By William Fisher
New charges filed against private security contractor Blackwater accuse the company of murder, destruction of audio and videotaped evidence, distribution of controlled substances, tax evasion, child prostitution, and weapons smuggling.
The new charges were filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by several of the Iraqi civilians who were injured or who lost family members when Blackwater personnel opened fire in Nisoor Square in Baghdad in September 2007.
The new allegations, which have been added to an ongoing civil lawsuit in Virginia federal court, charge that then Blackwater chairman Erik Prince "has created an enterprise that has engaged in a series of illegal acts that suffice as RICO predicate acts extending over a substantial period of time beginning
at least in 2003. The Prince RICO Enterprise continues to exist, continues to engage in repeated illegal acts, and poses a grave and special threat to the social well-being of the world."
The lawsuit alleged that Blackwater “created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company’s financial interests at the expense of innocent human life. This action seeks compensatory damages to compensate the injured and the families of those gunned down and killed by Blackwater shooters. This action seeks punitive damages in an amount sufficient to punish Erik Prince and his Blackwater companies for their repeated callous killing of innocents.”
Blackwater has changed its name and is now operating as Xe and other names under Prince’s control. Eric Prince has resigned as chairman of the company.
Katherine Gallagher, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a member of the legal team bringing the suit, told us, "Through this case, the victims of the most notorious -- though far from the only -- shooting of civilians on the streets of Baghdad seek to hold accountable those who have caused irreparable harm to them and their loved ones. The Plaintiffs are all Iraqis who were simply going about their daily lives when Blackwater opened fire in Nisoor Square. They look forward to having their day in court against Blackwater and its founder, Eric Prince."
She added, “The Iraqi victims of Xe - Blackwater’s unlawful actions have come to U.S. courts in search of justice. Justice begins with accountability, and private military contractors must be held accountable when they shoot innocent people.”
The complaint alleges that Xe-Blackwater “created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company's financial interests at the expense of innocent human life. The destruction and suffering caused by the defendants, controlled by Erik Prince, are contrary to the interests of the U.S. military and State Department, and the nation of Iraq."
The suit also seeks a court order requiring Erik Prince to divest himself of any direct or indirect interest in the RICO Enterprise or dissolve the RICO Enterprise after making due provision for the rights of innocents, imposes reasonable restrictions on Prince's future activities or investments, and prohibits Prince from engaging in any mercenary or private military business."
This case, Abtan v Prince, was originally filed in the District Court for the District of Columbia in October 2007 following the shooting in Nisoor Square in September 2007. The alleged victims voluntary dismissed the case in the District of Columbia and filed in the Eastern District of Virginia last month. The amended RICO complaint was filed last week.
The underlying facts in this civil case form the basis for the criminal case filed by the Department of Justice against six Blackwater "shooters." One pled guilty and the trial of the remaining five defendants is currently set for early 2010.
The defendants in both cases include Mr. Prince, Xe, various Prince-controlled entities such as Blackwater, The Prince Group, Falcon, Greystone Limited, Total Intelligence Solutions, EP Investments, and Raven Development Group.
Blackwater was operating Iraq under a contract with the U.S. State Department (DOS), its mission being to protect DOS personnel. In December 2008, the State Department’s inspector general warned that Blackwater might not be granted a license by the Iraqi government next year, forcing the Obama administration to make new security arrangements.
The Iraqi government subsequently denied Blackwater a license and the State Department hired another private security firm.
The issue of private security contractors in Iraq was further complicated by the Status of Forces agreement negotiated between the U.S. and Iraq. Under that agreement, State Department contractors no longer have immunity from criminal prosecution under Iraqi law.
The IG report found that changes since the 2007 shooting “have resulted in a more professional security operation and the curtailment of overly aggressive actions” by contractors toward Iraqi civilians.
In response to its findings, Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, urged the State Department to drop Blackwater as an Iraq contractor.
Blackwater founder Erik Prince is a former U.S.navu Seal and a major contributor to Republican Party candidates. In resigning, he released a brief statement announcing he is stepping down to “focus his efforts on a private equity venture unrelated to the company."
In a personal message sent to his employees and clients, Prince attempted to depict his departure as a natural evolution. "As many of you know, because we focus on continually improving our business that Xe is in the process of a comprehensive restructuring," he wrote. "It is with pride in our many accomplishments and confidence in Xe's future that I announce my resignation as the company's Chief Executive Officer."
Blackwater's new name and Prince's resignation followed the State Department's announcement that it would not be renewing Blackwater's security contract in Iraq. Blackwater still holds lucrative government contracts in Afghanistan and elsewhere and is reportedly marketing "CIA-type services" to Fortune 1000 companies through Prince's Total Intelligence Solutions.
The complaint alleges that Xe-Blackwater, “in addition to hiring persons known (or should have been known) to use steroids and other judgment-altering drugs, has been hiring as mercenaries former military officials known to have been involved in human rights abuses in Chile.”
It contends that “Xe-Blackwater knows that the former Chileans commandos hired by Xe-Blackwater received amnesty from punishment for their wanton disregard of human rights in exchange for being forbidden from taking part in any military or security activities in Chile.”
The suit also charges that “Xe-Blackwater has been hiring mercenaries from the Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Peru, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Jordan and perhaps South Africa.” Blackwater hired foreign nationals without regard for the fact that they were forbidden by the laws of their country from serving as mercenaries,” the complaint says.
It also alleges that Xe-Blackwater employees “shredded an unknown number of documents that related to the company’s criminal and civil legal exposures.”
Xe-Blackwater failed to take the appropriate steps in hiring proper personnel to perform services.” It failed to properly screen personnel before their hiring; to train personnel properly; to investigate allegations of wrongdoing; to reprimand for wrongful actions; to adequately monitor for and stop illegal substance abuse; and negligently permitted repeated lawlessness by employees,” the lawsuit charges.
It also accuses The Prince RICO Enterprise of “willfully evading the payment of taxes during 2006 and 2007 by hiding the proceeds from its illegal racketeering acts in offshore accounts, the complaint charges.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
ACLU REPORT CHARGES RACIAL PROFILING
By William Fisher
U.S. authorities detain thousands of people each year solely
on the basis of religion, race or nationality, the American Civil Liberties Union charges in a new report to the United Nations.
The report says racial profiling is often applied to immigrants from South Asia and to North Africans suspected of being Islamic militants following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Submitted to the U.N. Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the report said profiling could involve harassment, detention, arrest or investigation.
Many Latin American immigrants are also targeted for immigration violations while others, including African Americans, are profiled as suspected drug offenders, the report said.
Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU's human rights program, told us, “Racial profiling was widespread and pervasive during the George W. Bush Administration and it continues to be the reality today. The Obama Administration must finally put an end to this undemocratic and counterproductive practice by supporting the legislation currently making its way through Congress.”
He was referring to the End Racial Profiling Bill first introduced in 1997, but which has not yet been passed into law.
Civil libertarians place much of the responsibility for continued use of racial profiling to the practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and particularly to a DHS unit known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE, a law enforcement organization and the largest investigative arm of the DHS, is responsible for enforcing the nation’s immigration and customs laws.
Months ago, DHS’s new leader, Secretary Janet Napolitano, promised a thorough review of the agency’s policies and practices. But the ACLU’s Bhatnagar agrees with other civil liberties advocates that no results of that review have been made public.
These advocates are particularly critical of a number of DHS programs designed to increase the participation of state and local police in enforcing federal laws.
"Police officers who are often not adequately trained, and in some cases not trained at all, in federal immigration enforcement, will improperly rely on race or ethnicity as a proxy for undocumented status," the ACLU report said.
The involvement of local police in this was having a "devastating impact" on some communities, Bhatnagar told us.
The ACLU says it has received complaints from across the country of U.S. citizens of Latin appearance being illegally stopped, detained, arrested and even deported by local law enforcement functioning as immigration agents.
Another contentious issue is ICE’s detention policies and practices, which have resulted in significant increases in immigrants being held in jails run by ICE, city and county jails, and private prison facilities.
