By William Fisher
A major human rights advocacy group is charging that of the 98 detainees who have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2002, 34 are suspected or confirmed homicides, another 11 suggest that death was a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions, but only 12 deaths have resulted in punishment of any kind for any U.S. official.
In close to half the deaths surveyed in a new report by Human Rights First, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.
The report, entitled “Command’s Responsibility”. says that of the 34 homicide cases so far identified by the military, investigators recommended criminal charges in fewer than two thirds, and charges were actually brought (based on decisions made by command) in less than half.
While the CIA has been implicated in several deaths, no CIA agent has faced a criminal charge, the report says, adding, “Among the worst cases -- detainees tortured to death – only half have resulted in punishment and the harshest sentence for anyone involved in a torture-related death has been five months in jail.”
Among the report’s other findings: Commanders have failed to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, reported the deaths only after a period of days and sometimes weeks, or actively interfered in efforts to pursue investigations; investigators have failed to interview key witnesses, collect useable evidence, or maintain evidence that could be used for any subsequent prosecution; record keeping has been inadequate, further undermining chances for effective investigation or appropriate prosecution; overlapping criminal and administrative investigations have compromised chances for accountability; overbroad classification of information and other investigation restrictions have left CIA and Special Forces essentially immune from accountability; agencies have failed to disclose critical information, including the cause or circumstance of death, in close to half the cases examined; effective punishment has been too little and too late.
Charging that there is an “accountability gap”, HRF says closing it will require “a zero-tolerance approach to commanders who fail to take steps to provide clear guidance, and who allow unlawful conduct to persist on their watch.”
The report recommends that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, “move immediately to fully implement the ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (known as the McCain Amendment) passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Congress and signed into law on December 30, 2005”.
It also demands that “the President, the U.S. military, and relevant intelligence agencies should take immediate steps to make clear that all acts of torture and abuse are taken seriously – not from the moment a crime becomes public, but from the moment the United States sends troops and agents into the field”.
Congress, the report suggests, “should at long last establish an independent, bipartisan commission to review the scope of U.S. detention and interrogation operations worldwide in the ‘war on terror’. Such a commission could investigate and identify the systemic causes of failures that lead to torture, abuse, and wrongful death, and chart a detailed and specific path going forward to make sure those mistakes never happen again. The proposal for a commission has been endorsed by a wide range of distinguished Americans from Republican and Democratic members of Congress to former presidents to leaders in the U.S. military. Human Rights First urges Congress to act without further delay.”
In response to a question from IPS, Deborah Pearlstein, Director of HRF’s U.S. Law and Security Program, said the Pentagon’s detention policies have repeatedly been criticized by military lawyers and health officials, but their objections have largely been ignored.
Most recently, it was revealed that one of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution.
Mora's campaign underscores how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.
"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive
interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without
profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the
Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, in a 22-page memorandum.
The Pentagon has declined to comment on specific assertions in Mr. Mora's memorandum.
"Detainee operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope, from all different angles," a spokesperson said. "It was found that it was not a Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture."
The HRF report notes that “It is difficult to assess the systemic adequacy of punishment when so few have been punished, and when the deliberations of juries and commanders are largely unknown. Nonetheless, two patterns clearly emerge and are documented in Command’s Responsibility: (1) because of investigative and evidentiary failures, accountability for wrongdoing has been limited at best, and almost non-existent for command; and (2) commanders have played a key role in undermining chances for full accountability.”
It adds, “In dozens of cases documented in the report, grossly inadequate reporting, investigation, and follow-through have left no one at all responsible for homicides and other unexplained deaths. Commanders have failed both to provide troops clear guidance, and to take crimes seriously by insisting on vigorous investigations. And command responsibility itself – the law that requires commanders to be held liable for the unlawful acts of their subordinates about which they knew or should have known – has been all but forgotten.”
Which reminds me that “Command Responsibility” ought to begin with the Commander-in-Chief.
Friday, February 24, 2006
REMEMBER RENDITION?
By William Fisher
A few months ago – particularly after The Washington Post broke the story of secret U.S. “black sites” in Eastern Europe – it would have been difficult to pick up a newspaper or watch television without hearing the words “extreme rendition”.
Then, almost as suddenly as the issue appeared, it vanished. The world’s press stopped focusing on the U.S. practice of sending detainees to countries where they would likely be tortured or abused.
Last week, the rendition issue was back, but not in a way likely to please its opponents.
Rendition returned when a U.S. federal court dismissed a lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist during a stopover in New York as he returned from a vacation in September 2002. He was held virtually incommunicado by U.S. officials, and then sent to Syria, where he said he was tortured and held in a tiny cell he likened to a "grave" for nearly a year. He was never charged before Syria returned him to Canada.
Brooklyn District Court Judge David Trager cited the need for national security and secrecy in making his decision, but also raised the possibility of Canadian complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria.
As in other recent cases, the U.S. government asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing the lawsuit must be dismissed because allowing it to proceed would necessarily involve the disclosure of sensitive information that would threaten national security or diplomatic relations if made public.
"The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted," Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."
Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said Justice Dennis O'Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge's comments.
Arar also vowed he would never give up his quest to reverse the "evil'' done against him. "If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration? Where do we go? The United Nations? We — me and others who have been subjected to this — are normal citizens who have done no wrong.”
He said, "They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. The court system is what distinguishes the West from the Third World. When a court will not act because of `national security,' there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World." His lawyers said they would continue the fight.
In Canada, Justice O'Connor is expected to issue an interim report next month.
The Arar suit was the first court test of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition," a practice often referred to as the outsourcing of torture.
Critics of the practice said the U.S. court’s decision gives Washington a green light to continue its practice of sending terrorist suspects to third countries where they could be tortured.
Arar's is just one of a number of well-documented cases in which suspects have been shipped to third countries with dubious human rights records where interrogation methods outlawed in the U.S. can be used.
In his decision, Judge Trager acknowledged Arar's fears of torture in Syria were real and cited the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights abuses there.
But he said such decisions were beyond the realm of his court. "A judge who declares on his or her own ... authority that the policy of extraordinary rendition is under all circumstances unconstitutional must acknowledge that such a ruling can have the most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both," he wrote.
The U.S. and other countries that practice extreme rendition often hide behind what critics call “the fig leaf of diplomatic assurances”. This means the rendering government asks the receiving government to promise not to torture or abuse prisoners.
But, critics say, documented evidence shows such assurances to be a sham. According to Dr. Beau Grosscup, professor of international relations at California State University and an expert on terrorism, “Diplomatic assurances are trumped by the military, police and intelligence 'counter-insurgency' programs that the two Cold War superpowers instituted and still run in many of these countries that train police and military personnel in torture.” Grosscup says, “The real attitude driving the 'rendition' efforts is: ‘Having paid to train them in torture, why not get our monies worth’.”
Ron Daniels, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group based in New York which is helping in Arar’s defense, told IPS, “Torture is against the law in the United States. The Bush administration should not be attempting to avoid the laws of this country by sending people to be tortured over seas where other countries will do their dirty work out of the public eye. This is a barbaric practice with no place in the 21st Century.”
A Justice Department official said the ruling pleased the government.
At least one other rendition lawsuit has been filed in U.S. courts. Khaled Al-Masri, a German citizen born in Lebanon, took a bus from Germany to Macedonia, where Macedonian agents confiscated his passport and detained him for 23 days, without access to anyone, including his wife.
He says he was then put in a diaper, a belt with chains to his wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. He was put into a plane, his legs and arms spread-eagled and secured to the floor. He was drugged and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in solitary confinement for five months before being dropped off in a remote rural section of Albania. He claims it was a CIA-leased aircraft that flew him to Afghanistan, and CIA agents who were responsible for his rendition to Afghanistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the practice of rendition, saying it was a vital tool in the war on terror. But Ms. Rice said the U.S. does not "send anyone to a country to be tortured."
"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured," she said. "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."
However, on a trip to Europe shortly after making these comments, Secretary Rice admitted to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the rendition of Al-Masri was “a mistake”.
Does this mean renditions will not stop?
I wouldn't count on it!
A few months ago – particularly after The Washington Post broke the story of secret U.S. “black sites” in Eastern Europe – it would have been difficult to pick up a newspaper or watch television without hearing the words “extreme rendition”.
