By William Fisher
Democracy was a word scarcely heard in the just-concluded Congressional testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker.
The principal reason, according to a new report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is that despite sweeping rhetoric about the global spread of democracy, the Bush Administration has significantly damaged US democracy promotion efforts and increased the number of close ties with "friendly tyrants."
Security interests, such as the war on terrorism, and US energy needs have led the Bush Administration to maintain friendly, unchallenged relations with more than half of the forty-five "non-free" countries in the world.
According to the author of the new report, Thomas Carothers, Carnegie's Vice President for Studies, the Iraq war has been a principal cause of democracy backsliding. Autocratic Arab leaders - long-standing US allies -- have been able to "use the war to reinforce their long-standing message to their citizens about the perils of rapid democratic change," Carothers writes.
"Even a cursory look at Bush policy reveals a substantial gap between talk and action on democracy, whether it is the continued cozy relations with the Saudi government, the US embrace of Pakistan's military dictator Pervez Musharraf, or the largely uncritical line toward China's continued authoritarianism".
The report, entitled, "US Democracy Promotion During and After Bush," charges that despite the Bush Administration's "florid" rhetoric about promoting democracy throughout the world, this objective has been consistently trumped by the "Global War on Terror," resulting in American embrace of anti-democratic dictators within and outside the Middle East.
Carothers writes, "Day after day Arab citizens see on their televisions tens or even hundreds of Arabs dying as a result of a 'democratic experiment' in their region. The spillover problems of the war-refugees, new terrorist groups, rising Shia-Sunni tensions-cause other Arab governments to feel less rather than more latitude to try political openings...The democracy agenda is continually put forward (at least rhetorically) by the United States, whose policies in the region most Arabs detest, taints the very concept in many Arabs' minds."
The report suggests that Bush Administration rhetorical efforts to promote democracy are seriously hampered by the world perception of hypocrisy. It declares, "The Bush administration's trampling of the rule of law in its antiterrorist pursuits -- the repeated, shocking abuses of detainees and prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo; the secret CIA prisons; the unauthorized domestic eavesdropping; the stripping away of rights of designated 'enemy combatants'; and all the rest-has done grievous, even devastating harm to America's status as a promoter of democracy and human rights in the world."
It adds, "Although difficult to measure, the power of positive example has long been one of the most important -- perhaps the most important-means by which established democracies assert a pro-democratic influence in the world. It is enough to talk to any democracy or human rights activist abroad, many of whom have traditionally relied on US leverage to bolster their position, to understand how damaging the loss of US legitimacy in this domain has been under Bush."
Carothers recalls the President's messianic second inaugural address, which set out what came to be known as his "freedom agenda," declaring that "America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.... It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture."
But he concludes that "The actual extent of the Bush commitment to democracy promotion is much less than the president's sweeping rhetoric would suggest. Although the administration insists that the Iraq intervention was a democratizing mission from day one, this proposition remains intensely debated at home and abroad. Bush policy in the rest of the Middle East temporarily diverted from the traditional line of supporting autocratic Arab allies but has returned to it during the past year."
He adds, "The hope of advancing a regional democratic agenda has been deeply undercut by the Iraq war. Major elements of the Bush approach to the war on terror and to foreign policy in general have significantly damaged the cause not only of democracy but also of democracy promotion."
Negative views toward democracy and democracy promotion, he writes, are not limited to Iraq. The whole of the Middle East, "remains stuck in authoritarian rule. The spread of democracy has stagnated in the rest of the world, with democratic reversals or backsliding outweighing gains."
The Iraq War and other Bush Administration initiatives, the report states, have also been responsible for the erosion of pro-democracy support at home. "Under George W. Bush, democracy promotion has been widely discredited through its close association with the Iraq war. Only a minority of the US public now supports democracy promotion as a US policy goal, and both the Republican and Democratic parties are internally divided on the subject."
The report notes that democracy promotion achieved significant bipartisan support within the US policy community and public from the late 1980s until the early years of this decade, "that consensus has shattered."
The Republican Party, Carothers notes, "is riven by disputes between realists determined to pull Washington back from transformative goals abroad and neoconservatives still ferociously attached to such ideas."
And the Democratic Party, "although less clearly fractioned, is also divided. A strong vein of liberal internationalism runs through the community of Democratic foreign policy specialists, but significant skepticism about America's ability to project its political values abroad is common in the Democratic ranks."
Moreover, the report finds, "The US public is increasingly doubtful regarding democracy promotion, with the Iraq war triggering a substantial decline in public support for it. In a recent U.S. poll, fewer than half of the persons polled (45 percent) agreed with the proposition that the United States should promote democracy abroad. A partisan divide marks the public's views on this subject as well: Only 35 percent of registered Democrats accepted the idea, while 64 percent of registered Republicans did."
While acknowledging that "the future of democracy promotion as part of US foreign policy is uncertain," Carothers asserts that if the next US president seeks to resurrect domestic and international support for democracy and its promotion, he or she will have to adopt a new three-point policy framework.
"First, democracy promotion must be decontaminated from the negative taint it acquired under President Bush. This can be accomplished by improving U.S. compliance with the rule of law in the war on terrorism, ending the close association of democracy promotion with military intervention and regime change, and reducing the inconsistency of U.S. democracy policy by exerting real pressure for change on some key autocratic partners, such as Pakistan and Egypt.
"Second, democracy promotion must be repositioned in the war on terrorism. The idea that democratization will undercut the roots of terrorism is appealing but easily overstated. Promoting democratic change may in some countries help encourage moderates over radicals, but it is far from an antiterrorist elixir. The next administration should deescalate rhetorical emphasis on democracy promotion as the centerpiece of the war on terrorism and escalate actual commitment to the issue in pivotal cases where supporting democratic change can help diminish growing radicalization.
"Third, US democracy promotion must be recalibrated to account for larger changes in the international context. A host of ongoing developments, such as the rise of alternative political models, new trends in globalization, and the high price of oil and gas, have eroded the validity of a whole set of assumptions on which US democracy promotion was built in the 1980s and 1990s. The next administration will need to respond in large and small ways, such as by drawing an explicit tie between energy policy and democracy policy, reengaging internationally at the level of basic political ideas, reducing the America-centrism of US democracy building efforts, and strengthening the core institutional sources of democracy assistance."
Carothers concludes, "Continued efforts by President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to claim that a democratic transformation of the Middle East is somehow still in the making ring hollow against the harsh contrary reality: The Middle East not only remains deeply stuck in nondemocratic politics, it is wracked by violent conflicts in Iraq, in Lebanon between Hizbollah and Israel, in Palestine, and between Palestine and Israel, as well as gripped by rising Shia-Sunni tensions and the growing influence of Iran."
Beyond the Middle East, Carothers writes, Bush policy "is primarily driven by economic and security interests that often clash with support for democracy, such as in China, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, and many other places."
The report asserts that the post-September 11 conclusion in Washington policy circles that "pervasive Arab autocracy is a cause of the violent Islamic radicalism provoked a genuine questioning of the traditional US policy of support for 'friendly tyrants' in the region."
But, it concludes that this "new approach was deeply torn from the start both by an uncertain commitment to it from all parts of the US government and by conflicting imperatives deriving from other US interests."
As examples, Carothers writes, "Although the administration now characterizes its interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq as democratizing missions, in both cases the story is much more complex, with security objectives playing a major role. The intervention in Afghanistan was clearly security driven, although once the Taliban had been ousted the United States helped broker a democratically oriented political reconstruction process. Since the initial intervention, however, the Bush administration has been unwilling to commit a sufficient level of forces to secure order, allowing the elected government of President Hamid Kharzai to come under severe pressure from a renewed Taliban insurgency."
The report also notes that "How much democracy figured in the administration's decision to topple Saddam Hussein is still fiercely debated in Washington, more than four years after the fact."
Carothers writes, "The administration labored to get an elected government in place (after the Iraqi Shia leadership essentially forced the Coalition Provisional Authority to agree to elections) and to help it survive. Yet at the same time the administration failed to commit the number of US forces necessary to stabilize the country, while also showing little interest in democracy aid efforts in the country, and demonstrating a frequent impulse to stage manage post-Saddam Iraqi politics with scant regard for democratic principles."
As for the administration's policy of pushing friendly autocratic Arab allies toward greater political reform, "such efforts have been half-hearted at best," Carothers writes. "The administration exerted the greatest pressure on Egyptian President Mubarak, but even that has ended up largely toothless. The Egyptian strongman has paid no price (other than a delay of free trade agreement negotiations) for pointedly defying the administration's plea for free and fair elections in 2005 and subsequently cracking down on political opposition forces. Other U.S. autocratic allies in the region have felt almost no pressure at all, despite the Bush team's grand pronouncements about its commitment to a politically transformed region."
Administration concern about Iran, the report notes, "has further sidelined the democratization agenda. Seeking to mobilize a coalition of friendly Arab states to check Iran's influence in the region, the administration has recently been tightening ties with friendly autocrats in the region, including offering an extremely large new package of military sales and assistance for Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the smaller Gulf states."
Carothers says the Bush administration "describes this effort as unifying the 'moderates' against the 'radicals' in the region, implying that it is actually a pro-democratic policy." But his report notes that "the moderate camp is made up of a collection of firmly nondemocratic states, some highly repressive...."
In prosecuting the war on terrorism, Carothers charges," the administration has embraced various nondemocratic governments it perceives as useful partners. This is a familiar pattern in the Middle East where the close antiterrorism cooperation in recent years between the United States and a host of autocratic regimes, including those in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, is an extension of a long-standing approach. Under the war on terrorism this pattern has spread to other regions, including South and Southeast Asia and Africa."
The Bush team, he says, "has championed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf as a key ally in the war on terrorism, overlooking his glaring antidemocratic character for the sake of his (at least hoped for) help in going after Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The administration provides lavish diplomatic support, military assistance, and economic aid to the Pakistan strongman. The Bush bear hug is not tempered by any pro-democratic component-no real push on constitutional reform, free and fair elections, return to civilian rule, or human rights abuses. The absence of any noticeable concern with Pakistan's democratic deficit is partly the result of the administration's intense focus on obtaining Musharraf's cooperation and not wanting to raise troublesome political issues that might muddy the waters of friendship. It is also due to the Bush team's belief that Musharraf is holding together a potentially unstable, dangerous political situation, and that desirable as democratization might be in theory, in practice it is too risky to try."
Similar rationales have been advanced by the Bush Administration regarding energy-rich countries such as Ethiopia and Kazakhstan, Carothers asserts. It has been tough only on states such as Belarus, Burma, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, "where the United States has no significant interests in oil, antiterrorism cooperation, or other issues that would render friendship with the regime beneficial," Carothers observes.
Outside the Middle East, Carothers finds, "it is difficult to find evidence of any major positive US impact on the state of democracy. The report states, "Although the health of democracy in Latin America is clearly vital to America's overall interests in the region, the Bush administration has failed to engage on this issue in any high-level or sustained way." The same is true in Central Asia, China, Russia, and South Asia.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Saturday, September 08, 2007
MAJORIE COHN’S JUSTICE GENE
Book Review by William Fisher
The past six years have seen an avalanche of books excoriating President George W. Bush, the key figures in his administration, and the ideologies, policies and practices they have embraced.
Some have been eye-opening blockbusters, like Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. Others have found themselves in the remaindered section of your bookstore. Some, like Woodward’s, have been long and dense, tough reads filled with incriminating quotes from The Decider himself. Others have been often inaccessible offerings by serious journalists in military history, like Tom Ricks of the Washington Post (Fiasco) and Michael Gordon of the New York Times (Cobra II). A few have genuinely illuminated little-known and under-reported aspects of the Bush Administration; Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran springs to mind. So too does David Cole’s Enemy Aliens. Too many others have forsaken solid evidence and confirmed sources to deliver over-simplistic rants, more akin to pamphleteering on rhetorical steroids.
Consider just a few of the other titles in this growing cottage industry: The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception by David Corn. Bush Must Go by Bill Press. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by Sheldon Rampton. The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush by Molly Ivins. The Bush - Haters Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years by Jack Huberman. The One Per Cent Doctrine by Ron Suskind. And the list goes on. And on. And on.
So was there a need for yet another anti-Bush book? Well, it turns out there was. Because Majorie Cohn’s modest new volume, Cowboy Republic, (Polipoint Press) achieves two goals so often missing from the growing library of tomes chronicling Dubya’s failings. First, it includes the exquisite legal detail one would expect from a distinguished lawyer. But arguably more important, it does so in straightforward everyman-language that makes it accessible to ordinary folks who don’t happen to be either lawyers or political junkies.