The Los Angeles detention center has been a particular target of criticism. Civil rights groups are suing ICE in federal district court for detaining immigrants in egregious and unsanitary conditions in that facility.
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU of Southern California, the National Immigration Law Center, and a private law firm, also charges that the unsanitary conditions have led ICE to deprive immigrants of due-process rights such as access to mail or attorneys while in detention.
The Los Angeles facility, known as “B-18,” is allowed to temporarily house detainees for no more than 12 hours. But in what the ACLU calls “a perverse distortion of its original purpose,” it says immigration officials have kept detainees for weeks by shuttling them to local jails in the evenings and on weekends, and returning them to the facility on the next business day, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also alleged that immigration officials often fail to notify detainees that they have the right to obtain release on bail while their cases remain pending.
The lawsuit said B-18 has not provided basic medication besides the lack of sanitary equipment. Some of the facilities to which detainees are shuttled have similar gross deficiencies. Detainees are not permitted to have shower in jail. Up to 50 detainees routinely share one open commode, one urinal (or two open commodes) and one sink. At some local jails, overcrowding and vents that blow extremely cold air on the bunks force detainees to sleep on mattresses on the floor. At B-18 and other jails, guards force detainees to remain inside through the entire day, and only permit them to go outside when shuttling them between detention centers. They are not permitted to have any physical recreation.
These conditions violate the statutory and constitutional rights of the detainees. “It’s shameful that immigration officers are treating detainees like animals, apparently because the immigration bureaucracy cannot seem to send detainees to the right place,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU Director of Immigrant Rights and National Security.
ICE has also faired poorly in court cases. In April, a federal judge issued a ruling calling into question the U.S. immigration agents' treatment of a Syrian-born German citizen who was jailed by U.S. officials, subjected to strip and visual cavity searches, and asked to spy for the U.S. government. The federal court rejected the government's request to have the case against the U.S. government and immigration agents dismissed in its entirety.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Majed Chehade by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and a private law firm against the United States, federal agents, the City of North Las Vegas, and the North Las Vegas Police Department.
Chehade is a 64-year old German citizen whose wife, three children, and grandson are U.S. citizens. Chehade owns a home in Massachusetts and is the export director of a German manufacturing company. On his way to visit his daughter in December 2006, he was detained at Las Vegas Airport and taken to a local jail, where he was subjected to strip and visual cavity searches, denied access to medical care and his prescription medications, and told that if he wanted to return to the U.S., he would have to spy on behalf of the government.
In its ruling, the court held that strip searches of immigrants arriving in the country are constitutional only if supported by reasonable suspicion. The court further held that the immigration agents' actions could be considered "extreme and outrageous conduct" and allowed an inquiry into the legality of the government's attempt to conscript a foreign national to spy to move forward.
The ACLU and many other similar organizations are also critical of a DHS program known as Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. These centers have grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and the private sector.
The ACLU says the centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, “raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the ‘war on terrorism’ are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level.”
It adds that “federal, state and local governments are increasing their investment in fusion centers without properly assessing whether they serve a necessary purpose.”
U.S. authorities detain thousands of people each year solely
on the basis of religion, race or nationality, the American Civil Liberties Union charges in a new report to the United Nations.
The report says racial profiling is often applied to immigrants from South Asia and to North Africans suspected of being Islamic militants following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Submitted to the U.N. Committee to End Racial Discrimination, the report said profiling could involve harassment, detention, arrest or investigation.
Many Latin American immigrants are also targeted for immigration violations while others, including African Americans, are profiled as suspected drug offenders, the report said.
Chandra Bhatnagar, staff attorney with the ACLU's human rights program, told us, “Racial profiling was widespread and pervasive during the George W. Bush Administration and it continues to be the reality today. The Obama Administration must finally put an end to this undemocratic and counterproductive practice by supporting the legislation currently making its way through Congress.”
He was referring to the End Racial Profiling Bill first introduced in 1997, but which has not yet been passed into law.
Civil libertarians place much of the responsibility for continued use of racial profiling to the practices of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and particularly to a DHS unit known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). ICE, a law enforcement organization and the largest investigative arm of the DHS, is responsible for enforcing the nation’s immigration and customs laws.
Months ago, DHS’s new leader, Secretary Janet Napolitano, promised a thorough review of the agency’s policies and practices. But the ACLU’s Bhatnagar agrees with other civil liberties advocates that no results of that review have been made public.
These advocates are particularly critical of a number of DHS programs designed to increase the participation of state and local police in enforcing federal laws.
"Police officers who are often not adequately trained, and in some cases not trained at all, in federal immigration enforcement, will improperly rely on race or ethnicity as a proxy for undocumented status," the ACLU report said.
The involvement of local police in this was having a "devastating impact" on some communities, Bhatnagar told us.
The ACLU says it has received complaints from across the country of U.S. citizens of Latin appearance being illegally stopped, detained, arrested and even deported by local law enforcement functioning as immigration agents.
Another contentious issue is ICE’s detention policies and practices, which have resulted in significant increases in immigrants being held in jails run by ICE, city and county jails, and private prison facilities.
The Los Angeles detention center has been a particular target of criticism. Civil rights groups are suing ICE in federal district court for detaining immigrants in egregious and unsanitary conditions in that facility.
The lawsuit, filed by the ACLU of Southern California, the National Immigration Law Center, and a private law firm, also charges that the unsanitary conditions have led ICE to deprive immigrants of due-process rights such as access to mail or attorneys while in detention.
The Los Angeles facility, known as “B-18,” is allowed to temporarily house detainees for no more than 12 hours. But in what the ACLU calls “a perverse distortion of its original purpose,” it says immigration officials have kept detainees for weeks by shuttling them to local jails in the evenings and on weekends, and returning them to the facility on the next business day, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also alleged that immigration officials often fail to notify detainees that they have the right to obtain release on bail while their cases remain pending.
The lawsuit said B-18 has not provided basic medication besides the lack of sanitary equipment. Some of the facilities to which detainees are shuttled have similar gross deficiencies. Detainees are not permitted to have shower in jail. Up to 50 detainees routinely share one open commode, one urinal (or two open commodes) and one sink. At some local jails, overcrowding and vents that blow extremely cold air on the bunks force detainees to sleep on mattresses on the floor. At B-18 and other jails, guards force detainees to remain inside through the entire day, and only permit them to go outside when shuttling them between detention centers. They are not permitted to have any physical recreation.
These conditions violate the statutory and constitutional rights of the detainees. “It’s shameful that immigration officers are treating detainees like animals, apparently because the immigration bureaucracy cannot seem to send detainees to the right place,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, ACLU Director of Immigrant Rights and National Security.
ICE has also faired poorly in court cases. In April, a federal judge issued a ruling calling into question the U.S. immigration agents' treatment of a Syrian-born German citizen who was jailed by U.S. officials, subjected to strip and visual cavity searches, and asked to spy for the U.S. government. The federal court rejected the government's request to have the case against the U.S. government and immigration agents dismissed in its entirety.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Majed Chehade by the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and a private law firm against the United States, federal agents, the City of North Las Vegas, and the North Las Vegas Police Department.
Chehade is a 64-year old German citizen whose wife, three children, and grandson are U.S. citizens. Chehade owns a home in Massachusetts and is the export director of a German manufacturing company. On his way to visit his daughter in December 2006, he was detained at Las Vegas Airport and taken to a local jail, where he was subjected to strip and visual cavity searches, denied access to medical care and his prescription medications, and told that if he wanted to return to the U.S., he would have to spy on behalf of the government.
In its ruling, the court held that strip searches of immigrants arriving in the country are constitutional only if supported by reasonable suspicion. The court further held that the immigration agents' actions could be considered "extreme and outrageous conduct" and allowed an inquiry into the legality of the government's attempt to conscript a foreign national to spy to move forward.
The ACLU and many other similar organizations are also critical of a DHS program known as Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. These centers have grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and the private sector.
The ACLU says the centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, “raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the ‘war on terrorism’ are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level.”
