By William Fisher
Did physicians and psychologists help the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency develop a new research protocol to assess and refine the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques?
This is the question being raised in a new report by a leading human rights organization. The group says that, if confirmed, it would likely constitute a “new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.”
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) charges that “The extent to which American physicians and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is greater than previously known.”
A team of PHR doctors authored the new white paper, “Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report.” The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods.
“PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation,” the report says.
“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,” says PHR Medical Advisor and lead report author Scott Allen, MD.
For example, the report says, “Interrogators would place a cloth over a detainee’s face to block breathing and induce feelings of fear, helplessness, and a loss of control. A doctor would stand by to monitor and calibrate this physically and psychologically harmful act, which amounts to torture. It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program.”
Frank Donaghue, PHR’s Chief Executive Officer, told IPS, “Health professionals violated ethical duties by participating in the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody. PHR has long demanded a full investigation into the role health professionals played in detainee treatment. PHR again calls upon health professional associations to support a non-partisan commission of inquiry.”
“It is time for the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and others to demand a nonpartisan commission to investigate these crimes,” he said. “The associations must sanction any of their membership found to have violated their professional ethics.”
These and other professional organizations have condemned participation by their members in detainee interrogations.
The Inspector General’s report documents some practices -- previously unknown or unconfirmed -- that were used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end.
These practices included: Mock executions; brandishing guns and power drills; threats to sexually assault family members and murder children; walling” – repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee’s head against a cell wall; and confinement in a box.
“These unlawful, unethical, and ineffective interrogation tactics cause significant bodily and mental harm,” said co-author and PHR Senior Medical Advisor Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD. “The CIA Inspector General’s report confirms that torture escalates in severity and torturers frequently go beyond approved techniques.”
“The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers. The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring, and actually designed and implemented these abuses – while simultaneously serving as ‘safety monitors’ – reveals the ethical bankruptcy of the entire program,” said co-author Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR’s Psychological Ethics Advisor.
“That health professionals who swear to oaths of healing so abused the sacred trust society places in us by instigating, legitimizing and participating in torture, is an abomination,” states co-author Allen Keller, MD, Director of the Bellevue Medical Center/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture.
“Health professionals who aided torture must be held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing boards, and by society. Accountability is essential to maintain trust in our professions and to end torture, which scars bodies and minds, leaving survivors to endure debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares,” Keller said.
PHR has called for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services. PHR also calls for health professionals who have violated ethical standards or the law to be held accountable through criminal prosecution, loss of license and loss of professional society membership where appropriate.
The report by the CIA’s now-retired Inspector General, John Helgerson, was prepared in 2004. In response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a heavily redacted version of the report was released earlier. But because many pages of it were totally blacked out and unreadable, the ACLU asked a federal judge to order the CIA to release a less-redacted version. That version, with some sections still blacked out, was released last month.
Its publication sparked a firestorm of controversy, with key figures such as former vice-president Dick Cheney defending the CIA’s interrogation practices and accusing the Obama Administration of aiding terrorists by making the report public. It has reportedly also resulted in heated arguments between Attorney General Eric Holder and Leon Panetta, head of the CIA. Both are recent Obama appointments.
Holder has since appointed a special prosecutor to conduct a preliminary investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be pursued against CIA operatives who exceeded the guidelines provided to them by lawyers in the Justice Department during the administration of former President George W. Bush.
The C.I.A.’s interrogation methods were declared legal by the Justice Department under President Bush. Recently released memoranda asserting their legality have been attacked by many legal scholars and human rights advocates.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Home-Grown GITMO?
By William Fisher
As the planned closing of the U.S. military’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay draws nearer, human rights activists are raising questions about the treatment of detainees who will be transferred to the U.S. for trial.
But, while the media has focused virtually all its attention on these foreign prisoners held abroad, the government is already imprisoning in the U.S. American citizens awaiting trial on terror-related charges – and under what their supporters describe as draconian conditions.
These people are being held under a Department of Justice rule known as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a rule dating from the Bill Clinton era and strengthened during the administration of George W. Bush.
SAMs are designed to keep dangerous inmates in custody from communicating with other terror suspects on the outside, and to prevent them from ordering violence or harming other inmates. The measures were expanded after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, extending the limit to one year from 120 days and permitting the monitoring of communications between the inmates and their lawyers in certain circumstances.
The DOJ and its Bureau of Prisons say six people – four charged with terror-related crimes -- are currently being held under the SAMs rule. But one case appears to be attracting increasing attention.
This is the case of Syed Hashmi, a 29-year-old Pakistani immigrant and U.S. citizen who grew up in Queens, New York, and who has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in New York City for more than two years while he awaits trial on charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda.
Hashmi, a Muslim, is on a 23-hour solitary-confinement lockdown and 24-hour surveillance including when he showers and goes to the bathroom. He was not allowed family visits for months. Now, he can see one person for an hour and a half, every other week. He is permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper per letter. Within his own cell, he is restricted in his movements and he is not allowed to try to talk guards or other inmates.
Hashmi is forbidden any contact -- directly or through his attorneys -- with the news media. He can read newspapers, but only those portions approved by his jailers -- and not until 30 days after publication. He is forbidden to listen to news radio stations or to watch television news channels.
He is also under 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside of his cell. He is allowed one hour of recreation every day -- which is periodically denied -- and not given fresh air but must exercise alone inside a cage.
One of Hashmi’s Brooklyn College professors, Jeanne Theoharis, who has attended the hearings in his case, told IPS that Hashmi’s “mental health appears to be deteriorating." His attorneys are concerned that his extreme isolation "will cause lasting psychological, emotional, and physical damage" to their client.
Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College, was instrumental in organizing a campaign to draw attention to the civil liberties and human rights concerns of Hashmi’s case that enlisted more than 550 signatories to petition the Justice Department protesting the conditions of Hashmi's confinement and undermining his right to a fair trial. Among them were Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Duncan Kennedy of Harvard; Seyla Benhabib of Yale; and Eric Foner and Saskia Sassen of Columbia.
Prosecutors have said that Hashmi’s friend, Junaid Babar, stayed at his London apartment for two weeks, while Hashmi was studying for a Master’s degree in the U.K. Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in the apartment. Babar later delivered them to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
When, later in New York, a Grand Jury charged Hashmi with "conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization," the socks, ponchos, and raincoats became "military gear."
The government also charges that Hashmi let Babar use his cell phone "to call other conspirators." Hashmi says he had no idea whom Babar was calling.
Hashmi has denied that he was part of conspiracies to help Al Qaeda, or that he ever gave support to anybody to pass on materials to the terrorist group.
He was initially arrested in London in 2006 as he prepared to board a flight to Pakistan and was then extradited to the U.S. He has been held in New York since the Memorial Day weekend, 2007.
Hashmi has no criminal record and no history of committing acts of violence.
In court in January 2009, Hashmi’s lawyers called the restrictions on Hashmi too severe and asked a federal judge to lift some of them, perhaps allowing Hashmi to have a cellmate or to exercise in fresh air. But the judge denied a motion to consider the psychological impact of solitary confinement and ease the conditions of his detention. Hashmi’s trial is set for November 30, 2009.
Hashmi’s friend Babar has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support of Al Qaeda and has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain, Canada, and at Hashmi's trial. The Justice Department says Babar is the "centerpiece" of its case against Hashmi. In return, under a plea bargain, Babar will likely get a reduced sentence. If Hashmi is convicted, he may be sentenced to 70 years behind bars.
Much of the evidence against Hashmi is classified. His lawyers have received CIA-level clearance to view it but may not discuss it with Hashmi or with other uncleared experts.
Sean Maher, one of his attorneys, has told the media that he is under “severe limitations on what I can and can’t say.” Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted in 2005 for providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy for releasing a statement by imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to his followers in the outlaw Islamic Group. She is now appealing her conviction. Hashmi’s lawyer is under the same restrictions.
Maher also raised the issue of secrecy in federal court. “One of the paramount issues that this case brings up, without talking about any specifics in this case, is the use of secrecy in modern courtrooms. And in our Article III court, which we’re all trying to get people in Guantanamo to, what is the role of secrecy? And what will secrecy’s role play in these cases that President Obama says he might bring into these courts? “
As U.S. trials of GITMO detainees move closer to reality, these questions are likely to attract far wider interest. As Prof. Corey Robin, another of Hashmi’s teachers at Brooklyn College, told IPS, “The conditions of his confinement have not been changed since President Obama took office. As the nation looks backward to the Bush Administration, it is imperative that we draw attention to abuses – particularly those within our federal prisons and courts – that continue under the Obama Administration.”
As the planned closing of the U.S. military’s detention center at Guantanamo Bay draws nearer, human rights activists are raising questions about the treatment of detainees who will be transferred to the U.S. for trial.
But, while the media has focused virtually all its attention on these foreign prisoners held abroad, the government is already imprisoning in the U.S. American citizens awaiting trial on terror-related charges – and under what their supporters describe as draconian conditions.
These people are being held under a Department of Justice rule known as Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), a rule dating from the Bill Clinton era and strengthened during the administration of George W. Bush.
SAMs are designed to keep dangerous inmates in custody from communicating with other terror suspects on the outside, and to prevent them from ordering violence or harming other inmates. The measures were expanded after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, extending the limit to one year from 120 days and permitting the monitoring of communications between the inmates and their lawyers in certain circumstances.
The DOJ and its Bureau of Prisons say six people – four charged with terror-related crimes -- are currently being held under the SAMs rule. But one case appears to be attracting increasing attention.
This is the case of Syed Hashmi, a 29-year-old Pakistani immigrant and U.S. citizen who grew up in Queens, New York, and who has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in New York City for more than two years while he awaits trial on charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda.
Hashmi, a Muslim, is on a 23-hour solitary-confinement lockdown and 24-hour surveillance including when he showers and goes to the bathroom. He was not allowed family visits for months. Now, he can see one person for an hour and a half, every other week. He is permitted to write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper per letter. Within his own cell, he is restricted in his movements and he is not allowed to try to talk guards or other inmates.
Hashmi is forbidden any contact -- directly or through his attorneys -- with the news media. He can read newspapers, but only those portions approved by his jailers -- and not until 30 days after publication. He is forbidden to listen to news radio stations or to watch television news channels.