Majorie Cohn seems to have been around forever. A professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and president of the National Lawyers Guild, hers has been a powerful voice on both mainstream and alternative radio and television, in major newspapers and magazines, and on the web. Moreover, it is a voice that has become more thoughtful, more forceful, more consistent – and, yes, more civil, over the years.
Which is not to say Ms.. Cohn lacks passion. On the contrary, it is this very passion that helps make this little book to so eminently readable. But, happily, Ms. Cohn’s passion doesn’t turn her new book into a polemic. If anything, the language she uses in making her case against the Bush Administration is somewhat under-stated, perhaps in the best legal tradition. Michael Moore she is not.
The subtitle of Cowboy Republic is “Six Ways the Bush Gang has Defied the Law” – and this book is about the law. So, at one level, it is a love story: Marjorie Cohn has been in love with the law for many years. In the face of a largely apathetic public and an often- supine press, she persists in her belief that a renaissance in respect for the rule of law will ultimately be the nation’s way out of its current mess.
Her case against the Bush Administration’s contempt of the rule of law lays out most of the high crimes and misdemeanors with which Truthout readers – and most of everyone else – have now become so familiar. The hypocrisy of US “support” for the United Nations. The “marketing” of the Iraq invasion. The unending conflation of Iraq and 9/11. The torture memos. Guantanamo. Extraordinary renditions. National Security Letters. The “disappeared” in CIA “black sites.” The euphemisms – i.e. “enhanced interrogation” – used to sanitize repeated US violations of the Geneva Conventions. The warrantless surveillance programs. The roundup and detention of foreigners suspected of being of Middle Eastern descent. The over-hyped press conference trumpeting the arrests of “the worst of the worst” – later set free, deported, or charged with far less egregious crimes. And the complicity of the president’s lawyers in finding “legal justifications” to condone the un-condonable, to ignore the separation of powers, and to promulgate the notion of a “unitary executive.”
Ms. Cohn writes of these transgressions with economy and clarity. Moreover, she places them within the context of America’s history, starting with the Sedition Laws of the late 18th Century that imprisoned journalists for speaking out against the government, through Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s “Red Raids” to root out Bolsheviks in the 1920s, through the internment of Japanese-Americans in eh Second World War, through the Cold War’s shameful McCarthy debacle, through the myriad falsehoods perpetrated by government during Vietnam, though the lies of Nixon’s Watergate nightmare.
Her point is that the US has been here before, and that it has always been the law, in confluence with the activism of a minority of outraged citizenry, that has eventually righted the ship of Ship of State.
But Ms. Cohn refuses to rely solely on these tools. She is saying that time does not allow us the luxury of confidence in evolution and incrementalism alone. An activist needs action, and Ms. Cohn is nothing if not an activist.
Her hope was that the 2006 mid-term elections would have resulted in a groundswell of support for the impeachment of the President and his top aides. Today, she is clearly disappointed with the leadership of the new Congress. “Both Nency Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, and John Conyers, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee where impeachment would be initiated, have said, “Impeachment is off the table,” she writes.
Yet she is not without hope. “…if Congress fulfills its constitutional duty to investigate the Bush gang’s malfeasance, the legislators will invariably encounter stonewalling by the administration. That should anger many in Congress, who then might develop the resolve to launch impeachment hearings,” she writes, adding:
“It is now time for us to demand truth, justice and accountability from the Cowboy Republicans. That means op-eds and letters to the editor, and writing e-mailing and calling Congress, insisting that the Bush gang be held to account for its high crimes and misdemeanors. We must organize protects, marches, and demonstrations to end the Iraq war and occupation and prevent the next war. Our lives and those of our children depend on it.”
For Marjorie Cohn, it will never depend on waiting for Gen. David Petraeus.
The past six years have seen an avalanche of books excoriating President George W. Bush, the key figures in his administration, and the ideologies, policies and practices they have embraced.
Some have been eye-opening blockbusters, like Bob Woodward’s State of Denial. Others have found themselves in the remaindered section of your bookstore. Some, like Woodward’s, have been long and dense, tough reads filled with incriminating quotes from The Decider himself. Others have been often inaccessible offerings by serious journalists in military history, like Tom Ricks of the Washington Post (Fiasco) and Michael Gordon of the New York Times (Cobra II). A few have genuinely illuminated little-known and under-reported aspects of the Bush Administration; Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran springs to mind. So too does David Cole’s Enemy Aliens. Too many others have forsaken solid evidence and confirmed sources to deliver over-simplistic rants, more akin to pamphleteering on rhetorical steroids.
Consider just a few of the other titles in this growing cottage industry: The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception by David Corn. Bush Must Go by Bill Press. Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by Sheldon Rampton. The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush by Molly Ivins. The Bush - Haters Handbook: A Guide to the Most Appalling Presidency of the Past 100 Years by Jack Huberman. The One Per Cent Doctrine by Ron Suskind. And the list goes on. And on. And on.
So was there a need for yet another anti-Bush book? Well, it turns out there was. Because Majorie Cohn’s modest new volume, Cowboy Republic, (Polipoint Press) achieves two goals so often missing from the growing library of tomes chronicling Dubya’s failings. First, it includes the exquisite legal detail one would expect from a distinguished lawyer. But arguably more important, it does so in straightforward everyman-language that makes it accessible to ordinary folks who don’t happen to be either lawyers or political junkies.
Majorie Cohn seems to have been around forever. A professor at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and president of the National Lawyers Guild, hers has been a powerful voice on both mainstream and alternative radio and television, in major newspapers and magazines, and on the web. Moreover, it is a voice that has become more thoughtful, more forceful, more consistent – and, yes, more civil, over the years.
Which is not to say Ms.. Cohn lacks passion. On the contrary, it is this very passion that helps make this little book to so eminently readable. But, happily, Ms. Cohn’s passion doesn’t turn her new book into a polemic. If anything, the language she uses in making her case against the Bush Administration is somewhat under-stated, perhaps in the best legal tradition. Michael Moore she is not.
The subtitle of Cowboy Republic is “Six Ways the Bush Gang has Defied the Law” – and this book is about the law. So, at one level, it is a love story: Marjorie Cohn has been in love with the law for many years. In the face of a largely apathetic public and an often- supine press, she persists in her belief that a renaissance in respect for the rule of law will ultimately be the nation’s way out of its current mess.
Her case against the Bush Administration’s contempt of the rule of law lays out most of the high crimes and misdemeanors with which Truthout readers – and most of everyone else – have now become so familiar. The hypocrisy of US “support” for the United Nations. The “marketing” of the Iraq invasion. The unending conflation of Iraq and 9/11. The torture memos. Guantanamo. Extraordinary renditions. National Security Letters. The “disappeared” in CIA “black sites.” The euphemisms – i.e. “enhanced interrogation” – used to sanitize repeated US violations of the Geneva Conventions. The warrantless surveillance programs. The roundup and detention of foreigners suspected of being of Middle Eastern descent. The over-hyped press conference trumpeting the arrests of “the worst of the worst” – later set free, deported, or charged with far less egregious crimes. And the complicity of the president’s lawyers in finding “legal justifications” to condone the un-condonable, to ignore the separation of powers, and to promulgate the notion of a “unitary executive.”
Ms. Cohn writes of these transgressions with economy and clarity. Moreover, she places them within the context of America’s history, starting with the Sedition Laws of the late 18th Century that imprisoned journalists for speaking out against the government, through Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s “Red Raids” to root out Bolsheviks in the 1920s, through the internment of Japanese-Americans in eh Second World War, through the Cold War’s shameful McCarthy debacle, through the myriad falsehoods perpetrated by government during Vietnam, though the lies of Nixon’s Watergate nightmare.
Her point is that the US has been here before, and that it has always been the law, in confluence with the activism of a minority of outraged citizenry, that has eventually righted the ship of Ship of State.
But Ms. Cohn refuses to rely solely on these tools. She is saying that time does not allow us the luxury of confidence in evolution and incrementalism alone. An activist needs action, and Ms. Cohn is nothing if not an activist.
Her hope was that the 2006 mid-term elections would have resulted in a groundswell of support for the impeachment of the President and his top aides. Today, she is clearly disappointed with the leadership of the new Congress. “Both Nency Pelosi, the new Speaker of the House, and John Conyers, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee where impeachment would be initiated, have said, “Impeachment is off the table,” she writes.
Yet she is not without hope. “…if Congress fulfills its constitutional duty to investigate the Bush gang’s malfeasance, the legislators will invariably encounter stonewalling by the administration. That should anger many in Congress, who then might develop the resolve to launch impeachment hearings,” she writes, adding:
“It is now time for us to demand truth, justice and accountability from the Cowboy Republicans. That means op-eds and letters to the editor, and writing e-mailing and calling Congress, insisting that the Bush gang be held to account for its high crimes and misdemeanors. We must organize protects, marches, and demonstrations to end the Iraq war and occupation and prevent the next war. Our lives and those of our children depend on it.”
For Marjorie Cohn, it will never depend on waiting for Gen. David Petraeus.
BUSH ADMINISTRATION RAMPS UP SECRECY
By William Fisher
The Bush Administration is continuing its campaign to keep the public in the dark about the federal government’s policies and decisions and to suppress discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications.
This is the conclusion reached in the latest annual “report card” on government secrecy compiled by Open the Government.org, a coalition of consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor leaders, journalists, and others who seek to promote greater transparency in public institutions.
Summarizing developments during the past year, the report card says, “Government secrecy, particularly in the Executive Branch, continues to expand across a broad array of agencies and actions, including military procurement, new private inventions, and the scientific and technical advice that the government receives.”
But the authors of the report also see “glimmers of progress toward more openness and examples of continued determination on the part of the public and its representatives.” They conclude, “Even as more and more categories that exclude information from access are created by agencies, the public use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information from our government continues to rise.”
The report card’s principal findings for fiscal year 2007 include:
· More than 25 per cent of all federal dollars ($107.5 billion) awarded to Defense Department contractors were without competition. Only a third of contract dollars are were subject to full and open competition. On average since 2000, more than a quarter of all contract funding was not competed.
· Some 18 per cent of the DOD’s FY 2007 acquisition budget is classified. These so-called “black programs” amounted to $31.5 billion. Classified acquisition funding has more than doubled in real terms since fiscal year 1995, the report said.
· The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,176 orders by the Justice Department -- rejecting only one — in 2006. The Court, established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) following the Watergate scandals to restrict government snooping on citizens, has been at the center of a political firestorm since President Bush revealed that the Administration had been conducting electronic surveillance without seeking FISA warrants.
· The Administration continued to invoke the so-called “state secrets” privilege, which allows the president to withhold documents from the courts, Congress and the public. At the height of the Cold War, the administration used the privilege only 6 times between 1953 and 1976. Since 2001, it has been used a reported 39 times -- an average of six times a year in 6.5 years, or more than double the average (2.46) over the previous 24 years.
· Requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) totaled 21,412,736, an increase of 1,462,189 over the previous year. The report card says backlogs of unfilled request remain significant; the oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now been pending for more than 20 years.
· The government recovered more than $3.1 billion in settlements and judgments as a result of complaints from whistleblowers. Over the last two decades, whistleblowers helped the federal government recover more than $18 billion according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Justice.
· While the number of original classified documents decreased to from 258,633 in 2005 to 231,995 in 2007, classification activity still remains significantly higher than before 2001. For every dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2006, it spent $185 maintaining the secrets already on the books, a $51 increase from last year. Although more pages were declassified this year, the total publicly reported amount spent on declassification decreased. However, the report card notes, the intelligence agencies, which account for a large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the total reported figures.
· Government departments and agencies continued their practice of designating documents as “Sensitive But Unclassified” (SBU). Only some 19 per cent of 107 SBU designations were based on formally promulgated regulations, about half with comment and half without. The rest – 82 per cent – were made up by the agencies as they went along, the report card charges.
· In six years, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws. “In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued,” the report card asserts. In six years, it says, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws, adding, “In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued. Among recent presidents, Reagan issued 71 statements challenging provisions of laws before him; G.W.H. Bush issued 146; Clinton, 105.” The most notorious of the current president’s signing statements related to the so-called McCain Amendment to a 2005 defense authorization bill that barred the "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees. The presidential statement raised serious questions about whether Bush intended to obey this new law.
· The report card cites a report by Justice Department’s Inspector General indicating that the government made 143,074 National Security Letter (NSL) requests between 2003 and 2005. The number for 2006 remains classified. NSLs can be used to obtain information about individuals without the government applying for a court-reviewed warrant. With 2,176 secret surveillance orders approved in 2006, federal surveillance activity under the jurisdiction of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled in five years.
