Al Qaeda sympathizer who was plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities, as well as target members of our Armed Forces returning from abroad. Jose Pimentel of Washington Heights, which is in the northern end of Manhattan, faces terrorism-related charges….”
Bloomberg also got an opportunity to praise the work of New York’s Finest.
“The NYPD Intelligence Division did outstanding work in tracking this individual and containing the threat he posed to the city. The police constructed a duplicate of an explosive device that the suspect built, and then detonated it in a way that he intended to use his weapon. We wanted to show you a video about the resulting damage,” he said.
He went on: “The suspect was a so-called lone wolf, motivated by his own resentment of the presence of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as inspired by Al Qaeda propaganda. He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad. He represents exactly the kind of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller and his experts have warned about, as American military and intelligence agencies have eroded Al Qaeda's ability to launch large-scale attacks.
“This case is also reminiscent of another lone wolf plot in 2004 in which two New Yorkers angry over the treatment of prisoners in Iraq plotted to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Like the current case, the Herald Square plot was uncovered by the NYPD Intelligence Division.
“And as with still another case earlier this year in which a lone wolf plotted to attack a large synagogue, the NYPD teamed-up with the Manhattan District Attorney's office to prosecute Pimentel under State terrorism-related statutes.
“Whether launched by lone wolves, Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda affiliates, there have been at least 13 previous terrorist plots since 9/11 targeting New York City. This would be the fourteenth.
“Because of such repeated threats, the NYPD remains focused on preventing another terrorist attack. We assign a thousand officers to counter-terrorism duties every single day. This is just another case where our precautions paid off."
Some journalists covering the story simply transcribed Bloomberg’s words. Others were suspicious. Did Bloomberg rush this arrest and press conference to divert attention away from the conflicts with the Occupy movement, whose members, as well as some journalists, had just been driven out of Liberty Square, and their tends and other equipment destroyed by police? And where was the FBI? The Bureau participates in almost all such events with the mayor and with less city lights. Soon we learned that the FBI was saying it would not have made this arrest.
That’s a big statement for that agency, which has been suspected by many of using paid informants to entrap gullible individuals, and get them involved in terror plots. However, many of these so-called plots look like children’s games. In others, the alleged perpetrators look so disheveled, bedraggled, disoriented, that they seem like the last people who would be capable of carrying out a terror plot.
In addition to trying to influence juries with incendiary and fear-provoking pronouncements, politicians and the law enforcement agencies they support employ a second technique – in some ways, worse than the false accusations.
This is the designation known as the “person of interest.” This insidious label has the capacity to put life on hold, to turn lives upside down, to bankrupt citizens unable to pay lawyers’ fees to try to prove their innocence.
Remember Richard Jewell? To refresh your memory, Jewell, 33, was working as a security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Atlanta Police have received a message saying, "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes." Jewell was working in Centennial Park.
At 1:20 a.m., a pipe bomb exploded near a huge sound-and-light tower erected by AT&T, which had become a major attraction for visitors to Centennial Olympic Park. The blast killed two people and injured 111 others.
Richard Jewell was the hero of the incident. He was responsible for finding the backpack that had contained the bomb, and for getting people out of the immediate area, thus probably limiting further death and injury.
But four days after the bombing, news organizations reported that Jewell had become the main focus of their investigation as a potential suspect in the bombing. At the time, Jewell was unknown to authorities, and a lone wolf profile made sense to FBI investigators after being contacted by his former employer at Piedmont College.
Though he was never arrested or charged with any crime, Jewell was named as a "person of interest.” His home, where he lived with his mother, was searched and his background exhaustively investigated, all amid a media storm that had cameras following him to the grocery store. Eventually, Jewell was exonerated, and once again hailed as a hero. The media circus pursued Jewell everywhere for weeks, until Eric Rudolph pled guilty to carrying out the bombing attack at the Centennial Olympic Park, as well as three other attacks across the South.
After his exoneration, Jewell filed a series of lawsuits against the media outlets which he claimed had libeled him, primarily NBC News and The Atlanta Constitution, and insisted on a formal apology from them. Jewell's attorneys contend Piedmont College President Raymond Cleere called the FBI and spoke to the Atlanta newspapers, providing them with false information on Jewell and his employment there as a security guard. Jewell's lawsuit accused Cleere of describing Jewell as a "badge-wearing zealot" who "would write epic police reports for minor infractions." Eventually he received an apology from the FBI.
Toward the end of the incident, broadcast host Bill Press discussed Jewell on television. Turning to Larry Sabato, professor of government at the University of Virginia, a guest on the program, he commented, "He (Jewell) did a pretty good job of destroying his own reputation, first, didn't he, Larry?"
To which Sabato replied, "You know, Bill, that's a great example of what happens when some poor soul, and I'm going to assume he's innocent until it's proven otherwise, some poor soul wanders into the media spotlight, because that's what happens. I remember the fellow who deflected the gun from President Ford out in California in 1975 and he saved the president's life and within 48 hours, a newspaper had revealed to his family, who didn't know, that he was gay."
Unlike Jewell, Steven Hatfill was never seen as a hero. But, just as Jewell’s life had been turned upside down by law enforcement, Hatfill’s also became a living hell.