Then, almost as suddenly as the issue appeared, it vanished. The world’s press stopped focusing on the U.S. practice of sending detainees to countries where they would likely be tortured or abused.
Last week, the rendition issue was back, but not in a way likely to please its opponents.
Rendition returned when a U.S. federal court dismissed a lawsuit against the Bush administration brought by Ottawa engineer Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist during a stopover in New York as he returned from a vacation in September 2002. He was held virtually incommunicado by U.S. officials, and then sent to Syria, where he said he was tortured and held in a tiny cell he likened to a "grave" for nearly a year. He was never charged before Syria returned him to Canada.
Brooklyn District Court Judge David Trager cited the need for national security and secrecy in making his decision, but also raised the possibility of Canadian complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria.
As in other recent cases, the U.S. government asserted the "state secrets" privilege, arguing the lawsuit must be dismissed because allowing it to proceed would necessarily involve the disclosure of sensitive information that would threaten national security or diplomatic relations if made public.
"The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted," Trager wrote in an 88-page judgment. "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."
Canadian officials have always denied complicity in the decision to send Arar to Syria after he was held in U.S. custody for 13 days, but Arar said Justice Dennis O'Connor, who is examining the role Canadian officials played in the affair, should make special note of the judge's comments.
Arar also vowed he would never give up his quest to reverse the "evil'' done against him. "If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration? Where do we go? The United Nations? We — me and others who have been subjected to this — are normal citizens who have done no wrong.”
He said, "They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. The court system is what distinguishes the West from the Third World. When a court will not act because of `national security,' there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World." His lawyers said they would continue the fight.
In Canada, Justice O'Connor is expected to issue an interim report next month.
The Arar suit was the first court test of the Bush administration policy of "extraordinary rendition," a practice often referred to as the outsourcing of torture.
Critics of the practice said the U.S. court’s decision gives Washington a green light to continue its practice of sending terrorist suspects to third countries where they could be tortured.
Arar's is just one of a number of well-documented cases in which suspects have been shipped to third countries with dubious human rights records where interrogation methods outlawed in the U.S. can be used.
In his decision, Judge Trager acknowledged Arar's fears of torture in Syria were real and cited the U.S. State Department's own report on human rights abuses there.
But he said such decisions were beyond the realm of his court. "A judge who declares on his or her own ... authority that the policy of extraordinary rendition is under all circumstances unconstitutional must acknowledge that such a ruling can have the most serious of consequences to our foreign relations or national security or both," he wrote.
The U.S. and other countries that practice extreme rendition often hide behind what critics call “the fig leaf of diplomatic assurances”. This means the rendering government asks the receiving government to promise not to torture or abuse prisoners.
But, critics say, documented evidence shows such assurances to be a sham. According to Dr. Beau Grosscup, professor of international relations at California State University and an expert on terrorism, “Diplomatic assurances are trumped by the military, police and intelligence 'counter-insurgency' programs that the two Cold War superpowers instituted and still run in many of these countries that train police and military personnel in torture.” Grosscup says, “The real attitude driving the 'rendition' efforts is: ‘Having paid to train them in torture, why not get our monies worth’.”
Ron Daniels, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group based in New York which is helping in Arar’s defense, told IPS, “Torture is against the law in the United States. The Bush administration should not be attempting to avoid the laws of this country by sending people to be tortured over seas where other countries will do their dirty work out of the public eye. This is a barbaric practice with no place in the 21st Century.”
A Justice Department official said the ruling pleased the government.
At least one other rendition lawsuit has been filed in U.S. courts. Khaled Al-Masri, a German citizen born in Lebanon, took a bus from Germany to Macedonia, where Macedonian agents confiscated his passport and detained him for 23 days, without access to anyone, including his wife.
He says he was then put in a diaper, a belt with chains to his wrists and ankles, earmuffs, eye pads, a blindfold and a hood. He was put into a plane, his legs and arms spread-eagled and secured to the floor. He was drugged and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in solitary confinement for five months before being dropped off in a remote rural section of Albania. He claims it was a CIA-leased aircraft that flew him to Afghanistan, and CIA agents who were responsible for his rendition to Afghanistan.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has defended the practice of rendition, saying it was a vital tool in the war on terror. But Ms. Rice said the U.S. does not "send anyone to a country to be tortured."
"The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured," she said. "Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."
However, on a trip to Europe shortly after making these comments, Secretary Rice admitted to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the rendition of Al-Masri was “a mistake”.
Does this mean renditions will not stop?
I wouldn't count on it!
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
A TALE OF TWO GITMOS: WHERE WAS THE MSM?
By William Fisher
Last June 17, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "If you think of the people down there (at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Yet two recent reports, based on the Defense Department’s own documentation, reach conclusions that are dramatically different than Mr. Rumsfeld’s. And, amid the millions of words journalists have written about GITMO during the past few years, the mainstream press has largely ignored these new reports.
One report, prepared by a team headed by Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey – who is a lawyer for two of the Guantanamo detainees – found that more than half of the terror suspects being held have not been accused of committing hostile acts against the United States or its allies.
Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just eight percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just "associated with" terrorists.
The evaluations were completed as part of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted during 2004 to determine if the prisoners were being correctly held as enemy combatants. So far just 10 of the detainees have been formally charged with crimes and are headed for military tribunals.
According to the report, 55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of
committing a hostile act. But the DOD’s descriptions of their actions range from a
high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guesthouse or wore olive drab clothing.
The report also found that about one-third of the detainees were linked to
al-Qaida; 22 percent to the Taliban; 28 percent to both; and 7 percent to either
one or the other, but not specified.
Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press filed a story on the report on February 7, 2006. But few U.S. newspapers have run the story.
The DOD documents, which are publicly available, were declassified versions of
evaluations that contain additional information about each detainee. Those
additional details were not made public. The Pentagon had no comment on the report for the AP, which has filed a lawsuit seeking the release of the classified versions of the documents.
"The government has detained these individuals for more than four years, without
a trial or judicial hearing, and has had unfettered access to each detainee for
that time," said the Denbeaux report.
Of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the
military has released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
The second report, written by Corine Hegland for the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal (NJ), was based on a review conducted by the magazine of files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners.
Its conclusion: Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not “the worst of the worst” of the terrorist world.
“Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars,” the magazine said.
NJ reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
It added, “Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population”.
The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were terrorists, the NJ recounted. “They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
But, says the magazine, the CIA didn't see it that way. “By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004.”
According to Scheuer, “Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of the guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license, according to the magazine.
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense Department report leaked to the New York Times.
The report called the operations "tantamount to torture." Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism." And members of Congress were touting the prison’s excellent cuisine.
Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, told IPS, “If most of these guys are not al Qaeda, i.e., are vanilla flavored civilians or mere Taliban foot soldiers, then it gives the lie to the single mantra that the administration has left when attempting to defend itself against allegations of abuse in Gitmo: that the ‘terrorists’ are trained to make false allegations of abuse.”
Rona said it reminds him of a story he sees as emblematic of the legal process at Guantanamo. “The story is about a guy who, after relentless interrogation, finally admitted to knowing Osama --‘Yes, OK, I know him, I've seen him on Al Jazeera’ -- upon which basis the Combatant Status Review Tribunal was informed that ‘the individual admits to knowing bin Laden’. And upon this information, he was adjudicated an ‘enemy combatant’. "
Some reports disputing the Bush Administration’s versions of conditions at Guantanamo have received widespread coverage in the U.S. press. For example, Amnesty International created a media firestorm with a report in which it referred to the prison as a “Gulag”. Also widely covered was the recent report from investigators for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, recommending that Guantanamo be closed down. On the other side of the ledger, the recent report from a United Nations team of experts from the UN Human Rights Commission received relatively little attention in mainstream media. It recommended closure of the Guantanamo prison.
Similarly, the Seton Hall and National Journal reports found the media largely asleep. It may well be that local editors feel their readership is suffering from GITMO-overload.
Last June 17, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "If you think of the people down there (at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba), these are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They're terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, (Osama bin Laden's) bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker."
Yet two recent reports, based on the Defense Department’s own documentation, reach conclusions that are dramatically different than Mr. Rumsfeld’s. And, amid the millions of words journalists have written about GITMO during the past few years, the mainstream press has largely ignored these new reports.