He is also under 24-hour electronic monitoring inside and outside of his cell. He is allowed one hour of recreation every day -- which is periodically denied -- and not given fresh air but must exercise alone inside a cage.
One of Hashmi’s Brooklyn College professors, Jeanne Theoharis, who has attended the hearings in his case, told IPS that Hashmi’s “mental health appears to be deteriorating." His attorneys are concerned that his extreme isolation "will cause lasting psychological, emotional, and physical damage" to their client.
Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York's Brooklyn College, was instrumental in organizing a campaign to draw attention to the civil liberties and human rights concerns of Hashmi’s case that enlisted more than 550 signatories to petition the Justice Department protesting the conditions of Hashmi's confinement and undermining his right to a fair trial. Among them were Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Duncan Kennedy of Harvard; Seyla Benhabib of Yale; and Eric Foner and Saskia Sassen of Columbia.
Prosecutors have said that Hashmi’s friend, Junaid Babar, stayed at his London apartment for two weeks, while Hashmi was studying for a Master’s degree in the U.K. Babar stored luggage containing raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in the apartment. Babar later delivered them to the third-ranking member of Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
When, later in New York, a Grand Jury charged Hashmi with "conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization," the socks, ponchos, and raincoats became "military gear."
The government also charges that Hashmi let Babar use his cell phone "to call other conspirators." Hashmi says he had no idea whom Babar was calling.
Hashmi has denied that he was part of conspiracies to help Al Qaeda, or that he ever gave support to anybody to pass on materials to the terrorist group.
He was initially arrested in London in 2006 as he prepared to board a flight to Pakistan and was then extradited to the U.S. He has been held in New York since the Memorial Day weekend, 2007.
Hashmi has no criminal record and no history of committing acts of violence.
In court in January 2009, Hashmi’s lawyers called the restrictions on Hashmi too severe and asked a federal judge to lift some of them, perhaps allowing Hashmi to have a cellmate or to exercise in fresh air. But the judge denied a motion to consider the psychological impact of solitary confinement and ease the conditions of his detention. Hashmi’s trial is set for November 30, 2009.
Hashmi’s friend Babar has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support of Al Qaeda and has agreed to serve as a government witness in terrorism trials in Britain, Canada, and at Hashmi's trial. The Justice Department says Babar is the "centerpiece" of its case against Hashmi. In return, under a plea bargain, Babar will likely get a reduced sentence. If Hashmi is convicted, he may be sentenced to 70 years behind bars.
Much of the evidence against Hashmi is classified. His lawyers have received CIA-level clearance to view it but may not discuss it with Hashmi or with other uncleared experts.
Sean Maher, one of his attorneys, has told the media that he is under “severe limitations on what I can and can’t say.” Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted in 2005 for providing material support to a terrorist conspiracy for releasing a statement by imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to his followers in the outlaw Islamic Group. She is now appealing her conviction. Hashmi’s lawyer is under the same restrictions.
Maher also raised the issue of secrecy in federal court. “One of the paramount issues that this case brings up, without talking about any specifics in this case, is the use of secrecy in modern courtrooms. And in our Article III court, which we’re all trying to get people in Guantanamo to, what is the role of secrecy? And what will secrecy’s role play in these cases that President Obama says he might bring into these courts? “
As U.S. trials of GITMO detainees move closer to reality, these questions are likely to attract far wider interest. As Prof. Corey Robin, another of Hashmi’s teachers at Brooklyn College, told IPS, “The conditions of his confinement have not been changed since President Obama took office. As the nation looks backward to the Bush Administration, it is imperative that we draw attention to abuses – particularly those within our federal prisons and courts – that continue under the Obama Administration.”
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Rights Groups, Lawmakers, React to Probe of CIA
By William Fisher
Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision yesterday to investigate whether interrogators from the Central Intelligence Agency or its contractors violated any federal laws in applying “enhanced interrogation techniques” to detainees in U.S. custody overseas triggered immediate criticism from human rights advocates and appeared to widen the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.
As Holder released a long-delayed 2004 report by the CIA’s then-Inspector General (IG) detailing the often-brutal questioning of “high value” al Qaeda terror suspects, he named a special prosecutor to investigate whether CIA officers or its contractors went beyond the policies and practices authorized in legal memos from the George W. Bush administration.
The 190-page report, though still heavily redacted, describes a litany of interrogation abuses inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons, including repeatedly choking a prisoner, threatening to sexually assault a detainee’s mother in front of him, vowing to kill a detainee’s children, using a power drill during an interrogation to terrify the suspect, and staging a mock execution.
The report also addresses the repeated waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. Some CIA operatives were unclear about the legal basis for using this technique and sought guidance from their headquarters. The report says the attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, was aware of and approved its use. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month.
But prosecutor John Durham's mandate will be limited to roughly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated U.S. torture laws and other statutes. Moreover, Durham will first conduct a 'preliminary' investigation meant to determine whether a full investigation is appropriate. Many of the same cases were reviewed in 2005 during the Bush Administration, which decided that prosecutions were not justified.
Predictably, the middle ground taken by Holder failed to satisfy either the Right or the Left. Those on the Right want no investigations. Those on the Left believe the investigation should not be limited to CIA operatives but rather should follow the evidence trail up the chain of command to senior Bush administration officials.
Moreover, in the heated partisan environment of today’s Washington, any investigation is likely to complicate the Obama Administration’s efforts to forge bipartisan coalitions to implement the president’s legislative agenda, which includes ambitious initiatives in health care, climate change, education, and immigration.
The human rights community was virtually unanimous in the view that Durham’s limited mandate did not go far enough.
"The Obama administration made a commitment to transparency, and the release of the IG report is a step in the right direction. The American public has a right to know the full truth about the torture that was committed in its name," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the National Security project for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the group that originally brought the lawsuit against the government that resulted in the public release of the CIA IG report.
“The information in the report about the origins and scope of the CIA's torture program further underscores the need for a comprehensive investigation into the torture of detainees and those who authorized it," he said.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group that has provided defense counsel for many Guantanamo Bay detainees, said, “Justice demands an investigation without such limits – a comprehensive investigation that doesn't exempt high-ranking officials.”
Clare Algar, Executive Director of Reprieve, a London-based British charity that has defended more than 30 terror detainees, said, “Rather than creating low-level scapegoats, any prosecution should reveal that the criminal acts described in these memos were ordered by those at the very top of the CIA and Bush Administration.”
Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First Advocacy Counsel, said “The Attorney General should ensure that the appointed prosecutor has discretion to follow the facts wherever they lead, including investigating the architects of the system of prison abuse, not only those who implemented it.”
And, in a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, “After years of evidence that torture and human rights violations were ordered and authorized from above, only lower level personnel have been held to account. We can’t let impunity for torture continue.”
Members of Congress were far less unanimous.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said “The documents released today provide evidence that the CIA detention and interrogation program exceeded its authority.” Her committee is currently conducting its own investigation of the CIA ‘s abuse of prisoners in its secret prisons overseas. She said, “The Committee’s study will continue until we complete our work, regardless of any decision by Attorney General Holder on whether to proceed to a criminal investigation.”
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the DOJ investigation reminded him of previous inquiries into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, when “lower ranking troops who committed abuses were hung out to dry.”
But Republicans took a decidedly different view. The senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond of Missouri, characterized the appointment of a special prosecutor as a “witch hunt targeting the terror fighters who have kept us safe since 9/11.”
And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called Holder’s decision “poor and misguided.” Bond and eight other GOP Senators said Holder’s actions would have a “chilling effect” on the CIA.
In the House of Representatives, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the DOJ investigation could interfere with the government’s counter-terrorism programs. He added that the abuse charges had already been “exhaustively reviewed.”
But House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes, said that senior Bush officials should not be left out of any probe.
As Holder was releasing the CIA IG report, the White House announced that the government would continue to carry out “renditions” – shipping detainees to third countries to be held in custody. But officials said these actions would be much more carefully monitored to ensure that prisoners were not sent to countries known to torture prisoners.
That announcement draw sharp and unanimous criticism from human rights advocates.
The ACLU’s Amrit Singh, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush, echoed the community’s sentiment. She said, “It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture.”
She cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, which offered assurances against torture but beat Mr. Arar with electrical cable anyway.
The disclosures by the Justice Department also included two reports that former Vice President Dick Cheney wanted released earlier this year, stating that they would demonstrate the effectiveness of abusive interrogation techniques. However, these reports refer to no specific interrogation methods and make no effort to measure their effectiveness.
Their release drew sharp criticism from human rights groups.
The comments of CCR Attorney Gitanjali S. Gutierrez are typical. She said, “These are the documents Dick Cheney was so excited to see declassified, but they don’t make the case for torture, they only show that the CIA is able to tailor documents to justify its actions after the fact.”
Cheney said yesterday that the CIA's interrogation of terror suspects "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks." In a statement, he said those who carried out the interrogations "deserve our gratitude" -- not "to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."
Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision yesterday to investigate whether interrogators from the Central Intelligence Agency or its contractors violated any federal laws in applying “enhanced interrogation techniques” to detainees in U.S. custody overseas triggered immediate criticism from human rights advocates and appeared to widen the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.
As Holder released a long-delayed 2004 report by the CIA’s then-Inspector General (IG) detailing the often-brutal questioning of “high value” al Qaeda terror suspects, he named a special prosecutor to investigate whether CIA officers or its contractors went beyond the policies and practices authorized in legal memos from the George W. Bush administration.
The 190-page report, though still heavily redacted, describes a litany of interrogation abuses inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons, including repeatedly choking a prisoner, threatening to sexually assault a detainee’s mother in front of him, vowing to kill a detainee’s children, using a power drill during an interrogation to terrify the suspect, and staging a mock execution.
The report also addresses the repeated waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks. Some CIA operatives were unclear about the legal basis for using this technique and sought guidance from their headquarters. The report says the attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, was aware of and approved its use. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in a single month.
But prosecutor John Durham's mandate will be limited to roughly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated U.S. torture laws and other statutes. Moreover, Durham will first conduct a 'preliminary' investigation meant to determine whether a full investigation is appropriate. Many of the same cases were reviewed in 2005 during the Bush Administration, which decided that prosecutions were not justified.