Steven Jay Hatfill, now 60, is an American physician, virologist and bio-weapons expert who underwent what was considered by many to be a trial by media with great toll on his personal and professional life. After eight months of pressure from the media and amateur detectives, the US Department of Justice identified the former government scientist as a "person of interest" in its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. He was put under 24/7 surveillance.
FBI searches of his apartment in July and August 2002 were well-attended by journalists, many of whom had been pointing at Dr. Hatfill for months.
Dr. Hatfill later sued the government for ruining his reputation, a case that the government settled for US$5.8 million. He also filed lawsuits against several periodicals that had pointed to him as a figure warranting further investigation.
The situation became even more tragic when FBI and DOJ officials later blamed the anthrax deaths on another government scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, whom they concluded had acted alone. Ivins committed suicide. The case remains unsolved.
The abuses described here are miscarriages of justice, whether they occur in or outside a court. Politicians and law enforcement agencies depend on a supine press corps to circulate their stories all over the world in minutes. With the help of a media more skilled in stenography than in reporting, unsubstantiated rumors are printed and broadcast as facts. If further investigation is done by the media (which is rare) corrections often appear, if at all, long after the event. Yet they can rob you of your reputation before you have a chance to respond.
To be the target of a media blitz is tantamount to being found guilty of something. When a politician or an overly zealous prosecutor tags you as a dangerous terrorist before you ever go to court, you might as well not go to court. Such is the fear of terror that has pervaded our country since 9/11 that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has even successfully dictated where and how to try those accused of terrorism.
Is there anything ordinary citizens can do about these kinds of events? Unfortunately, not much. We should be urging our political leaders to choose their words more carefully and to show more respect for the rule of law. We should reign in over-zealous prosecutors who see their mission in life as collecting scalps. And we should be campaigning in Congress for substantial revisions in the “material support” law.
Politicians, judges, prosecutors and lawmakers need to demonstrate that they know the difference between governance and show business!
Ordinary citizens can’t censor what politicians say. And Judges could do a far better job of censoring what lawyers say (or fail to say) in court.
Perhaps the simplest target for irate citizens is the “person of interest” designation. The phrase has no legal meaning; it is administrative verbiage that law enforcement uses to show the public it’s working hard to find to find the guilty.
That phrase should be expunged from the Justice Department’s lexicon.
And that’s well within the President’s prerogatives.
.
Remember Mike Nifong? Sure. He’s the sleazebag former District Attorney in the Duke University lacrosse team’s stripper rape scandal back in 2006. He made himself a short-lived hero by agreeing to prosecute members of the Duke Lacrosse team for raping an Africa-American stripper and dancer the team had hired for a party.
But Nifong, hell bent on winning reelection, forgot that he was an officer of the Court. He went public with a series of accusations that later turned out to be untrue; he exaggerated and intensified racial tensions; he unduly influenced the Durham police investigation; he tried to manipulate potential witnesses; he refused to hear exculpatory evidence prior to indictment; that regulations on the conduct of an identification exercise were breached by failure to include "dummy" photographs; that he had never spoken directly to the alleged victim about the accusations; and that he made misleadingly incomplete presentations of various aspects of the evidence in the case (including DNA results).
He was dismissed from his job and later disbarred
Or how about federal prosecutor William Welch, and his deputy chief, Brenda Morris, who convicted Senator Ted Stevens -- and helped their own cause by withholding evidence from the defense that could have helped the defendant.
Or there’s Richard Convertino, the lead prosecutor in the so-called Detroit Sleeper Cell terrorism case. He was removed from the case on suspicion that he allegedly failed to turn over photographic evidence to the defense and obtained evidence from witnesses, leading the judge and other attorneys to believe the photographs did not exist.
These acts and alleged acts by prosecutors all qualify as prosecutorial misconduct. There are hundreds of such cases in our justice system every year. Very few of them ever get such high visibility. In fact, most abuses of this kind probably go unnoticed and unreported. In the three cases referenced above, only Nifong lost his law license. The others did not.
But, since 9/11, there has been another kind of misconduct growing. It usually takes place outside the courtroom and is a favorite of politicians of both parties, especially if they are running for reelection.
This is the phenomenon of politicians and others with private agendas calling press conferences to launch inflammatory – and usually false or grossly exaggerated – claims about the importance of a given case to the national security of the United States.
Examples are legion. When Jose Padilla was arrested for what the press told us was an attempt to explode a “dirty bomb” (a nuclear device) in the middle of New York City, then Attorney General John Ashcroft was in Moscow.
He immediately reorganized his day and hurriedly called a press conference where he trumpeted Padilla’s apprehension in what TIME called a “fear-inducing video hookup.”
Ashcroft was surely on a roll that day. But is was not long before it began to be clear that, to quote TIME again, “[Padilla] is not the deadly, skilled operative Attorney General John Ashcroft seemed to be describing when he announced Padilla's arrest… In fact, history may judge the Administration's legal treatment of Padilla—locking him up indefinitely with no plan to try him—as more alarming than Padilla himself.”
When Padilla was finally arraigned in Federal Court, the “dirty bomb” charge was nowhere to be found.
Then there was the prosecution of Dr. Rafil Dhafir, an oncologist from Manlius, NY, a community near Syracuse. Dhafir was arrested in February 2003 in a raid that drew nationwide media coverage. Long before his trial began, he was labeled “a terrorist” by then Attorney General Ashcroft and then New York Gov. George Pataki.