One report, prepared by a team headed by Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey – who is a lawyer for two of the Guantanamo detainees – found that more than half of the terror suspects being held have not been accused of committing hostile acts against the United States or its allies.
Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just eight percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just "associated with" terrorists.
The evaluations were completed as part of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted during 2004 to determine if the prisoners were being correctly held as enemy combatants. So far just 10 of the detainees have been formally charged with crimes and are headed for military tribunals.
According to the report, 55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of
committing a hostile act. But the DOD’s descriptions of their actions range from a
high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guesthouse or wore olive drab clothing.
The report also found that about one-third of the detainees were linked to
al-Qaida; 22 percent to the Taliban; 28 percent to both; and 7 percent to either
one or the other, but not specified.
Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press filed a story on the report on February 7, 2006. But few U.S. newspapers have run the story.
The DOD documents, which are publicly available, were declassified versions of
evaluations that contain additional information about each detainee. Those
additional details were not made public. The Pentagon had no comment on the report for the AP, which has filed a lawsuit seeking the release of the classified versions of the documents.
"The government has detained these individuals for more than four years, without
a trial or judicial hearing, and has had unfettered access to each detainee for
that time," said the Denbeaux report.
Of the approximately 760 prisoners brought to Guantanamo since 2002, the
military has released 180 and transferred 76 to the custody of other countries.
The second report, written by Corine Hegland for the fiercely nonpartisan National Journal (NJ), was based on a review conducted by the magazine of files on 132 prisoners who have asked the courts for help, and a thorough reading of heavily censored transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals conducted in Guantanamo for 314 prisoners.
Its conclusion: Most of the "enemy combatants" held at Guantanamo -- for four years now -- are simply not “the worst of the worst” of the terrorist world.
“Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars,” the magazine said.
NJ reported, “Notwithstanding Rumsfeld's description, the majority of them were not caught by American soldiers on the battlefield. They came into American custody from third parties, mostly from Pakistan, some after targeted raids there, most after a dragnet for Arabs after 9/11.”
It added, “Much of the evidence against the detainees is weak. One prisoner at Guantanamo, for example, has made accusations against more than 60 of his fellow inmates; that's more than 10 percent of Guantanamo's entire prison population”.
The men in the orange jumpsuits, President Bush said, were terrorists, the NJ recounted. “They were the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth, Rumsfeld said. They were so vicious, if given the chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba, said Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
But, says the magazine, the CIA didn't see it that way. “By the fall of 2002, it was common knowledge around CIA circles that fewer than 10 percent of Guantanamo's prisoners were high-value terrorist operatives, according to Michael Scheuer who headed the agency's bin Laden unit through 1999 and resigned in 2004.”
According to Scheuer, “Most of the men were probably foot soldiers at best” who were "going to know absolutely nothing about terrorism." Guantanamo prisoners might be pumped for information about how they learned to fight, which could help American soldiers facing trained Islamic insurgencies. But the Defense Department and FBI interrogators at Guantanamo were interested more in catastrophic terrorism than in combat practicalities. They kept asking "every one of the guys about 9/11 and when was the next attack," questions most of these low-level prisoners couldn't answer.
Even as the CIA was deciding that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo didn't have much to say, Pentagon officials were getting frustrated with how little the detainees were saying. So they ramped up the pressure and gave interrogators more license, according to the magazine.
By June 2004 conditions were so bad at Guantanamo that the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only civilian group allowed to meet with detainees, sent a furious confidential report to the White House charging that the entire system in Cuba was "devised to break the will of prisoners at Guantanamo," making them "wholly dependent on their interrogators" through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions," according to a Defense Department report leaked to the New York Times.
The report called the operations "tantamount to torture." Pentagon officials, meanwhile, were citing the "safe, humane, and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terrorism." And members of Congress were touting the prison’s excellent cuisine.
Gabor Rona, international legal director for Human Rights First, told IPS, “If most of these guys are not al Qaeda, i.e., are vanilla flavored civilians or mere Taliban foot soldiers, then it gives the lie to the single mantra that the administration has left when attempting to defend itself against allegations of abuse in Gitmo: that the ‘terrorists’ are trained to make false allegations of abuse.”
Rona said it reminds him of a story he sees as emblematic of the legal process at Guantanamo. “The story is about a guy who, after relentless interrogation, finally admitted to knowing Osama --‘Yes, OK, I know him, I've seen him on Al Jazeera’ -- upon which basis the Combatant Status Review Tribunal was informed that ‘the individual admits to knowing bin Laden’. And upon this information, he was adjudicated an ‘enemy combatant’. "
Some reports disputing the Bush Administration’s versions of conditions at Guantanamo have received widespread coverage in the U.S. press. For example, Amnesty International created a media firestorm with a report in which it referred to the prison as a “Gulag”. Also widely covered was the recent report from investigators for the United Nations Human Rights Commission, recommending that Guantanamo be closed down. On the other side of the ledger, the recent report from a United Nations team of experts from the UN Human Rights Commission received relatively little attention in mainstream media. It recommended closure of the Guantanamo prison.
Similarly, the Seton Hall and National Journal reports found the media largely asleep. It may well be that local editors feel their readership is suffering from GITMO-overload.
Monday, February 20, 2006
WHAT TO DO WITH THE PRISONERS?
By William Fisher
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with the United Nations report calling on the U.S. to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
And many of those interviewed by us were fearful that the George W. Bush administration would use the source of the report – the admittedly flawed United Nations Human Rights Commission -- to discredit its findings.
The report found that U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the U.S. to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation ordered by the Commission. The U.N. team was refused access to prisoners and did not visit the facility for that reason.
The human rights body has been widely criticized because its 53 members include representatives of countries with questionable human rights records. These include Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The U.S. has been among U.N. member states attempting to reform the Commission, denying membership to countries that are known to commit human rights abuses.
The report concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.”
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," said Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
Prof. Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the U.N.'s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament.
Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He told us, “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts' jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He told us, “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closure means the U.S. is going to open up its legal environment to respect international human rights norms not only at GITMO but in all its detention facilities worldwide, that would be a step forward. If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all. The U.S. needs to live up to its obligations under both U.S. and international law.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, Director Counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told us, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the U.S. decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantánamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the U.S. might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantánamo. For the many detainees who do not have this judicial protection in place (because until very recently we did not have identifying information for them and/or authorization to represent them) we have no way of ensuring that the men are not rendered to indefinite detention or torture either in their countries of birth or some third country. “
Prof. Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on U.S. Constitutional and international law, told us, “Closing Gitmo would be a welcomed change. However, it will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations. The problem is the underlying legal claims of the President and the continued failure of the government to comply with domestic and international law. The most important recommendation is that these individuals be given legitimate trials in federal court rather than the meaningless proceedings held at GITMO. The current proceedings have little resemblance to legal hearings. They are controlled by rules written by government prosecutors to guarantee conviction and stand as a fundamental affront to the most basic notions of the rule of law.”
Yale Richmond, a veteran of 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, believes that “As long as (GITMO) remains open, it will be used against us. Better to close it.” But, he told us, “That raises the question of whether the prisoners should be tried in US courts, and what Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush (in that order) would say if some of them were found ‘not guilty’."
Christopher J. Roederer, Associate Professor of Law at the Florida Coastal School of Law, told us, “I do think that GITMO should be closed, or fully opened up to full inspection and access. The main problem with the report in my view is that there was no visit and no access to the prisoners – but whose fault is that? Did we accept Saddam’s assurances that there were no WMDs on his say-so? Did we not hold his lack of full cooperation against him?”
Experts we interviewed think there is a good possibility that the Bush Administration will try to use the troubled composition of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to discredit or dismiss the findings of the report.
Patricia Kushlis, a retired U.S. Information Agency officer and a specialist in international politics, public diplomacy and national security, told us, “I suspect the Administration will try to use this as a rationale for questioning the report's veracity, or at least credibility. Whether it will stick, or not, is another question.”
Prof. Roederer told us, “I only think it hurts as a rhetorical matter. It may work rhetorically to defend our actions by pointing back at our accusers as coming from ‘bad’ places, but that retort misses the point of the allegation. If the merits disclose violations it is no answer to say that other states are violating human rights or even that members of the Committee are focusing on the U.S. to move the spotlight off of their own countries. The charge is still left intact - two or more wrongs do not make a right.”