Predictably, the middle ground taken by Holder failed to satisfy either the Right or the Left. Those on the Right want no investigations. Those on the Left believe the investigation should not be limited to CIA operatives but rather should follow the evidence trail up the chain of command to senior Bush administration officials.
Moreover, in the heated partisan environment of today’s Washington, any investigation is likely to complicate the Obama Administration’s efforts to forge bipartisan coalitions to implement the president’s legislative agenda, which includes ambitious initiatives in health care, climate change, education, and immigration.
The human rights community was virtually unanimous in the view that Durham’s limited mandate did not go far enough.
"The Obama administration made a commitment to transparency, and the release of the IG report is a step in the right direction. The American public has a right to know the full truth about the torture that was committed in its name," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the National Security project for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the group that originally brought the lawsuit against the government that resulted in the public release of the CIA IG report.
“The information in the report about the origins and scope of the CIA's torture program further underscores the need for a comprehensive investigation into the torture of detainees and those who authorized it," he said.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group that has provided defense counsel for many Guantanamo Bay detainees, said, “Justice demands an investigation without such limits – a comprehensive investigation that doesn't exempt high-ranking officials.”
Clare Algar, Executive Director of Reprieve, a London-based British charity that has defended more than 30 terror detainees, said, “Rather than creating low-level scapegoats, any prosecution should reveal that the criminal acts described in these memos were ordered by those at the very top of the CIA and Bush Administration.”
Devon Chaffee, Human Rights First Advocacy Counsel, said “The Attorney General should ensure that the appointed prosecutor has discretion to follow the facts wherever they lead, including investigating the architects of the system of prison abuse, not only those who implemented it.”
And, in a statement, Amnesty International USA, said, “After years of evidence that torture and human rights violations were ordered and authorized from above, only lower level personnel have been held to account. We can’t let impunity for torture continue.”
Members of Congress were far less unanimous.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said “The documents released today provide evidence that the CIA detention and interrogation program exceeded its authority.” Her committee is currently conducting its own investigation of the CIA ‘s abuse of prisoners in its secret prisons overseas. She said, “The Committee’s study will continue until we complete our work, regardless of any decision by Attorney General Holder on whether to proceed to a criminal investigation.”
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the DOJ investigation reminded him of previous inquiries into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, when “lower ranking troops who committed abuses were hung out to dry.”
But Republicans took a decidedly different view. The senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond of Missouri, characterized the appointment of a special prosecutor as a “witch hunt targeting the terror fighters who have kept us safe since 9/11.”
And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called Holder’s decision “poor and misguided.” Bond and eight other GOP Senators said Holder’s actions would have a “chilling effect” on the CIA.
In the House of Representatives, Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the DOJ investigation could interfere with the government’s counter-terrorism programs. He added that the abuse charges had already been “exhaustively reviewed.”
But House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Texas Democrat Silvestre Reyes, said that senior Bush officials should not be left out of any probe.
As Holder was releasing the CIA IG report, the White House announced that the government would continue to carry out “renditions” – shipping detainees to third countries to be held in custody. But officials said these actions would be much more carefully monitored to ensure that prisoners were not sent to countries known to torture prisoners.
That announcement draw sharp and unanimous criticism from human rights advocates.
The ACLU’s Amrit Singh, who tracked rendition cases under President George W. Bush, echoed the community’s sentiment. She said, “It is extremely disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration practice of relying on diplomatic assurances, which have been proven completely ineffective in preventing torture.”
She cited the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian sent in 2002 by the United States to Syria, which offered assurances against torture but beat Mr. Arar with electrical cable anyway.
The disclosures by the Justice Department also included two reports that former Vice President Dick Cheney wanted released earlier this year, stating that they would demonstrate the effectiveness of abusive interrogation techniques. However, these reports refer to no specific interrogation methods and make no effort to measure their effectiveness.
Their release drew sharp criticism from human rights groups.
The comments of CCR Attorney Gitanjali S. Gutierrez are typical. She said, “These are the documents Dick Cheney was so excited to see declassified, but they don’t make the case for torture, they only show that the CIA is able to tailor documents to justify its actions after the fact.”
Cheney said yesterday that the CIA's interrogation of terror suspects "saved lives and prevented terrorist attacks." In a statement, he said those who carried out the interrogations "deserve our gratitude" -- not "to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions."
Monday, August 24, 2009
Mubarak: Autocrat With Chutzpah
By William Fisher
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, writing last week on health care reform, said “There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
But as I read his column, my brain seemed to wander, not to health care, but to another major news event of that week: The visit to the White House of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
But why thoughts of this 81-year-old autocrat? Krugman said it: “There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
I don’t mean that I think Obama should deploy American Crusaders into the Land of the Nile to establish a liberal, pro-Western, American-style democracy. George W. Bush tried that in Iraq and we’ve seen how well that adventure turned out. That’s not realism; that’s hubris.
What I mean is that for a generation, the U.S. has generously bribed Egypt year in and year out for not again trying to invade Israel. And what Egypt has to show for our trouble is, well, zero, zilch, nada. Egypt has done next to nothing to further an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. And it has done nothing to improve the economic, social or political life of its people. Yet we persist in repeating what we’ve always done and expecting a different result.
Some would say that’s a great definition of insanity. But that’s what has passed for realism in our foreign policy in the Middle East.
Today’s rationale for keeping the big bucks flowing to the Mubarak regime is that Egypt will play a major role in finally ending the Israel-Palestine disaster. Except that we’ve seen this movie before. We seem to have a knack for reaching out for the slenderest of reeds to hang onto.
During the years I lived in Cairo, I witnessed the rhetoric of the State-controlled media. It was and is institutionalized government propaganda – always anti-Israeli and often anti-Semitic. (Israel and the Palestinian Authority, of course, constantly add fuel to the fire with their own propaganda machines.)
But the Mubarak regime has repeatedly used the Israeli-Palestinian impasse as a fig-leaf to obscure its own monumental deficiencies – and later used Bush’s “war on terror” mantra as an even more dramatic cover story. Does this sound like the job description of an honest broker?
I also read translations of some of the revisionist-history textbooks used in Egyptian schools – proclaiming, for example, Egypt’s “victory” over the Israelis in Sinai. I talked with upper-class, well-educated college students and members of my own staff about the Holocaust. Some of them denied it altogether; others said it resulted in the destruction of only one million Jews.
And what’s been done with all of our aid? Well, to say Egypt is an economic and political basket-case would be generous to basket-cases. Its continuing stagnation is the result of a toxic combination of overpopulation, lack of proper education and training, the effect of decades of failed economic policies, rampant corruption, and the absence of anything remotely resembling good governance.
Egypt has received more than $50 billion in military and economic aid from the United States since 1977, when it agreed to a peace treaty with Israel. Yet, long before the world collapsed into the current recession, unemployment in Egypt was off the charts – well over 10 per cent in most years. Kids who graduated from schools like Cairo University and the American University in Cairo – many with Master’s degrees – were driving taxis for tourists. And now the tourism industry is on life support. Many other Egyptians have joined the growing brain-drain to Europe and North America.
And the worst is probably yet to come. The labor force is growing at a far faster rate than the demand for labor. So the future looks even bleaker for Egpyt’s 80 million people.
In recent years, Mubarak and his Ministers have made countless speeches about entrepreneurism and how it is alive and well in Egypt. But entrepreurism appears to be only for those with lots of time on their hands. For example, what should be a relatively simple task of starting a new business can and does take months lost in the mother of all Byzantine bureaucracies. And if you happen to be one of those aspiring entrepreneurs, but you don’t happen to belong to one of the country’s “good families,” you can forget about getting a loan from any bank. Banks in Egypt lend to people who don’t need loans.
Corruption – a pandemic in the Middle East – is everywhere in Egypt. Some of it qualifies as petty corruption, like bribing the phone company manager to turn your phone on or paying off the supervisor at the police academy to say that you are three inches taller that you actually are to meet the Academy’s requirements.
But there’s also big-time corruption, like unlawfully importing toxic agricultural chemicals, and relabeling them to secure a higher mark-up. The American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt reports that corruption in the import-export supply chain adds about $30 to every single transaction. That makes Egypt uncompetitive and its Customs officials comfortable.
But it’s political corruption that will be Mubarak’s legacy. In preparation for his visit to Washington, the aging strongman granted an interview with Charlie Rose. Here are a few of the choice statements Mubarak made, with a straight face, and largely unchallenged by the sychophantic Rose:
Mubarak: Look, we are a large country. And we have stability here. We enjoy stability…It is not on my mind to have my son inherit me…the choice and election of the president is open to the population in its entirety. It is the decision of the population to elect who would represent people. It is not for me to decide that. It is the decision of the people to elect the person who they trust… There is freedom of speech…The more good opposition the more stronger our (inaudible).
Rose: Do you think the Bush administration was right to promote democracy in the region in the way that it did?
Mubarak: No…We do not accept pressures in politics or in interior domestic politics from any administration with due respect to all governments. We do not accept pressures on the pretext of domestic reform. It has to be home-grown. Reform has to be home-grown. And it is what the people demand…to accept pressure from an administration or another, no. This pressure might be against the interest of the people. I respond to the demands of the people…Democracy is there in Egypt. We have freedoms that were not there before. We have an election of the president. We have freedom of the press. We have about 600 dailies and weeklies, give or take…We are doing reforms based on the demands of the people.
Rose: It is said that (Obama) will not publicly discuss human rights. He does not want it to be an issue, but that he will bring it up in private.
Mubarak: Your concept of human rights is a merely political one. Human rights are not only political. You have social rights. You have the right to education. You have the right to health. You have the right to a job. There are many other rights. And we are doing well on these fronts…We have a human rights commission…There have been many sentences against people who have breached human rights. It is not merely a political concept. It is social. It is health.
Rose: Much is written about the fact that in the election, the most — the last election in which there were more candidates, that since then, you have moved away and that you have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mubarak: These people whom you are talking about cannot form a political party, because our constitution maintains and stipulates that a political party shall never be based on a religious basis. They cannot form a political party. And this is part and parcel of the constitution as amended by the people. But the Muslim Brotherhood are there as (members of Parliament) as individual (members) within the Parliament. We have about 80 of them.
Rose: You've had emergency rule since 1981. Emergency rule. You should be confident enough in your leadership not to have to….