It adds that “federal, state and local governments are increasing their investment in fusion centers without properly assessing whether they serve a necessary purpose.”
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Give Us Your Huddled Masses – But Battered Women Need Not Apply!
By William Fisher
Here’s a note for the “to do” list of the Obama Administration’s newly appointed Domestic Violence Czar – or Czarina in this case: Battered wives and significant others pose a serious law enforcement and public health problem affecting as many as one in four women in this country. But they are not just an American problem. Women are being whacked all over the world. And some of them are trying to find safety in America – and are being turned away.
Why? Because of the inept and bureaucratic foot-dragging of our Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Thanks to their sorry non-performance over more than a decade, domestic violence is still not a legal basis for seeking asylum in the U.S.
Consider the plight of Rodi Alvarado from Guatemala. At 16, she married a man who, for the next decade, terrorized her. He raped and sodomized her almost daily, beating her before and during the violations. Because he was unfaithful, he infected her with sexually transmitted diseases. He dislocated her jaw when he learned that her period was late, and violently kicked her when she refused to abort her baby, causing her to bleed for eight days.
She tried to run away, even to the other side of the country, but her husband – a former soldier – always found her. One night, he woke her to whip her with an electrical cord, pulled out a machete and threatened to cut off her arms and legs if she ever tried to leave him again. He broke windows and mirrors with her head. He pistol-whipped and threw a machete at her, punched her and dragged her by her hair.
Mrs. Alvarado repeatedly sought help from the police in Guatemala, but to no avail. She pled her case to a judge, but the judge said the same thing: They don’t involve themselves in domestic matters.
Finally, in 1995, she did the most difficult and desperate thing she could do to save her life. After 10 years of cruelty, at age 28, she fled Guatemala and sought asylum in the United States.
There was only one problem. The U.S. has no asylum provisions that cover victims of domestic violence. Mrs. Alvarado was ordered deported. Under U.S. law, asylum applicants have to show they can't go home because they face persecution because of religion, race, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. But not domestic abuse.
Enter a sympathetic immigration judge, who granted Mrs. Alvarado a temporary stay of deportation. That was in 1996 – thirteen years ago. And for thirteen years, Mrs. Alvarado has remained in this legal limbo. She hasn’t been deported – she works as a housekeeper in a California convent. But she can’t achieve any legal status and can’t be reunited with her son and daughter, who remain in Guatemala. She hasn’t seen them in thirteen years.
The reason: For more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have been playing musical chairs with a new asylum regulation that would cover victims of domestic violence. Without such a regulation, Mrs. Alvarado’s case cannot come before a Board of Immigration Appeals, which is supposed to re-decide her fate.
The musical chairs have bounced Mrs. Alvarado’s case from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, and now to the Obama Administration.
Opponents said new asylum rules would lead to a surge in claims, an assertion disputed by a large and bipartisan group of immigration, legal and religious advocates.
Those proposed regulations saved --and stalled --Alvarado's case. In 1996, an immigration judge granted Alvarado temporary asylum, finding that the abuse she suffered and the government's inability to protect her constituted persecution. But newly-installed Bush immigration service opposed the decision, and Alvarado's case went before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Justice Department panel that reviews immigration cases.
The board ruled that Alvarado was not eligible for asylum and ordered that she be deported. But on her last day in office, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno voided that ruling and instructed the board to reconsider the Alvarado case after the immigration service finalized the proposed regulations. A month later, George W. Bush took office.
The next stop in this cruel bureaucratic game was the desk of John Ashcroft, then Bush’s Attorney General. Ashcroft certified the case to himself, making him effectively the judge. He said he would decide Mrs. Alvarado’s fate. But he didn’t. Instead, he kicked the can down the road, deciding neither to grant nor deny asylum to Alvarado. A decision, he said, should await new regulations from the Department of Homeland Security.
Wonder of wonders, the DHS actually drafted a regulation to make domestic abuse a valid legal basis for asylum-seekers. But the Department of Justice disagreed with the draft. In the years since then, the DOJ and the DHS have failed to agree on the domestic abuse asylum regulations. Ashcroft’s inaction simply complicated the problem. Just before he stepped down, he passed the responsibility for the Alvarado case to his successor, Alberto Gonzales, who faithfully followed in the quicksand footsteps of his predecessors: He did nothing. And his successor, Michael Mukasey, did exactly the same thing: Nothing.
The DHS says it will not press for Mrs. Alvarado’s deportation regardless of how much longer it may take the agency to finalize the new regulations. But that’s cold comfort to Mrs. Alvarado. At the current pace, she could be a very old lady by the time the DHS and the DOJ decide to actually do something.
That’s where Obama’s new Domestic Violence Czar could be a huge help. Lynn Rosenthal is an experienced advocate for abused women. She was executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She has focused on domestic violence issues like housing, state and local coordinated community response, federal policy, and survivor-centered advocacy.
Reporting to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, she will have the ears of the two guys at the top of the tree. And it may be helpful that Biden has had a long-standing interest in the domestic violence issue, dating from his days in the Senate and his key role in enacting the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.
Immigration experts say they are more encouraged than ever that cases like Mrs. Alvarado’s will be resolved by the Obama Administration. No doubt Ms. Rosenthal’s cup will runneth over with issues of purely homegrown domestic violence – which the stresses of the recession have apparently caused to spiral out of control. Perhaps the relatively tiny number of battered women seeking asylum in America will be assigned a low priority.
But further delay would simply exacerbate a gross denial of justice. So even at a time when immigration in general remains one of the third rails of American politics, Lynn Rosenthal needs to find the time to flex a little White House muscle with the DOJ and the DHS. She needs to ensure that the process of writing one new regulation doesn’t again fall victim to another decade of bureaucratic bungling and inter-agency turf wars.
So Rodi Alvarado can see her kids again.
Here’s a note for the “to do” list of the Obama Administration’s newly appointed Domestic Violence Czar – or Czarina in this case: Battered wives and significant others pose a serious law enforcement and public health problem affecting as many as one in four women in this country. But they are not just an American problem. Women are being whacked all over the world. And some of them are trying to find safety in America – and are being turned away.
Why? Because of the inept and bureaucratic foot-dragging of our Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. Thanks to their sorry non-performance over more than a decade, domestic violence is still not a legal basis for seeking asylum in the U.S.
Consider the plight of Rodi Alvarado from Guatemala. At 16, she married a man who, for the next decade, terrorized her. He raped and sodomized her almost daily, beating her before and during the violations. Because he was unfaithful, he infected her with sexually transmitted diseases. He dislocated her jaw when he learned that her period was late, and violently kicked her when she refused to abort her baby, causing her to bleed for eight days.
She tried to run away, even to the other side of the country, but her husband – a former soldier – always found her. One night, he woke her to whip her with an electrical cord, pulled out a machete and threatened to cut off her arms and legs if she ever tried to leave him again. He broke windows and mirrors with her head. He pistol-whipped and threw a machete at her, punched her and dragged her by her hair.
Mrs. Alvarado repeatedly sought help from the police in Guatemala, but to no avail. She pled her case to a judge, but the judge said the same thing: They don’t involve themselves in domestic matters.
Finally, in 1995, she did the most difficult and desperate thing she could do to save her life. After 10 years of cruelty, at age 28, she fled Guatemala and sought asylum in the United States.
There was only one problem. The U.S. has no asylum provisions that cover victims of domestic violence. Mrs. Alvarado was ordered deported. Under U.S. law, asylum applicants have to show they can't go home because they face persecution because of religion, race, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. But not domestic abuse.
Enter a sympathetic immigration judge, who granted Mrs. Alvarado a temporary stay of deportation. That was in 1996 – thirteen years ago. And for thirteen years, Mrs. Alvarado has remained in this legal limbo. She hasn’t been deported – she works as a housekeeper in a California convent. But she can’t achieve any legal status and can’t be reunited with her son and daughter, who remain in Guatemala. She hasn’t seen them in thirteen years.
