Marjorie Cohn
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law. Her new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd), will be published in April 2009. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.
Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian residing in Britain, said he was tortured after being sent to Morocco and Afghanistan in 2002 by the U.S. government. Mohamed was transferred to Guantánamo in 2004 and all terrorism charges against him were dismissed last year.
Mohamed was a victim of extraordinary rendition, in which a person is abducted without any legal proceedings and transferred to a foreign country for detention and interrogation, often tortured.
Mohamed and four other plaintiffs are accusing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. of flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured. In Mohamed’s case, two British justices accused the Bush administration of pressuring the British government to block the release of evidence that was “relevant to allegations of torture” of Mohamed.
Twenty-five lines edited out of the court documents included details about how Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel as well as other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding “is very far down the list of things they did,” according to a British official quoted by the Telegraph (UK).
The plaintiffs’ complaint quotes a former Jeppesen employee as saying, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights – you know, the torture flights.” A senior company official also apparently admitted the company transported people to countries where they would be tortured.
Obama’s Justice Department appeared before a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday in the Jeppesen lawsuit. But instead of making a clean break with the dark policies of the Bush years, the Obama administration claimed the same “state secrets” privilege that Bush used to block inquiry into his policies of torture and illegal surveillance. Claiming that the extraordinary rendition program is a state secret is disingenuous since it is has been extensively documented in the media.
“This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course,” said the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel for the five men.
If the judges accept Obama's state secrets claim, these men will be denied their day in court and precluded from any recovery for the damages they suffered as a result of extraordinary rendition.
Two and a half weeks before Obama’s representative appeared in the Jeppesen case, the new President had signed Executive Order 13491. It established a special task force “to study and evaluate the practices of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that such practices comply with the domestic laws, international obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control.”
This order prohibits extraordinary rendition. It also ensures humane treatment of persons in U.S. custody or control. But it doesn’t specifically guarantee that prisoners the United States renders to other countries will be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that doesn’t amount to torture. It does, however, aim to ensure that our government’s practices of transferring people to other countries complies with U.S. laws and policies, including our obligations under international law.
One of those laws is the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty the United States ratified in 1992. Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits the States Parties from subjecting persons “to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The Human Rights Committee, which is the body that monitors the ICCPR, has interpreted that prohibition to forbid States Parties from exposing “individuals to the danger of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment upon return to another country by way of their extradition, expulsion or refoulement.”
Order 13491 also mandates, “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” The order does not define “expeditiously” and the definitional section of the order says that the terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Once again, “short term” and “transitory” are not defined.
In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Eric Holder categorically stated that the United States should not turn over an individual to a country where we have reason to believe he will be tortured. Leon Panetta, nominee for CIA director, went further and interpreted Order 13491 as forbidding “that kind of extraordinary rendition, where we send someone for the purposes of torture or for actions by another country that violate our human values.”
But alarmingly, Panetta appeared to champion the same standard used by the Bush administration, which reportedly engaged in extraordinary rendition 100 to 150 times as of March 2005. After September 11, 2001, President Bush issued a classified directive that expanded the CIA’s authority to render terrorist suspects to other States. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the CIA and the State Department received assurances that prisoners will be treated humanely. “I will seek the same kinds of assurances that they will not be treated inhumanely,” Panetta told the senators.
Gonzales had admitted, however, “We can’t fully control what that country might do. We obviously expect a country to whom we have rendered a detainee to comply with their representations to us . . . If you’re asking me, ‘Does a country always comply?’ I don’t have an answer to that.”
The answer is no. Binyam Mohamed’s case is apparently the tip of the iceberg. Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria, was apprehended by U.S. authorities in New York on September 26, 2002, and transported to Syria, where he was brutally tortured for months. Arar used an Arabic expression to describe the pain he experienced: “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.” The Canadian government later exonerated Arar of any terrorist ties. Thirteen CIA operatives were arrested in Italy for kidnapping an Egyptian, Abu Omar, in Milan and transporting him to Cairo where he was tortured.