Mubarak: You do not grasp fully the emergency law. It has been there since the days of the British occupation. And it used to be called marshal law. We confine our recourse to the emergency law, to terrorist crimes. Otherwise it is the rule of law under the normal laws through the…courts of law.
Rose: But is it necessary?
Mubarak: We have two choices, either to issue a law to combat terrorism, which will be a permanent law. It was refused because nobody wanted a permanent law. And the second choice is emergency law that will be used exclusively against terrorist crimes. We have not used it for any intent to close down a newspaper or to contain or limit any movement, any freedom of movement.
Rose: The history of Egypt for the last 28 years is the history of one man, Hosni Mubarak…What is your legacy? What are you proud of?
Mubarak: What I will leave behind is that I have been working for — in public service for 60 years. I took part — I saw action. I rebuilt the country after military action. We revamped the entire infrastructure of Egypt. We are improving education. We are expanding education. We are building universities. We are doing many, many other things.
Well, one of the most credible truth-tellers about Egypt is a new organization called Voices for a Democratic Egypt (VDE), on whose Board of Advisors sits one of Egypt’s most courageous human rights advocates -- Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founding chair of the Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.
Ibrahim was arrested in 2000 for accepting a grant from the European Union and using the funds for “defaming Egypt’s national character.” He was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, acquitted in a second trial, and now lives in exile in the U.S.
VDE aims to provide a forum for activism and a strong platform and voice for those striving for democratic transformation in Egypt. The day before Mubarak had his photo-op with Obama, VDE held a news conference in Washington to unveil a new report on what’s really happening in Egypt.
Here’s some of what the report had to say:
Egypt’s human rights record over the last two years has shown demonstrable regression on all fronts. A state of emergency has been in force since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 that suspends basic constitutional protections, and was renewed in May 2008 despite presidential campaign promises to the contrary.
Prisoner Abuse
Dozens of torture cases were documented in 2008 and 2009, including several resulting in death. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) has documented at least 40 cases of torture since 2008, at least 14 of which ended in death by police officers, more than five times as 2007. It is widely known that most torture cases go unreported and undetected and that torturers largely go unpunished except in a few highly publicized cases. And individual cases of torture at police stations continue to be reported with little to no response from the authorities in investigating incidents or holding the perpetrators accountable.
Press Freedom
Mubarak boasted to Charlie Rose about the growth in free media. But last year, the Arab League -- under the leadership of the Egyptian Minister of Media – voted for a new measure “regulating television, radio, and satellite media.”
That document is now paralleled by an Egyptian draft law to “regulate” visual, audio, and electronic media. It prohibits satellite television broadcasts that "negatively affect social peace, national unity, public order, and public morals," or "defame leaders, or national and religious symbols" of Arab states. Egypt's state-controlled Nilesat satellite subsequently dropped three channels that broadcast programs featuring government critics and victims of human rights abuses.
Then there’s the continuing harassment of journalists and owners of media outlets. Five newspaper editors were prosecuted for insulting President Mubarak and / or affiliates of the NDP (Mubarak’s National Democratic Party). Plainclothes police shut down the Cairo News Company (CNC) after it supposedly supplied Al Jazeera with images of anti-government protests. An Al Jazeera reporter was convicted of harming "the dignity of the country" with a documentary about torture in Egyptian police stations. Cairo security officers arrested several journalists and bloggers who used the social-networking website Facebook to call for strikes; and security officers in New Cairo stripped and beat one of them for the same activity.
The authorities in Alexandria arrested fourteen members of the "6 April Youth" group and jailed them for two weeks without charge after they sang patriotic songs and refused to disperse when ordered. Several bloggers have been arrested and “disappeared,” including a number affiliated with the April 6 movement, several Islamists, and a Christian blogger. Another blogger was incarcerated for over three months and subjected to torture, including electrical shock, suspension, mental abuse, and solitary confinement. And one other blogger continues to be incarcerated for charges of “insulting religion” and the president.
The Judiciary
Laws affecting a state of emergency and suspending normal constitutional protections continue to undermine the judiciary notably through: (1) imposition of “administrative” detention orders which supersede normal court decisions; (2) trial of civilians in military courts; (3) so-called Hisba lawsuits
brought by “private citizens” affiliated with the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) against dissidents, writers, artists, etc.; and (4) parallel court systems created through emergency legislation, including state security courts and emergency courts that do not afford due process.
An example of prosecutions of civilians in exceptional courts was the trial of individuals in December 2008 who had participated in the April 6 national strike. In December 2008, the state security emergency court convicted 22 defendants from that strike. Trial in this exceptional court involves denial of due process as well as the right to appeal, and has been decried by Egyptian and international human rights organizations
Freedom of Association
There was continued repression of community organizers, NGOs, and individuals exercising their internationally-protected rights to freedom of association. Several NGOs were dissolved in 2007 and 2008 on arbitrary grounds and without due process, including for “endangering national security” and receipt of foreign funding.
Security officials blocked several meetings held by human rights organizations and acted to block international activities of NGOs.Egypt has also acted to block substantive efforts at the enforcement of human rights through participation in international bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council.
Religious Freedom
The climate for Egypt’s largest religious minority, Coptic
Christians, remained difficult. In February 2008, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in favor of twelve defendants seeking to return to Christianity after previously converting to Islam, but ruled that their national ID cards should indicate that they “used to be Muslim,” which ensures continued hardship and discrimination against the converts.
Other religious minorities, including the Qur’anists, an offshoot of Sunni Islam, and Baha’is, continue to be the targets of discrimination. Baha’is are not allowed to build houses of worship or practice their faith publicly.
The government continues to stall on the passage of a national uniform law on construction of houses of worship that would remedy the hardship Copts face in building or repairing their churches. Copts – who represent about five per cent of the population -- continue to suffer from discrimination in public employment and are underrepresented in high leadership positions. And Coptic history continues to be conspicuously absent from educational textbooks.
Don’t you wonder why Charlie Rose failed to challenge so many of Mubarak’s answers? Like “Democracy is there in Egypt.” Or “There is freedom of speech.” Or “I respond to the demands of the people.” Or “We are doing reforms based on the demands of the people.” Or “We have a human rights commission…There have been many sentences against people who have breached human rights.”
I think the Washington Post had it just about right when it said in an editorial on the eve of the Mubarak-Obama meeting, “Middle East ‘realists,’ who seem to abound in the new administration, argue that Mr. Mubarak's help is needed to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian settlement and to contain pro-Iranian radical groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. But it's likely that they, like many U.S. policymakers before them, will be disappointed by the disparity between Mr. Mubarak's words and actions. For several years now, the Egyptian regime has been promising Washington that it will broker an end to the rift between Hamas and the more moderate Palestinian Authority, end the smuggling of weapons to militants in Gaza and obtain the release of an Israeli soldier held hostage since 2006. It has failed on all three counts.”
WAPO concluded: “No amount of coddling by Mr. Obama is likely to change the behavior of Mr. Mubarak, who has 28 years of experience in deflecting U.S. initiatives…If Mr. Obama focuses his attention today on Mr. Mubarak and his dubious diplomatic contributions -- as opposed to the Egyptian people and their legitimate demands for political change -- the president will ignore the lessons of history.”
I hope Obama will not ignore the lessons of history. I hope he will not be so focused on Egypt’s potential to help with the Israeli-Palestinian debacle that he will put Mubarak’s widespread repression on a back burner somewhere. I am not proposing a do-over of the blunt-force-trauma approach of George W. Bush. I am suggesting that our aid dollars give us considerable leverage; yet there is a sense that Mubarak now thinks we need him more than he needs us.
That’s a betrayal of hundreds of very courageous Egyptian advocates for human rights and good governance who put their lives and livelihoods on the line every day. The least our president should do is recognize their existence, their sacrifice, and their contributions to “change we can believe in.”
We ignore them at our peril. Because, if participative democracy ever comes to Egypt, it will be these men and women who will drive it.
Meanwhile, as Krugman wrote, ““There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
The author served as a State Department and USAID consultant in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. He lived in Cairo for several years.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, writing last week on health care reform, said “There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
But as I read his column, my brain seemed to wander, not to health care, but to another major news event of that week: The visit to the White House of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
But why thoughts of this 81-year-old autocrat? Krugman said it: “There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
I don’t mean that I think Obama should deploy American Crusaders into the Land of the Nile to establish a liberal, pro-Western, American-style democracy. George W. Bush tried that in Iraq and we’ve seen how well that adventure turned out. That’s not realism; that’s hubris.
What I mean is that for a generation, the U.S. has generously bribed Egypt year in and year out for not again trying to invade Israel. And what Egypt has to show for our trouble is, well, zero, zilch, nada. Egypt has done next to nothing to further an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. And it has done nothing to improve the economic, social or political life of its people. Yet we persist in repeating what we’ve always done and expecting a different result.
Some would say that’s a great definition of insanity. But that’s what has passed for realism in our foreign policy in the Middle East.
Today’s rationale for keeping the big bucks flowing to the Mubarak regime is that Egypt will play a major role in finally ending the Israel-Palestine disaster. Except that we’ve seen this movie before. We seem to have a knack for reaching out for the slenderest of reeds to hang onto.
During the years I lived in Cairo, I witnessed the rhetoric of the State-controlled media. It was and is institutionalized government propaganda – always anti-Israeli and often anti-Semitic. (Israel and the Palestinian Authority, of course, constantly add fuel to the fire with their own propaganda machines.)
But the Mubarak regime has repeatedly used the Israeli-Palestinian impasse as a fig-leaf to obscure its own monumental deficiencies – and later used Bush’s “war on terror” mantra as an even more dramatic cover story. Does this sound like the job description of an honest broker?
I also read translations of some of the revisionist-history textbooks used in Egyptian schools – proclaiming, for example, Egypt’s “victory” over the Israelis in Sinai. I talked with upper-class, well-educated college students and members of my own staff about the Holocaust. Some of them denied it altogether; others said it resulted in the destruction of only one million Jews.
And what’s been done with all of our aid? Well, to say Egypt is an economic and political basket-case would be generous to basket-cases. Its continuing stagnation is the result of a toxic combination of overpopulation, lack of proper education and training, the effect of decades of failed economic policies, rampant corruption, and the absence of anything remotely resembling good governance.