The reason: For more than a decade, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have been playing musical chairs with a new asylum regulation that would cover victims of domestic violence. Without such a regulation, Mrs. Alvarado’s case cannot come before a Board of Immigration Appeals, which is supposed to re-decide her fate.
The musical chairs have bounced Mrs. Alvarado’s case from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, and now to the Obama Administration.
Opponents said new asylum rules would lead to a surge in claims, an assertion disputed by a large and bipartisan group of immigration, legal and religious advocates.
Those proposed regulations saved --and stalled --Alvarado's case. In 1996, an immigration judge granted Alvarado temporary asylum, finding that the abuse she suffered and the government's inability to protect her constituted persecution. But newly-installed Bush immigration service opposed the decision, and Alvarado's case went before the Board of Immigration Appeals, a Justice Department panel that reviews immigration cases.
The board ruled that Alvarado was not eligible for asylum and ordered that she be deported. But on her last day in office, Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno voided that ruling and instructed the board to reconsider the Alvarado case after the immigration service finalized the proposed regulations. A month later, George W. Bush took office.
The next stop in this cruel bureaucratic game was the desk of John Ashcroft, then Bush’s Attorney General. Ashcroft certified the case to himself, making him effectively the judge. He said he would decide Mrs. Alvarado’s fate. But he didn’t. Instead, he kicked the can down the road, deciding neither to grant nor deny asylum to Alvarado. A decision, he said, should await new regulations from the Department of Homeland Security.
Wonder of wonders, the DHS actually drafted a regulation to make domestic abuse a valid legal basis for asylum-seekers. But the Department of Justice disagreed with the draft. In the years since then, the DOJ and the DHS have failed to agree on the domestic abuse asylum regulations. Ashcroft’s inaction simply complicated the problem. Just before he stepped down, he passed the responsibility for the Alvarado case to his successor, Alberto Gonzales, who faithfully followed in the quicksand footsteps of his predecessors: He did nothing. And his successor, Michael Mukasey, did exactly the same thing: Nothing.
The DHS says it will not press for Mrs. Alvarado’s deportation regardless of how much longer it may take the agency to finalize the new regulations. But that’s cold comfort to Mrs. Alvarado. At the current pace, she could be a very old lady by the time the DHS and the DOJ decide to actually do something.
That’s where Obama’s new Domestic Violence Czar could be a huge help. Lynn Rosenthal is an experienced advocate for abused women. She was executive director of the National Network to End Domestic Violence and executive director of the New Mexico Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She has focused on domestic violence issues like housing, state and local coordinated community response, federal policy, and survivor-centered advocacy.
Reporting to Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, she will have the ears of the two guys at the top of the tree. And it may be helpful that Biden has had a long-standing interest in the domestic violence issue, dating from his days in the Senate and his key role in enacting the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.
Immigration experts say they are more encouraged than ever that cases like Mrs. Alvarado’s will be resolved by the Obama Administration. No doubt Ms. Rosenthal’s cup will runneth over with issues of purely homegrown domestic violence – which the stresses of the recession have apparently caused to spiral out of control. Perhaps the relatively tiny number of battered women seeking asylum in America will be assigned a low priority.
But further delay would simply exacerbate a gross denial of justice. So even at a time when immigration in general remains one of the third rails of American politics, Lynn Rosenthal needs to find the time to flex a little White House muscle with the DOJ and the DHS. She needs to ensure that the process of writing one new regulation doesn’t again fall victim to another decade of bureaucratic bungling and inter-agency turf wars.
So Rodi Alvarado can see her kids again.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Obama Considering Indefinite Detention?
By William Fisher
As President Barack Obama struggles with the political backlash from a Congress determined to keep Guantanamo terrorism suspects out of the U.S., his administration is reportedly preparing an executive order that would give him authority to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial, according to weekend media reports.
News of the order was reported by The Washington Post and ProPublica, an independent investigative newsroom, and published Saturday by The Post and later by The New York Times. It would involve some 90 Guantanamo detainees who are regarded as “too dangerous to release” but who cannot be tried in U.S. criminal courts because evidence against them was gathered by cooperating foreign intelligence services or because it is tainted by the suspects being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques.
The dilemma of what to do with these suspects is threatening to scuttle Obama’s pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) prison camp by January 2010.
In one of the few truly bipartisan actions recently taken by Congress, lawmakers of both parties and in both the House of Representatives and the Senate – their eyes fixed firmly on the 2010 elections – have expressed overwhelming opposition to bringing GITMO detainees to the U.S., even to stand trial. Amid charges of fear-mongering, they voted earlier this month to deny the administration the money it requested to fund the closure of the iconic prison.
But part of Obama’s dilemma is that an “indefinite detention” regime would channel the position taken by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and would also threaten to alienate the left-wing of Obama’s Democratic Party, including the human and civil rights communities, which hailed the new president’s decisions to outlaw torture and shutter Guantanamo.
Civil libertarians and many legal scholars were quick to condemn the idea of indefinite detention.
Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU), told us, "It would be highly disappointing if President Obama accepted the false proposition that a system of indefinite detention is either necessary or legal. It is neither. The suggestion that the President himself has the prerogative to declare individual enemies and suspend the core protections of the Bill of Rights smacks of the same assertion of sweeping executive power that characterized the last administration and that is antitethical to our basic framework of government."
ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer told us, "To allow the government to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial would fundamentally alter the character of American democracy. And a preventive detention system would be a human rights disaster whether based on a statute enacted by Congress or an executive order issued by the President.”
Michael Ratner, president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy organization that has mobilized dozens of lawyers to represent GITMO detainees, told us, "Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes – from Congress or the President’s pen – it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional.”
Some Constitutional scholars were equally outspoken. Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school told us, "The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, clearly requires that alleged terrorists be given a trial.”
He added, “Unlike President Bush, President Obama is a lawyer and used to teach Constitutional Law. He must know better. The fact that President Obama and his administration are once again continuing the illegal and totalitarian Bush administration policies does not augur well for the future of our Republic, its Constitution and Bill of Rights, as well as America's commitment to the Rule of Law."
But opposition to the indefinite detention idea was not limited to the Left. Bruce Fein, a well-known Conservative who served in the Department of Justice during the Reagan presidency, told us, "Indefinite detention without accusation or trial is a terrible idea. If the United States government is unable to assemble evidence of guilt (including conspiracy to provide material assistance, which criminalizes even unalarming plots in their embryonic stages) with all its staggering resources devoted to counterterrorism, including huge bounties for informants, then the suspect is probably innocent.”
And Prof. Brian J. Foley of the Boston University School of Law told us, "Indefinite detention based on evidence that cannot be presented in a U.S. court is likely indefinite detention based on unreliable evidence (confessions extracted by torture, hearsay and other un-cross-examined testimony and hunches that may be infected with bias or mistake). Locking up the wrong people will not help us prevent terrorism and indeed might mislead us into believing we have diminished the threat.”
But other observers were more cautious. Prof. David M. Glazier of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told us, “It is hard to judge the legality of the Obama Administration proposal because of the vagueness in the reporting. The real legal flaw with Guantanamo is not the concept of indefinite detention, but rather the failure to conform it to the law of war. Confinement in prison cells, coercive interrogation, and even routine shackling of prisoners all violate the law of war.”
According to The Washington Post, "Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order." Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation.
But CCR’s Ratner disagrees. He said, " If the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that executive overreach, left to continue unchecked for many years, has a tendency to harden into precedent."
Nor is this option is not without political risk for Obama; it could anger lawmakers who could see it as an “end-run” around Congressional authority.
Among the few lawmakers publicly opposed to indefinite detention is Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold. In a letter to President Obama, he wrote that indefinite detention poses a risk “establishing policies and legal precedents that rather than ridding our country of the burden of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, merely set the stage for future Guantanamos, whether on our shores or elsewhere, with disastrous consequences for our national security.”
In a May speech at the National Archives, Obama said he was considering indefinite detention for some prisoners. He suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. "We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone," he said.