On the day of the arrest Ashcroft announced that “funders of terrorism” had been arrested. And just before Dhafir’s trial began in October 2004, Pataki described the case as a “money laundering case to help terrorist organizations … conduct horrible acts,” an announcement perfectly timed to reach potential jurors.
But no reference to terrorism or to Dhafir’s Muslim faith was permitted in court, and no terrorism charges were ever brought against him. His supporters claim he was “selectively prosecuted.”
Dhafir was convicted in February 2005 of 59 criminal counts, including money laundering, conspiracy to violate US sanctions against Iraq, misusing $2 million that donors contributed to his unlicensed charity, Help the Needy, spending $544,000 for his own purposes, defrauding Medicare out of $316,000, and evading $400,000 in federal income tax payments by writing off the illegal charity donations. No terrorism here.
Politicians outside the courtroom intentionally hyping the extreme dangers presented by defendants have become standard practice. This has occurred numerous times when it was clear that the alleged “terrorists” were pathetic down-and-outers who many believe had been entrapped by the FBI.
What politicians say at their press conferences is intended to achieve one objective only: to plant doubt in the minds of prospective jurors.
Independent activist Katherine Hughes adds that, “In Dr. Dhafir’s case, they also transformed his community image from a compassionate humanitarian into a crook and supporter of terrorists.”
And just a few days ago, we recall New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg convening a hastily organized press conference to announce the arrest of one Jose Pimentel.
Flanked by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Bloomberg said:
“Yesterday afternoon, New York City police officers arrested a 27-year-old Al Qaeda sympathizer who was plotting to bomb police patrol cars and also postal facilities, as well as target members of our Armed Forces returning from abroad. Jose Pimentel of Washington Heights, which is in the northern end of Manhattan, faces terrorism-related charges….”
Bloomberg also got an opportunity to praise the work of New York’s Finest.
“The NYPD Intelligence Division did outstanding work in tracking this individual and containing the threat he posed to the city. The police constructed a duplicate of an explosive device that the suspect built, and then detonated it in a way that he intended to use his weapon. We wanted to show you a video about the resulting damage,” he said.
He went on: “The suspect was a so-called lone wolf, motivated by his own resentment of the presence of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as inspired by Al Qaeda propaganda. He was not part of a larger conspiracy emanating from abroad. He represents exactly the kind of threat FBI Director Robert Mueller and his experts have warned about, as American military and intelligence agencies have eroded Al Qaeda's ability to launch large-scale attacks.
“This case is also reminiscent of another lone wolf plot in 2004 in which two New Yorkers angry over the treatment of prisoners in Iraq plotted to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Like the current case, the Herald Square plot was uncovered by the NYPD Intelligence Division.
“And as with still another case earlier this year in which a lone wolf plotted to attack a large synagogue, the NYPD teamed-up with the Manhattan District Attorney's office to prosecute Pimentel under State terrorism-related statutes.
“Whether launched by lone wolves, Al Qaeda, or Al Qaeda affiliates, there have been at least 13 previous terrorist plots since 9/11 targeting New York City. This would be the fourteenth.
“Because of such repeated threats, the NYPD remains focused on preventing another terrorist attack. We assign a thousand officers to counter-terrorism duties every single day. This is just another case where our precautions paid off."
Some journalists covering the story simply transcribed Bloomberg’s words. Others were suspicious. Did Bloomberg rush this arrest and press conference to divert attention away from the conflicts with the Occupy movement, whose members, as well as some journalists, had just been driven out of Liberty Square, and their tends and other equipment destroyed by police? And where was the FBI? The Bureau participates in almost all such events with the mayor and with less city lights. Soon we learned that the FBI was saying it would not have made this arrest.
That’s a big statement for that agency, which has been suspected by many of using paid informants to entrap gullible individuals, and get them involved in terror plots. However, many of these so-called plots look like children’s games. In others, the alleged perpetrators look so disheveled, bedraggled, disoriented, that they seem like the last people who would be capable of carrying out a terror plot.
In addition to trying to influence juries with incendiary and fear-provoking pronouncements, politicians and the law enforcement agencies they support employ a second technique – in some ways, worse than the false accusations.
This is the designation known as the “person of interest.” This insidious label has the capacity to put life on hold, to turn lives upside down, to bankrupt citizens unable to pay lawyers’ fees to try to prove their innocence.
Remember Richard Jewell? To refresh your memory, Jewell, 33, was working as a security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. The Atlanta Police have received a message saying, "There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes." Jewell was working in Centennial Park.
At 1:20 a.m., a pipe bomb exploded near a huge sound-and-light tower erected by AT&T, which had become a major attraction for visitors to Centennial Olympic Park. The blast killed two people and injured 111 others.
Richard Jewell was the hero of the incident. He was responsible for finding the backpack that had contained the bomb, and for getting people out of the immediate area, thus probably limiting further death and injury.
But four days after the bombing, news organizations reported that Jewell had become the main focus of their investigation as a potential suspect in the bombing. At the time, Jewell was unknown to authorities, and a lone wolf profile made sense to FBI investigators after being contacted by his former employer at Piedmont College.