Egypt has received more than $50 billion in military and economic aid from the United States since 1977, when it agreed to a peace treaty with Israel. Yet, long before the world collapsed into the current recession, unemployment in Egypt was off the charts – well over 10 per cent in most years. Kids who graduated from schools like Cairo University and the American University in Cairo – many with Master’s degrees – were driving taxis for tourists. And now the tourism industry is on life support. Many other Egyptians have joined the growing brain-drain to Europe and North America.
And the worst is probably yet to come. The labor force is growing at a far faster rate than the demand for labor. So the future looks even bleaker for Egpyt’s 80 million people.
In recent years, Mubarak and his Ministers have made countless speeches about entrepreneurism and how it is alive and well in Egypt. But entrepreurism appears to be only for those with lots of time on their hands. For example, what should be a relatively simple task of starting a new business can and does take months lost in the mother of all Byzantine bureaucracies. And if you happen to be one of those aspiring entrepreneurs, but you don’t happen to belong to one of the country’s “good families,” you can forget about getting a loan from any bank. Banks in Egypt lend to people who don’t need loans.
Corruption – a pandemic in the Middle East – is everywhere in Egypt. Some of it qualifies as petty corruption, like bribing the phone company manager to turn your phone on or paying off the supervisor at the police academy to say that you are three inches taller that you actually are to meet the Academy’s requirements.
But there’s also big-time corruption, like unlawfully importing toxic agricultural chemicals, and relabeling them to secure a higher mark-up. The American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt reports that corruption in the import-export supply chain adds about $30 to every single transaction. That makes Egypt uncompetitive and its Customs officials comfortable.
But it’s political corruption that will be Mubarak’s legacy. In preparation for his visit to Washington, the aging strongman granted an interview with Charlie Rose. Here are a few of the choice statements Mubarak made, with a straight face, and largely unchallenged by the sychophantic Rose:
Mubarak: Look, we are a large country. And we have stability here. We enjoy stability…It is not on my mind to have my son inherit me…the choice and election of the president is open to the population in its entirety. It is the decision of the population to elect who would represent people. It is not for me to decide that. It is the decision of the people to elect the person who they trust… There is freedom of speech…The more good opposition the more stronger our (inaudible).
Rose: Do you think the Bush administration was right to promote democracy in the region in the way that it did?
Mubarak: No…We do not accept pressures in politics or in interior domestic politics from any administration with due respect to all governments. We do not accept pressures on the pretext of domestic reform. It has to be home-grown. Reform has to be home-grown. And it is what the people demand…to accept pressure from an administration or another, no. This pressure might be against the interest of the people. I respond to the demands of the people…Democracy is there in Egypt. We have freedoms that were not there before. We have an election of the president. We have freedom of the press. We have about 600 dailies and weeklies, give or take…We are doing reforms based on the demands of the people.
Rose: It is said that (Obama) will not publicly discuss human rights. He does not want it to be an issue, but that he will bring it up in private.
Mubarak: Your concept of human rights is a merely political one. Human rights are not only political. You have social rights. You have the right to education. You have the right to health. You have the right to a job. There are many other rights. And we are doing well on these fronts…We have a human rights commission…There have been many sentences against people who have breached human rights. It is not merely a political concept. It is social. It is health.
Rose: Much is written about the fact that in the election, the most — the last election in which there were more candidates, that since then, you have moved away and that you have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mubarak: These people whom you are talking about cannot form a political party, because our constitution maintains and stipulates that a political party shall never be based on a religious basis. They cannot form a political party. And this is part and parcel of the constitution as amended by the people. But the Muslim Brotherhood are there as (members of Parliament) as individual (members) within the Parliament. We have about 80 of them.
Rose: You've had emergency rule since 1981. Emergency rule. You should be confident enough in your leadership not to have to….
Mubarak: You do not grasp fully the emergency law. It has been there since the days of the British occupation. And it used to be called marshal law. We confine our recourse to the emergency law, to terrorist crimes. Otherwise it is the rule of law under the normal laws through the…courts of law.
Rose: But is it necessary?
Mubarak: We have two choices, either to issue a law to combat terrorism, which will be a permanent law. It was refused because nobody wanted a permanent law. And the second choice is emergency law that will be used exclusively against terrorist crimes. We have not used it for any intent to close down a newspaper or to contain or limit any movement, any freedom of movement.
Rose: The history of Egypt for the last 28 years is the history of one man, Hosni Mubarak…What is your legacy? What are you proud of?
Mubarak: What I will leave behind is that I have been working for — in public service for 60 years. I took part — I saw action. I rebuilt the country after military action. We revamped the entire infrastructure of Egypt. We are improving education. We are expanding education. We are building universities. We are doing many, many other things.
Well, one of the most credible truth-tellers about Egypt is a new organization called Voices for a Democratic Egypt (VDE), on whose Board of Advisors sits one of Egypt’s most courageous human rights advocates -- Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, founding chair of the Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies.
Ibrahim was arrested in 2000 for accepting a grant from the European Union and using the funds for “defaming Egypt’s national character.” He was imprisoned by the Mubarak regime, acquitted in a second trial, and now lives in exile in the U.S.
VDE aims to provide a forum for activism and a strong platform and voice for those striving for democratic transformation in Egypt. The day before Mubarak had his photo-op with Obama, VDE held a news conference in Washington to unveil a new report on what’s really happening in Egypt.
Here’s some of what the report had to say:
Egypt’s human rights record over the last two years has shown demonstrable regression on all fronts. A state of emergency has been in force since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 that suspends basic constitutional protections, and was renewed in May 2008 despite presidential campaign promises to the contrary.
Prisoner Abuse
Dozens of torture cases were documented in 2008 and 2009, including several resulting in death. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) has documented at least 40 cases of torture since 2008, at least 14 of which ended in death by police officers, more than five times as 2007. It is widely known that most torture cases go unreported and undetected and that torturers largely go unpunished except in a few highly publicized cases. And individual cases of torture at police stations continue to be reported with little to no response from the authorities in investigating incidents or holding the perpetrators accountable.
Press Freedom
Mubarak boasted to Charlie Rose about the growth in free media. But last year, the Arab League -- under the leadership of the Egyptian Minister of Media – voted for a new measure “regulating television, radio, and satellite media.”
That document is now paralleled by an Egyptian draft law to “regulate” visual, audio, and electronic media. It prohibits satellite television broadcasts that "negatively affect social peace, national unity, public order, and public morals," or "defame leaders, or national and religious symbols" of Arab states. Egypt's state-controlled Nilesat satellite subsequently dropped three channels that broadcast programs featuring government critics and victims of human rights abuses.
Then there’s the continuing harassment of journalists and owners of media outlets. Five newspaper editors were prosecuted for insulting President Mubarak and / or affiliates of the NDP (Mubarak’s National Democratic Party). Plainclothes police shut down the Cairo News Company (CNC) after it supposedly supplied Al Jazeera with images of anti-government protests. An Al Jazeera reporter was convicted of harming "the dignity of the country" with a documentary about torture in Egyptian police stations. Cairo security officers arrested several journalists and bloggers who used the social-networking website Facebook to call for strikes; and security officers in New Cairo stripped and beat one of them for the same activity.
The authorities in Alexandria arrested fourteen members of the "6 April Youth" group and jailed them for two weeks without charge after they sang patriotic songs and refused to disperse when ordered. Several bloggers have been arrested and “disappeared,” including a number affiliated with the April 6 movement, several Islamists, and a Christian blogger. Another blogger was incarcerated for over three months and subjected to torture, including electrical shock, suspension, mental abuse, and solitary confinement. And one other blogger continues to be incarcerated for charges of “insulting religion” and the president.
The Judiciary
Laws affecting a state of emergency and suspending normal constitutional protections continue to undermine the judiciary notably through: (1) imposition of “administrative” detention orders which supersede normal court decisions; (2) trial of civilians in military courts; (3) so-called Hisba lawsuits
brought by “private citizens” affiliated with the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) against dissidents, writers, artists, etc.; and (4) parallel court systems created through emergency legislation, including state security courts and emergency courts that do not afford due process.
An example of prosecutions of civilians in exceptional courts was the trial of individuals in December 2008 who had participated in the April 6 national strike. In December 2008, the state security emergency court convicted 22 defendants from that strike. Trial in this exceptional court involves denial of due process as well as the right to appeal, and has been decried by Egyptian and international human rights organizations
Freedom of Association
There was continued repression of community organizers, NGOs, and individuals exercising their internationally-protected rights to freedom of association. Several NGOs were dissolved in 2007 and 2008 on arbitrary grounds and without due process, including for “endangering national security” and receipt of foreign funding.
Security officials blocked several meetings held by human rights organizations and acted to block international activities of NGOs.Egypt has also acted to block substantive efforts at the enforcement of human rights through participation in international bodies such as the UN Human Rights Council.
Religious Freedom
The climate for Egypt’s largest religious minority, Coptic
Christians, remained difficult. In February 2008, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in favor of twelve defendants seeking to return to Christianity after previously converting to Islam, but ruled that their national ID cards should indicate that they “used to be Muslim,” which ensures continued hardship and discrimination against the converts.
Other religious minorities, including the Qur’anists, an offshoot of Sunni Islam, and Baha’is, continue to be the targets of discrimination. Baha’is are not allowed to build houses of worship or practice their faith publicly.
The government continues to stall on the passage of a national uniform law on construction of houses of worship that would remedy the hardship Copts face in building or repairing their churches. Copts – who represent about five per cent of the population -- continue to suffer from discrimination in public employment and are underrepresented in high leadership positions. And Coptic history continues to be conspicuously absent from educational textbooks.
Don’t you wonder why Charlie Rose failed to challenge so many of Mubarak’s answers? Like “Democracy is there in Egypt.” Or “There is freedom of speech.” Or “I respond to the demands of the people.” Or “We are doing reforms based on the demands of the people.” Or “We have a human rights commission…There have been many sentences against people who have breached human rights.”
I think the Washington Post had it just about right when it said in an editorial on the eve of the Mubarak-Obama meeting, “Middle East ‘realists,’ who seem to abound in the new administration, argue that Mr. Mubarak's help is needed to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian settlement and to contain pro-Iranian radical groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas. But it's likely that they, like many U.S. policymakers before them, will be disappointed by the disparity between Mr. Mubarak's words and actions. For several years now, the Egyptian regime has been promising Washington that it will broker an end to the rift between Hamas and the more moderate Palestinian Authority, end the smuggling of weapons to militants in Gaza and obtain the release of an Israeli soldier held hostage since 2006. It has failed on all three counts.”