· The federal penchant for secrecy is also spilling over to state governments, the report card claims. Since 2001, it says, “States have continued to introduce and enact new laws that limit, rather than loosen, access to government information at the state and local level. In that period, some 339 bills were introduced in the states and 266 passed the respective legislatures. The largest number of bills introduced (114) had to do with expanded executive powers, confidentiality based on federal regulations or programs, and closure of otherwise public meetings for security meetings. Fewer than half (52) passed; the lowest percentage of passage among 6 categories of bills.”
Open the Government.org concludes, “The current administration has exercised an unprecedented level not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications. It has also increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. These practices inhibit democracy and our representative government; neither the public nor Congress can make informed decisions in these circumstances. Our open society is undermined and made insecure.”
The Open the Government coalition includes representatives of the Federation of American Scientists, the Sunlight Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, the U S Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In a related development, the White House has declared the Office of Administration (OA) exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to avoid complying with a request to make public its information about five million missing emails,
Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a FOIA request with the White House's OA for records that would document the White House's knowledge of the missing emails, its failure to restore the email or put in place an electronic record-keeping system that would prevent this problem, and the possibility that the emails were purposefully deleted.
In response, the Justice Department declared that the OA is not subject to FOIA. CREW is suing the White House Office of Administration for failing to respond to their request.
At least five million emails “disappeared” between March 2003 and October 2005, according to a report by CREW. The missing emails were discovered by the White House in 2005, according to a briefing given to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff by Keith Roberts, the Deputy General Counsel of the White House Office.
Rep. Henry Waxman [D-CA], Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is demanding that the OA turn over its analysis of the email system, conducted by the Office of the Chief Information Officer. According to the letter Rep. Waxman sent to White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Aug. 30, Roberts informed the Oversight Committee that an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process.
According to Rep. Waxman's letter, Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor did not detect the problems in the archive system when they first began. The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, Anne Weismann, general counsel of CREW, told Bloomberg News.
The White House recently changed its FOIA website to exclude the OA from White House entities subject to FOIA. A note in the FOIA sections of the OA website now says, "The Office of Administration, whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities." Under Office of Administration's FOIA Regulations, it says, "The OA's Regulations concerning FOIA are currently being updated." OA's annual FOIA reports are available on the White House website for 1996-2006. In 2006, OA processed 65 requests and spent $87,772 on FOIA processing (including appeals).
The National Security Archive, a member of the OpenTheGovernment.org coalition, filed a lawsuit against the White House last week seeking the recovery and preservation of the emails.
The Bush Administration is continuing its campaign to keep the public in the dark about the federal government’s policies and decisions and to suppress discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications.
This is the conclusion reached in the latest annual “report card” on government secrecy compiled by Open the Government.org, a coalition of consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, labor leaders, journalists, and others who seek to promote greater transparency in public institutions.
Summarizing developments during the past year, the report card says, “Government secrecy, particularly in the Executive Branch, continues to expand across a broad array of agencies and actions, including military procurement, new private inventions, and the scientific and technical advice that the government receives.”
But the authors of the report also see “glimmers of progress toward more openness and examples of continued determination on the part of the public and its representatives.” They conclude, “Even as more and more categories that exclude information from access are created by agencies, the public use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain information from our government continues to rise.”
The report card’s principal findings for fiscal year 2007 include:
· More than 25 per cent of all federal dollars ($107.5 billion) awarded to Defense Department contractors were without competition. Only a third of contract dollars are were subject to full and open competition. On average since 2000, more than a quarter of all contract funding was not competed.
· Some 18 per cent of the DOD’s FY 2007 acquisition budget is classified. These so-called “black programs” amounted to $31.5 billion. Classified acquisition funding has more than doubled in real terms since fiscal year 1995, the report said.
· The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,176 orders by the Justice Department -- rejecting only one — in 2006. The Court, established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) following the Watergate scandals to restrict government snooping on citizens, has been at the center of a political firestorm since President Bush revealed that the Administration had been conducting electronic surveillance without seeking FISA warrants.
· The Administration continued to invoke the so-called “state secrets” privilege, which allows the president to withhold documents from the courts, Congress and the public. At the height of the Cold War, the administration used the privilege only 6 times between 1953 and 1976. Since 2001, it has been used a reported 39 times -- an average of six times a year in 6.5 years, or more than double the average (2.46) over the previous 24 years.
· Requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) totaled 21,412,736, an increase of 1,462,189 over the previous year. The report card says backlogs of unfilled request remain significant; the oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now been pending for more than 20 years.
· The government recovered more than $3.1 billion in settlements and judgments as a result of complaints from whistleblowers. Over the last two decades, whistleblowers helped the federal government recover more than $18 billion according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Justice.
· While the number of original classified documents decreased to from 258,633 in 2005 to 231,995 in 2007, classification activity still remains significantly higher than before 2001. For every dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2006, it spent $185 maintaining the secrets already on the books, a $51 increase from last year. Although more pages were declassified this year, the total publicly reported amount spent on declassification decreased. However, the report card notes, the intelligence agencies, which account for a large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the total reported figures.
· Government departments and agencies continued their practice of designating documents as “Sensitive But Unclassified” (SBU). Only some 19 per cent of 107 SBU designations were based on formally promulgated regulations, about half with comment and half without. The rest – 82 per cent – were made up by the agencies as they went along, the report card charges.
· In six years, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws. “In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued,” the report card asserts. In six years, it says, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws, adding, “In the 211 years of our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with the bills were issued. Among recent presidents, Reagan issued 71 statements challenging provisions of laws before him; G.W.H. Bush issued 146; Clinton, 105.” The most notorious of the current president’s signing statements related to the so-called McCain Amendment to a 2005 defense authorization bill that barred the "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees. The presidential statement raised serious questions about whether Bush intended to obey this new law.
· The report card cites a report by Justice Department’s Inspector General indicating that the government made 143,074 National Security Letter (NSL) requests between 2003 and 2005. The number for 2006 remains classified. NSLs can be used to obtain information about individuals without the government applying for a court-reviewed warrant. With 2,176 secret surveillance orders approved in 2006, federal surveillance activity under the jurisdiction of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled in five years.
· The federal penchant for secrecy is also spilling over to state governments, the report card claims. Since 2001, it says, “States have continued to introduce and enact new laws that limit, rather than loosen, access to government information at the state and local level. In that period, some 339 bills were introduced in the states and 266 passed the respective legislatures. The largest number of bills introduced (114) had to do with expanded executive powers, confidentiality based on federal regulations or programs, and closure of otherwise public meetings for security meetings. Fewer than half (52) passed; the lowest percentage of passage among 6 categories of bills.”
Open the Government.org concludes, “The current administration has exercised an unprecedented level not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and their implications. It has also increasingly refused to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. These practices inhibit democracy and our representative government; neither the public nor Congress can make informed decisions in these circumstances. Our open society is undermined and made insecure.”
The Open the Government coalition includes representatives of the Federation of American Scientists, the Sunlight Foundation, the American Association of Law Libraries, OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, the U S Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In a related development, the White House has declared the Office of Administration (OA) exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to avoid complying with a request to make public its information about five million missing emails,
Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a FOIA request with the White House's OA for records that would document the White House's knowledge of the missing emails, its failure to restore the email or put in place an electronic record-keeping system that would prevent this problem, and the possibility that the emails were purposefully deleted.
In response, the Justice Department declared that the OA is not subject to FOIA. CREW is suing the White House Office of Administration for failing to respond to their request.
At least five million emails “disappeared” between March 2003 and October 2005, according to a report by CREW. The missing emails were discovered by the White House in 2005, according to a briefing given to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff by Keith Roberts, the Deputy General Counsel of the White House Office.
Rep. Henry Waxman [D-CA], Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is demanding that the OA turn over its analysis of the email system, conducted by the Office of the Chief Information Officer. According to the letter Rep. Waxman sent to White House Counsel Fred Fielding on Aug. 30, Roberts informed the Oversight Committee that an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process.
According to Rep. Waxman's letter, Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor did not detect the problems in the archive system when they first began. The revelation that there were daily audits suggests that e-mails were destroyed, Anne Weismann, general counsel of CREW, told Bloomberg News.
The White House recently changed its FOIA website to exclude the OA from White House entities subject to FOIA. A note in the FOIA sections of the OA website now says, "The Office of Administration, whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related authorities." Under Office of Administration's FOIA Regulations, it says, "The OA's Regulations concerning FOIA are currently being updated." OA's annual FOIA reports are available on the White House website for 1996-2006. In 2006, OA processed 65 requests and spent $87,772 on FOIA processing (including appeals).
The National Security Archive, a member of the OpenTheGovernment.org coalition, filed a lawsuit against the White House last week seeking the recovery and preservation of the emails.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
RAMADAN GIVING PRESENTS DILEMMA FOR AMERICAN MUSLIMS
By William Fisher
As the mid-September Ramadan fast approaches, many American Muslims are in a quandary about how to fulfill their Quranic obligation to contribute to charity - since the US government has closed down and frozen the assets of many of the leading philanthropies that have traditionally championed Muslim causes for providing material support" to terrorist organizations.
Under current US law, the simple act of writing a check to a charity that is on a government watch list could result in a prosecution for supporting terrorist activity - even if the donor is unaware of the charity's designation by the government.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has shut down dozens of Muslim-oriented charitable organizations and frozen millions of dollars of contributions, which languish in US banks. But criminal charges have been brought against only one such organization, The Holy Land Foundation, currently on trial in Dallas. The group was shut down and its assets confiscated in 2001 but the government did not file formal charges until 2004, and the trial did not begin until 2007.
Civil liberties advocates and many legal analysts are calling for changes in the three basic laws that give the government "blank check" authority to target Muslim-oriented charities with virtually no due process for the accused.
One of them, the Georgetown Law Center's David Cole, a widely respected Constitutional scholar, charges that "With our return to a 'preventive paradigm' of preemptively weeding out threats to national security, guilt by association has been resurrected from the McCarthy era. While it was illegal in the 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party, it is now a crime to support an individual or organization on a terror watch list, although the government can designate and freeze assets without a showing of actual ties to terrorism or illegal acts."
His view is shared by many other civil rights advocates and organizations. For example, Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA told Truthout, "This is another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power, in this case by using executive orders to skirt established time-tested laws. With the legal process sidetracked by Bush's make-it-up-as-you-go system of prosecution in the war on terror, we may never know whether due cause was established in these cases."
She added, "Ironically, the Bush administration keeps talking about spreading democracy and the rule of law to other parts of the world, while at the same time eroding those same principles here at home."
Kay Guinane, director of Nonprofit Speech Rights for OMB Watch, a not-for-profit government watchdog, says, "The real tragedy behind closure of Muslim charities is the fate of people in need of humanitarian assistance, who are doing without because the funds have been frozen by the US and sit in the bank, benefiting no one."
OMB Watch asserts that such treatment of Muslim charities hurts, not helps, the war on terrorism. "With Muslim-Americans already facing post-9/11 suspicion and bias, both from other Americans and from the government, targeting Muslim charities sends an ugly message: The message that the government is selectively targeting Muslim charities."
And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, believes there is "nothing much to show" for the government actions against Muslim-oriented charities. According to Dan Mitchell, Heritage's Senior Fellow in Political Economy, the anti-terrorist financing campaign has cost the private sector billions of dollars and has entailed a sweeping invasion of privacy, yet there is "nothing much to show for it."
The government's approach,he says, "defies common sense and has turned the traditional approach to law enforcement upside down." To this end, he says,
the FBI has not been able to develop a financial profile of a terrorist that
was any different from a regular banking customer. In the absence of a way
to target our efforts, the government is overwhelmed with data it cannot use and the banking sector has effectively been "looking for a needle in a haystack."
"Short of reading people's minds," he says, "there is no way to systematically track down terrorists or terrorist financing sources this way, and pursuing such a strategy is a waste of valuable resources."
According to David Cole, there are three main statutory regimes now being employed by the government to combat terrorism - and he says all of them are deeply flawed.
They are:
The USA PATRIOT Act Executive Order 13224, which makes it a crime to provide "material support" to an individual or organization on a terror watch list. These watch lists are prepared by the Secretary of State. There is no provision for notifying those being listed. According to Cole, "Material support has been interpreted loosely to include, for example, peacemaking assistance to a group such as the Kurdistan Workers Party or a link on a website, which resulted in the arrest of one individual." This statute, he argues, effectively circumvents due process, which is conspicuously absent from the process of designation."
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which was originally designed for embargoes. During the Clinton administration, the government started using it for anti-terrorist purposes, putting "embargoes" on political groups or individuals under suspicion. According to Cole, "In the absence of a hearing or notification of charges, this is a violation of due process."
Immigration Law, says Cole, is the third weapon used by the government. "An immigrant cannot support any group that has threatened to use a weapon. Because this law is retroactive, even support for an organization such as the African National Congress that was legal at the time is an offense that could lead to deportation," he asserts.