CCR’s Olshansky said, “Although the full membership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission includes states with less than ideal human rights records, the report that we have seen is being issued by unimpeachable sources”. She noted that the five individuals who prepared the report are the “foremost authorities” on the issues addressed in the report. “They have no role or responsibility for the actions of their home governments.”
Gabor Rona of HRF agrees. He told us, “ The people who researched and wrote this report are among the world’s most distinguished human rights scholars. They are independent of the countries that are members of the Human Rights Commission. The Bush Administration should consider their findings carefully and not respond by attempting to shoot the messenger.”
In November, the Bush administration offered three of the five members of the U.N. team the same tour of the prison given to journalists and members of Congress. This tour prohibits direct contact with prisoners.
The report focuses on the U.S. government's legal basis for the detentions as described in its formal response to the U.N. inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States — and any other country engaged in combat — to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
But the U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
It also rejected the premise that "the war on terrorism" exempted the U.S. from international conventions on torture and civil and political rights.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Prof. Nowak also said the U.N. team was "particularly concerned" about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees said were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
Coming on the heels of the release of yet more photos of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, widely published photos of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the U.N. report has helped to make this a pretty uncomfortable week for the Bush Administration. White House press secretary Scott McClellan attempted to blow off the U.N. report by asserting that, since the investigative team did not visit GITMO, it told only one side of the story.
Yet there is virtual unanimity in the foreign affairs community that the so-called “torture issue” has greatly diminished America’s reputation abroad – and not only in the eyes of Arabs and other Muslims. Notably, it has been the issue on which the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, publicly disagreed with President Bush during her recent White House visit.
President Bush has dug his heels in on the Guantanamo issue. But his administration has a penchant for publicly exhorting the world to “stay the course” – and then privately changing the course. So there may yet be hope for a more rational policy.
Foreign policy and human rights experts appear to agree with the United Nations report calling on the U.S. to shut down its detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – but most believe that simply closing it misses a larger point: What to do with the prisoners?
And many of those interviewed by us were fearful that the George W. Bush administration would use the source of the report – the admittedly flawed United Nations Human Rights Commission -- to discredit its findings.
The report found that U.S. treatment of Guantanamo detainees violates their rights to physical and mental health and, in some cases, constitutes torture. It urges the U.S. to close the facility and bring the captives to trial on U.S. territory, charging that Washington's justification for the continued detention is a distortion of international law.
Compiled by five U.N. envoys who interviewed former prisoners, detainees' lawyers and families, and U.S. officials, the report is the result of an 18-month investigation ordered by the Commission. The U.N. team was refused access to prisoners and did not visit the facility for that reason.
The human rights body has been widely criticized because its 53 members include representatives of countries with questionable human rights records. These include Azerbaijan, China, Cuba, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe. The U.S. has been among U.N. member states attempting to reform the Commission, denying membership to countries that are known to commit human rights abuses.
The report concluded that the violent force-feeding of hunger strikers, incidents of excessive violence used in transporting prisoners and combinations of interrogation techniques "must be assessed as amounting to torture" — are likely to stoke U.S. and international criticism of the prison.”
"We very, very carefully considered all of the arguments posed by the U.S. government," said Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture and one of the envoys. "There are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture."
Prof. Nowak, a member of the International Commission of Jurists, is Professor of Constitutional Law and Human Rights at the University of Vienna and Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights (BIM). Since 1996, he has served as Judge at the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
Human rights and legal advocates hope the U.N.'s conclusions will add weight to similar findings by rights groups and the European Parliament.
Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of the Duke University Law School shares that hope. He told us, “I believe that the existence of the prison in Guantanamo and the treatment of the detainees there violates international law. However, if the base at Guantanamo should be closed, it is essential that something worse not replace it. For example, it would be much worse if the prisoners are then transferred to prisons in foreign countries beyond American courts' jurisdiction.”
This view was echoed by Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First (HRF), a New York-based advocacy group. He told us, “Whether or not Guantanamo stays open or is closed addresses only one symptom of a larger question: What will happen to the detainees? If closure means the U.S. is going to open up its legal environment to respect international human rights norms not only at GITMO but in all its detention facilities worldwide, that would be a step forward. If closing GITMO simply means shipping the detainees off to other places and fates where their rights continue to be violated, that would be no step at all. The U.S. needs to live up to its obligations under both U.S. and international law.”
Barbara J. Olshansky, Director Counsel of the Guantanamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told us, “With each day (GITMO) remains open, it presents a very ugly picture to the world of the U.S. decision to cast aside the rule of law and trample the most fundamental human rights.”
She added, “Guantánamo has become the symbol for our country’s decision to deny human dignity. At the same time, however, we remain very concerned about the actions the U.S. might take if it were to close the base. It has taken a great deal of effort to ensure that detainees are not transferred to indefinite detention or to detention under torture from Guantánamo. For the many detainees who do not have this judicial protection in place (because until very recently we did not have identifying information for them and/or authorization to represent them) we have no way of ensuring that the men are not rendered to indefinite detention or torture either in their countries of birth or some third country. “
Prof. Jonathan Turley of Georgetown University and a widely recognized authority on U.S. Constitutional and international law, told us, “Closing Gitmo would be a welcomed change. However, it will mean little if the underlying abuses continue at a dozen less visible locations. The problem is the underlying legal claims of the President and the continued failure of the government to comply with domestic and international law. The most important recommendation is that these individuals be given legitimate trials in federal court rather than the meaningless proceedings held at GITMO. The current proceedings have little resemblance to legal hearings. They are controlled by rules written by government prosecutors to guarantee conviction and stand as a fundamental affront to the most basic notions of the rule of law.”
Yale Richmond, a veteran of 30 years in the U.S. Foreign Service, believes that “As long as (GITMO) remains open, it will be used against us. Better to close it.” But, he told us, “That raises the question of whether the prisoners should be tried in US courts, and what Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush (in that order) would say if some of them were found ‘not guilty’."
Christopher J. Roederer, Associate Professor of Law at the Florida Coastal School of Law, told us, “I do think that GITMO should be closed, or fully opened up to full inspection and access. The main problem with the report in my view is that there was no visit and no access to the prisoners – but whose fault is that? Did we accept Saddam’s assurances that there were no WMDs on his say-so? Did we not hold his lack of full cooperation against him?”
Experts we interviewed think there is a good possibility that the Bush Administration will try to use the troubled composition of the U.N. Human Rights Commission to discredit or dismiss the findings of the report.
Patricia Kushlis, a retired U.S. Information Agency officer and a specialist in international politics, public diplomacy and national security, told us, “I suspect the Administration will try to use this as a rationale for questioning the report's veracity, or at least credibility. Whether it will stick, or not, is another question.”
Prof. Roederer told us, “I only think it hurts as a rhetorical matter. It may work rhetorically to defend our actions by pointing back at our accusers as coming from ‘bad’ places, but that retort misses the point of the allegation. If the merits disclose violations it is no answer to say that other states are violating human rights or even that members of the Committee are focusing on the U.S. to move the spotlight off of their own countries. The charge is still left intact - two or more wrongs do not make a right.”
CCR’s Olshansky said, “Although the full membership of the U.N. Human Rights Commission includes states with less than ideal human rights records, the report that we have seen is being issued by unimpeachable sources”. She noted that the five individuals who prepared the report are the “foremost authorities” on the issues addressed in the report. “They have no role or responsibility for the actions of their home governments.”
Gabor Rona of HRF agrees. He told us, “ The people who researched and wrote this report are among the world’s most distinguished human rights scholars. They are independent of the countries that are members of the Human Rights Commission. The Bush Administration should consider their findings carefully and not respond by attempting to shoot the messenger.”
In November, the Bush administration offered three of the five members of the U.N. team the same tour of the prison given to journalists and members of Congress. This tour prohibits direct contact with prisoners.
The report focuses on the U.S. government's legal basis for the detentions as described in its formal response to the U.N. inquiry: "The law of war allows the United States — and any other country engaged in combat — to hold enemy combatants without charges or access to counsel for the duration of hostilities. Detention is not an act of punishment, but of security and military necessity. It serves the purpose of preventing combatants from continuing to take up arms against the United States."
But the U.N. team concluded that there had been insufficient due process to determine whether the more than 750 people who had been detained at Guantanamo Bay since January 2002 were "enemy combatants," and determined that the primary purpose of their confinement was for interrogation, not to prevent them from taking up arms. The U.S. has released or transferred more than 260 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
It also rejected the premise that "the war on terrorism" exempted the U.S. from international conventions on torture and civil and political rights.