WAPO concluded: “No amount of coddling by Mr. Obama is likely to change the behavior of Mr. Mubarak, who has 28 years of experience in deflecting U.S. initiatives…If Mr. Obama focuses his attention today on Mr. Mubarak and his dubious diplomatic contributions -- as opposed to the Egyptian people and their legitimate demands for political change -- the president will ignore the lessons of history.”
I hope Obama will not ignore the lessons of history. I hope he will not be so focused on Egypt’s potential to help with the Israeli-Palestinian debacle that he will put Mubarak’s widespread repression on a back burner somewhere. I am not proposing a do-over of the blunt-force-trauma approach of George W. Bush. I am suggesting that our aid dollars give us considerable leverage; yet there is a sense that Mubarak now thinks we need him more than he needs us.
That’s a betrayal of hundreds of very courageous Egyptian advocates for human rights and good governance who put their lives and livelihoods on the line every day. The least our president should do is recognize their existence, their sacrifice, and their contributions to “change we can believe in.”
We ignore them at our peril. Because, if participative democracy ever comes to Egypt, it will be these men and women who will drive it.
Meanwhile, as Krugman wrote, ““There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness.”
The author served as a State Department and USAID consultant in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. He lived in Cairo for several years.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Arpaio: Still “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”
By William Fisher
The man who boasts he is “America’s Toughest Sheriff” -- and who is being investigated by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations -- this week added another lawsuit to thousands already pending against him.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona are suing the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, and several of his 164 deputies for the illegal arrest and detention of a U.S. citizen and a legal resident.
The ACLU suit contends that Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies racially profiled the father and son, Julian and Julio Mora, as they drove their pickup truck on a busy public road and illegally arrested and detained them, violating the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law and prohibition on unreasonable seizures.
Harini Raghupathi, an attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, told IPS, “The unlawful arrest and detention that Julian and Julio Mora suffered highlights MCSO’s pattern of blatant disregard for the fundamental protections of the Fourth Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution. That provision bars unlawful searches and seizures without probable cause and a warrant.
“This country was founded on the freedom of individuals to go about their business without fear of being unlawfully stopped, picked up, or interrogated by the government. Here, we see the Moras were denied this most essential freedom,” she said.
According to the ACLU, Julian Mora was driving to work when, without provocation, an MCSO vehicle cut in front of him forcing him to stop abruptly. MCSO deputies then ordered the father and son out of their vehicle, then frisked and handcuffed them.
The complaint says, “Although the deputies had no reason to believe that the Moras had broken any law or were in the country unlawfully, they transported the Moras to Handyman Maintenance, Inc. (HMI), where MCSO was conducting a raid that morning. For the next three hours, the Moras were held at HMI, where they were denied food and water and forbidden contact with the outside world. They were not released until they were interrogated.”
It continues: “The ordeal was particularly humiliating for 66-year-old Julian Mora who, due to his diabetic condition, has difficulty controlling his bladder and had an urgent need to use the bathroom. MCSO personnel, however, rejected his repeated requests. Eventually, deputies escorted him outside where he was made to urinate in the parking lot. MCSO personnel later mocked his son Julio when he had to use the bathroom, because he had difficulty going with his hands still cuffed.”
Nineteen-year-old Julio Mora, a U.S. citizen, says, "To this day, I don't know why the officers stopped us out of all the cars on the road. We were treated like criminals and never told why. I was very scared. I never thought something like this would happen to me. Now I know it can happen to anyone, citizens too. I don't think it's fair."
Civil libertarians say the latest lawsuit is emblematic of anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. – arguably most intense in states that border Mexico – and of mixed signals coming from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit has Federal responsibility for enforcing immigration regulations.
Under the administration of former President Bill Clinton, Congress passed a comprehensive immigration bill in 1996. The legislation contains a little-known section called 278(g), which authorizes local law enforcement to engage in raids on businesses believed to have employees who are undocumented, and to arrest and detain those workers.
During the George W. Bush presidency, use of 278(g) was aggressively ramped up. By August 2008, more than 840 officers in twenty states were deputized, and 70,000 immigrants detained. County sheriffs make up 62 percent of ICE partners.
In recent weeks, despite objections from civil rights lawyers and many law enforcement agencies, the Obama Administration’s new secretary of DHS, Janet Napolitano, indicated her intention to expand this program, though she says it will now focus on illegal immigrants who are known to be serious criminals. ICE asserts that the 287(g) program is not designed to crack down on overcrowded apartments, day laborer activities, or traffic offenses.
The Bush Administration granted the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to Sheriff Arpaio, despite the fact that jails under his supervision cost his county over $43 million in death and abuse lawsuits. Arpaio is accused of housing prisoners in tents, making them appear before media TV cameras wearing pink underwear, shackling them in chain gangs, and trespassing into neighboring jurisdictions to unlawfully dump immigrants at the border for deportation. Traffic violators and day laborers are Arpaio’s main targets.
Eleven agencies in the country have signed the new so-called 287(g) agreement, while 66 agencies operating under the old program — including Arpaio's — were given 90 days starting July 10 to decide whether they want to agree to follow the revamped program.
The new regulations require Arpaio to clear plans for immigration sweeps in advance with ICE and coordinate the release of information to the news media.
Arpaio, who called the new program “an amnesty for illegal immigrants,” has not yet indicated whether he will accept DHS’s new terms. He said, "I'm not going to bend to the federal government, I'm going to do my job. I don't report to the federal government, I report to the people." He has been reelected multiple times.
But, even as he considered the new arrangements, Arpaio launched a three-day immigration sweep east of metro Phoenix on July 24. Deputies arrested 74 people; 25 of them were illegal immigrants.
The Associated Press reports that this sweep was the latest of 10 Arpaio has conducted in the last two and a half years. Many were held in heavily Latino areas in metropolitan Phoenix, with deputies stopping drivers for traffic violations.
The sweeps generated protests of racial profiling and have led to a Justice Department investigation of Arpaio. Arpaio said the people who were pulled over were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes. The raids have not resulted in the conviction of any employer for an employer sanctions violation.
But even if Arpaio declines to sign on to the new DHS regulations, he has made it clear that intends to continue cracking down on illegal immigration by enforcing more limited Arizona immigration laws.
Arpaio has a long history of conflict with other law enforcement and judicial authorities. As reported by William Finnegan in The New Yorker magazine, “A federal investigation found Arpaio’s deputies used ‘stun guns’ on inmates strapped into restraint chairs; some have died in those chairs. One lawsuit brought by a dead prisoners’ family ended in an $8 million settlement after “a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoners, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”
From 2004 through November 2007, Arpaio was the target of 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts -- 50 times as many prison-conditions lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined.
Arpaio is also named in a class-action lawsuit that centers on the treatment of pretrial detainees. The suit claims Arpaio is violating the constitutional rights of those detainees.
The man who boasts he is “America’s Toughest Sheriff” -- and who is being investigated by the Department of Justice for civil rights violations -- this week added another lawsuit to thousands already pending against him.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Arizona are suing the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, and several of his 164 deputies for the illegal arrest and detention of a U.S. citizen and a legal resident.
The ACLU suit contends that Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) deputies racially profiled the father and son, Julian and Julio Mora, as they drove their pickup truck on a busy public road and illegally arrested and detained them, violating the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law and prohibition on unreasonable seizures.
Harini Raghupathi, an attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, told IPS, “The unlawful arrest and detention that Julian and Julio Mora suffered highlights MCSO’s pattern of blatant disregard for the fundamental protections of the Fourth Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution. That provision bars unlawful searches and seizures without probable cause and a warrant.
“This country was founded on the freedom of individuals to go about their business without fear of being unlawfully stopped, picked up, or interrogated by the government. Here, we see the Moras were denied this most essential freedom,” she said.
According to the ACLU, Julian Mora was driving to work when, without provocation, an MCSO vehicle cut in front of him forcing him to stop abruptly. MCSO deputies then ordered the father and son out of their vehicle, then frisked and handcuffed them.
The complaint says, “Although the deputies had no reason to believe that the Moras had broken any law or were in the country unlawfully, they transported the Moras to Handyman Maintenance, Inc. (HMI), where MCSO was conducting a raid that morning. For the next three hours, the Moras were held at HMI, where they were denied food and water and forbidden contact with the outside world. They were not released until they were interrogated.”
It continues: “The ordeal was particularly humiliating for 66-year-old Julian Mora who, due to his diabetic condition, has difficulty controlling his bladder and had an urgent need to use the bathroom. MCSO personnel, however, rejected his repeated requests. Eventually, deputies escorted him outside where he was made to urinate in the parking lot. MCSO personnel later mocked his son Julio when he had to use the bathroom, because he had difficulty going with his hands still cuffed.”
Nineteen-year-old Julio Mora, a U.S. citizen, says, "To this day, I don't know why the officers stopped us out of all the cars on the road. We were treated like criminals and never told why. I was very scared. I never thought something like this would happen to me. Now I know it can happen to anyone, citizens too. I don't think it's fair."
Civil libertarians say the latest lawsuit is emblematic of anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. – arguably most intense in states that border Mexico – and of mixed signals coming from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), whose Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit has Federal responsibility for enforcing immigration regulations.
Under the administration of former President Bill Clinton, Congress passed a comprehensive immigration bill in 1996. The legislation contains a little-known section called 278(g), which authorizes local law enforcement to engage in raids on businesses believed to have employees who are undocumented, and to arrest and detain those workers.
During the George W. Bush presidency, use of 278(g) was aggressively ramped up. By August 2008, more than 840 officers in twenty states were deputized, and 70,000 immigrants detained. County sheriffs make up 62 percent of ICE partners.
In recent weeks, despite objections from civil rights lawyers and many law enforcement agencies, the Obama Administration’s new secretary of DHS, Janet Napolitano, indicated her intention to expand this program, though she says it will now focus on illegal immigrants who are known to be serious criminals. ICE asserts that the 287(g) program is not designed to crack down on overcrowded apartments, day laborer activities, or traffic offenses.