Cole, who is currently litigating several cases challenging the material support laws, told Truthout, "What is needed is a requirement that the government show that a supporter intends to support the group's terrorist activities. Without such a requirement, the statute imposes guilt by association. There are also big problems with the procedures by which groups get designated, which afford virtually no process to designated groups."
The exact extent of charitable giving among American Muslims is as imprecise as the number of Muslims living in the US - estimates range from a million adults to seven million adults and children. But for all of them, the tradition of charity, referred to in Islam as Zakat, is a Muslim pillar of faith and thus a religious obligation. At peak times of giving, such as at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting, Muslims throughout the world contribute to the poorest and neediest.
Where they will direct their contributions during this Ramadan remains unclear.
Arguably the Holy Land case is the highest-profile of the government's moves against charities -- President Bush personally announced the freezing of Holy Land's assets. HLF was the largest Muslim-American humanitarian organization, providing assistance overseas with an annual budget of close to $12 million. HLF provided services in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Kosovo, Chechnya, and elsewhere. To the average Muslim living in the US, HLF was a trusted name.
But on December 4, 2001, HLF was designated under IEEPA as a terrorist organization because, the government alleged, they were providing assistance to Hamas in the Occupied Territories. The government seized more than $5 million in HLF assets, and all of its records.
The case against HLF primarily revolves around donations to various charity (Zakat) committees throughout the West Bank and Gaza. These committees consist of members of the local Palestinian community and include individuals of various sociopolitical affiliations. Other non-Muslim organizations in the US and elsewhere also fund projects through Zakat committees because, they say, these groups provide an efficient means of disbursing assistance to humanitarian projects.
In the Dallas courtroom, prosecutors and HLF defense lawyers have clashed over whether jurors should see documents that Israeli soldiers seized during raids of Palestinian organizations.
In what could be a 'first' in the US legal system, two Israeli agents testified using pseudonyms that HLF was part of a global network of organizations that raised money from Muslims throughout the world and funneled it to Hamas.
Prosecutors believe the documents seized by Israeli soldiers show that HLF leaders knew they were sending millions of dollars to groups controlled by Hamas.
Defense attorneys have tried to cast doubt on the authenticity and significance of the documents, which included pamphlets, brochures and posters that are presumably pro-Hamas. Prosecutors said documents seized from the security offices of the Palestinian Authority contained information on Hamas' funding, including from Holy Land. Defense lawyers suggested that the evidence did not meet the standards for trial in a US court.
OMB Watch says the HLF prosecution has provided a glimpse into the government's use of evidence to justify seizure and freezing of charitable assets in the name of the war of terrorism. It charges that the case appears to depend on questionable foreign intelligence information and faulty translations.
Prior to the start of the jury trial, HLF brought a civil lawsuit against the government, seeking to overturn the terrorist designation. It was unsuccessful, principally because the appeals court refused to allow review of the Treasury Department's evidence and HLF being unable to present evidence on its own behalf.
In July 2004, HLF requested an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General, alleging the FBI used erroneous translations of sensitive Israeli intelligence material as the crux of its case. But later the same day, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against HLF and its seven top officials, charging them with money laundering and providing material support to Hamas.
In pre-trial filings in the criminal case, the prosecution disclosed it has 21 binders with over 8,000 pages of Israeli intelligence information, according to the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the Israeli government effectively controls what prosecutors can reveal to the public.
In a major error, 14 volumes of classified material were released to defense attorneys by mistake, and the judge refused the prosecution's motion to compel return of the documents. Instead, they now sit in the judge's office. While defense attorneys are forbidden from commenting on the contents of the files, the Dallas Morning News reported that "the information bolstered their case."
The FBI documents rely on the Israeli material to establish two claims central to the prosecution: grants were made to local charities that support Hamas, and funds were earmarked for families of suicide bombers. But none of the local charities named in the indictment have been designated as supporters of terrorism by the Treasury or State Departments.
The FBI claim is apparently based on a Bureau memo quoting the manager of HLF's Jerusalem office as saying the money was "channeled to Hamas." However, HLF attorneys say the Arabic to Hebrew to English translation should correctly say there is "no connection."
The indictment also claims that funds were earmarked for families of suicide bombers, but HLF's defenders say the allegations are based on faulty translations and incorrect use of the term "martyr." In the Middle East, defense attorneys explain, the term "martyr" refers to a broad category of people who die an early and unnatural death, not just suicide bombers.
In a related development, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the HLF prosecution, asked the court to remove the Washington-based group's name, and those of several hundred other similarly named Muslim individuals and institutions.
And the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales objecting to the list and saying it could lead to increased discrimination against American Muslims.
The CAIR brief charges that "The Fifth Amendment was violated because the public naming of the unindicted co-conspirators damaged their reputation, good name, and economic well-being, without offering a forum for vindication, and without a legitimate governmental reason for doing so. The First Amendment was violated because the governmental action of publicly naming the unindicted co-conspirators chilled the expressive associational activities of the unindicted co-conspirators and the government does not have a substantially related compelling interest for their action"
It said the practice of naming unindicted co-conspirators should be proscribed from the outset. "Such a practice should be per se unconstitutional, because once the government publicizes the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, the damage to their reputations, economic well-being, and expressive associations is done. . ."
Legal analysts say designating an "unindicted co-conspirator" makes it easier for the government to gain access to their records.
Most civil liberties advocates believe that the principal problems with the government's actions against Muslim-oriented charities stem from US law and its application by the government. For example, as David Cole points out, "The use of secret evidence means that the government never has to show that the groups engaged in any illegitimate activities in a publicly transparent way."
He charges that "Under the PATRIOT Act amendments to general-purpose civil forfeitures, which may apply to IEEPA, the government can even offer evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible if a court finds that complying with the Federal Rules of Evidence would jeopardize national security, and deems the evidence 'reliable'."
In shutting down Muslim charities in United States, he says, the government "invokes an obscure administrative regime that allows it to bypass the criminal process altogether. Under IEEPA, the president has unilaterally banned all transactions with the charities, frozen millions of dollars, and effectively closed them down, all without a criminal conviction, a criminal charge, or even an administrative hearing."
OMB Watch agrees. "Shutting down an organization does not require formal determination of wrongdoing. It requires a single piece of paper, signed by a midlevel government official. Although in practice a number of agencies typically review and agree to the action, there is no formal administrative process, let alone any adjudication of guilt," it asserts.
Cole and many other civil liberties advocates are calling for changes in the enabling legislation when Congress returns from its August recess next week.
But most Congress-watchers believe that Republicans are likely to stand with the Bush Administration on this issue. And they say that Democrats do not see the issue as any kind of vote-winner as the 2008 elections approach, and are fearful that any perceived support of American Muslims will cast them as being "soft on terrorism."
As for American Muslims, awaiting the start of Ramadan, their charitable giving dilemma is summed up by Anwar Kazmi, the owner of a software business in the Boston area.
"We're taught that this is not even our money; God has given you things and others have a share in what you have. If you don't give, it's like saying, 'I'm not going to pray'. "
END
As the mid-September Ramadan fast approaches, many American Muslims are in a quandary about how to fulfill their Quranic obligation to contribute to charity - since the US government has closed down and frozen the assets of many of the leading philanthropies that have traditionally championed Muslim causes for providing material support" to terrorist organizations.
Under current US law, the simple act of writing a check to a charity that is on a government watch list could result in a prosecution for supporting terrorist activity - even if the donor is unaware of the charity's designation by the government.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has shut down dozens of Muslim-oriented charitable organizations and frozen millions of dollars of contributions, which languish in US banks. But criminal charges have been brought against only one such organization, The Holy Land Foundation, currently on trial in Dallas. The group was shut down and its assets confiscated in 2001 but the government did not file formal charges until 2004, and the trial did not begin until 2007.
Civil liberties advocates and many legal analysts are calling for changes in the three basic laws that give the government "blank check" authority to target Muslim-oriented charities with virtually no due process for the accused.
One of them, the Georgetown Law Center's David Cole, a widely respected Constitutional scholar, charges that "With our return to a 'preventive paradigm' of preemptively weeding out threats to national security, guilt by association has been resurrected from the McCarthy era. While it was illegal in the 1950s to be a member of the Communist Party, it is now a crime to support an individual or organization on a terror watch list, although the government can designate and freeze assets without a showing of actual ties to terrorism or illegal acts."
His view is shared by many other civil rights advocates and organizations. For example, Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA told Truthout, "This is another example of the Bush administration's abuse of power, in this case by using executive orders to skirt established time-tested laws. With the legal process sidetracked by Bush's make-it-up-as-you-go system of prosecution in the war on terror, we may never know whether due cause was established in these cases."
She added, "Ironically, the Bush administration keeps talking about spreading democracy and the rule of law to other parts of the world, while at the same time eroding those same principles here at home."
Kay Guinane, director of Nonprofit Speech Rights for OMB Watch, a not-for-profit government watchdog, says, "The real tragedy behind closure of Muslim charities is the fate of people in need of humanitarian assistance, who are doing without because the funds have been frozen by the US and sit in the bank, benefiting no one."
OMB Watch asserts that such treatment of Muslim charities hurts, not helps, the war on terrorism. "With Muslim-Americans already facing post-9/11 suspicion and bias, both from other Americans and from the government, targeting Muslim charities sends an ugly message: The message that the government is selectively targeting Muslim charities."
And the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, believes there is "nothing much to show" for the government actions against Muslim-oriented charities. According to Dan Mitchell, Heritage's Senior Fellow in Political Economy, the anti-terrorist financing campaign has cost the private sector billions of dollars and has entailed a sweeping invasion of privacy, yet there is "nothing much to show for it."
The government's approach,he says, "defies common sense and has turned the traditional approach to law enforcement upside down." To this end, he says,
the FBI has not been able to develop a financial profile of a terrorist that
was any different from a regular banking customer. In the absence of a way
to target our efforts, the government is overwhelmed with data it cannot use and the banking sector has effectively been "looking for a needle in a haystack."
"Short of reading people's minds," he says, "there is no way to systematically track down terrorists or terrorist financing sources this way, and pursuing such a strategy is a waste of valuable resources."
According to David Cole, there are three main statutory regimes now being employed by the government to combat terrorism - and he says all of them are deeply flawed.
They are:
The USA PATRIOT Act Executive Order 13224, which makes it a crime to provide "material support" to an individual or organization on a terror watch list. These watch lists are prepared by the Secretary of State. There is no provision for notifying those being listed. According to Cole, "Material support has been interpreted loosely to include, for example, peacemaking assistance to a group such as the Kurdistan Workers Party or a link on a website, which resulted in the arrest of one individual." This statute, he argues, effectively circumvents due process, which is conspicuously absent from the process of designation."
The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which was originally designed for embargoes. During the Clinton administration, the government started using it for anti-terrorist purposes, putting "embargoes" on political groups or individuals under suspicion. According to Cole, "In the absence of a hearing or notification of charges, this is a violation of due process."
Immigration Law, says Cole, is the third weapon used by the government. "An immigrant cannot support any group that has threatened to use a weapon. Because this law is retroactive, even support for an organization such as the African National Congress that was legal at the time is an offense that could lead to deportation," he asserts.
Cole, who is currently litigating several cases challenging the material support laws, told Truthout, "What is needed is a requirement that the government show that a supporter intends to support the group's terrorist activities. Without such a requirement, the statute imposes guilt by association. There are also big problems with the procedures by which groups get designated, which afford virtually no process to designated groups."
The exact extent of charitable giving among American Muslims is as imprecise as the number of Muslims living in the US - estimates range from a million adults to seven million adults and children. But for all of them, the tradition of charity, referred to in Islam as Zakat, is a Muslim pillar of faith and thus a religious obligation. At peak times of giving, such as at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting, Muslims throughout the world contribute to the poorest and neediest.
Where they will direct their contributions during this Ramadan remains unclear.
Arguably the Holy Land case is the highest-profile of the government's moves against charities -- President Bush personally announced the freezing of Holy Land's assets. HLF was the largest Muslim-American humanitarian organization, providing assistance overseas with an annual budget of close to $12 million. HLF provided services in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Kosovo, Chechnya, and elsewhere. To the average Muslim living in the US, HLF was a trusted name.
But on December 4, 2001, HLF was designated under IEEPA as a terrorist organization because, the government alleged, they were providing assistance to Hamas in the Occupied Territories. The government seized more than $5 million in HLF assets, and all of its records.
The case against HLF primarily revolves around donations to various charity (Zakat) committees throughout the West Bank and Gaza. These committees consist of members of the local Palestinian community and include individuals of various sociopolitical affiliations. Other non-Muslim organizations in the US and elsewhere also fund projects through Zakat committees because, they say, these groups provide an efficient means of disbursing assistance to humanitarian projects.