Though he was never arrested or charged with any crime, Jewell was named as a "person of interest.” His home, where he lived with his mother, was searched and his background exhaustively investigated, all amid a media storm that had cameras following him to the grocery store. Eventually, Jewell was exonerated, and once again hailed as a hero. The media circus pursued Jewell everywhere for weeks, until Eric Rudolph pled guilty to carrying out the bombing attack at the Centennial Olympic Park, as well as three other attacks across the South.
After his exoneration, Jewell filed a series of lawsuits against the media outlets which he claimed had libeled him, primarily NBC News and The Atlanta Constitution, and insisted on a formal apology from them. Jewell's attorneys contend Piedmont College President Raymond Cleere called the FBI and spoke to the Atlanta newspapers, providing them with false information on Jewell and his employment there as a security guard. Jewell's lawsuit accused Cleere of describing Jewell as a "badge-wearing zealot" who "would write epic police reports for minor infractions." Eventually he received an apology from the FBI.
Toward the end of the incident, broadcast host Bill Press discussed Jewell on television. Turning to Larry Sabato, professor of government at the University of Virginia, a guest on the program, he commented, "He (Jewell) did a pretty good job of destroying his own reputation, first, didn't he, Larry?"
To which Sabato replied, "You know, Bill, that's a great example of what happens when some poor soul, and I'm going to assume he's innocent until it's proven otherwise, some poor soul wanders into the media spotlight, because that's what happens. I remember the fellow who deflected the gun from President Ford out in California in 1975 and he saved the president's life and within 48 hours, a newspaper had revealed to his family, who didn't know, that he was gay."
Unlike Jewell, Steven Hatfill was never seen as a hero. But, just as Jewell’s life had been turned upside down by law enforcement, Hatfill’s also became a living hell.
Steven Jay Hatfill, now 60, is an American physician, virologist and bio-weapons expert who underwent what was considered by many to be a trial by media with great toll on his personal and professional life. After eight months of pressure from the media and amateur detectives, the US Department of Justice identified the former government scientist as a "person of interest" in its investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks. He was put under 24/7 surveillance.
FBI searches of his apartment in July and August 2002 were well-attended by journalists, many of whom had been pointing at Dr. Hatfill for months.
Dr. Hatfill later sued the government for ruining his reputation, a case that the government settled for US$5.8 million. He also filed lawsuits against several periodicals that had pointed to him as a figure warranting further investigation.
The situation became even more tragic when FBI and DOJ officials later blamed the anthrax deaths on another government scientist, Bruce Edwards Ivins, whom they concluded had acted alone. Ivins committed suicide. The case remains unsolved.
The abuses described here are miscarriages of justice, whether they occur in or outside a court. Politicians and law enforcement agencies depend on a supine press corps to circulate their stories all over the world in minutes. With the help of a media more skilled in stenography than in reporting, unsubstantiated rumors are printed and broadcast as facts. If further investigation is done by the media (which is rare) corrections often appear, if at all, long after the event. Yet they can rob you of your reputation before you have a chance to respond.
To be the target of a media blitz is tantamount to being found guilty of something. When a politician or an overly zealous prosecutor tags you as a dangerous terrorist before you ever go to court, you might as well not go to court. Such is the fear of terror that has pervaded our country since 9/11 that Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has even successfully dictated where and how to try those accused of terrorism.
Is there anything ordinary citizens can do about these kinds of events? Unfortunately, not much. We should be urging our political leaders to choose their words more carefully and to show more respect for the rule of law. We should reign in over-zealous prosecutors who see their mission in life as collecting scalps. And we should be campaigning in Congress for substantial revisions in the “material support” law.
Politicians, judges, prosecutors and lawmakers need to demonstrate that they know the difference between governance and show business!
Ordinary citizens can’t censor what politicians say. And Judges could do a far better job of censoring what lawyers say (or fail to say) in court.
Perhaps the simplest target for irate citizens is the “person of interest” designation. The phrase has no legal meaning; it is administrative verbiage that law enforcement uses to show the public it’s working hard to find to find the guilty.
That phrase should be expunged from the Justice Department’s lexicon.
And that’s well within the President’s prerogatives.
.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
The Liberties We’ve Lost in the ‘War on Terror” are Temporary, Right?
By William Fisher
As the country enters its second post-9/11 decade, I asked renowned human rights crusader Chip Pitts about what civil liberties/human rights we’ve collectively lost in the so-called “war on terror” as what was previously legal has now become criminal.
Here’s what he said:
“Virtually all of our most fundamental rights and liberties have been affected for the worse, with little or no awareness among the populace at large. The ignorance is no accident, but the product of conscious mendacity, manipulation and complicity among the leading political parties, all branches of government, defense contractors and the entrenched military-industrial-surveillance complex, and mainstream media – all of which (with occasional notable exceptions) are tragically pulled by various perverse incentives in the direction of trying to out-do each other in pandering to the basest fears and instincts of the American Body Politic”.
He added: “A huge number of legal violations have occurred, ranging from the momentous (illegal war) to the mundane (failure to fully notify the appropriate committees of Congress about the illegal warrantless surveillance as required under the National Security Act), but I’ll limit myself to highlighting the most significant to the rights of the American public.”
How has the ‘War on Terror’ impacted the Rule of Law?
“The first category of infringements I would place under the general rubric of undermining the Rule of Law. Although all the regressions could be put in this category, some strike more than others at the very concept itself. If the Rule of Law means anything, it means that everyone is subject to the same rules of general application and that those rules are fairly applied: a ‘government of laws, and not of men’ as founding father and American President John Adams famously put it.”