The report said the simultaneous use of several interrogation techniques — prolonged solitary confinement, exposure to extreme temperatures, noise and light; forced shaving and other techniques that exploit religious beliefs or cause intimidation and humiliation — constituted inhumane treatment and, in some cases, reached the threshold of torture.
Prof. Nowak also said the U.N. team was "particularly concerned" about the force-feeding of hunger strikers through nasal tubes that detainees said were brutally inserted and removed, causing intense pain, bleeding and vomiting.
Coming on the heels of the release of yet more photos of detainee abuse taken at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003, widely published photos of British abuse of prisoners in Iraq, the U.N. report has helped to make this a pretty uncomfortable week for the Bush Administration. White House press secretary Scott McClellan attempted to blow off the U.N. report by asserting that, since the investigative team did not visit GITMO, it told only one side of the story.
Yet there is virtual unanimity in the foreign affairs community that the so-called “torture issue” has greatly diminished America’s reputation abroad – and not only in the eyes of Arabs and other Muslims. Notably, it has been the issue on which the new German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, publicly disagreed with President Bush during her recent White House visit.
President Bush has dug his heels in on the Guantanamo issue. But his administration has a penchant for publicly exhorting the world to “stay the course” – and then privately changing the course. So there may yet be hope for a more rational policy.
THE PLIGHT OF NATIONAL SECURITY WHISTLEBLOWERS
By William Fisher
Find illegal activity in the U.S. national security agency you work for. Report it to your superiors. Get rewarded by being demoted or having your security clearance revoked -- tantamount to losing your career – while those whose conduct you’ve reported get promoted.
This was the picture painted to a House of Representatives committee last week, as its members heard from five soldiers and civilians who say their livelihoods and reputations have been destroyed or placed in serious jeopardy by their attempts to expose and correct waste, fraud or abuse in their workplaces.
They are known as “national security whistleblowers”. And, unlike whistleblowers in civilian agencies of the U.S. government, they have little legal protection against retaliation.
The House Committee is chaired by Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut. But, in a rare occurrence in the current contentious political climate in Washington, he is receiving virtually unanimous bipartisan support for efforts to develop legislation to fix the problem.
Shays and his colleagues listened to a litany of retaliations taken against people
who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping, and other alleged misconduct.
The litany came from current or former employees of the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, and the Energy Department. They told the committee that after they spoke out against alleged government misconduct or criminal activity, they "were retaliated against, in some cases by having their security clearances revoked or their careers ruined."
Specialist Samuel Provance said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib. He said he tried to tell the general “things he didn’t want to hear”, adding, "Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on". Provance lost his security clearance, was placed under a “gag order”, and is now stationed in Germany, where his responsibilities consist of "picking up trash and guard duty.”
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was among the first to disclose the Pentagon's “Able Danger” data-mining program. He said he believes that the program identified Mohammed Atta before he became the lead hijacker in the 2001 terrorist attacks, though a Pentagon review found no evidence to support that conclusion. Shaffer’s security clearance was revoked.
Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency (NSA), charged that there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the agency’s so-called ‘special-access programs’ but was advised that he could not discuss them even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session. He told the Committee the Defense Department’s harassment of him included spreading rumors that he suffers from bipolar disease.
Mike German resigned as an FBI agent after reporting that other agents and managers mishandled a major counterterrorism case in 2002 and falsified records. The Justice Department inspector general confirmed German's allegations, and that he was retaliated against – his security clearance was revoked.
Richard Levernier's job as a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist was to test how well prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He testified that the tests he supervised showed a 50 percent failure rate. When he reported this to his superiors, he was demoted and his security clearance revoked. He says he was forced into early retirement.
All these witnesses said they tried to follow the chain of command for reporting wrongdoing, but were rebuffed or stonewalled. Some started by going to their immediate supervisors; others went to the Inspector Generals of their agencies; a few eventually told their stories to congresspersons or to the media.
The defense of whistleblowers comes at a time when top Bush administration
officials are turning up the pressure to stop leaks of classified information.
Two news reports in recent months, an article in The New York Times on the
National Security Agency's surveillance program and a Washington Post article on secret CIA detention centers, have been referred for criminal investigation.
Sibel Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) told us, “National Security employees’ should not have to sacrifice their careers or financial security in doing what is right. Good employees are being chased out of jobs and fired by those who either are engaged in wrongful behavior or don’t want to hear about.”
She added, “A national security employee has to choose between career and conscience when confronted with agency wrongdoing. We need to adopt protections for employees that allow them to be secure in their jobs and encourage them to report waste, fraud, and abuse of power.”
Ms. Edmonds, arguably the best known of recent national security whistleblowers, began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. She was fired in the spring of 2002 after reporting concerns about sabotage, intimidation, corruption and incompetence to superiors. In October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller, then Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed a gag order on Ms. Edmonds, citing possible damage to diplomatic relations or national security. Ms. Edmonds sued and appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court agreed with lower courts that trying her case would compromise “state secrets”.
The NSWBC has drafted 'model legislation for whistleblowers’, which is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat. Edmonds’ group is also working on a House version of this bill.
At last week’s House hearing, Specialist Provance’s testimony drew extraordinary attention by Committee members, as it came only days after the release by an Australian television channel of new photos and videos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Investigation of the “Able Danger” datamining program of the National Security Agency has been championed by a powerful Republican, Rep. Kurt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on the subject. He claims that Lt. Col. Shaffer reported the program to the staff director of the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Philip Zelikow, when he and other staff members traveled to Afghanistan. Later, however, Commission staff told him they had all the information they required. The program was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s report.
Responding to a question from Congressman Weldon, Shaffer said he is convinced the Defense Department wants details of "Able Danger" buried to avoid embarrassment to defense officials. He also accused the Defense Department of conducting a “smear campaign” against him.
Shaffer was barred from testifying at an earlier Senate hearing on the program, but Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told that hearing that the Defense Department had found no evidence that a likeness of Mohammed Atta was ever obtained through the program.
Noting that current whistleblower protection laws do not cover employees of agencies involved in national security, Rep. Shays said, “Those with whom we trust the nation's secrets are too often treated like second-class citizens when it comes to asserting their rights to speak truth to power."
Find illegal activity in the U.S. national security agency you work for. Report it to your superiors. Get rewarded by being demoted or having your security clearance revoked -- tantamount to losing your career – while those whose conduct you’ve reported get promoted.
This was the picture painted to a House of Representatives committee last week, as its members heard from five soldiers and civilians who say their livelihoods and reputations have been destroyed or placed in serious jeopardy by their attempts to expose and correct waste, fraud or abuse in their workplaces.
They are known as “national security whistleblowers”. And, unlike whistleblowers in civilian agencies of the U.S. government, they have little legal protection against retaliation.
The House Committee is chaired by Representative Christopher Shays, a Republican from Connecticut. But, in a rare occurrence in the current contentious political climate in Washington, he is receiving virtually unanimous bipartisan support for efforts to develop legislation to fix the problem.
Shays and his colleagues listened to a litany of retaliations taken against people
who have spoken out about abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, illicit federal wiretapping, and other alleged misconduct.
The litany came from current or former employees of the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Defense Department, and the Energy Department. They told the committee that after they spoke out against alleged government misconduct or criminal activity, they "were retaliated against, in some cases by having their security clearances revoked or their careers ruined."
Specialist Samuel Provance said he was demoted and humiliated after telling a general investigating the Abu Ghraib scandal that senior officers had covered up detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib. He said he tried to tell the general “things he didn’t want to hear”, adding, "Young soldiers were scapegoated while superiors misrepresented what had happened and tried to misdirect attention away from what was really going on". Provance lost his security clearance, was placed under a “gag order”, and is now stationed in Germany, where his responsibilities consist of "picking up trash and guard duty.”
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer was among the first to disclose the Pentagon's “Able Danger” data-mining program. He said he believes that the program identified Mohammed Atta before he became the lead hijacker in the 2001 terrorist attacks, though a Pentagon review found no evidence to support that conclusion. Shaffer’s security clearance was revoked.