In the Dallas courtroom, prosecutors and HLF defense lawyers have clashed over whether jurors should see documents that Israeli soldiers seized during raids of Palestinian organizations.
In what could be a 'first' in the US legal system, two Israeli agents testified using pseudonyms that HLF was part of a global network of organizations that raised money from Muslims throughout the world and funneled it to Hamas.
Prosecutors believe the documents seized by Israeli soldiers show that HLF leaders knew they were sending millions of dollars to groups controlled by Hamas.
Defense attorneys have tried to cast doubt on the authenticity and significance of the documents, which included pamphlets, brochures and posters that are presumably pro-Hamas. Prosecutors said documents seized from the security offices of the Palestinian Authority contained information on Hamas' funding, including from Holy Land. Defense lawyers suggested that the evidence did not meet the standards for trial in a US court.
OMB Watch says the HLF prosecution has provided a glimpse into the government's use of evidence to justify seizure and freezing of charitable assets in the name of the war of terrorism. It charges that the case appears to depend on questionable foreign intelligence information and faulty translations.
Prior to the start of the jury trial, HLF brought a civil lawsuit against the government, seeking to overturn the terrorist designation. It was unsuccessful, principally because the appeals court refused to allow review of the Treasury Department's evidence and HLF being unable to present evidence on its own behalf.
In July 2004, HLF requested an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General, alleging the FBI used erroneous translations of sensitive Israeli intelligence material as the crux of its case. But later the same day, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against HLF and its seven top officials, charging them with money laundering and providing material support to Hamas.
In pre-trial filings in the criminal case, the prosecution disclosed it has 21 binders with over 8,000 pages of Israeli intelligence information, according to the Los Angeles Times, which noted that the Israeli government effectively controls what prosecutors can reveal to the public.
In a major error, 14 volumes of classified material were released to defense attorneys by mistake, and the judge refused the prosecution's motion to compel return of the documents. Instead, they now sit in the judge's office. While defense attorneys are forbidden from commenting on the contents of the files, the Dallas Morning News reported that "the information bolstered their case."
The FBI documents rely on the Israeli material to establish two claims central to the prosecution: grants were made to local charities that support Hamas, and funds were earmarked for families of suicide bombers. But none of the local charities named in the indictment have been designated as supporters of terrorism by the Treasury or State Departments.
The FBI claim is apparently based on a Bureau memo quoting the manager of HLF's Jerusalem office as saying the money was "channeled to Hamas." However, HLF attorneys say the Arabic to Hebrew to English translation should correctly say there is "no connection."
The indictment also claims that funds were earmarked for families of suicide bombers, but HLF's defenders say the allegations are based on faulty translations and incorrect use of the term "martyr." In the Middle East, defense attorneys explain, the term "martyr" refers to a broad category of people who die an early and unnatural death, not just suicide bombers.
In a related development, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the HLF prosecution, asked the court to remove the Washington-based group's name, and those of several hundred other similarly named Muslim individuals and institutions.
And the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys wrote to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales objecting to the list and saying it could lead to increased discrimination against American Muslims.
The CAIR brief charges that "The Fifth Amendment was violated because the public naming of the unindicted co-conspirators damaged their reputation, good name, and economic well-being, without offering a forum for vindication, and without a legitimate governmental reason for doing so. The First Amendment was violated because the governmental action of publicly naming the unindicted co-conspirators chilled the expressive associational activities of the unindicted co-conspirators and the government does not have a substantially related compelling interest for their action"
It said the practice of naming unindicted co-conspirators should be proscribed from the outset. "Such a practice should be per se unconstitutional, because once the government publicizes the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, the damage to their reputations, economic well-being, and expressive associations is done. . ."
Legal analysts say designating an "unindicted co-conspirator" makes it easier for the government to gain access to their records.
Most civil liberties advocates believe that the principal problems with the government's actions against Muslim-oriented charities stem from US law and its application by the government. For example, as David Cole points out, "The use of secret evidence means that the government never has to show that the groups engaged in any illegitimate activities in a publicly transparent way."
He charges that "Under the PATRIOT Act amendments to general-purpose civil forfeitures, which may apply to IEEPA, the government can even offer evidence that would otherwise be inadmissible if a court finds that complying with the Federal Rules of Evidence would jeopardize national security, and deems the evidence 'reliable'."
In shutting down Muslim charities in United States, he says, the government "invokes an obscure administrative regime that allows it to bypass the criminal process altogether. Under IEEPA, the president has unilaterally banned all transactions with the charities, frozen millions of dollars, and effectively closed them down, all without a criminal conviction, a criminal charge, or even an administrative hearing."
OMB Watch agrees. "Shutting down an organization does not require formal determination of wrongdoing. It requires a single piece of paper, signed by a midlevel government official. Although in practice a number of agencies typically review and agree to the action, there is no formal administrative process, let alone any adjudication of guilt," it asserts.
Cole and many other civil liberties advocates are calling for changes in the enabling legislation when Congress returns from its August recess next week.
But most Congress-watchers believe that Republicans are likely to stand with the Bush Administration on this issue. And they say that Democrats do not see the issue as any kind of vote-winner as the 2008 elections approach, and are fearful that any perceived support of American Muslims will cast them as being "soft on terrorism."
As for American Muslims, awaiting the start of Ramadan, their charitable giving dilemma is summed up by Anwar Kazmi, the owner of a software business in the Boston area.
"We're taught that this is not even our money; God has given you things and others have a share in what you have. If you don't give, it's like saying, 'I'm not going to pray'. "
END
Friday, August 24, 2007
BUSH'S G.W.O.T. TACTICS MAKE AMERICA LESS SAFE, LESS FREE
By William Fisher
The Constitutional scholars who represented extraordinary rendition victim Maher Arar charge that America is losing the war on terrorism and the civil rights of its citizens because of Bush Administration policies.
In a new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror," law professors David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the problem lies in the aggressive "preventive paradigm" the Bush administration adopted in the wake of 9/11.
The authors note that the Bush administration "is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11, but they ask, "Has the administration's 'war on terror' actually made us safer?"
Their answer: "While the 'preventive paradigm' can point to few gains in our security, it has come at great cost to our ideals. In the name of preemptive security, the administration has undertaken torture; indefinite detention without trial; extraordinary renditions; disappearances into CIA 'black sites'; warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq."
These measures, they add, "constitute the core of the 'preventive paradigm', and have compromised the most basic commitments of the rule of law. And by doing so they have actually impeded our efforts to bring known terrorists to trial, limited our long-term options for security, sparked anti-American resentment and terrorist recruitment, and undermined relations even with our closest allies."
The authors offer an alternative vision for combating terrorists while preserving the rule of law. Their approach is based on "noncoercive measures and multilateral cooperation, relies on the 'soft power' of foreign relations rather than military might, and recognizes that where coercion is necessary and appropriate, it must adhere to basic legal rules, treating the rule of law as an asset, not an obstacle, in the struggle to keep us safe and free."
In an online interview with Truthout, Cole said, "This book shows that if we are to be safe in the twenty-first century, we need to be smart about counterterrorism, not just act tough. The Bush administration's 'war on terror', by adopting coercive preventive measures, has not only sacrificed some of the deepest commitments of our democracy, but has garnered few terrorists and actually made us less safe. We need to treat the rule of law as an asset, not an obstacle, if we are to avoid creating a problem even bigger than the one we faced on 9/11."
Cole, considered one of the nation's preeminent Constitutional scholars, is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. With other lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, he represents Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was rendered to Syria where he was tortured. He is also working with Arab and Muslim foreign nationals rounded up and abused in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and is currently challenging the constitutionality of the laws making it a crime to provide "material support" to groups designated as terrorists.
David Lobel, a CCR vice-president, is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He also represents Arar, has consulted on Guantanamo Bay cases, and has worked with American servicemen challenging the army's unilateral extension of their contracts.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born, Canadian citizen, was detained during a layover at JFK International airport in September 2002, on his way home to his family in Canada. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly two weeks, interrogated, and denied access to a lawyer. The Bush administration labeled him a member of Al Qaeda, and rendered him, not to Canada, his home and country of citizenship, but to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture.
Arar sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and then-Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, as well as numerous US immigration officials. His case was dismissed when the government invoked the 'state secrets' privilege, contending that hearing the case in open court would compromise US national security. His case was dismissed and is currently being appealed.
In September 2006, after a two-year probe, the Commission of Inquiry established by the Canadian Government to "Investigate the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Mr. Arar" concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada." Canadian investigators, with US cooperation, exhaustively investigated Arar and found no information that could implicate him in terrorist activities. The Canadian Government paid him $10 million.
In January 2007, after months of negotiations between the Canadian government and Arar's Canadian legal counsel, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to Arar on behalf of the Canadian government.
Harper released a copy of a letter sent to Arar, apologizing "for any role Canadian officials may have played in what happened to Mr. Arar, Monia Mazigh and their family...."
Despite the inquiry's exoneration of Arar, the United States has also refused to remove Arar from its watchlist.He now lives in British Columbia.
Harper again called on Washington to remove Maher Arar from its no-fly and terrorist watch lists. He reiterated that Canada would keep pressing the United States to clear Arar's name.
Authors Cole and Lobel say their new book represents the first comprehensive review of the administration's record in fighting terrorism. They argue that 'preemptive coercion' "has not only compromised our most basic values, but has little to show in terms of captured terrorists, disrupted terrorist plots, or increased security."
They cite the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that al Qaeda has fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan's border region. "Worldwide terrorist attacks have grown dramatically since 2001. And most experts agree that independent terrorist groups, from al Qaeda in Iraq to the individuals who bombed subways and buses in London and Madrid, have multiplied since 9/11. Meanwhile, despite its boasts, the total number of individuals the Bush administration has convicted of engaging in a terrorist act is one (Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber)."
The authors calculate that the administration's record in its anti-terrorism immigration initiatives after 9/11 is 0 for 93,000.
"These sweeping measures unearthed not a single convicted terrorist," they write, adding, "The administration's record in criminal 'terrorism' cases is not much better, as it has lost far more cases than it has won, and has brought almost no actual terrorists to justice. Similarly, by the government's own account, only about 5 percent of those it has held at Guantanamo were fighters for al Qaeda or the Taliban."
More than half the GITMO detainees former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior US government officials once called "the worst of the worst" have been released. "The administration's preventive war in Iraq has also made the United States more vulnerable to terrorism, not less, as it has prompted the creation of suicidal organizations that did not even exist prior to 9/11 in response to American tactics," the authors say.
"The administration's response to 9/11 has not only compromised fundamental principles of the rule of law, but has actually made America less safe. They have launched an aggressive campaign they call the 'preventive paradigm', started a war that has sacrificed tens of thousands of lives and wasted untold resources, and sacrificed some of our most important liberties, yet they have little or nothing to show for it. Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in Pakistan, independent groups have sprouted up all over the world, and meanwhile the administration has convicted exactly one person for an actual terrorist attempt since 9/11 - Richard Reid, the shoe bomber," Cole and Lobell write.
The 'preventive paradigm', they explain, "is an approach adopted by the administration right after 9/11, and given that name by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. It emphasizes the use of highly coercive measures against people or states not for wrongs they have committed in the past, but on the basis of speculative guesses about what they might do in the future. It has included special registration of Arabs and Muslims, preventive detention, intensive surveillance, coercive interrogation, and a 'preventive war' in Iraq."
"In each instance," they charge, "the administration has argued that the measures must be used before we have strong evidence of wrongdoing. And as a result, the measures have been employed against many who pose no threat at all, and have been remarkably unsuccessful in identifying actual terrorists."
"The Government locked up over 5,000 foreign nationals in preventive detention in the first two years after 9/11, sought out 8,000 Arab and Muslim men for FBI interviews, and called in 80,000 Arab and Muslim foreign nationals for special registration, fingerprinting and photographing. The idea was that we might find a terrorist. But not one of these men has been convicted of a terrorist offense," the authors contend.
The authors say their new book offers "a straightforward common-sense assessment of how we have been doing in what the Bush administration calls the 'war on terror'.
"Particularly with Bush leaving office and a campaign for a new president in full swing, it's important that we look at how the administration's 'preventive paradigm' has worked," they say.
"And we think it's particularly important to address that question from two angles - what it has done to the principles for which this country stands at its best, and what it has meant for US security. We argue that the tactic of using coercive government measures 'preventively', based not on proven past wrongdoing but speculation about future threats, has led us to compromise the most basic principles of the rule of law - equality, fair procedures, checks and balances, and the like."