“Yet we now have a much more arbitrary system of justice, in which people can be deemed second-class citizens and have their assets seized, have their travel and other rights burdened, and be stigmatized, imprisoned, or even killed merely by essentially unreviewable executive fiat.”
“That’s the net effect of new approaches including the following, all of which impose serious burdens without the traditional checks and balances and independent reviews previously enshrined in law:
· Asset Seizure section 106 of the Patriot Act, which has led, for example, to the closure on legally dubious grounds of nearly all of the major Muslim charities in the United States, among other seizures occurring merely upon executive branch ‘designation’,
· the notoriously error-ridden ‘watch lists’ and ‘no fly’ lists which have thrown certain innocent individuals into a Kafkaesque Hell from which there’s no easy escape, setting a precedent for further pernicious ‘government by watch-list’ that extra-legally allocates benefits and burdens,
· the TSA bodyscanners, which don’t work to detect the plastic explosives which were their supposed reason for being, as noted by sources as diverse as the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, and CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta – but have been shown to pose risks to privacy and health, disproportionately burdening vulnerable populations including children, the elderly, religious objectors, and the immune-compromised who risk serious harm from the cumulative effects of long-term radiation exposure,
· the reality of profiling on racial, religious, ethnic, and national origin grounds, despite official rhetoric and policies against it, facilitated by reliance on a (likely unconstitutional) broad exception relating to national security and border-related investigations,
· the risk that anyone could be subject to the military commissions regime, a novel secondary justice system in which the executive branch is judge, jury, and executioner and in which a person may find themselves arbitrarily placed without principled distinction simply because they’ve been labeled a ‘terrorist’ or ‘enemy combatant’ (thus US citizen Jose Padilla was shifted at the last minute from the military to the civilian regime after years of being imprisoned, tortured, and denied counsel as an “enemy combatant,” and shoe bomber Richard Reid was tried in civilian court as were 400 other terrorists, but others find themselves subjected to the lower evidentiary and justice standards of the military regime, without reasoned explanation),
· Assassination (defenders call it legal ‘targeted killing’) even of US citizens off the battlefield, without due process of law, without lawyers or the right to confront the evidence or witnesses against them, without the right to trial by jury or any of the other protections guaranteed by the US Constitution.”
Haven’t we also experienced specific infringements of fundamental rights crucial to our national identity and fundamental values?
“We certainly have. Even a cursory review of the Constitutional protections that have been compromised illustrates the point. For example:
· The First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, press, association, assembly, religion, and petitioning government for redress of grievances, all newly under pressure from widespread warrantless surveillance, secret data mining of private data, surreptitious infiltration of peaceful protest and solidarity groups, President Obama’s increased prosecution of supposedly protected whistleblowers and leakers, and changes in the law allowing criminalization and chilling of such speech and association promoting peace and human rights under the Patriot Act’s ‘material support’ provision (which criminalized ‘expert advice and assistance’ and was upheld in the US Supreme Court’s closely divided, erroneous decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project),
· The Fourth Amendment rights to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant and probable cause to believe a crime or terrorism was involved, which also have been eroded by the FISA Amendments Act (allowing the Bush-era illegal warrantless surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and web-surfing habits), Patriot Act provisions including section 505 regarding the notorious and repeatedly abused National Security Letters (allowing the FBI to search a wide variety of library and business records without probable cause, any judicial review, or notifying the target), section 215 (the library and business records provision requiring the secret FISA court to approve searches on a mere ‘relevance’ standard and probably also being interpreted to allow a secret data mining program some Senators say would ‘stun’ and ‘anger’ the US public if revealed), section 213 (allowing ‘sneak and peek’ secret black bag job searches of homes), and section 218 (basically importing expansive foreign intelligence surveillance powers into domestic criminal law).
· The Fifth Amendment rights to due process of law has been infringed not only by the extreme measure of assassination noted above, but also by increasingly routine arbitrary changes of the rules—contrary to President Obama’s promises -- so as to block accountability for other violations of fundamental rights, as with the use of the state secrets privilege, standing, and other procedural doctrines to completely immunize those who labeled citizens like Jose Padilla ‘enemy combatants’, or those who tortured, participated in extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and ‘disappearing’ people) to places of torture, and planned and conducted warrantless surveillance,
· The Eighth Amendment rights to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (also protected by an international treaty, the Convention Against Torture, signed by Pres. Ronald Reagan, and by federal statute), which has been rhetorically embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations but ignored in practice (especially by the former, but also allegedly to a lesser extent even by the latter, in cases such as those of Bradley Manning, Gulet Muhammed, and in Afghanistan and Iraq).”
Have these major infringements spilled over into the routine law enforcement and justice systems of the United States?