Russell Tice, a former intelligence officer at the National Security Agency (NSA), charged that there were "illegalities and unconstitutional activity" in the agency’s so-called ‘special-access programs’ but was advised that he could not discuss them even with members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees in closed session. He told the Committee the Defense Department’s harassment of him included spreading rumors that he suffers from bipolar disease.
Mike German resigned as an FBI agent after reporting that other agents and managers mishandled a major counterterrorism case in 2002 and falsified records. The Justice Department inspector general confirmed German's allegations, and that he was retaliated against – his security clearance was revoked.
Richard Levernier's job as a senior Department of Energy nuclear security specialist was to test how well prepared America's nuclear weapons sites were to defend against a terrorist attack. He testified that the tests he supervised showed a 50 percent failure rate. When he reported this to his superiors, he was demoted and his security clearance revoked. He says he was forced into early retirement.
All these witnesses said they tried to follow the chain of command for reporting wrongdoing, but were rebuffed or stonewalled. Some started by going to their immediate supervisors; others went to the Inspector Generals of their agencies; a few eventually told their stories to congresspersons or to the media.
The defense of whistleblowers comes at a time when top Bush administration
officials are turning up the pressure to stop leaks of classified information.
Two news reports in recent months, an article in The New York Times on the
National Security Agency's surveillance program and a Washington Post article on secret CIA detention centers, have been referred for criminal investigation.
Sibel Edmonds, founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC) told us, “National Security employees’ should not have to sacrifice their careers or financial security in doing what is right. Good employees are being chased out of jobs and fired by those who either are engaged in wrongful behavior or don’t want to hear about.”
She added, “A national security employee has to choose between career and conscience when confronted with agency wrongdoing. We need to adopt protections for employees that allow them to be secure in their jobs and encourage them to report waste, fraud, and abuse of power.”
Ms. Edmonds, arguably the best known of recent national security whistleblowers, began working for the FBI shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, translating top-secret documents pertaining to suspected terrorists. She was fired in the spring of 2002 after reporting concerns about sabotage, intimidation, corruption and incompetence to superiors. In October 2002, at the request of FBI Director Robert Mueller, then Attorney General John Ashcroft imposed a gag order on Ms. Edmonds, citing possible damage to diplomatic relations or national security. Ms. Edmonds sued and appealed her case all the way to the Supreme Court. But the high court agreed with lower courts that trying her case would compromise “state secrets”.
The NSWBC has drafted 'model legislation for whistleblowers’, which is expected to be introduced in the Senate by Sen. Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat. Edmonds’ group is also working on a House version of this bill.
At last week’s House hearing, Specialist Provance’s testimony drew extraordinary attention by Committee members, as it came only days after the release by an Australian television channel of new photos and videos showing prisoner abuse by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Investigation of the “Able Danger” datamining program of the National Security Agency has been championed by a powerful Republican, Rep. Kurt Weldon of Pennsylvania, who wrote a book on the subject. He claims that Lt. Col. Shaffer reported the program to the staff director of the 9/11 Commission, Dr. Philip Zelikow, when he and other staff members traveled to Afghanistan. Later, however, Commission staff told him they had all the information they required. The program was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission’s report.
Responding to a question from Congressman Weldon, Shaffer said he is convinced the Defense Department wants details of "Able Danger" buried to avoid embarrassment to defense officials. He also accused the Defense Department of conducting a “smear campaign” against him.
Shaffer was barred from testifying at an earlier Senate hearing on the program, but Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told that hearing that the Defense Department had found no evidence that a likeness of Mohammed Atta was ever obtained through the program.
Noting that current whistleblower protection laws do not cover employees of agencies involved in national security, Rep. Shays said, “Those with whom we trust the nation's secrets are too often treated like second-class citizens when it comes to asserting their rights to speak truth to power."
Friday, February 17, 2006
YOU’RE DOING A HECK OF A JOB, BILLY
By William Fisher
“Sir, have you no sense of decency?” asked the bow-tied pixyish lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, of Senator Joe McCarthy fifty years ago as he tried to defend an army officer accused by Joltin’ Joe of being a Communist.
I was reminded of Welch’s show-stopping words as I (reluctantly) watched Bill O’Reilly’s “O’Reilly Factor” on President Bush’s TV house organ, Fox News, a couple of weeks ago.
But I found myself wondering whether O’Reilly’s attack on former vice president Al Gore was a matter of ignorance -- or just Megamouth’s way of getting my adrenalin flowing.
Whatever his state of mind, his outrageous commentary sure succeeded in the adrenalin department. But my conclusion is that the Designated Dissembler must be living in some parallel universe.
The target of the Verminator’s wrath in this particular broadcast was Al Gore, and a speech he made in Saudi Arabia back in December.
O’Reilly quoted Gore as having said, "Arabs in the United States have been indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
“Wow. Quite a statement,” O’Reilly exclaimed.
But he went on. Ever-true to the investigative traditions of Ida Tarbell, Woodstein and Jeff Gannon (a.k.a.Guckert), Billyboy had his staff call Gore’s office for further information. They wanted to know “exactly where the unforgivable conditions are located and also to provide some names of Arabs who have been abused inside the USA”, adding, “If innocent Arabs are being abused on U.S. soil, we want to know about it.”
Fair and balanced to the end, O’Reilly conceded, “There were a few cases after 9/11 where Arabs were taken into custody by mistake, but just a few, as far as we can tell.”
Well, since Gore’s office wasn’t going to provide “backup”, I thought I’d help out.
In the days and months following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then Attorney General John (“Let the Eagle Soar”) Ashcroft, with the help of then Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (you’ll remember him from Hurricane Katrina) conducted two sweeps, rounding up some 5,000 – that’s 5,000, Bill -- Arabs and other Muslims, as well as many Sikhs. They were U.S. citizens, residents, visitors, students, and so forth. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t among them.
And here’s a summary of what the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report had to say about these detentions:
None of these detainees were charged with terrorist-related offenses…the decision to detain them was “extremely attenuated” from the 9/11 investigation...the Justice Department’s designation of detainees of interest to the 9/11 investigation was “indiscriminate and haphazard.” and did not adequately distinguish between terrorism suspects and other immigration detainees.
Detainees were subjected to harsh conditions of confinement, including cells that were illuminated 24 hours per day, and confinement to their cells for all but one hour per day. (There was) “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn) against some September 11 detainees….” Detainees were treated like prisoners, denied access to lawyers and contact with families.
And the terrorist convictions resulting from these manhunts? Zero. That’s zero, Bill. Zippo. Zilch.
A few hundred were deported, some accepting deportation just to escape from U.S. custody.
I hope this is the “backup” Al Gore’s people wouldn’t provide, Mr. O’Reilly. But, of course, a really simple Google search would have produced the same intelligence. It’s public record, presented to Congress, and was probably published in whatever newspaper you read. If you read, that is.
Undeterred by any of these pesky little facts, the Great Rating then uncorked his punchline issue.
Why is Al Gore “saying this stuff in the Middle East? Surely, Gore knows that his words will be used to fuel more Arab anger towards America… you would think he'd be more responsible. I mean, come on. The USA is fighting terrorists all over the world, and Gore is implying that we use terrorist methods against innocent Arabs on the home front?…In a time of war. That would be like an American politician traveling to Japan during World War II and saying FDR was interning Japanese-Americans, which he was.”
Pardon me, oh great drive-by character assassin, but where better to speak out than in the Middle East? After all, that’s where most of these detainees come from. And at what better time than when most of the world hates us?
Hell, even Karen Hughes – surely no hired gun for some vast left-wing conspiracy -- does exactly that when she goes on her “listening tours” of the Middle East and elsewhere.
She admits we’re not perfect. We’re human, which means we make mistakes. And she is fond of telling her audiences that the freedom of expression we enjoy as Americans includes the freedom to admit our mistakes, and try to correct them.
It’s one of the bigger things that separates us from them.
So I’m not concerned about what Al Gore chooses to say in the Middle East or anywhere else.
I’m a lot more concerned about what separates us from us. In that department, you’re doing a heck of a job, Billy!
“Sir, have you no sense of decency?” asked the bow-tied pixyish lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, of Senator Joe McCarthy fifty years ago as he tried to defend an army officer accused by Joltin’ Joe of being a Communist.
I was reminded of Welch’s show-stopping words as I (reluctantly) watched Bill O’Reilly’s “O’Reilly Factor” on President Bush’s TV house organ, Fox News, a couple of weeks ago.