In his May speech, the president outlined five strategies the administration would use to deal with them: criminal trials, revamped military tribunals, transfers to other countries, releases, and continued detention.
On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide, and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.
Administration officials told The Washington Post that the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release.
The other half of the cases, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. agreed with an assessment offered during congressional testimony this month that fewer than 25 percent of the detainees would be charged in criminal courts and that 50 others have been approved for transfer or release.
As President Barack Obama struggles with the political backlash from a Congress determined to keep Guantanamo terrorism suspects out of the U.S., his administration is reportedly preparing an executive order that would give him authority to hold prisoners indefinitely without trial, according to weekend media reports.
News of the order was reported by The Washington Post and ProPublica, an independent investigative newsroom, and published Saturday by The Post and later by The New York Times. It would involve some 90 Guantanamo detainees who are regarded as “too dangerous to release” but who cannot be tried in U.S. criminal courts because evidence against them was gathered by cooperating foreign intelligence services or because it is tainted by the suspects being subjected to harsh interrogation techniques.
The dilemma of what to do with these suspects is threatening to scuttle Obama’s pledge to close the Guantanamo Bay (GITMO) prison camp by January 2010.
In one of the few truly bipartisan actions recently taken by Congress, lawmakers of both parties and in both the House of Representatives and the Senate – their eyes fixed firmly on the 2010 elections – have expressed overwhelming opposition to bringing GITMO detainees to the U.S., even to stand trial. Amid charges of fear-mongering, they voted earlier this month to deny the administration the money it requested to fund the closure of the iconic prison.
But part of Obama’s dilemma is that an “indefinite detention” regime would channel the position taken by his predecessor, President George W. Bush, and would also threaten to alienate the left-wing of Obama’s Democratic Party, including the human and civil rights communities, which hailed the new president’s decisions to outlaw torture and shutter Guantanamo.
Civil libertarians and many legal scholars were quick to condemn the idea of indefinite detention.
Jonathan Hafetz, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, (ACLU), told us, "It would be highly disappointing if President Obama accepted the false proposition that a system of indefinite detention is either necessary or legal. It is neither. The suggestion that the President himself has the prerogative to declare individual enemies and suspend the core protections of the Bill of Rights smacks of the same assertion of sweeping executive power that characterized the last administration and that is antitethical to our basic framework of government."
ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer told us, "To allow the government to imprison terrorism suspects indefinitely without charge or trial would fundamentally alter the character of American democracy. And a preventive detention system would be a human rights disaster whether based on a statute enacted by Congress or an executive order issued by the President.”
Michael Ratner, president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy organization that has mobilized dozens of lawyers to represent GITMO detainees, told us, "Prolonged imprisonment without trial is exactly the Guantanamo system that the President promised to shut down. Whatever form it takes – from Congress or the President’s pen – it is anathema to the basic principles of American law and the courts will find it unconstitutional.”
Some Constitutional scholars were equally outspoken. Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school told us, "The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a party, clearly requires that alleged terrorists be given a trial.”
He added, “Unlike President Bush, President Obama is a lawyer and used to teach Constitutional Law. He must know better. The fact that President Obama and his administration are once again continuing the illegal and totalitarian Bush administration policies does not augur well for the future of our Republic, its Constitution and Bill of Rights, as well as America's commitment to the Rule of Law."
But opposition to the indefinite detention idea was not limited to the Left. Bruce Fein, a well-known Conservative who served in the Department of Justice during the Reagan presidency, told us, "Indefinite detention without accusation or trial is a terrible idea. If the United States government is unable to assemble evidence of guilt (including conspiracy to provide material assistance, which criminalizes even unalarming plots in their embryonic stages) with all its staggering resources devoted to counterterrorism, including huge bounties for informants, then the suspect is probably innocent.”
And Prof. Brian J. Foley of the Boston University School of Law told us, "Indefinite detention based on evidence that cannot be presented in a U.S. court is likely indefinite detention based on unreliable evidence (confessions extracted by torture, hearsay and other un-cross-examined testimony and hunches that may be infected with bias or mistake). Locking up the wrong people will not help us prevent terrorism and indeed might mislead us into believing we have diminished the threat.”
But other observers were more cautious. Prof. David M. Glazier of the Loyola Law School in Los Angeles told us, “It is hard to judge the legality of the Obama Administration proposal because of the vagueness in the reporting. The real legal flaw with Guantanamo is not the concept of indefinite detention, but rather the failure to conform it to the law of war. Confinement in prison cells, coercive interrogation, and even routine shackling of prisoners all violate the law of war.”
According to The Washington Post, "Civil liberties groups have encouraged the administration, that if a prolonged detention system were to be sought, to do it through executive order." Such an order could be rescinded and would not block later efforts to write legislation.
But CCR’s Ratner disagrees. He said, " If the last eight years have taught us anything, it’s that executive overreach, left to continue unchecked for many years, has a tendency to harden into precedent."
Nor is this option is not without political risk for Obama; it could anger lawmakers who could see it as an “end-run” around Congressional authority.
Among the few lawmakers publicly opposed to indefinite detention is Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold. In a letter to President Obama, he wrote that indefinite detention poses a risk “establishing policies and legal precedents that rather than ridding our country of the burden of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, merely set the stage for future Guantanamos, whether on our shores or elsewhere, with disastrous consequences for our national security.”
In a May speech at the National Archives, Obama said he was considering indefinite detention for some prisoners. He suggested that it would include congressional and judicial oversight. "We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can't be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone," he said.
In his May speech, the president outlined five strategies the administration would use to deal with them: criminal trials, revamped military tribunals, transfers to other countries, releases, and continued detention.
On the day Obama took office, 242 men were imprisoned at Guantanamo. Since the inauguration, 11 detainees have been released or transferred, one prisoner committed suicide, and one was moved to New York to face terrorism charges in federal court.
Administration officials told The Washington Post that the cases of about half of the remaining 229 detainees have been reviewed for prosecution or release.
The other half of the cases, the officials said, present the greatest difficulty. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. agreed with an assessment offered during congressional testimony this month that fewer than 25 percent of the detainees would be charged in criminal courts and that 50 others have been approved for transfer or release.
Friday, June 26, 2009
U.N. ASKED TO HELP RENDITION VICTIM
By William Fisher
Human rights groups are asking United Nations officials to investigate the case of an Italian citizen and victim of the "extraordinary rendition" program of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who is currently being held in a Moroccan prison based on a confession coerced from him through torture.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Geneva-based Alkarama for Human Rights have requested that two U.N. Special Rapporteurs investigate the circumstances of Abou Elkassim Britel's forced disappearance, rendition, detention and torture, and raise his case with the governments of the United States, Morocco, Pakistan and Italy.
The requests were made to the U.N. Special Rapporteurs on Torture and the on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism.
"Victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program detained at Guantánamo and other prisons around the world are being ignored by the U.S. government, whose unlawful program landed them there in the first place," Steven Watt, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, told us.
He said, "The U.S. has failed to take responsibility for its most egregious actions, leaving Mr. Britel and countless other victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program with no choice but to turn to the international community for justice."
Britel, who is also a plaintiff in the ACLU's lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the rendition program, is one of the few victims of the program whose identity is known, and who is still detained outside of Guantánamo Bay.
Britel was initially apprehended and detained in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities on alleged immigration violations in February 2002. After a period of detention and interrogation there, he was handed over to U.S. officials.
The ACLU charges that in May 2002, U.S. officials stripped and beat Britel before dressing him in a diaper and overalls, shackling and blindfolding him and flying him to Morocco for detention and interrogation. Once in Morocco, they say U.S. officials handed him over to Moroccan intelligence officials who detained him incommunicado at the Temara detention center, where he was interrogated, beaten, deprived of sleep and food and threatened with sexual torture.
Britel was released from custody by Moroccan authorities in February 2003, but was again arrested and detained in May 2003 as he attempted to leave Morocco for his home in Italy. While detained incommunicado in the same detention facility where he had been tortured months earlier, Britel falsely confessed under torture to his involvement in terrorism. He was later tried and convicted by a Moroccan court on terrorism-related charges and is currently serving a nine-year sentence in a Moroccan prison.