“Some of us had naïve expectations that these developments wouldn’t further affect ordinary citizens. Yet we now all know that legions of ordinary citizens already have been harmed and had their privacy and liberties infringed by National Security Letters and other Patriot Act provisions, as decades of gradual progress in expanding rights have been undermined and generations who have fought for hard-won liberties have seen both their liberty and their security dramatically reduced this past decade. This category includes:
· The increasing militarization of domestic policing and intelligence gathering, as seen in such developments as the Pentagon’s new Northern Command, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) involvement in domestic intelligence and counterterror efforts, Pentagon involvement in infiltration of domestic peace and anti-war groups, increasing deployment of weaponized drones within US borders as well as at the borders, and the surveillance, biometric, and other equipment and weapons defense contractors have imported from Iraq and Afghanistan into American streets, all as described (among others) by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin in their Top Secret America Washington Post series and book, and all in great tension with our Constitutional regime and historic bias against domestic deployment of military forces as reflected in Posse Comitatus and other laws,
· Although sold as temporary, emergency counterterror measures, these laws and approaches such as the Patriot Act have only become more permanent and used overwhelmingly for routine, domestic law enforcement (such as drug cases and minor offenses) – as repeatedly confirmed in the government’s own reports, such as the recent one described by the ACLU pertaining to ‘sneak and peek’ home search warrants -- again contrary to the basic premises and fundamental laws of our democratic republic and its origins in a Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights arranged precisely against such arbitrary and unconstrained power.
· The way the laws have, as described above, been used to immunize high officials and the powerful from accountability of any type (no torture victim has received his or her day in US court!) at the very time laws for lesser violations have resulted in the United States carrying the dubious honor of having imprisoned more of its population, in both absolute and percentage terms, than any other nation in the world. This discrepancy remains a substantial driver for the Occupy movement and can be expected to continue to drive social instability, protest, and conflict unless and until the gaps in transparency and accountability are remedied and again realigned with the original, sensible Constitutional vision and allocation of rights and powers.”
_____________________________________________________________
Chip Pitts teaches human rights and corporate social responsibility law at Stanford Law School and Oxford University, and serves as a volunteer activist for a number of organizations and initiatives seeking to advance human rights, civil liberties, social justice, and economic development.
As the country enters its second post-9/11 decade, I asked renowned human rights crusader Chip Pitts about what civil liberties/human rights we’ve collectively lost in the so-called “war on terror” as what was previously legal has now become criminal.
Here’s what he said:
“Virtually all of our most fundamental rights and liberties have been affected for the worse, with little or no awareness among the populace at large. The ignorance is no accident, but the product of conscious mendacity, manipulation and complicity among the leading political parties, all branches of government, defense contractors and the entrenched military-industrial-surveillance complex, and mainstream media – all of which (with occasional notable exceptions) are tragically pulled by various perverse incentives in the direction of trying to out-do each other in pandering to the basest fears and instincts of the American Body Politic”.
He added: “A huge number of legal violations have occurred, ranging from the momentous (illegal war) to the mundane (failure to fully notify the appropriate committees of Congress about the illegal warrantless surveillance as required under the National Security Act), but I’ll limit myself to highlighting the most significant to the rights of the American public.”
How has the ‘War on Terror’ impacted the Rule of Law?
“The first category of infringements I would place under the general rubric of undermining the Rule of Law. Although all the regressions could be put in this category, some strike more than others at the very concept itself. If the Rule of Law means anything, it means that everyone is subject to the same rules of general application and that those rules are fairly applied: a ‘government of laws, and not of men’ as founding father and American President John Adams famously put it.”
“Yet we now have a much more arbitrary system of justice, in which people can be deemed second-class citizens and have their assets seized, have their travel and other rights burdened, and be stigmatized, imprisoned, or even killed merely by essentially unreviewable executive fiat.”
“That’s the net effect of new approaches including the following, all of which impose serious burdens without the traditional checks and balances and independent reviews previously enshrined in law:
· Asset Seizure section 106 of the Patriot Act, which has led, for example, to the closure on legally dubious grounds of nearly all of the major Muslim charities in the United States, among other seizures occurring merely upon executive branch ‘designation’,
· the notoriously error-ridden ‘watch lists’ and ‘no fly’ lists which have thrown certain innocent individuals into a Kafkaesque Hell from which there’s no easy escape, setting a precedent for further pernicious ‘government by watch-list’ that extra-legally allocates benefits and burdens,
· the TSA bodyscanners, which don’t work to detect the plastic explosives which were their supposed reason for being, as noted by sources as diverse as the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, and CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta – but have been shown to pose risks to privacy and health, disproportionately burdening vulnerable populations including children, the elderly, religious objectors, and the immune-compromised who risk serious harm from the cumulative effects of long-term radiation exposure,
· the reality of profiling on racial, religious, ethnic, and national origin grounds, despite official rhetoric and policies against it, facilitated by reliance on a (likely unconstitutional) broad exception relating to national security and border-related investigations,
· the risk that anyone could be subject to the military commissions regime, a novel secondary justice system in which the executive branch is judge, jury, and executioner and in which a person may find themselves arbitrarily placed without principled distinction simply because they’ve been labeled a ‘terrorist’ or ‘enemy combatant’ (thus US citizen Jose Padilla was shifted at the last minute from the military to the civilian regime after years of being imprisoned, tortured, and denied counsel as an “enemy combatant,” and shoe bomber Richard Reid was tried in civilian court as were 400 other terrorists, but others find themselves subjected to the lower evidentiary and justice standards of the military regime, without reasoned explanation),
· Assassination (defenders call it legal ‘targeted killing’) even of US citizens off the battlefield, without due process of law, without lawyers or the right to confront the evidence or witnesses against them, without the right to trial by jury or any of the other protections guaranteed by the US Constitution.”