But I found myself wondering whether O’Reilly’s attack on former vice president Al Gore was a matter of ignorance -- or just Megamouth’s way of getting my adrenalin flowing.
Whatever his state of mind, his outrageous commentary sure succeeded in the adrenalin department. But my conclusion is that the Designated Dissembler must be living in some parallel universe.
The target of the Verminator’s wrath in this particular broadcast was Al Gore, and a speech he made in Saudi Arabia back in December.
O’Reilly quoted Gore as having said, "Arabs in the United States have been indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
“Wow. Quite a statement,” O’Reilly exclaimed.
But he went on. Ever-true to the investigative traditions of Ida Tarbell, Woodstein and Jeff Gannon (a.k.a.Guckert), Billyboy had his staff call Gore’s office for further information. They wanted to know “exactly where the unforgivable conditions are located and also to provide some names of Arabs who have been abused inside the USA”, adding, “If innocent Arabs are being abused on U.S. soil, we want to know about it.”
Fair and balanced to the end, O’Reilly conceded, “There were a few cases after 9/11 where Arabs were taken into custody by mistake, but just a few, as far as we can tell.”
Well, since Gore’s office wasn’t going to provide “backup”, I thought I’d help out.
In the days and months following the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then Attorney General John (“Let the Eagle Soar”) Ashcroft, with the help of then Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff (you’ll remember him from Hurricane Katrina) conducted two sweeps, rounding up some 5,000 – that’s 5,000, Bill -- Arabs and other Muslims, as well as many Sikhs. They were U.S. citizens, residents, visitors, students, and so forth. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t among them.
And here’s a summary of what the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report had to say about these detentions:
None of these detainees were charged with terrorist-related offenses…the decision to detain them was “extremely attenuated” from the 9/11 investigation...the Justice Department’s designation of detainees of interest to the 9/11 investigation was “indiscriminate and haphazard.” and did not adequately distinguish between terrorism suspects and other immigration detainees.
Detainees were subjected to harsh conditions of confinement, including cells that were illuminated 24 hours per day, and confinement to their cells for all but one hour per day. (There was) “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some correctional officers at the MDC (Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn) against some September 11 detainees….” Detainees were treated like prisoners, denied access to lawyers and contact with families.
And the terrorist convictions resulting from these manhunts? Zero. That’s zero, Bill. Zippo. Zilch.
A few hundred were deported, some accepting deportation just to escape from U.S. custody.
I hope this is the “backup” Al Gore’s people wouldn’t provide, Mr. O’Reilly. But, of course, a really simple Google search would have produced the same intelligence. It’s public record, presented to Congress, and was probably published in whatever newspaper you read. If you read, that is.
Undeterred by any of these pesky little facts, the Great Rating then uncorked his punchline issue.
Why is Al Gore “saying this stuff in the Middle East? Surely, Gore knows that his words will be used to fuel more Arab anger towards America… you would think he'd be more responsible. I mean, come on. The USA is fighting terrorists all over the world, and Gore is implying that we use terrorist methods against innocent Arabs on the home front?…In a time of war. That would be like an American politician traveling to Japan during World War II and saying FDR was interning Japanese-Americans, which he was.”
Pardon me, oh great drive-by character assassin, but where better to speak out than in the Middle East? After all, that’s where most of these detainees come from. And at what better time than when most of the world hates us?
Hell, even Karen Hughes – surely no hired gun for some vast left-wing conspiracy -- does exactly that when she goes on her “listening tours” of the Middle East and elsewhere.
She admits we’re not perfect. We’re human, which means we make mistakes. And she is fond of telling her audiences that the freedom of expression we enjoy as Americans includes the freedom to admit our mistakes, and try to correct them.
It’s one of the bigger things that separates us from them.
So I’m not concerned about what Al Gore chooses to say in the Middle East or anywhere else.
I’m a lot more concerned about what separates us from us. In that department, you’re doing a heck of a job, Billy!
FEMA CAN’T CATCH A BREAK!
By William Fisher
If Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans today, the government would be no better prepared to cope with it than it was last August when it flooded the city, wrecked much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, and killed 1,400 people.
This is the consensus reached by three new government reports and testimony Monday before a Senate Committee.
The reports detail an almost total failure in planning for and dealing with the devastating impacts of the disaster, massive waste in government procurement practices, widespread fraud by recipients of relief and absence of systems to monitor it, price gouging, and questionable no-bid contracts by companies that often did little actual work.
And, in testimony before a Senate committee Monday, witnesses said that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – which has principal responsibility for disaster planning and relief – has taken some steps to improve, these are likely to fall far short of what is needed before the 2006 Hurricane Season begins.
Two of the reports, released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud and mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
These two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who
received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program -- which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees -- were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
The third report -- "A Failure of Initiative" -- expected to be issued this week by Republicans in the House of Representatives -- claims that Hurricane Katrina “exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.”
The 600-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council.
The report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because President George W. Bush alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
The report paints Chertoff, who took over the mammoth DHS six months before the storm, as detached from events. It contends he activated the Government’s emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all," delaying the flow of federal troops and materiel by as much as three days.
The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and
act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New
Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to
catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people. Some 1,400 people lost their lives in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.
And on the ground, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, who has since resigned, field commanders and the U.S. military's commanding general set up rival chains of command.
In testimony before Sen. Collins’s committee last week, Brown claimed he had kept senior White House aides, including the president’s chief and deputy chief of staff, fully informed about conditions on the ground, including the levee breaks.
He shifted blame for his agency’s performance to Chertoff who, Brown said, has chosen defense against terrorist attacks over protecting the homeland from natural disasters.
Chertoff on Monday rejected this criticism. "I want to tell you I unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters," he said in a speech.
The House Republican report says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached. The president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says. "If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a
terror attack. "Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for
prime time."
"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so
ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which
specific dire warnings had been issued for days," the report says. "This crisis
was not only predictable, it was predicted."
The homeland security secretary, the report says, should have moved two days before Hurricane Katrina hit — when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm — to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place ahead of the storm.
His department also should have done more to help evacuate the Gulf Coast, the
report says. The Homeland Security Department, the draft report says, "failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall."
The House Republican group as well as the Senate committee have charged that the White House failed to provide copies of e-mail messages or other
correspondence by senior advisers to the president.
The report’s criticism also extended to the administrations of Louisiana Governor
Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin, the report says, waited far too long to issue a mandatory evacuation
order. The city and the state also had no reliable system to ensure that people
in nursing homes or hospitals, or the estimated 100,000 residents without
transportation, could get out of harm's way.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination," it says, "then Katrina was a failure of initiative," the House report charges.
A report presented Monday to a Senate Committee by the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), found that “Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses.”
The report suggests that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud.
GAO’s examination of the Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the “significant fraud and abuse.
The report says that FEMA itself found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”
Even when FEMA’s automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments were at times still sent, says the testimony of Gregory Kutz, managing director of the GAO’s forensic audits unit.
The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure their own $2,000 relief check by using “falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories,” and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Testimony charged that much of the money disbursed by FEMA was inappropriately used – for such things as bail bonds, payment of prior traffic violations, driver’s license reinstatement, tattoos, massage parlors, alcoholic beverages, condoms, and adult erotica products.
Five dozen Web sites that either asked for money or sought to harvest personal
information for identity theft also have been shut down, the report said.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms
for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor's lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Fla., at $375 a night, according to the audits.
Almost $900 million was spent by FEMA for 25,000 mobile homes, according to the testimony of the DHS Inspector General (IG), Richard Skinner. But, he said, only about 1,200 have been able to be occupied because they are not suitable for use on a floodplain. The rest are largely standing empty in Hope, Arkansas, where many are deteriorating and others are being cannibalized for parts.
The IG reported that contracts for debris removal, reconstruction and housing, were often hurriedly executed without competitive bids or only limited bidding. He testified that his office is continuing to investigate instances of overcharging and charging for work not performed.
The audits, which are not yet complete, do not try to estimate a total dollar figure on abuse, but GAO auditor Kutz told senators it was "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."
The Senate Committee also heard testimony from the Justice Department (DOJ), whose spokesperson said that federal prosecutors have filed fraud, theft and other charges against 212 people accused of scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes. Forty people have pleaded guilty so far. Many defendants were
accused of trying to obtain emergency aid, typically a $2,000 debit card, issued
to hurricane victims by FEMA and the American Red Cross.