The Bush Administration granted the largest and most powerful 287(g) contract to Sheriff Arpaio, despite the fact that jails under his supervision cost his county over $43 million in death and abuse lawsuits. Arpaio is accused of housing prisoners in tents, making them appear before media TV cameras wearing pink underwear, shackling them in chain gangs, and trespassing into neighboring jurisdictions to unlawfully dump immigrants at the border for deportation. Traffic violators and day laborers are Arpaio’s main targets.
Eleven agencies in the country have signed the new so-called 287(g) agreement, while 66 agencies operating under the old program — including Arpaio's — were given 90 days starting July 10 to decide whether they want to agree to follow the revamped program.
The new regulations require Arpaio to clear plans for immigration sweeps in advance with ICE and coordinate the release of information to the news media.
Arpaio, who called the new program “an amnesty for illegal immigrants,” has not yet indicated whether he will accept DHS’s new terms. He said, "I'm not going to bend to the federal government, I'm going to do my job. I don't report to the federal government, I report to the people." He has been reelected multiple times.
But, even as he considered the new arrangements, Arpaio launched a three-day immigration sweep east of metro Phoenix on July 24. Deputies arrested 74 people; 25 of them were illegal immigrants.
The Associated Press reports that this sweep was the latest of 10 Arpaio has conducted in the last two and a half years. Many were held in heavily Latino areas in metropolitan Phoenix, with deputies stopping drivers for traffic violations.
The sweeps generated protests of racial profiling and have led to a Justice Department investigation of Arpaio. Arpaio said the people who were pulled over were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes. The raids have not resulted in the conviction of any employer for an employer sanctions violation.
But even if Arpaio declines to sign on to the new DHS regulations, he has made it clear that intends to continue cracking down on illegal immigration by enforcing more limited Arizona immigration laws.
Arpaio has a long history of conflict with other law enforcement and judicial authorities. As reported by William Finnegan in The New Yorker magazine, “A federal investigation found Arpaio’s deputies used ‘stun guns’ on inmates strapped into restraint chairs; some have died in those chairs. One lawsuit brought by a dead prisoners’ family ended in an $8 million settlement after “a surveillance video that showed fourteen guards beating, shocking, and suffocating the prisoners, and after the sheriff’s office was accused of discarding evidence, including the crushed larynx of the deceased.”
From 2004 through November 2007, Arpaio was the target of 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts -- 50 times as many prison-conditions lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined.
Arpaio is also named in a class-action lawsuit that centers on the treatment of pretrial detainees. The suit claims Arpaio is violating the constitutional rights of those detainees.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Constitution Lives!
By William Fisher
A federal court this week ruled for the first time that the U.S. Government cannot freeze an organization's assets under a terror financing law without a warrant based upon probable cause and without telling the organization the basis for its action and a meaningful opportunity to defend itself.
If the decision of U.S. District Judge James G. Carr is upheld, it will strip the government of a key weapon in the broad counter-terrorism authority claimed by the administration of former President George W. Bush following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The ruling came Tuesday in a lawsuit originally filed in November 2008 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Ohio and several civil rights attorneys on behalf of KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, Inc., a charity based in Columbus, Ohio. Lawyers from the Obama Justice Department defended the position of their predecessors.
Georgetown University law professor David Cole, who is co-counsel in the case, called the government’s approach “a blunt sledgehammer.”
He told us, "The government has an undoubtedly legitimate interest in stopping the funding of terrorist activity, but the authority used against KindHearts and so many other charities is a blunt sledgehammer that permits the government to shut down charities indefinitely without any finding of wrongdoing, without any notice of the basis for its actions, without any prior judicial approval, and without any meaningful opportunity for the charity to defend itself.”
He added, “Judge Carr's decision recognizes that such unchecked power cannot be squared with the Constitution's Fourth and Fifth Amendments, which were designed, in the wake of King George's legendary abuses, to restrain official power to seize property arbitrarily."
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze KindHearts' assets three-and-a-half years ago without a warrant, notice or a hearing, based simply on the assertion that OFAC was investigating whether the charity should be designated as a "specially designated global terrorist (SDGT)."
In Tuesday's ruling, Judge Carr found that the administration must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing an organization's assets, citing judicial precedent holding that the executive branch's "domestic actions – even when taken in the name of national security – must comport with the Fourth Amendment."
Judge Carr also ruled that OFAC violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process because it "violated KindHearts' fundamental right to be told on what basis and for what reasons the government deprived it of all access to all its assets and shut down its operations."
KindHearts had never been found to have engaged in any wrongdoing and had never been designated an SDGT, yet it was effectively shut down since OFAC first froze its assets on February 19, 2006. As a result of the freeze pending investigation, it would have been a crime for anyone to do any business with KindHearts and the charity would have no access to its own property.
KindHearts provided detailed information to the government about its operations and requested that the government specify its reasons for blocking its assets pending investigation. But the government ignored KindHearts' submissions and repeatedly delayed in responding to its requests. The court found that the government's actions were fundamental violations of due process.
Judge Carr ordered a hearing for September to determine how to correct what he said were constitutional flaws in the government’s case. Justice Department lawyers are reviewing the opinion, but it is unclear whether they will appeal the decision to a higher court.
The Treasury Department alleged that KindHearts provided financial support for Hamas and worked with this group in the West Bank of Israel and in Lebanon to support terrorist activities.
While KindHearts was never named a “specially designated global terrorist,” Judge Carr said the government “has effectively shut KindHearts down” by freezing its assets and designating its as criminal.
The organization was unable to use its own resources to pay for a legal defense. Judge Carr said OFAC was “arbitrary and capricious” in considering whether the group could pay its lawyers.
He rejected the position of the Justice Department that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures – was trumped by the national security authority of the President. He called the Fourth Amendment “a bulwark against the abuses and excesses of unchecked government authority.”
Judge Carr was also critical of the limited information provided to the charity by the Treasury Department. He said this information came only after “long, unexplained and inexplicable delay” and repeated requests from the group’s lawyers.
KindHearts' founders established the charity in 2002 – after the government shut down a number of other charities – with the express purpose of providing humanitarian aid both abroad and in the United States in full compliance with the law. Despite the efforts KindHearts took to implement OFAC policies and even seek its guidance, OFAC froze about $1 million of KindHearts' assets in February 2006.
Since 9/11, the government has shut down eight charitable organizations in the U.S. and frozen the assets of hundreds others in other countries. Last November, five members of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted in federal court in Dallas of funneling money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and sentenced to prison. The defendants said they only gave much-needed aid to a volatile region.
Two other high-profile terrorism-financing trials, in Chicago and Florida, ended without convictions on the major counts.
The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 enhanced OFAC’s ability to implement sanctions and to coordinate with other agencies by clarifying OFAC’s authorities to block assets of suspect entities prior to a formal designation in ‘aid of an investigation.’
Later amendments to the PATRIOT Act authorized submission of classified information to a court, in camera and ex parte, upon a legal challenge to a designation.
The Treasury Department says, “This new PATRIOT Act authority has greatly enhanced our ability to make and defend designations by making it absolutely clear that OFAC may use classified information in making designations without turning the material over to an entity or individual that challenges its designation.”
But civil libertarians contend that changes in the law have greatly enhanced the Department’s ability to target and disable organizations and individuals based primarily on suspicion and not on proven evidence of wrong-doing as would be required in a court of law for a conviction of terrorism.
Attorney David Cole, a widely respected Constitutional scholar, sees a correlation between the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s and the government’s current policies. He told us, “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.”
“While the House Un-American Activities Committee once relied on the private sector to mete out punishment through the destruction of reputations and careers, today measures such as the Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines have turned funders into the new enforcers. In this light, he said the nonprofit sector has an obligation to resist such a partnership with government.”
A federal court this week ruled for the first time that the U.S. Government cannot freeze an organization's assets under a terror financing law without a warrant based upon probable cause and without telling the organization the basis for its action and a meaningful opportunity to defend itself.
If the decision of U.S. District Judge James G. Carr is upheld, it will strip the government of a key weapon in the broad counter-terrorism authority claimed by the administration of former President George W. Bush following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The ruling came Tuesday in a lawsuit originally filed in November 2008 by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Ohio and several civil rights attorneys on behalf of KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, Inc., a charity based in Columbus, Ohio. Lawyers from the Obama Justice Department defended the position of their predecessors.
Georgetown University law professor David Cole, who is co-counsel in the case, called the government’s approach “a blunt sledgehammer.”
He told us, "The government has an undoubtedly legitimate interest in stopping the funding of terrorist activity, but the authority used against KindHearts and so many other charities is a blunt sledgehammer that permits the government to shut down charities indefinitely without any finding of wrongdoing, without any notice of the basis for its actions, without any prior judicial approval, and without any meaningful opportunity for the charity to defend itself.”
He added, “Judge Carr's decision recognizes that such unchecked power cannot be squared with the Constitution's Fourth and Fifth Amendments, which were designed, in the wake of King George's legendary abuses, to restrain official power to seize property arbitrarily."
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) froze KindHearts' assets three-and-a-half years ago without a warrant, notice or a hearing, based simply on the assertion that OFAC was investigating whether the charity should be designated as a "specially designated global terrorist (SDGT)."
In Tuesday's ruling, Judge Carr found that the administration must obtain a warrant based on probable cause before seizing an organization's assets, citing judicial precedent holding that the executive branch's "domestic actions – even when taken in the name of national security – must comport with the Fourth Amendment."
Judge Carr also ruled that OFAC violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process because it "violated KindHearts' fundamental right to be told on what basis and for what reasons the government deprived it of all access to all its assets and shut down its operations."
KindHearts had never been found to have engaged in any wrongdoing and had never been designated an SDGT, yet it was effectively shut down since OFAC first froze its assets on February 19, 2006. As a result of the freeze pending investigation, it would have been a crime for anyone to do any business with KindHearts and the charity would have no access to its own property.
KindHearts provided detailed information to the government about its operations and requested that the government specify its reasons for blocking its assets pending investigation. But the government ignored KindHearts' submissions and repeatedly delayed in responding to its requests. The court found that the government's actions were fundamental violations of due process.
Judge Carr ordered a hearing for September to determine how to correct what he said were constitutional flaws in the government’s case. Justice Department lawyers are reviewing the opinion, but it is unclear whether they will appeal the decision to a higher court.