Haven’t we also experienced specific infringements of fundamental rights crucial to our national identity and fundamental values?
“We certainly have. Even a cursory review of the Constitutional protections that have been compromised illustrates the point. For example:
· The First Amendment rights of freedom of speech, press, association, assembly, religion, and petitioning government for redress of grievances, all newly under pressure from widespread warrantless surveillance, secret data mining of private data, surreptitious infiltration of peaceful protest and solidarity groups, President Obama’s increased prosecution of supposedly protected whistleblowers and leakers, and changes in the law allowing criminalization and chilling of such speech and association promoting peace and human rights under the Patriot Act’s ‘material support’ provision (which criminalized ‘expert advice and assistance’ and was upheld in the US Supreme Court’s closely divided, erroneous decision Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project),
· The Fourth Amendment rights to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant and probable cause to believe a crime or terrorism was involved, which also have been eroded by the FISA Amendments Act (allowing the Bush-era illegal warrantless surveillance of Americans’ phone calls, emails, and web-surfing habits), Patriot Act provisions including section 505 regarding the notorious and repeatedly abused National Security Letters (allowing the FBI to search a wide variety of library and business records without probable cause, any judicial review, or notifying the target), section 215 (the library and business records provision requiring the secret FISA court to approve searches on a mere ‘relevance’ standard and probably also being interpreted to allow a secret data mining program some Senators say would ‘stun’ and ‘anger’ the US public if revealed), section 213 (allowing ‘sneak and peek’ secret black bag job searches of homes), and section 218 (basically importing expansive foreign intelligence surveillance powers into domestic criminal law).
· The Fifth Amendment rights to due process of law has been infringed not only by the extreme measure of assassination noted above, but also by increasingly routine arbitrary changes of the rules—contrary to President Obama’s promises -- so as to block accountability for other violations of fundamental rights, as with the use of the state secrets privilege, standing, and other procedural doctrines to completely immunize those who labeled citizens like Jose Padilla ‘enemy combatants’, or those who tortured, participated in extraordinary rendition (kidnapping and ‘disappearing’ people) to places of torture, and planned and conducted warrantless surveillance,
· The Eighth Amendment rights to freedom from torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (also protected by an international treaty, the Convention Against Torture, signed by Pres. Ronald Reagan, and by federal statute), which has been rhetorically embraced by both the Bush and Obama administrations but ignored in practice (especially by the former, but also allegedly to a lesser extent even by the latter, in cases such as those of Bradley Manning, Gulet Muhammed, and in Afghanistan and Iraq).”
Have these major infringements spilled over into the routine law enforcement and justice systems of the United States?
“Some of us had naïve expectations that these developments wouldn’t further affect ordinary citizens. Yet we now all know that legions of ordinary citizens already have been harmed and had their privacy and liberties infringed by National Security Letters and other Patriot Act provisions, as decades of gradual progress in expanding rights have been undermined and generations who have fought for hard-won liberties have seen both their liberty and their security dramatically reduced this past decade. This category includes:
· The increasing militarization of domestic policing and intelligence gathering, as seen in such developments as the Pentagon’s new Northern Command, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) involvement in domestic intelligence and counterterror efforts, Pentagon involvement in infiltration of domestic peace and anti-war groups, increasing deployment of weaponized drones within US borders as well as at the borders, and the surveillance, biometric, and other equipment and weapons defense contractors have imported from Iraq and Afghanistan into American streets, all as described (among others) by Dana Priest and Bill Arkin in their Top Secret America Washington Post series and book, and all in great tension with our Constitutional regime and historic bias against domestic deployment of military forces as reflected in Posse Comitatus and other laws,
· Although sold as temporary, emergency counterterror measures, these laws and approaches such as the Patriot Act have only become more permanent and used overwhelmingly for routine, domestic law enforcement (such as drug cases and minor offenses) – as repeatedly confirmed in the government’s own reports, such as the recent one described by the ACLU pertaining to ‘sneak and peek’ home search warrants -- again contrary to the basic premises and fundamental laws of our democratic republic and its origins in a Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights arranged precisely against such arbitrary and unconstrained power.
· The way the laws have, as described above, been used to immunize high officials and the powerful from accountability of any type (no torture victim has received his or her day in US court!) at the very time laws for lesser violations have resulted in the United States carrying the dubious honor of having imprisoned more of its population, in both absolute and percentage terms, than any other nation in the world. This discrepancy remains a substantial driver for the Occupy movement and can be expected to continue to drive social instability, protest, and conflict unless and until the gaps in transparency and accountability are remedied and again realigned with the original, sensible Constitutional vision and allocation of rights and powers.”
_____________________________________________________________
Chip Pitts teaches human rights and corporate social responsibility law at Stanford Law School and Oxford University, and serves as a volunteer activist for a number of organizations and initiatives seeking to advance human rights, civil liberties, social justice, and economic development.
US Congress: Very Busy Doing Nothing at All
By William Fisher
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
Bahrain: All the King’s Men
By William Fisher
With conflict wracking larger and more influential countries like Egypt and Syria, last week’s developments in Bahrain might well get pushed to the bottom of the world’s news budget or ignored altogether.
But that would be shameful and shortsighted.
Because what happened in the tiny Gulf kingdom last week is truly remarkable. A reigning monarch commissioned a report that was devastating in its condemnation of his regime – and the King accepted it and vowed to implement its recommendations.