In 2006, an Italian investigating judge dismissed a six-year long investigation into Britel's alleged involvement in terrorism after the judge found a complete lack of evidence linking him with any terrorist-related or criminal activity.
In a related development, the U.N.'s top human rights advocate, Navanethem Pillay, this week called on the Obama administration to release Guantanamo Bay inmates or try them in a court of law.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said that officials who authorized the use of torture must be held accountable for their crimes. She called for a probe into officials who participated in torture sessions or provided its legal justification.
The South African lawyer was also critical of President Obama's decision to hold some suspected terrorists in detention indefinitely without trial.
"People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized," she said.
While praising the Obama administration for banning many of the harshest interrogation techniques, she said it needed to go further, providing victims of U.S. abuses with an opportunity to rebuild their lives.
"I believe we are finally starting to turn the page on this extremely
unfortunate chapter of recent history, with counter-terrorism measures starting to move back in to line with international human rights standards," Pillay said.
"But there is still much to do before the Guantanamo chapter is truly brought to a close."
Pillay’s remarks challenged Obama's decision to limit investigation into past abuses and to continue to hold some detainees who have not been charged with a crime. In May, Obama said some detainees deemed too dangerous to release might have to be held indefinitely.
"There should be no half-measures, or new creative ways to treat people as criminals when they have not been found guilty of any crime," Pillay said.
"Guantanamo showed that torture and unlawful forms of detention can all too easily creep back in to practice during times of stress, and there is still a long way to go before the moral high ground lost since 9/11 can be fully reclaimed."
But Pillay did not address the Obama administration's decision to use reformed military commissions to try suspected terrorists. Human rights groups have criticized the commissions, particularly that terror suspects could be convicted and executed based on evidence obtained by torture.
Pillay said that detainees who are not prosecuted and potentially face torture if they are sent back to their own countries "must be given a new home, where they can start to build a new life, in the United States or elsewhere. I welcome the fact that in recent weeks a number of countries have agreed to take in a few people in this position, and urge others to follow suit, including first and foremost the United States itself."
Earlier this month, the first Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was flown to the United States to face death-pentalty charges for his alleged role in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. He is in custody in New York City.
But huge majorities of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have resisted allowing any more of the remaining 229 detainees at Guantanamo into the United States. Republicans, in particular, have said they do not want GITMO detainees “wandering around in their neighborhgoods.”
As a result, the Senate voted 90 to 6 in May to withhold funding for the closure of Guantanamo until the Obama Administration submits a plan for doing so.
Pillay was also highly critical of the administration of George W. Bush. She charged that the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies had undermined international efforts to end torture. "The terrorist acts that shook the world on 11 September 2001 had a devastating impact on the fight to eliminate torture," she wrote. "Some states that had previously been careful not to practice or condone torture became less scrupulous."
Pillay called for "leadership” to end “this grotesque practice." She welcomed Obama's decision to close Guantanamo by next January and to ban waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques.
"Equally importantly, victims of torture must be helped to recover from one of the worst ordeals that a human being can face. The physical and mental scars of torture are excruciating, the effect on families devastating, and there are often long-term socio-economic effects, including a stigma that can be extremely hard to erase. Victims of torture must be compensated and cared for -- for as long as it takes to enable them once again to lead a relatively normal life," she said.
Human rights groups are asking United Nations officials to investigate the case of an Italian citizen and victim of the "extraordinary rendition" program of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency who is currently being held in a Moroccan prison based on a confession coerced from him through torture.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Geneva-based Alkarama for Human Rights have requested that two U.N. Special Rapporteurs investigate the circumstances of Abou Elkassim Britel's forced disappearance, rendition, detention and torture, and raise his case with the governments of the United States, Morocco, Pakistan and Italy.
The requests were made to the U.N. Special Rapporteurs on Torture and the on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism.
"Victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program detained at Guantánamo and other prisons around the world are being ignored by the U.S. government, whose unlawful program landed them there in the first place," Steven Watt, staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, told us.
He said, "The U.S. has failed to take responsibility for its most egregious actions, leaving Mr. Britel and countless other victims of the 'extraordinary rendition' program with no choice but to turn to the international community for justice."
Britel, who is also a plaintiff in the ACLU's lawsuit against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the rendition program, is one of the few victims of the program whose identity is known, and who is still detained outside of Guantánamo Bay.
Britel was initially apprehended and detained in Pakistan by Pakistani authorities on alleged immigration violations in February 2002. After a period of detention and interrogation there, he was handed over to U.S. officials.
The ACLU charges that in May 2002, U.S. officials stripped and beat Britel before dressing him in a diaper and overalls, shackling and blindfolding him and flying him to Morocco for detention and interrogation. Once in Morocco, they say U.S. officials handed him over to Moroccan intelligence officials who detained him incommunicado at the Temara detention center, where he was interrogated, beaten, deprived of sleep and food and threatened with sexual torture.
Britel was released from custody by Moroccan authorities in February 2003, but was again arrested and detained in May 2003 as he attempted to leave Morocco for his home in Italy. While detained incommunicado in the same detention facility where he had been tortured months earlier, Britel falsely confessed under torture to his involvement in terrorism. He was later tried and convicted by a Moroccan court on terrorism-related charges and is currently serving a nine-year sentence in a Moroccan prison.
In 2006, an Italian investigating judge dismissed a six-year long investigation into Britel's alleged involvement in terrorism after the judge found a complete lack of evidence linking him with any terrorist-related or criminal activity.
In a related development, the U.N.'s top human rights advocate, Navanethem Pillay, this week called on the Obama administration to release Guantanamo Bay inmates or try them in a court of law.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said that officials who authorized the use of torture must be held accountable for their crimes. She called for a probe into officials who participated in torture sessions or provided its legal justification.
The South African lawyer was also critical of President Obama's decision to hold some suspected terrorists in detention indefinitely without trial.
"People who order or inflict torture cannot be exonerated, and the roles of certain lawyers, as well as doctors who have attended torture sessions, should also be scrutinized," she said.
While praising the Obama administration for banning many of the harshest interrogation techniques, she said it needed to go further, providing victims of U.S. abuses with an opportunity to rebuild their lives.
"I believe we are finally starting to turn the page on this extremely
unfortunate chapter of recent history, with counter-terrorism measures starting to move back in to line with international human rights standards," Pillay said.
"But there is still much to do before the Guantanamo chapter is truly brought to a close."
Pillay’s remarks challenged Obama's decision to limit investigation into past abuses and to continue to hold some detainees who have not been charged with a crime. In May, Obama said some detainees deemed too dangerous to release might have to be held indefinitely.
"There should be no half-measures, or new creative ways to treat people as criminals when they have not been found guilty of any crime," Pillay said.
"Guantanamo showed that torture and unlawful forms of detention can all too easily creep back in to practice during times of stress, and there is still a long way to go before the moral high ground lost since 9/11 can be fully reclaimed."
But Pillay did not address the Obama administration's decision to use reformed military commissions to try suspected terrorists. Human rights groups have criticized the commissions, particularly that terror suspects could be convicted and executed based on evidence obtained by torture.
Pillay said that detainees who are not prosecuted and potentially face torture if they are sent back to their own countries "must be given a new home, where they can start to build a new life, in the United States or elsewhere. I welcome the fact that in recent weeks a number of countries have agreed to take in a few people in this position, and urge others to follow suit, including first and foremost the United States itself."
Earlier this month, the first Guantanamo detainee, Ahmed Ghailani, was flown to the United States to face death-pentalty charges for his alleged role in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. He is in custody in New York City.
But huge majorities of both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have resisted allowing any more of the remaining 229 detainees at Guantanamo into the United States. Republicans, in particular, have said they do not want GITMO detainees “wandering around in their neighborhgoods.”
As a result, the Senate voted 90 to 6 in May to withhold funding for the closure of Guantanamo until the Obama Administration submits a plan for doing so.