The Treasury Department alleged that KindHearts provided financial support for Hamas and worked with this group in the West Bank of Israel and in Lebanon to support terrorist activities.
While KindHearts was never named a “specially designated global terrorist,” Judge Carr said the government “has effectively shut KindHearts down” by freezing its assets and designating its as criminal.
The organization was unable to use its own resources to pay for a legal defense. Judge Carr said OFAC was “arbitrary and capricious” in considering whether the group could pay its lawyers.
He rejected the position of the Justice Department that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution -- which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures – was trumped by the national security authority of the President. He called the Fourth Amendment “a bulwark against the abuses and excesses of unchecked government authority.”
Judge Carr was also critical of the limited information provided to the charity by the Treasury Department. He said this information came only after “long, unexplained and inexplicable delay” and repeated requests from the group’s lawyers.
KindHearts' founders established the charity in 2002 – after the government shut down a number of other charities – with the express purpose of providing humanitarian aid both abroad and in the United States in full compliance with the law. Despite the efforts KindHearts took to implement OFAC policies and even seek its guidance, OFAC froze about $1 million of KindHearts' assets in February 2006.
Since 9/11, the government has shut down eight charitable organizations in the U.S. and frozen the assets of hundreds others in other countries. Last November, five members of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development were convicted in federal court in Dallas of funneling money to the Palestinian militant group Hamas and sentenced to prison. The defendants said they only gave much-needed aid to a volatile region.
Two other high-profile terrorism-financing trials, in Chicago and Florida, ended without convictions on the major counts.
The USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 enhanced OFAC’s ability to implement sanctions and to coordinate with other agencies by clarifying OFAC’s authorities to block assets of suspect entities prior to a formal designation in ‘aid of an investigation.’
Later amendments to the PATRIOT Act authorized submission of classified information to a court, in camera and ex parte, upon a legal challenge to a designation.
The Treasury Department says, “This new PATRIOT Act authority has greatly enhanced our ability to make and defend designations by making it absolutely clear that OFAC may use classified information in making designations without turning the material over to an entity or individual that challenges its designation.”
But civil libertarians contend that changes in the law have greatly enhanced the Department’s ability to target and disable organizations and individuals based primarily on suspicion and not on proven evidence of wrong-doing as would be required in a court of law for a conviction of terrorism.
Attorney David Cole, a widely respected Constitutional scholar, sees a correlation between the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s and the government’s current policies. He told us, “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.”
“While the House Un-American Activities Committee once relied on the private sector to mete out punishment through the destruction of reputations and careers, today measures such as the Anti-Terrorist Financing Guidelines have turned funders into the new enforcers. In this light, he said the nonprofit sector has an obligation to resist such a partnership with government.”
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
MORE DEATHS IN DETENTION
By William Fisher
In response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed yesterday that the government had failed to disclose eleven more deaths in immigration detention facilities.
In April, DHS officials released what they called a comprehensive list of all deaths in detention. That list included a total of 90 individuals. With yesterday’s announcement, the government has now admitted to a total of 104 in-custody deaths since fiscal year 2003.
But the ACLU is continuing to express doubt that they now have a complete tally of those who have died while in ICE custody.
David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, told us, "Even after the government's announcement yesterday we still can have no real confidence that each and every death has been accounted for.”
Noting that the government announced last week what it called sweeping plans to overhaul the immigration detention system, Shapiro added, “No overhaul can be complete without intentional efforts being made to infuse accountability and transparency into the system.”
He said, “From our perspective, that would come in the form of legally binding standards governing basic levels of care and conditions inside immigration detention facilities. Simply having the government consolidate its oversight is not enough - there have to be mechanisms in place to hold the government accountable because, as we've seen, their track record in terms of immigration detention to date is not good, to say the least.”
"Today's announcement confirms our very worst fears," he said.
The ACLU sued DHS, ICE and the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in June 2008 for failing to turn over thousands of public documents in their possession relating to the deaths of immigration detainees held in U.S. custody. The ACLU filed the lawsuit after repeated failures by DHS officials to release those documents in response to requests for critical information about the deaths of dozens of people in immigration detention.
And in another FOIA request, submitted by the ACLU to DHS in 2007, the ACLU sought information about whether ICE – or any independent monitoring agency – adequately tracks deaths of immigration detainees, who are often housed in county jails around the country alongside criminal detainees, or in one of numerous immigration detention facilities managed by private prison companies.
ICE owns and operates its own detention facilities, and also rents bed space from county and city prisons and jails. ICE locks up about 32,000 civil immigration detainees each day -- 400,000 a year. Many of these are pursuing their immigration cases in the courts.
The ACLU says deficient medical care is believed to be a leading cause of death in immigration detention, and is the number one complaint the organization has received from ICE detainees. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in 2007 against the San Diego Correctional Facility (SDCF), an ICE facility run by Corrections Corporations of America, Inc. (CCA), the country's largest for-profit correctional services provider. In its lawsuit, the ACLU challenges medical care policies and denial of needed treatment by ICE and the Division of Immigration Health Services, which it says has led to suffering and death among detainees.
At the immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, more than 60 detainees have recently been on hunger strikes to protest conditions Authorities there retaliated by putting the hunger strikers in solitary confinement.
And the Los Angeles detention center has been another 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. I charges that some of the facilities to which detainees are shuttled have similar gross deficiencies: Detainees are not permitted to 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.
ICE's city, county and private prisons and jails also house serious criminals. The ACLU says that immigration detainees are mixed in with the general prison population, housed in penal-like facilities for months and sometimes years, with virtually no due process and often without the most basic safeguards such as hearings to assess the need for continued detention. These include asylum seekers, legal immigrants, victims of human trafficking, and immigrants with no criminal records.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that private, for-profit prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.
The Obama Administration’s newly appointed official supervising ICE, John Morton, said last week that he wanted to turn immigration detention into a "truly civil detention system," one focused on safely and humanely holding people accused of civil immigration violations until they are deported or released. The announced reforms include creating offices and advisory boards to focus on medical care and the management of centers, reviewing contracts with private prisons and local jails, and installing managers at the 23 largest centers to make sure complaints are heard and problems fixed.
He said Centers would face random inspections. Community groups and immigrant advocates would be invited to offer advice and comment. And the government would stop sending parents with children to a notorious prison near Austin, Texas, as it seeks alternatives to the Bush-era tactic of putting whole families behind bars.
Congress is also expressing interest in the immigration detention issue. Legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate that would change the laws governing immigration detention and increase oversight and enforceability of detention standards.
In response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed yesterday that the government had failed to disclose eleven more deaths in immigration detention facilities.
In April, DHS officials released what they called a comprehensive list of all deaths in detention. That list included a total of 90 individuals. With yesterday’s announcement, the government has now admitted to a total of 104 in-custody deaths since fiscal year 2003.
But the ACLU is continuing to express doubt that they now have a complete tally of those who have died while in ICE custody.
David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, told us, "Even after the government's announcement yesterday we still can have no real confidence that each and every death has been accounted for.”
Noting that the government announced last week what it called sweeping plans to overhaul the immigration detention system, Shapiro added, “No overhaul can be complete without intentional efforts being made to infuse accountability and transparency into the system.”
He said, “From our perspective, that would come in the form of legally binding standards governing basic levels of care and conditions inside immigration detention facilities. Simply having the government consolidate its oversight is not enough - there have to be mechanisms in place to hold the government accountable because, as we've seen, their track record in terms of immigration detention to date is not good, to say the least.”
"Today's announcement confirms our very worst fears," he said.
The ACLU sued DHS, ICE and the DHS Office of the Inspector General (OIG) in June 2008 for failing to turn over thousands of public documents in their possession relating to the deaths of immigration detainees held in U.S. custody. The ACLU filed the lawsuit after repeated failures by DHS officials to release those documents in response to requests for critical information about the deaths of dozens of people in immigration detention.
And in another FOIA request, submitted by the ACLU to DHS in 2007, the ACLU sought information about whether ICE – or any independent monitoring agency – adequately tracks deaths of immigration detainees, who are often housed in county jails around the country alongside criminal detainees, or in one of numerous immigration detention facilities managed by private prison companies.
ICE owns and operates its own detention facilities, and also rents bed space from county and city prisons and jails. ICE locks up about 32,000 civil immigration detainees each day -- 400,000 a year. Many of these are pursuing their immigration cases in the courts.
The ACLU says deficient medical care is believed to be a leading cause of death in immigration detention, and is the number one complaint the organization has received from ICE detainees. The ACLU filed a lawsuit in 2007 against the San Diego Correctional Facility (SDCF), an ICE facility run by Corrections Corporations of America, Inc. (CCA), the country's largest for-profit correctional services provider. In its lawsuit, the ACLU challenges medical care policies and denial of needed treatment by ICE and the Division of Immigration Health Services, which it says has led to suffering and death among detainees.
At the immigration detention center in Basile, Louisiana, more than 60 detainees have recently been on hunger strikes to protest conditions Authorities there retaliated by putting the hunger strikers in solitary confinement.
And the Los Angeles detention center has been another 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. I charges that some of the facilities to which detainees are shuttled have similar gross deficiencies: Detainees are not permitted to 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.
ICE's city, county and private prisons and jails also house serious criminals. The ACLU says that immigration detainees are mixed in with the general prison population, housed in penal-like facilities for months and sometimes years, with virtually no due process and often without the most basic safeguards such as hearings to assess the need for continued detention. These include asylum seekers, legal immigrants, victims of human trafficking, and immigrants with no criminal records.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that private, for-profit prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.
The Obama Administration’s newly appointed official supervising ICE, John Morton, said last week that he wanted to turn immigration detention into a "truly civil detention system," one focused on safely and humanely holding people accused of civil immigration violations until they are deported or released. The announced reforms include creating offices and advisory boards to focus on medical care and the management of centers, reviewing contracts with private prisons and local jails, and installing managers at the 23 largest centers to make sure complaints are heard and problems fixed.
He said Centers would face random inspections. Community groups and immigrant advocates would be invited to offer advice and comment. And the government would stop sending parents with children to a notorious prison near Austin, Texas, as it seeks alternatives to the Bush-era tactic of putting whole families behind bars.
Congress is also expressing interest in the immigration detention issue. Legislation has been introduced in both the House and the Senate that would change the laws governing immigration detention and increase oversight and enforceability of detention standards.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