Skeptics are saying talk is cheap – follow the feet. And where the Middle East is concerned, a healthy dollop of skepticism is always welcome.
Especially because the report to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa left no room for doubt as to who was responsible for widespread death and destruction: All the King’s Men. All the King’s Men are Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Bahrain’s people are Shia Muslims. The Royal Commission found this situation to be central to the conflict. (The King disagreed.)
The commission, headed by Egyptian judge Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, also found "systemic use" of “physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture, with respect to a large number of detainees" held in detention by the authorities.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the commission also demolished a key government claim, stating baldly that it found no "discernible link" between specific incidents in Bahrain and Iran — a charge heard repeatedly.
Bassiouni's team also found that some mosques and prayer houses that were destroyed by the government had no building permits. However, the report says, "The government should have realized that … the timing [and] the manner in which demolitions were conducted and the fact that these were primarily Shia … would be perceived as a collective punishment and … inflame the tension between the government and the Shia population".
The report also confirmed that hundreds of students were dismissed from university after being photographed demonstrating. And more than 1,600 people say they were dismissed or suspended from their jobs. It added that Shia employees were often treated differently from non-Shia, "creating a reasonable presumption that many were subjected to discrimination."
Maybe, in accepting the report and promising reforms, the Royal Family is simply trying to mollify its subjects. But window dressing is not going to impress the opposition. Just a whiff of insincerity in the dialogue the King says he wants and the people will be out in the street once more.
Correcting the abuses committed by the security forces will not be easy, but it is not impossible. The King needs to replace the people in charge of the security services. He must resist appointing someone who is a member of the Royal Family. The entire culture of the security forces must be changed. It must be fair. It must respect the rule of law. It must abandon torture. And it must be inclusive of Bahrain’s Shia majority. And King Hamad and his people need to recognize his people’s inherent right to peacefully protest. That’s a very tall order, but it is doable over time.
Much less certain is whether the pervasive discrimination felt by the Shia population can be reversed. The Shia majority complains of being zeroed out of competition for top jobs in both the public and private sectors and discriminated against in housing, finance and the country’s social life. They say this discrimination has existed for many years and has become firmly embedded in Bahraini culture, thus even more difficult to correct.
But unless the majority begins to see concrete signs that the King is at least trying to effect this transformation, we can expect more divisiveness and conflict, death and destruction.
King Hamad has a tough job ahead. But he has also an enormous opportunity. Pray that he takes it.
With conflict wracking larger and more influential countries like Egypt and Syria, last week’s developments in Bahrain might well get pushed to the bottom of the world’s news budget or ignored altogether.
But that would be shameful and shortsighted.
Because what happened in the tiny Gulf kingdom last week is truly remarkable. A reigning monarch commissioned a report that was devastating in its condemnation of his regime – and the King accepted it and vowed to implement its recommendations.
Skeptics are saying talk is cheap – follow the feet. And where the Middle East is concerned, a healthy dollop of skepticism is always welcome.
Especially because the report to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa left no room for doubt as to who was responsible for widespread death and destruction: All the King’s Men. All the King’s Men are Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Bahrain’s people are Shia Muslims. The Royal Commission found this situation to be central to the conflict. (The King disagreed.)
The commission, headed by Egyptian judge Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, also found "systemic use" of “physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture, with respect to a large number of detainees" held in detention by the authorities.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the commission also demolished a key government claim, stating baldly that it found no "discernible link" between specific incidents in Bahrain and Iran — a charge heard repeatedly.
Bassiouni's team also found that some mosques and prayer houses that were destroyed by the government had no building permits. However, the report says, "The government should have realized that … the timing [and] the manner in which demolitions were conducted and the fact that these were primarily Shia … would be perceived as a collective punishment and … inflame the tension between the government and the Shia population".
The report also confirmed that hundreds of students were dismissed from university after being photographed demonstrating. And more than 1,600 people say they were dismissed or suspended from their jobs. It added that Shia employees were often treated differently from non-Shia, "creating a reasonable presumption that many were subjected to discrimination."
Maybe, in accepting the report and promising reforms, the Royal Family is simply trying to mollify its subjects. But window dressing is not going to impress the opposition. Just a whiff of insincerity in the dialogue the King says he wants and the people will be out in the street once more.
Correcting the abuses committed by the security forces will not be easy, but it is not impossible. The King needs to replace the people in charge of the security services. He must resist appointing someone who is a member of the Royal Family. The entire culture of the security forces must be changed. It must be fair. It must respect the rule of law. It must abandon torture. And it must be inclusive of Bahrain’s Shia majority. And King Hamad and his people need to recognize his people’s inherent right to peacefully protest. That’s a very tall order, but it is doable over time.
Much less certain is whether the pervasive discrimination felt by the Shia population can be reversed. The Shia majority complains of being zeroed out of competition for top jobs in both the public and private sectors and discriminated against in housing, finance and the country’s social life. They say this discrimination has existed for many years and has become firmly embedded in Bahraini culture, thus even more difficult to correct.
But unless the majority begins to see concrete signs that the King is at least trying to effect this transformation, we can expect more divisiveness and conflict, death and destruction.
King Hamad has a tough job ahead. But he has also an enormous opportunity. Pray that he takes it.
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