Pillay was also highly critical of the administration of George W. Bush. She charged that the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies had undermined international efforts to end torture. "The terrorist acts that shook the world on 11 September 2001 had a devastating impact on the fight to eliminate torture," she wrote. "Some states that had previously been careful not to practice or condone torture became less scrupulous."
Pillay called for "leadership” to end “this grotesque practice." She welcomed Obama's decision to close Guantanamo by next January and to ban waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques.
"Equally importantly, victims of torture must be helped to recover from one of the worst ordeals that a human being can face. The physical and mental scars of torture are excruciating, the effect on families devastating, and there are often long-term socio-economic effects, including a stigma that can be extremely hard to erase. Victims of torture must be compensated and cared for -- for as long as it takes to enable them once again to lead a relatively normal life," she said.
THE BEEB INVESTIGATES BAGRAM
By William Fisher
An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that former detainees at the U.S. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with dogs.
The BBC’s conclusions are based on interviews with 27 former detainees who were held at Bagram between 2002 and 2006. None of these men were ever charged with a crime. Hundreds of detainees are still being held in U.S. custody at the Afghan prison without charge or trial.
Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told us, "The BBC investigation provides further confirmation of the United States' mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram. These abuses are the direct consequence of decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government to avoid the Geneva Convention and forsake the rule of law. For too long, the unlawful detention and mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram has gone on outside the public eye. Hopefully, this investigation will help change that."
"When prisoners are in American custody and under American control, no matter the location, our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake," he said, adding:
"Torture and abuse at Bagram is further evidence that prisoner abuse in U.S. custody was systemic, not aberrational, and originated at the highest levels of government. We must learn the truth about what went wrong, hold the proper people accountable and make sure these failed policies are not continued or repeated."
In April, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at Bagram, including the number of people currently detained, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as "enemy combatants."
"The U.S. government's detention of hundreds of prisoners at Bagram has been shrouded in complete secrecy," said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU staff attorney. "The American people have a right to know what's happening at Bagram and whether prisoners have been tortured there."
Amnesty International said it was 'shocked' by the Bagram claims. It noted that a new detention center is currently under construction at the camp.
Another prominent human rights organization, the U.K.-based Reprieve, called on the British Government to take action concerning two Pakistanis who it says the U.K. helped render there from Iraq.
“The legal black hole in Bagram underlines the British government’s moral black hole when it comes to rendering two Pakistani prisoners there in 2004,” said Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve. “These men were in British custody in Iraq, were turned over to the U.S., and have now been held for five years without any respect for their legal rights.”
In February 2009, British Defense Secretary John Hutton announced to the House of Commons that Britain had handed two anonymous Pakistani men over to the U.S., and they had subsequently been rendered to Afghanistan, where they were still being held. “We have been assured that are held in a humane, safe and secure environment, meeting international standards consistent with cultural and religious norms,” Hutton said at the time.
“As we have said all along, beating people and holding them incommunicado is not humane, safe and secure,” Stafford Smith told us. “Britain has a moral duty to identify these men, so that we can reunite them with their legal rights, yet Mr. Hutton refuses to do this.”
No prisoner in Bagram has been allowed to see a lawyer, or challenge his detention. According to the BBC, the U.S. justice department argues that because Afghanistan is an active combat zone it is not possible to conduct rigorous inquiries into individual cases and that it would divert precious military resources at a crucial time.
“These men were never in Afghanistan until the UK and the US took them there,” said Stafford Smith. “It is the height of hypocrisy to take someone to Bagram and then claim that it is too dangerous to let them see a lawyer. Even Guantánamo Bay is better than this.”
The Pentagon has denied the BBC’s charges of harsh treatment and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.
The Bagram Airbase built by the Soviet military in the 1980s. The approximately 600 people held there are classified as "unlawful enemy combatants.' None was charged with any offence or put on trial -- some even received apologies when they were released.
Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the BBC interviews: physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers.
In four cases detainees were threatened with death at gunpoint.
"They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans," said one inmate.
"They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death," he said.
"They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you."
The BBC said its findings were shown to the Pentagon. Lt Col Mark Wright, a spokesman for the US Secretary of Defense, insisted that conditions at Bagram "meet international standards for care and custody". He said the US Defense Department has a policy of treating detainees humanely.
But he acknowledged that "There have been well-documented instances where that policy was not followed, and service members have been held accountable for their actions in those cases."
Since coming to office, US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month. But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.
An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that former detainees at the U.S. Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with dogs.
The BBC’s conclusions are based on interviews with 27 former detainees who were held at Bagram between 2002 and 2006. None of these men were ever charged with a crime. Hundreds of detainees are still being held in U.S. custody at the Afghan prison without charge or trial.
Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told us, "The BBC investigation provides further confirmation of the United States' mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram. These abuses are the direct consequence of decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government to avoid the Geneva Convention and forsake the rule of law. For too long, the unlawful detention and mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram has gone on outside the public eye. Hopefully, this investigation will help change that."
"When prisoners are in American custody and under American control, no matter the location, our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake," he said, adding:
"Torture and abuse at Bagram is further evidence that prisoner abuse in U.S. custody was systemic, not aberrational, and originated at the highest levels of government. We must learn the truth about what went wrong, hold the proper people accountable and make sure these failed policies are not continued or repeated."
In April, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at Bagram, including the number of people currently detained, their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as "enemy combatants."
"The U.S. government's detention of hundreds of prisoners at Bagram has been shrouded in complete secrecy," said Melissa Goodman, an ACLU staff attorney. "The American people have a right to know what's happening at Bagram and whether prisoners have been tortured there."
Amnesty International said it was 'shocked' by the Bagram claims. It noted that a new detention center is currently under construction at the camp.
Another prominent human rights organization, the U.K.-based Reprieve, called on the British Government to take action concerning two Pakistanis who it says the U.K. helped render there from Iraq.
“The legal black hole in Bagram underlines the British government’s moral black hole when it comes to rendering two Pakistani prisoners there in 2004,” said Clive Stafford Smith, Director of Reprieve. “These men were in British custody in Iraq, were turned over to the U.S., and have now been held for five years without any respect for their legal rights.”
In February 2009, British Defense Secretary John Hutton announced to the House of Commons that Britain had handed two anonymous Pakistani men over to the U.S., and they had subsequently been rendered to Afghanistan, where they were still being held. “We have been assured that are held in a humane, safe and secure environment, meeting international standards consistent with cultural and religious norms,” Hutton said at the time.
“As we have said all along, beating people and holding them incommunicado is not humane, safe and secure,” Stafford Smith told us. “Britain has a moral duty to identify these men, so that we can reunite them with their legal rights, yet Mr. Hutton refuses to do this.”
No prisoner in Bagram has been allowed to see a lawyer, or challenge his detention. According to the BBC, the U.S. justice department argues that because Afghanistan is an active combat zone it is not possible to conduct rigorous inquiries into individual cases and that it would divert precious military resources at a crucial time.
“These men were never in Afghanistan until the UK and the US took them there,” said Stafford Smith. “It is the height of hypocrisy to take someone to Bagram and then claim that it is too dangerous to let them see a lawyer. Even Guantánamo Bay is better than this.”
The Pentagon has denied the BBC’s charges of harsh treatment and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.
The Bagram Airbase built by the Soviet military in the 1980s. The approximately 600 people held there are classified as "unlawful enemy combatants.' None was charged with any offence or put on trial -- some even received apologies when they were released.
Many allegations of ill-treatment appear repeatedly in the BBC interviews: physical abuse, the use of stress positions, excessive heat or cold, unbearably loud noise, being forced to remove clothes in front of female soldiers.
In four cases detainees were threatened with death at gunpoint.
"They did things that you would not do against animals let alone to humans," said one inmate.
"They poured cold water on you in winter and hot water in summer. They used dogs against us. They put a pistol or a gun to your head and threatened you with death," he said.
"They put some kind of medicine in the juice or water to make you sleepless and then they would interrogate you."