At the same time, they add, the book shows that these sacrifices have not netted much if any benefit from a security standpoint. "It has netted few real terrorists and disrupted few real plots. What's worse, it has backfired, as measures such as coercive interrogation, disappearances into secret CIA prisons, indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, and preventive war have sparked unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism worldwide, thereby increasing the likelihood that we will be attacked again."
The book argues that "one can be 'preventive' without using harsh measures like preventive detention, coercive interrogation, and preventive war. The rule of law permits a nation to do much to protect itself while staying true to principles of justice and equality. Measures such as safeguarding nuclear stockpiles around the world, outfitting first responders, protecting vulnerable infrastructure, and screening cargo and passengers more carefully have the potential to offer substantial protection, without the sacrifices in principle that the Bush administration's approach has entailed - and without the backlash that has followed."
The Constitutional scholars who represented extraordinary rendition victim Maher Arar charge that America is losing the war on terrorism and the civil rights of its citizens because of Bush Administration policies.
In a new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror," law professors David Cole and Jules Lobel argue that the problem lies in the aggressive "preventive paradigm" the Bush administration adopted in the wake of 9/11.
The authors note that the Bush administration "is fond of reminding us that no terrorist attacks have occurred on domestic soil since 9/11, but they ask, "Has the administration's 'war on terror' actually made us safer?"
Their answer: "While the 'preventive paradigm' can point to few gains in our security, it has come at great cost to our ideals. In the name of preemptive security, the administration has undertaken torture; indefinite detention without trial; extraordinary renditions; disappearances into CIA 'black sites'; warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, and an illegal and disastrous war in Iraq."
These measures, they add, "constitute the core of the 'preventive paradigm', and have compromised the most basic commitments of the rule of law. And by doing so they have actually impeded our efforts to bring known terrorists to trial, limited our long-term options for security, sparked anti-American resentment and terrorist recruitment, and undermined relations even with our closest allies."
The authors offer an alternative vision for combating terrorists while preserving the rule of law. Their approach is based on "noncoercive measures and multilateral cooperation, relies on the 'soft power' of foreign relations rather than military might, and recognizes that where coercion is necessary and appropriate, it must adhere to basic legal rules, treating the rule of law as an asset, not an obstacle, in the struggle to keep us safe and free."
In an online interview with Truthout, Cole said, "This book shows that if we are to be safe in the twenty-first century, we need to be smart about counterterrorism, not just act tough. The Bush administration's 'war on terror', by adopting coercive preventive measures, has not only sacrificed some of the deepest commitments of our democracy, but has garnered few terrorists and actually made us less safe. We need to treat the rule of law as an asset, not an obstacle, if we are to avoid creating a problem even bigger than the one we faced on 9/11."
Cole, considered one of the nation's preeminent Constitutional scholars, is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. With other lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, he represents Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen who was rendered to Syria where he was tortured. He is also working with Arab and Muslim foreign nationals rounded up and abused in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and is currently challenging the constitutionality of the laws making it a crime to provide "material support" to groups designated as terrorists.
David Lobel, a CCR vice-president, is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He also represents Arar, has consulted on Guantanamo Bay cases, and has worked with American servicemen challenging the army's unilateral extension of their contracts.
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born, Canadian citizen, was detained during a layover at JFK International airport in September 2002, on his way home to his family in Canada. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly two weeks, interrogated, and denied access to a lawyer. The Bush administration labeled him a member of Al Qaeda, and rendered him, not to Canada, his home and country of citizenship, but to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture.
Arar sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and then-Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, as well as numerous US immigration officials. His case was dismissed when the government invoked the 'state secrets' privilege, contending that hearing the case in open court would compromise US national security. His case was dismissed and is currently being appealed.
In September 2006, after a two-year probe, the Commission of Inquiry established by the Canadian Government to "Investigate the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Mr. Arar" concluded "categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada." Canadian investigators, with US cooperation, exhaustively investigated Arar and found no information that could implicate him in terrorist activities. The Canadian Government paid him $10 million.
In January 2007, after months of negotiations between the Canadian government and Arar's Canadian legal counsel, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology to Arar on behalf of the Canadian government.
Harper released a copy of a letter sent to Arar, apologizing "for any role Canadian officials may have played in what happened to Mr. Arar, Monia Mazigh and their family...."
Despite the inquiry's exoneration of Arar, the United States has also refused to remove Arar from its watchlist.He now lives in British Columbia.
Harper again called on Washington to remove Maher Arar from its no-fly and terrorist watch lists. He reiterated that Canada would keep pressing the United States to clear Arar's name.
Authors Cole and Lobel say their new book represents the first comprehensive review of the administration's record in fighting terrorism. They argue that 'preemptive coercion' "has not only compromised our most basic values, but has little to show in terms of captured terrorists, disrupted terrorist plots, or increased security."
They cite the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, which found that al Qaeda has fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan's border region. "Worldwide terrorist attacks have grown dramatically since 2001. And most experts agree that independent terrorist groups, from al Qaeda in Iraq to the individuals who bombed subways and buses in London and Madrid, have multiplied since 9/11. Meanwhile, despite its boasts, the total number of individuals the Bush administration has convicted of engaging in a terrorist act is one (Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber)."
The authors calculate that the administration's record in its anti-terrorism immigration initiatives after 9/11 is 0 for 93,000.
"These sweeping measures unearthed not a single convicted terrorist," they write, adding, "The administration's record in criminal 'terrorism' cases is not much better, as it has lost far more cases than it has won, and has brought almost no actual terrorists to justice. Similarly, by the government's own account, only about 5 percent of those it has held at Guantanamo were fighters for al Qaeda or the Taliban."
More than half the GITMO detainees former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior US government officials once called "the worst of the worst" have been released. "The administration's preventive war in Iraq has also made the United States more vulnerable to terrorism, not less, as it has prompted the creation of suicidal organizations that did not even exist prior to 9/11 in response to American tactics," the authors say.
"The administration's response to 9/11 has not only compromised fundamental principles of the rule of law, but has actually made America less safe. They have launched an aggressive campaign they call the 'preventive paradigm', started a war that has sacrificed tens of thousands of lives and wasted untold resources, and sacrificed some of our most important liberties, yet they have little or nothing to show for it. Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself in Pakistan, independent groups have sprouted up all over the world, and meanwhile the administration has convicted exactly one person for an actual terrorist attempt since 9/11 - Richard Reid, the shoe bomber," Cole and Lobell write.
The 'preventive paradigm', they explain, "is an approach adopted by the administration right after 9/11, and given that name by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft. It emphasizes the use of highly coercive measures against people or states not for wrongs they have committed in the past, but on the basis of speculative guesses about what they might do in the future. It has included special registration of Arabs and Muslims, preventive detention, intensive surveillance, coercive interrogation, and a 'preventive war' in Iraq."
"In each instance," they charge, "the administration has argued that the measures must be used before we have strong evidence of wrongdoing. And as a result, the measures have been employed against many who pose no threat at all, and have been remarkably unsuccessful in identifying actual terrorists."
"The Government locked up over 5,000 foreign nationals in preventive detention in the first two years after 9/11, sought out 8,000 Arab and Muslim men for FBI interviews, and called in 80,000 Arab and Muslim foreign nationals for special registration, fingerprinting and photographing. The idea was that we might find a terrorist. But not one of these men has been convicted of a terrorist offense," the authors contend.
The authors say their new book offers "a straightforward common-sense assessment of how we have been doing in what the Bush administration calls the 'war on terror'.
"Particularly with Bush leaving office and a campaign for a new president in full swing, it's important that we look at how the administration's 'preventive paradigm' has worked," they say.
"And we think it's particularly important to address that question from two angles - what it has done to the principles for which this country stands at its best, and what it has meant for US security. We argue that the tactic of using coercive government measures 'preventively', based not on proven past wrongdoing but speculation about future threats, has led us to compromise the most basic principles of the rule of law - equality, fair procedures, checks and balances, and the like."
At the same time, they add, the book shows that these sacrifices have not netted much if any benefit from a security standpoint. "It has netted few real terrorists and disrupted few real plots. What's worse, it has backfired, as measures such as coercive interrogation, disappearances into secret CIA prisons, indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo, and preventive war have sparked unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism worldwide, thereby increasing the likelihood that we will be attacked again."
The book argues that "one can be 'preventive' without using harsh measures like preventive detention, coercive interrogation, and preventive war. The rule of law permits a nation to do much to protect itself while staying true to principles of justice and equality. Measures such as safeguarding nuclear stockpiles around the world, outfitting first responders, protecting vulnerable infrastructure, and screening cargo and passengers more carefully have the potential to offer substantial protection, without the sacrifices in principle that the Bush administration's approach has entailed - and without the backlash that has followed."
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
EX-STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL SLAMS US PUBLIC DIPLOMACY CZARINA
By William Fisher
A senior State Department official who resigned in 2003 to protest the American invasion of Iraq is charging that the public diplomacy efforts of Bush confidante Karen Hughes have been in place for many years, are failing to win hearts and minds overseas, and are causing US diplomats to “feel like second-class citizens at the State Department.”
John Brown, now a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, tells Truthout he finds much of the recent praise afforded Ms. Hughes misinformed and exaggerated.
For example, Brown points out that much of America’s best public diplomacy work has always been carried out by diplomats in US Embassies around the world. But today, he says, “public diplomacy officers overseas feel hampered by security requirements that limit their ability to be in touch and communicate with local audiences. Some of these security concerns may be legitimate, but they can be Washington-driven rather than determined by a real assessment of the local situation.”
Brown adds, “PD work is often not taken as seriously as it should by other elements in the Embassy ‘country team’ that consider outreach to host-country nationals in media, academic, and artistic circles, only a secondary aspect of a US diplomatic mission's work, such as reporting to Washington or assistance to American citizens overseas.”
His recommendation: “Bureaucratically, PD officers overseas should be given far greater flexibility and budgets to carry out their work. Ms. Hughes likes to announce one ‘new initiative’ after another that make her and the administration look good (she thinks), but what could make a difference (short of Bush policy changes, which of course is the most important factor in making US PD respectable) is the empowerment of our PD diplomats abroad so that they truly can ‘engage, inform and influence’ the best and the brightest in the countries where they are posted.”
Brown, a Princeton PhD, joined the Foreign Service in 1981 and served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. His diplomatic work focused on press and cultural affairs.
In 2003, Brown resigned from the State Department to protest the Iraq invasion. He wrote to then Secretary of State Colin Powell: “I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq." He said the President “has failed to explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration.”
“Throughout the globe,” he wrote, “the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century.”
Brown takes issue with a number of recent assessments of Ms. Hughes’s work.
For example, he disagrees with the claim of foreign affairs analyst Nicholas Kralev who, writing in the Washington Times, said Hughes was “more aware of the nuances of US foreign policy, was strongly supportive of educational exchanges, had incorporated public diplomacy into the ‘consciousness’ of the State Department, and was streamlining the bureaucracy ‘to handle public diplomacy issues more efficiently’.”
On the contrary, Brown asserts, public diplomacy experts in US embassies abroad have been made to “feel like second-class citizens at the State Department.”
Similarly, Brown questions why Hughes is being credited with increasing foreign exchange programs. “Educational exchanges have existed for decades. And Bush's policies -- particularly in Iraq -- make Hughes's PD efforts appear hypocritical and propagandistic to overseas audiences. Put simply, in Iraq and elsewhere, we do not practice what we preach in our PD declarations about the need for mutual understanding, communication, and ‘listening to others’."
He says, “It's become quite fashionable to compare 21st century America with the Roman Empire. Like the Romans or not, at least they could not be accused of hypocrisy. They came, they saw, they conquered -- without blabbing on and on about the need for ‘mutual understanding’."
Hughes, a former Texas TV reporter and a key Bush Administration insider, was appointed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 2005.
She said recently, “For the first time, public diplomacy was recognized as a national security priority, and we got $50 million in the emergency supplemental. … we were able to show from our initial survey data that 87% of participants in our programs have a better understanding of the United States and 73% have more favorable attitudes toward our country as a result of their participation. …So we've really expanded our exchange programs. When I came, the year before I arrived, we had 27,000 people participate. This year we'll have almost 40,000. And I'm working on a budget where we're hoping to [increase participants] to more than 50,000. I've been an advocate for increasing the public diplomacy budget, and it has increased substantially since I've been here, from $677 million to $845 million…Last year we issued a record number of student visas, I think 591,000.”
Brown says, “I would love for someone with access to the proper records to check on the accuracy of these statistics.”
He also takes issue with William Rugh, who was ambassador to Yemen
from 1984 to 1987 and ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 1992 to 1995. Writing in the Baltimore Sun last month, Rugh said Hughes had been unfairly criticized and asserted she was making “quiet progress.”
Rugh wrote:
"First, the undersecretary of state does not control the half of the traditional public diplomacy budget that goes for broadcasting (it is >under an independent board) or the Pentagon's huge information effort in Iraq and elsewhere.