In the Justice Department probe, the largest investigation centered on a Red
Cross call center in Bakersfield, Calif., in which some employees schemed to
steal the emergency money for themselves and others, prosecutors said. Fifty-three people have been charged in this probe.
In a separate but related development, a federal judge ruled Monday that the government could drop some 12,000 families made homeless by the hurricanes from a program that has put them up at hotels. They will receive housing grants instead.
This is a story that's not going away any time soon. Not until the Gulf Coast gets rebuilt -- or until the next hurricane season, whichever comes first. Meanwhile, we continue to wait for Presidential leadership.
If Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans today, the government would be no better prepared to cope with it than it was last August when it flooded the city, wrecked much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, and killed 1,400 people.
This is the consensus reached by three new government reports and testimony Monday before a Senate Committee.
The reports detail an almost total failure in planning for and dealing with the devastating impacts of the disaster, massive waste in government procurement practices, widespread fraud by recipients of relief and absence of systems to monitor it, price gouging, and questionable no-bid contracts by companies that often did little actual work.
And, in testimony before a Senate committee Monday, witnesses said that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – which has principal responsibility for disaster planning and relief – has taken some steps to improve, these are likely to fall far short of what is needed before the 2006 Hurricane Season begins.
Two of the reports, released by the Government Accountability Office and the Homeland Security Department's office of inspector general, detail a series of accounting flaws, fraud and mismanagement in their initial review of how $85 billion in federal aid is being spent.
These two audits found that up to 900,000 of the 2.5 million applicants who
received aid under FEMA's emergency cash assistance program -- which included the $2,000 debit cards given to evacuees -- were based on duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers, or false addresses and names.
The third report -- "A Failure of Initiative" -- expected to be issued this week by Republicans in the House of Representatives -- claims that Hurricane Katrina “exposed the U.S. government's failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives.”
The 600-page report lays primary fault with the passive reaction and misjudgments of top Bush aides, singling out Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Operations Center and the White House Homeland Security Council.
The report found that "earlier presidential involvement could have speeded the response" because President George W. Bush alone could have cut through all bureaucratic resistance.
The report paints Chertoff, who took over the mammoth DHS six months before the storm, as detached from events. It contends he activated the Government’s emergency response systems "late, ineffectively or not at all," delaying the flow of federal troops and materiel by as much as three days.
The White House did not fully engage the president or "substantiate, analyze and
act on the information at its disposal," failing to confirm the collapse of New
Orleans's levee system on Aug. 29, the day of Katrina's landfall, which led to
catastrophic flooding of the city of 500,000 people. Some 1,400 people lost their lives in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast.
And on the ground, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Brown, who has since resigned, field commanders and the U.S. military's commanding general set up rival chains of command.
In testimony before Sen. Collins’s committee last week, Brown claimed he had kept senior White House aides, including the president’s chief and deputy chief of staff, fully informed about conditions on the ground, including the levee breaks.
He shifted blame for his agency’s performance to Chertoff who, Brown said, has chosen defense against terrorist attacks over protecting the homeland from natural disasters.
Chertoff on Monday rejected this criticism. "I want to tell you I unequivocally and strongly reject this attempt to drive a wedge between our concerns about terrorism and our concerns about natural disasters," he said in a speech.
The House Republican report says the Bush administration was informed on the day Hurricane Katrina hit that the levees had been breached. The president and other top administration officials earlier said that they had learned of the breach the next day.
That delay was significant, the report says. "If the levees breached and flooded a large portion of the city, then the flooded city would have to be completely evacuated," the draft report says. "Any delay in confirming the breaches would result in a delay in the post-landfall evacuation of the city." It adds that the White House itself discounted damage reports that later proved true.
"If this is what happens when we have advance warning, we shudder to imagine the consequences when we do not," the draft says, referring to the potential for a
terror attack. "Four and a half years after 9/11, America is still not ready for
prime time."
"It remains difficult to understand how government could respond so
ineffectively to a disaster that was anticipated for years, and for which
specific dire warnings had been issued for days," the report says. "This crisis
was not only predictable, it was predicted."
The homeland security secretary, the report says, should have moved two days before Hurricane Katrina hit — when the National Weather Service issued dire predictions about the storm — to set up a special interagency leadership team to ensure that emergency supplies and rescue squads would be in place ahead of the storm.
His department also should have done more to help evacuate the Gulf Coast, the
report says. The Homeland Security Department, the draft report says, "failed to anticipate the likely consequences of the storm and procure the buses, boats and aircraft that were ultimately necessary to evacuate the flooded city prior to Katrina's landfall."
The House Republican group as well as the Senate committee have charged that the White House failed to provide copies of e-mail messages or other
correspondence by senior advisers to the president.
The report’s criticism also extended to the administrations of Louisiana Governor
Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans.
Mr. Nagin, the report says, waited far too long to issue a mandatory evacuation
order. The city and the state also had no reliable system to ensure that people
in nursing homes or hospitals, or the estimated 100,000 residents without
transportation, could get out of harm's way.
"If 9/11 was a failure of imagination," it says, "then Katrina was a failure of initiative," the House report charges.
A report presented Monday to a Senate Committee by the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), found that “Thousands of applicants for federal emergency relief money after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita used duplicate or invalid Social Security numbers or bogus addresses.”
The report suggests that the $2.3 billion program was a victim of extensive fraud.
GAO’s examination of the Expedited Assistance program determined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) failed to take even the most basic steps to confirm the identifies of about 1.4 million people who sought expedited cash assistance, leaving the program vulnerable to the “significant fraud and abuse.
The report says that FEMA itself found that 900,000 of the 2.5 million applications for all forms of individual assistance were “potential duplicates.”
Even when FEMA’s automated computer system picked out what might be fraudulent applications, payments were at times still sent, says the testimony of Gregory Kutz, managing director of the GAO’s forensic audits unit.
The controls were so lax that auditors were able to secure their own $2,000 relief check by using “falsified identifies, bogus addresses and fabricated disaster stories,” and then simply waiting for the money to arrive in the mail, says the report for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Testimony charged that much of the money disbursed by FEMA was inappropriately used – for such things as bail bonds, payment of prior traffic violations, driver’s license reinstatement, tattoos, massage parlors, alcoholic beverages, condoms, and adult erotica products.
Five dozen Web sites that either asked for money or sought to harvest personal
information for identity theft also have been shut down, the report said.
Thousands of additional dollars appear to have been squandered on hotel rooms
for evacuees that were paid at retail rather than the contractor's lower estimated cost. They included $438 rooms in New York City and beachfront condominiums in Panama City, Fla., at $375 a night, according to the audits.
Almost $900 million was spent by FEMA for 25,000 mobile homes, according to the testimony of the DHS Inspector General (IG), Richard Skinner. But, he said, only about 1,200 have been able to be occupied because they are not suitable for use on a floodplain. The rest are largely standing empty in Hope, Arkansas, where many are deteriorating and others are being cannibalized for parts.
The IG reported that contracts for debris removal, reconstruction and housing, were often hurriedly executed without competitive bids or only limited bidding. He testified that his office is continuing to investigate instances of overcharging and charging for work not performed.
The audits, which are not yet complete, do not try to estimate a total dollar figure on abuse, but GAO auditor Kutz told senators it was "certainly millions of dollars; it could be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars."
The Senate Committee also heard testimony from the Justice Department (DOJ), whose spokesperson said that federal prosecutors have filed fraud, theft and other charges against 212 people accused of scams related to Gulf Coast hurricanes. Forty people have pleaded guilty so far. Many defendants were
accused of trying to obtain emergency aid, typically a $2,000 debit card, issued
to hurricane victims by FEMA and the American Red Cross.
In the Justice Department probe, the largest investigation centered on a Red
Cross call center in Bakersfield, Calif., in which some employees schemed to
steal the emergency money for themselves and others, prosecutors said. Fifty-three people have been charged in this probe.
In a separate but related development, a federal judge ruled Monday that the government could drop some 12,000 families made homeless by the hurricanes from a program that has put them up at hotels. They will receive housing grants instead.
This is a story that's not going away any time soon. Not until the Gulf Coast gets rebuilt -- or until the next hurricane season, whichever comes first. Meanwhile, we continue to wait for Presidential leadership.
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