The BBC said its findings were shown to the Pentagon. Lt Col Mark Wright, a spokesman for the US Secretary of Defense, insisted that conditions at Bagram "meet international standards for care and custody". He said the US Defense Department has a policy of treating detainees humanely.
But he acknowledged that "There have been well-documented instances where that policy was not followed, and service members have been held accountable for their actions in those cases."
Since coming to office, US President Barack Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month. But unlike its detainees at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Health Care Chamber of Horrors: Choose Your Bureaucrat!
By William Fisher
With their principles firmly focused on the 2010 elections, and juicy campaign contributions from the so-called health care industry, Republicans and some potentially endangered Democrats are furiously fulminating about “socialized medicine” and government bureaucrats who will “ration your health care” and “get between you and your doctor.”
Can Harry and Louise be far behind?
Well, government is not the only place where bureaucrats work. They are ubiquitous in those wonderful companies we pay to bring us our health insurance policies.
They aren’t big on “socialized medicine” – though not even economists dispute that universal health care is a social good.
But they’re regularly rewarded for rationing your health care and getting between you and your doctor.
Consider this mini-chamber of horrors, culled from a recent and highly dramatic House hearing chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman of California.
Robin Beaton, 59, found out last June she had an aggressive form of breast cancer and needed surgery -- immediately. But just days before her double mastectomy, she found out that her insurance provider would not cover the procedure. (In the industry, they call it “rescission.”) Why rescission? ?
In May 2008, Beaton had visited a dermatologist for acne. A word written on her chart was interpreted to mean precancerous, so the insurance company decided to launch an investigation into her medical history.
Beaton's dermatologist begged her insurance provider to go ahead with the surgery.
"He said, 'This is a misunderstanding. This is not precancerous. All she has is acne.” Still, the insurance carrier decided to rescind her coverage. The company said it had reviewed her medical records and found out that she had misinformed them about some of her medical history.
Beaton had listed her weight incorrectly. She also didn't disclose medication she had taken for a pre-existing heart condition -- medicine she wasn't taking when she originally applied for coverage.
Another witness, Wittney Horton, said her coverage was canceled after her carrier said she did not disclose that she had taken a drug prescribed for weight loss and because of her irregular menstrual cycle. Her carrier sent her a letter saying they would not have accepted her had they known she had "polycystic ovaries," a condition she did not know she had.
And Peggy Raddatz testified on behalf of her late brother, who was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin's type lymphoma. In the midst of his chemotherapy treatment, his coverage was cancelled and he was not able to receive the stem cell transplant needed to save his life.
Raddatz's brother was told his coverage was canceled for failing to disclose that, unknown to him, a doctor had once noted in his file that a CT scan showed a small aneurysm and some insignificant gallstones.
These are but a few of the thousands of people who thought their premiums entitled them to be treated. And if you think these are extraordinary cases, consider this:
Blue Cross of California, a subsidiary of WellPoint, encouraged employees through performance evaluations to cancel the health insurance policies of individuals with expensive illnesses. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect score of "5" for "exceptional performance" on an evaluation that noted the employee's role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.
Blue Cross of California and two other insurers saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period.
(Note to media watchers: When CNN reported this hearing, it conveniently ignored an inconvenient truth: the names of the errant insurers. Thanks to Karen Tumulty of TIME, we now know who they are: Wittney Horton and Robin Beaton were insured by Blue Cross. Peggy Raddatz’s brother, Otto, was insured by Fortis Insurance Company. Also, this riveting hearing got no airtime on the TV networks, nor did it appear in The New York Times or The Washington Post.)
At the risk of inviting my own “recission,” I invite you to examine my own health insurance history. I have several chronic ailments. But, over the last 15 years, Medicare – yes, that awful “socialized medicine” plan – has never denied me the treatment I needed. Ditto my Medigap insurance, purchased through AARP.
Bureaucrats abound in both the public and private sectors, and Lord knows, Medicare has more than its share of warts (is that a pre-existing condition?).
But, given my druthers, I’ll choose what’s now being called the public option.
It’s worth remembering that, through our votes and our letters and phone calls to our representatives in Congress, we have at least a fair shot at managing the public bureaucrats. The private sector is accountable only to the bottom line and the great invisible hand of the market.
Maybe you’d like to let the market perform your next surgery?
With their principles firmly focused on the 2010 elections, and juicy campaign contributions from the so-called health care industry, Republicans and some potentially endangered Democrats are furiously fulminating about “socialized medicine” and government bureaucrats who will “ration your health care” and “get between you and your doctor.”
Can Harry and Louise be far behind?
Well, government is not the only place where bureaucrats work. They are ubiquitous in those wonderful companies we pay to bring us our health insurance policies.
They aren’t big on “socialized medicine” – though not even economists dispute that universal health care is a social good.
But they’re regularly rewarded for rationing your health care and getting between you and your doctor.
Consider this mini-chamber of horrors, culled from a recent and highly dramatic House hearing chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman of California.
Robin Beaton, 59, found out last June she had an aggressive form of breast cancer and needed surgery -- immediately. But just days before her double mastectomy, she found out that her insurance provider would not cover the procedure. (In the industry, they call it “rescission.”) Why rescission? ?
In May 2008, Beaton had visited a dermatologist for acne. A word written on her chart was interpreted to mean precancerous, so the insurance company decided to launch an investigation into her medical history.
Beaton's dermatologist begged her insurance provider to go ahead with the surgery.
"He said, 'This is a misunderstanding. This is not precancerous. All she has is acne.” Still, the insurance carrier decided to rescind her coverage. The company said it had reviewed her medical records and found out that she had misinformed them about some of her medical history.
Beaton had listed her weight incorrectly. She also didn't disclose medication she had taken for a pre-existing heart condition -- medicine she wasn't taking when she originally applied for coverage.
Another witness, Wittney Horton, said her coverage was canceled after her carrier said she did not disclose that she had taken a drug prescribed for weight loss and because of her irregular menstrual cycle. Her carrier sent her a letter saying they would not have accepted her had they known she had "polycystic ovaries," a condition she did not know she had.
And Peggy Raddatz testified on behalf of her late brother, who was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin's type lymphoma. In the midst of his chemotherapy treatment, his coverage was cancelled and he was not able to receive the stem cell transplant needed to save his life.
Raddatz's brother was told his coverage was canceled for failing to disclose that, unknown to him, a doctor had once noted in his file that a CT scan showed a small aneurysm and some insignificant gallstones.
These are but a few of the thousands of people who thought their premiums entitled them to be treated. And if you think these are extraordinary cases, consider this:
Blue Cross of California, a subsidiary of WellPoint, encouraged employees through performance evaluations to cancel the health insurance policies of individuals with expensive illnesses. One Blue Cross employee earned a perfect score of "5" for "exceptional performance" on an evaluation that noted the employee's role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.
Blue Cross of California and two other insurers saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period.
(Note to media watchers: When CNN reported this hearing, it conveniently ignored an inconvenient truth: the names of the errant insurers. Thanks to Karen Tumulty of TIME, we now know who they are: Wittney Horton and Robin Beaton were insured by Blue Cross. Peggy Raddatz’s brother, Otto, was insured by Fortis Insurance Company. Also, this riveting hearing got no airtime on the TV networks, nor did it appear in The New York Times or The Washington Post.)
At the risk of inviting my own “recission,” I invite you to examine my own health insurance history. I have several chronic ailments. But, over the last 15 years, Medicare – yes, that awful “socialized medicine” plan – has never denied me the treatment I needed. Ditto my Medigap insurance, purchased through AARP.
Bureaucrats abound in both the public and private sectors, and Lord knows, Medicare has more than its share of warts (is that a pre-existing condition?).
But, given my druthers, I’ll choose what’s now being called the public option.
It’s worth remembering that, through our votes and our letters and phone calls to our representatives in Congress, we have at least a fair shot at managing the public bureaucrats. The private sector is accountable only to the bottom line and the great invisible hand of the market.
Maybe you’d like to let the market perform your next surgery?
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