“Second, 'public diplomacy' is not a panacea. Misinformation is widespread in
this world of 24/7 global chatter, and public diplomacy can help bring facts and reasoning into the ongoing discussion. But it alone cannot remake America's image abroad -- an image that is formed primarily by our policies and actions.
“Third, public diplomacy has not recovered from a decade of neglect when we
won the Cold War and Washington decided it was no longer necessary.
“The fourth reason criticism of Ms. Hughes is unfair is that there are no quick fixes. Public diplomacy includes long-term instruments such as education as well as explanations of policy, and she has taken important steps that will bear fruit in the long run.”
Brown charges that Rugh exaggerates Hughes's accomplishments. “He takes her completely at face value, without asking about her role (for example) in the
White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that led the country into war. He overlooks
many of her missteps, such as her disastrous ‘listening tour’ soon after she assumed her position.”
He asks, “If she is such a close confidante of the President, why hasn't she been able to solve some of the PD problems which (Rugh claims) she inherited?”
He also notes that the so-called “soft-power” programs Ms. Hughes claims credit for have existed for decades. “Whatever budgetary increases she has gotten for them are minimal, if you can trust her statistics. Just compare them with what the Pentagon gets to pay for its bases and golf courses.”
Brown contends that “it is Bush’s policies, not Hughes-propaganda masquerading as educational/cultural exchanges, that have the most impact on what foreign publics think about the United States. And these policies, widely considered overseas as unilateral and militaristic, show a near-total disregard for the opinions of mankind.”
He notes that “Ms. Hughes often speaks of the importance of the ‘diplomacy of deeds’. And indeed, the deeds of this administration tell the world far more about the current US regime than whatever public-diplomacy programs spinstress
Karen claims credit for. What are these deeds? A senseless war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib -- just to name a few of the Bush atrocities that appall -- and kill -- our fellow human beings.”
The bottom line for Brown: “Never mind the polls that show America is more unpopular overseas than ever. After all, in the Bush world they create their own reality, and who cares about aliens who happen to share this planet with us Americans?”
A senior State Department official who resigned in 2003 to protest the American invasion of Iraq is charging that the public diplomacy efforts of Bush confidante Karen Hughes have been in place for many years, are failing to win hearts and minds overseas, and are causing US diplomats to “feel like second-class citizens at the State Department.”
John Brown, now a Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, tells Truthout he finds much of the recent praise afforded Ms. Hughes misinformed and exaggerated.
For example, Brown points out that much of America’s best public diplomacy work has always been carried out by diplomats in US Embassies around the world. But today, he says, “public diplomacy officers overseas feel hampered by security requirements that limit their ability to be in touch and communicate with local audiences. Some of these security concerns may be legitimate, but they can be Washington-driven rather than determined by a real assessment of the local situation.”
Brown adds, “PD work is often not taken as seriously as it should by other elements in the Embassy ‘country team’ that consider outreach to host-country nationals in media, academic, and artistic circles, only a secondary aspect of a US diplomatic mission's work, such as reporting to Washington or assistance to American citizens overseas.”
His recommendation: “Bureaucratically, PD officers overseas should be given far greater flexibility and budgets to carry out their work. Ms. Hughes likes to announce one ‘new initiative’ after another that make her and the administration look good (she thinks), but what could make a difference (short of Bush policy changes, which of course is the most important factor in making US PD respectable) is the empowerment of our PD diplomats abroad so that they truly can ‘engage, inform and influence’ the best and the brightest in the countries where they are posted.”
Brown, a Princeton PhD, joined the Foreign Service in 1981 and served in London, Prague, Krakow, Kiev, Belgrade and Moscow. His diplomatic work focused on press and cultural affairs.
In 2003, Brown resigned from the State Department to protest the Iraq invasion. He wrote to then Secretary of State Colin Powell: “I cannot in good conscience support President Bush's war plans against Iraq." He said the President “has failed to explain clearly why our brave men and women in uniform should be ready to sacrifice their lives in a war on Iraq at this time; to lay out the full ramifications of this war, including the extent of innocent civilian casualties; to specify the economic costs of the war for ordinary Americans; to clarify how the war would help rid the world of terror; to take international public opinion against the war into serious consideration.”
“Throughout the globe,” he wrote, “the United States is becoming associated with the unjustified use of force. The president's disregard for views in other nations, borne out by his neglect of public diplomacy, is giving birth to an anti-American century.”
Brown takes issue with a number of recent assessments of Ms. Hughes’s work.
For example, he disagrees with the claim of foreign affairs analyst Nicholas Kralev who, writing in the Washington Times, said Hughes was “more aware of the nuances of US foreign policy, was strongly supportive of educational exchanges, had incorporated public diplomacy into the ‘consciousness’ of the State Department, and was streamlining the bureaucracy ‘to handle public diplomacy issues more efficiently’.”
On the contrary, Brown asserts, public diplomacy experts in US embassies abroad have been made to “feel like second-class citizens at the State Department.”
Similarly, Brown questions why Hughes is being credited with increasing foreign exchange programs. “Educational exchanges have existed for decades. And Bush's policies -- particularly in Iraq -- make Hughes's PD efforts appear hypocritical and propagandistic to overseas audiences. Put simply, in Iraq and elsewhere, we do not practice what we preach in our PD declarations about the need for mutual understanding, communication, and ‘listening to others’."
He says, “It's become quite fashionable to compare 21st century America with the Roman Empire. Like the Romans or not, at least they could not be accused of hypocrisy. They came, they saw, they conquered -- without blabbing on and on about the need for ‘mutual understanding’."
Hughes, a former Texas TV reporter and a key Bush Administration insider, was appointed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in 2005.
She said recently, “For the first time, public diplomacy was recognized as a national security priority, and we got $50 million in the emergency supplemental. … we were able to show from our initial survey data that 87% of participants in our programs have a better understanding of the United States and 73% have more favorable attitudes toward our country as a result of their participation. …So we've really expanded our exchange programs. When I came, the year before I arrived, we had 27,000 people participate. This year we'll have almost 40,000. And I'm working on a budget where we're hoping to [increase participants] to more than 50,000. I've been an advocate for increasing the public diplomacy budget, and it has increased substantially since I've been here, from $677 million to $845 million…Last year we issued a record number of student visas, I think 591,000.”
Brown says, “I would love for someone with access to the proper records to check on the accuracy of these statistics.”
He also takes issue with William Rugh, who was ambassador to Yemen
from 1984 to 1987 and ambassador to the United Arab Emirates from 1992 to 1995. Writing in the Baltimore Sun last month, Rugh said Hughes had been unfairly criticized and asserted she was making “quiet progress.”
Rugh wrote:
"First, the undersecretary of state does not control the half of the traditional public diplomacy budget that goes for broadcasting (it is >under an independent board) or the Pentagon's huge information effort in Iraq and elsewhere.
“Second, 'public diplomacy' is not a panacea. Misinformation is widespread in
this world of 24/7 global chatter, and public diplomacy can help bring facts and reasoning into the ongoing discussion. But it alone cannot remake America's image abroad -- an image that is formed primarily by our policies and actions.
“Third, public diplomacy has not recovered from a decade of neglect when we
won the Cold War and Washington decided it was no longer necessary.
“The fourth reason criticism of Ms. Hughes is unfair is that there are no quick fixes. Public diplomacy includes long-term instruments such as education as well as explanations of policy, and she has taken important steps that will bear fruit in the long run.”
Brown charges that Rugh exaggerates Hughes's accomplishments. “He takes her completely at face value, without asking about her role (for example) in the
White House Iraq Group (WHIG) that led the country into war. He overlooks
many of her missteps, such as her disastrous ‘listening tour’ soon after she assumed her position.”
He asks, “If she is such a close confidante of the President, why hasn't she been able to solve some of the PD problems which (Rugh claims) she inherited?”
He also notes that the so-called “soft-power” programs Ms. Hughes claims credit for have existed for decades. “Whatever budgetary increases she has gotten for them are minimal, if you can trust her statistics. Just compare them with what the Pentagon gets to pay for its bases and golf courses.”
Brown contends that “it is Bush’s policies, not Hughes-propaganda masquerading as educational/cultural exchanges, that have the most impact on what foreign publics think about the United States. And these policies, widely considered overseas as unilateral and militaristic, show a near-total disregard for the opinions of mankind.”
He notes that “Ms. Hughes often speaks of the importance of the ‘diplomacy of deeds’. And indeed, the deeds of this administration tell the world far more about the current US regime than whatever public-diplomacy programs spinstress
Karen claims credit for. What are these deeds? A senseless war in Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib -- just to name a few of the Bush atrocities that appall -- and kill -- our fellow human beings.”
The bottom line for Brown: “Never mind the polls that show America is more unpopular overseas than ever. After all, in the Bush world they create their own reality, and who cares about aliens who happen to share this planet with us Americans?”
Saturday, August 18, 2007
NATION'S EDITORIAL WRITERS LARGELY IGNORE PADILLA VERDICT
By William Fisher
The conviction of Jose Padilla - whose larger implications are being labeled by legal experts as one of today's most significant Constitutional issues - has been largely ignored by editorial writers at the nation's newspapers.
While hundreds of US dailies ran the story of the guilty verdict handed down against the Brooklyn-born "dirty bomber" last week, few front-paged the conviction, and the trial and its outcome drew editorial comment from only a relative handful of publications.
Among the exceptions was a small number of the naton's 1,400-plus newspapers that have consistently opposed the Bush Administration's approach to the "global war on terror" - and a few that have been staunch supporters of that approach.
Yet virtually all Constitutional scholars and civil liberties advocates remain outraged that a US citizen was held virtually incommunicado in a navy brig for years before getting his day in court.
While few express any support for Padilla, most view his case as raising critical issues that go far beyond his three-month Miami trial.
Their issues range from questioning the authority of the president to declare anyone, including a US citizen, an unlawful enemy combatant; the Constitution's guarantee of a speedy trial and the right to confront one's accusers; Padilla's capacity to participate in his own defense after allegedly being abused while being held in solitary confinement for more than three years; and the legality of the concept of prolonged "preventive detention."
Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty USA, summed up the position of much of the civil liberties community. Padilla's trial, he said, "failed to address a key issue which poses a great threat to all Americans -- detention of a US citizen without charge, as well as alleged torture and ill-treatment during detention."
He added, the jury's verdict "cannot be seen as an endorsement of a regime of unreviewable executive detention. President Bush should not take today's ruling as permission to continue to hold Americans outside the law at his whim."
The Padilla story began in May 2002, when he stepped off a plane in Chicago and was met by federal agents armed with a material witness warrant, which enabled them to arrest him without a criminal charge.
Padilla spent a month in a jail in New York on that warrant, until President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, sparking a lengthy Legal battle over presidential powers to detain US citizens indefinitely.
During that period, then Attorney General John Ashcroft hastily called a news conference during a visit to Moscow to announce Padilla's arrest and his intention to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a major US city and to blow up apartment buildings.
Padilla was then transferred to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he was held incommunicado, refused access to a lawyer, and allegedly tortured. He was not charged with a crime or afforded basic constitutional rights until late 2005, when the Supreme Court was poised to consider his appeal.
His three-month trial opened in Broward County, where Padilla once lived. The 36-year-old and two co-defendants were quickly found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people, as well as providing material support to terrorists. Between his arrest and his trial, the "dirty bomb" allegation disappeared. Unless his conviction is reversed on appeal, Padilla faces life imprisonment.
Padilla's conviction "is a significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters,'' Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement. "As this trial demonstrated, we will use our authority as prosecutors to dismantle terrorist networks and those who support them in the United States and abroad.''
During the period when Ashcroft and other Bush Administration officials were trumpeting the "dirty bomb" charges, some of the nation's editorial writers became cheerleaders for the Bush Administration's approach to counter-terrorism.
But most - with a few exceptions -- have been silent on the Padilla verdict. One of the exceptions is the Charleston S.C. Evening Post, which hailed the verdict as a "Double Victory" and a "resounding vindication of the Bush Administration's policy of preventing acts of terror."
Said its editorial page, "In May 2002, when Padilla was arrested, the major concern was to prevent another attack. Padilla wanted to carry out murder and mayhem on a similar scale of horror to 9/11. He was prevented from doing so and had his day in court. Score a victory for counter-terrorism and for American justice."
But most of the few newspapers that editorialized on the verdict took another view. Typical was the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald Tribune, which wrote, "Military courts have their place, and foreigners are not entitled to all the protections of US citizens. But Padilla was born in America and arrested on US soil. His case belonged in the US courts, where prosecutors finally demonstrated that they did, in fact, have a case against him."
Other Florida newspapers also weighed in editorially. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel opined, "There shouldn't be any displeasure that Jose Padilla was found guilty in a Miami courtroom of supporting terrorism. The speed in which the verdict was returned indicates the jury was convinced of his guilt. But there should be plenty of concern about how the entire case was mishandled by the federal government, and the Bush administration, which has its own definition of citizen rights and protections. It is hard for anyone to feel good about the way this case went forward.
"Some critics of Bush's strategy say the nation should rely less on military might to fight terrorism and focus more on tracking down al-Qaida and other groups through criminal investigations. The Padilla case indicated that charges against American citizens, at least, can be successfully prosecuted in civilian courts without resorting to secret military tribunals."
And the Daytona Beach News-Journal, an aggressively anti-Bush daily, said in an editorial entitled "Jose Padilla verdict masks a gross travesty", "A jury in Miami took less than two days to find Jose Padilla guilty of conspiracy to fund and support Islamic terrorism abroad. It's not quite the end of the story, if rights and due process are to matter at all in America.
"The Padilla verdict ...coming as it did at the end of a five-year odyssey of exaggerated accusations and stunning abuses of power against an American citizen, speaks more of the Bush administration's manipulation of fears, facts and prejudices to deceptive ends than of justice done. Why should this case matter to you? Because the abuses it entailed along the way have yet to be rectified either by Congress or the Supreme Court. Until then, what happened to Padilla can happen to anyone."
Nearby, the Palm Beach Post's editorial -- "Arbitrary Justice" -- oncluded: "Guilty, the right way." Meaning, in a civilian court.
Elsewhere, editorial coverage was arguably more predictable.
Said The New York Times, "It is hard to disagree with the jury's guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration's serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of - conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas - bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases."
A similar note was struck by The Washington Post, which wrote, "Every person held by the government -- US citizen or not -- must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that US citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Mr. Padilla's abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated."
A somewhat different theme appeared in the Los Angeles Times. "Padilla's importance is in what it sanctions but did not decide: the government's confinement of US citizens without charges. Padilla's military detention and his treatment while detained may in fact have been unlawful. The Bush administration's real victory, then, was in preventing the courts from saying so."
Said The Baltimore Sun, "Jose Padilla was a petty criminal who found Islam in an American prison and thought that in jihad he could amount to something. He didn't: One government intelligence report suggests that the idea of a dirty bomb was a ruse to allow him to get away from the al-Qaida camp where he was staying. He's pathetic, actually. Yet because of someone like this, the Bush administration was willing to junk the Constitution and redefine the legal system as it saw fit. That's the real crime."
And the widely respected Christian Science Monitor wrote, "America can't win a global war to defend its values by stepping on them...One protection from Islamic terrorists lies in clinging to the civic virtues that terrorists seek to end. Such values are a source of safety and should not be eroded in trying to kill, capture - or prosecute - suspected terrorists. One of America's strengths in this war lies in being able to rally other nations to its side by upholding universal principles. That same strength also weakens terrorists."
Editorial writers will doubtless have another chance to weigh in on the issues raised by the Padilla prosecution - as he appeals his conviction.
According to Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, there are numerous avenues for appeal. She told Truthout, "The appeals court erred in upholding the government's authority to imprison a US citizen for several years without charges. The government violated Padilla's due process rights by failing to bring timely charges against him. Finally, Padilla's lawyers' motion to declare him incompetent to stand trial because of the torture and abuse to which the government subjected him during his pretrial detention was wrongly denied. Any of these errors, or all of them cumulatively, could result in reversal of Padilla's convictions on appeal."
But the consensus among civil libertarians is perhaps best summed up by one of the nation's leading Constitutional law experts. According to David Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, "The conviction shows that the government did not need to assert the extraordinary power to detain Padilla without charges for several years. But at the same time, because of how they treated Padilla in detention and others in CIA black sites, the government was never able to bring him to trial on the much more serious charges of plotting a 'dirty bomb' and blowing up apartments in the United States. In essence, the administration gambled that it could get Padilla on something, even if it couldn't hold him responsible for what they say he was planning to do. In this instance, they prevailed. But do we really want the government gambling with our national security?"
Whether editorial writers will opt to try to address that question next time around remains to be seen.
The conviction of Jose Padilla - whose larger implications are being labeled by legal experts as one of today's most significant Constitutional issues - has been largely ignored by editorial writers at the nation's newspapers.
While hundreds of US dailies ran the story of the guilty verdict handed down against the Brooklyn-born "dirty bomber" last week, few front-paged the conviction, and the trial and its outcome drew editorial comment from only a relative handful of publications.
Among the exceptions was a small number of the naton's 1,400-plus newspapers that have consistently opposed the Bush Administration's approach to the "global war on terror" - and a few that have been staunch supporters of that approach.
Yet virtually all Constitutional scholars and civil liberties advocates remain outraged that a US citizen was held virtually incommunicado in a navy brig for years before getting his day in court.
While few express any support for Padilla, most view his case as raising critical issues that go far beyond his three-month Miami trial.
Their issues range from questioning the authority of the president to declare anyone, including a US citizen, an unlawful enemy combatant; the Constitution's guarantee of a speedy trial and the right to confront one's accusers; Padilla's capacity to participate in his own defense after allegedly being abused while being held in solitary confinement for more than three years; and the legality of the concept of prolonged "preventive detention."
Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty USA, summed up the position of much of the civil liberties community. Padilla's trial, he said, "failed to address a key issue which poses a great threat to all Americans -- detention of a US citizen without charge, as well as alleged torture and ill-treatment during detention."
He added, the jury's verdict "cannot be seen as an endorsement of a regime of unreviewable executive detention. President Bush should not take today's ruling as permission to continue to hold Americans outside the law at his whim."
The Padilla story began in May 2002, when he stepped off a plane in Chicago and was met by federal agents armed with a material witness warrant, which enabled them to arrest him without a criminal charge.
Padilla spent a month in a jail in New York on that warrant, until President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, sparking a lengthy Legal battle over presidential powers to detain US citizens indefinitely.
During that period, then Attorney General John Ashcroft hastily called a news conference during a visit to Moscow to announce Padilla's arrest and his intention to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a major US city and to blow up apartment buildings.
Padilla was then transferred to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where he was held incommunicado, refused access to a lawyer, and allegedly tortured. He was not charged with a crime or afforded basic constitutional rights until late 2005, when the Supreme Court was poised to consider his appeal.
His three-month trial opened in Broward County, where Padilla once lived. The 36-year-old and two co-defendants were quickly found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people, as well as providing material support to terrorists. Between his arrest and his trial, the "dirty bomb" allegation disappeared. Unless his conviction is reversed on appeal, Padilla faces life imprisonment.
Padilla's conviction "is a significant victory in our efforts to fight the threat posed by terrorists and their supporters,'' Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement. "As this trial demonstrated, we will use our authority as prosecutors to dismantle terrorist networks and those who support them in the United States and abroad.''
During the period when Ashcroft and other Bush Administration officials were trumpeting the "dirty bomb" charges, some of the nation's editorial writers became cheerleaders for the Bush Administration's approach to counter-terrorism.
But most - with a few exceptions -- have been silent on the Padilla verdict. One of the exceptions is the Charleston S.C. Evening Post, which hailed the verdict as a "Double Victory" and a "resounding vindication of the Bush Administration's policy of preventing acts of terror."
Said its editorial page, "In May 2002, when Padilla was arrested, the major concern was to prevent another attack. Padilla wanted to carry out murder and mayhem on a similar scale of horror to 9/11. He was prevented from doing so and had his day in court. Score a victory for counter-terrorism and for American justice."
But most of the few newspapers that editorialized on the verdict took another view. Typical was the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald Tribune, which wrote, "Military courts have their place, and foreigners are not entitled to all the protections of US citizens. But Padilla was born in America and arrested on US soil. His case belonged in the US courts, where prosecutors finally demonstrated that they did, in fact, have a case against him."
Other Florida newspapers also weighed in editorially. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel opined, "There shouldn't be any displeasure that Jose Padilla was found guilty in a Miami courtroom of supporting terrorism. The speed in which the verdict was returned indicates the jury was convinced of his guilt. But there should be plenty of concern about how the entire case was mishandled by the federal government, and the Bush administration, which has its own definition of citizen rights and protections. It is hard for anyone to feel good about the way this case went forward.
"Some critics of Bush's strategy say the nation should rely less on military might to fight terrorism and focus more on tracking down al-Qaida and other groups through criminal investigations. The Padilla case indicated that charges against American citizens, at least, can be successfully prosecuted in civilian courts without resorting to secret military tribunals."
And the Daytona Beach News-Journal, an aggressively anti-Bush daily, said in an editorial entitled "Jose Padilla verdict masks a gross travesty", "A jury in Miami took less than two days to find Jose Padilla guilty of conspiracy to fund and support Islamic terrorism abroad. It's not quite the end of the story, if rights and due process are to matter at all in America.
"The Padilla verdict ...coming as it did at the end of a five-year odyssey of exaggerated accusations and stunning abuses of power against an American citizen, speaks more of the Bush administration's manipulation of fears, facts and prejudices to deceptive ends than of justice done. Why should this case matter to you? Because the abuses it entailed along the way have yet to be rectified either by Congress or the Supreme Court. Until then, what happened to Padilla can happen to anyone."
Nearby, the Palm Beach Post's editorial -- "Arbitrary Justice" -- oncluded: "Guilty, the right way." Meaning, in a civilian court.
Elsewhere, editorial coverage was arguably more predictable.
Said The New York Times, "It is hard to disagree with the jury's guilty verdict against Jose Padilla, the accused, but never formally charged, dirty bomber. But it would be a mistake to see it as a vindication for the Bush administration's serial abuse of the American legal system in the name of fighting terrorism. On the way to this verdict, the government repeatedly trampled on the Constitution, and its prosecution of Mr. Padilla was so cynical and inept that the crime he was convicted of - conspiracy to commit terrorism overseas - bears no relation to the ambitious plot to wreak mass destruction inside the United States, which the Justice Department first loudly proclaimed. Even with the guilty verdict, this conviction remains a shining example of how not to prosecute terrorism cases."
A similar note was struck by The Washington Post, which wrote, "Every person held by the government -- US citizen or not -- must have due process to challenge that detention. The presumption must be that US citizens can rely on the federal courts to oversee their prosecutions. And Mr. Padilla's abhorrent disappearance into limbo should come to be remembered as an aberration never to be repeated."
A somewhat different theme appeared in the Los Angeles Times. "Padilla's importance is in what it sanctions but did not decide: the government's confinement of US citizens without charges. Padilla's military detention and his treatment while detained may in fact have been unlawful. The Bush administration's real victory, then, was in preventing the courts from saying so."
Said The Baltimore Sun, "Jose Padilla was a petty criminal who found Islam in an American prison and thought that in jihad he could amount to something. He didn't: One government intelligence report suggests that the idea of a dirty bomb was a ruse to allow him to get away from the al-Qaida camp where he was staying. He's pathetic, actually. Yet because of someone like this, the Bush administration was willing to junk the Constitution and redefine the legal system as it saw fit. That's the real crime."
And the widely respected Christian Science Monitor wrote, "America can't win a global war to defend its values by stepping on them...One protection from Islamic terrorists lies in clinging to the civic virtues that terrorists seek to end. Such values are a source of safety and should not be eroded in trying to kill, capture - or prosecute - suspected terrorists. One of America's strengths in this war lies in being able to rally other nations to its side by upholding universal principles. That same strength also weakens terrorists."
Editorial writers will doubtless have another chance to weigh in on the issues raised by the Padilla prosecution - as he appeals his conviction.
According to Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, there are numerous avenues for appeal. She told Truthout, "The appeals court erred in upholding the government's authority to imprison a US citizen for several years without charges. The government violated Padilla's due process rights by failing to bring timely charges against him. Finally, Padilla's lawyers' motion to declare him incompetent to stand trial because of the torture and abuse to which the government subjected him during his pretrial detention was wrongly denied. Any of these errors, or all of them cumulatively, could result in reversal of Padilla's convictions on appeal."
But the consensus among civil libertarians is perhaps best summed up by one of the nation's leading Constitutional law experts. According to David Cole, Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, "The conviction shows that the government did not need to assert the extraordinary power to detain Padilla without charges for several years. But at the same time, because of how they treated Padilla in detention and others in CIA black sites, the government was never able to bring him to trial on the much more serious charges of plotting a 'dirty bomb' and blowing up apartments in the United States. In essence, the administration gambled that it could get Padilla on something, even if it couldn't hold him responsible for what they say he was planning to do. In this instance, they prevailed. But do we really want the government gambling with our national security?"
Whether editorial writers will opt to try to address that question next time around remains to be seen.
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