Panetta made clear that the CIA will continue to engage in rendition to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects and transfer them to other countries. “If we capture a high-value prisoner,” he said, “I believe we have the right to hold that individual temporarily to be able to debrief that individual and make sure that individual is properly incarcerated.” No clarification of how long is “temporarily” or what “debrief” would mean.
When Sen. Christopher (R-Mo.) asked about the Clinton administration’s use of the CIA to transfer prisoners to countries where they were later executed, Panetta replied, “I think that is an appropriate use of rendition.” Jane Mayer, columnist for the New Yorker, has documented numerous instances of extraordinary rendition during the Clinton administration, including cases in which suspects were executed in the country to which the United States had rendered them. Once when Richard Clarke, President Clinton’s chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, “proposed a snatch,” Vice-President Al Gore said, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”
There is a slippery slope between ordinary rendition and extraordinary rendition. “Rendition has to end,” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “Rendition is a violation of sovereignty. It’s a kidnapping. It’s force and violence.” Ratner queried whether Cuba could enter the United States and take Luis Posada, the man responsible for blowing up a commercial Cuban airline in 1976 and killing 73 people. Or whether the United States could go down to Cuba and kidnap Assata Shakur, who escaped a murder charge in New Jersey.
Moreover, “renditions for the most part weren’t very productive,” a former CIA official told the Los Angeles Times. After a prisoner was turned over to authorities in Egypt, Jordan or another country, the CIA had very little influence over how prisoners were treated and whether they were ultimately released.
The U.S. government should disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001. Those who ordered renditions should be prosecuted. And the special task force should recommend, and Obama should agree to, an end to all renditions.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Monday, February 09, 2009
THE PATH MORE TAKEN…
By William Fisher
President Barack Obama yesterday cast doubt on his promise to put an end to secret government by allowing his Justice Department to follow a path frequently taken by his predecessor.
Before a Federal appeals court in San Francisco, lawyers from the Obama Department of Justice invoked the same “state secrets privilege” used by the administration of President George W. Bush to argue that a lawsuit brought on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohamed and four other alleged victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program should not go forward because revealing the evidence would harm national security
If the appeals court agrees, it will mean that the alleged victims will not have their day in court. The court has not yet ruled on the case.
The defendant in the civil lawsuit is known as Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, which is alleged to have knowingly provided the CIA with the chartered aircraft used to “render” terror suspects to countries where they were tortured.
ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, who argued today on behalf of Mohamed and the other appellants, told us, "To date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets' here. And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this issue. This is a betrayal of the rule of law. It is not the standard we expected from the Obama Administration."
The ACLU was encouraged to believe that the Obama Justice Department would break from the practices of the Bush Administration. Eric Holder, recently confirmed as President Obama’s new Attorney General, said at his confirmation hearing, “I will review significant pending cases in which DOJ has invoked the state secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in legally appropriate situations.”
This appeared to be at odds with testimony by Obama’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who told Senators at his confirmation hearing that the practice of rendition would be continued, but that “extraordinary rendition” – sending terror suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured – would end.
In a statement, Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director, said, “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same.”
He added, “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”
The Mohamed case stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2007 by the ACLU against Jeppesen on behalf of five victims of the United States government's "extraordinary rendition" program. The suit charged that Jeppesen knowingly participated by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly “disappear” the five men to detention and interrogation.
According to the ACLU, shortly after the suit was filed, “The government intervened and inappropriately asserted the “state secrets privilege,” claiming further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public.”
The case was dismissed in February 2008, and the ACLU then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the San Francisco Bay area.
According to published reports, Jeppesen had actual knowledge of the consequences of its activities. A former Jeppesen employee informed Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine that, at an internal corporate meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."
The case has also caused a furor in the United Kingdom and a problem for the U.S. State Department. In a separate case brought on behalf of Mohamed, who is a legal British resident, Britain’s High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion. The High Court said that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohamed.
The court said it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the United States to reconsider sharing intelligence with the U.K.
But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy “governed by the rule of law” would seek to suppress evidence “relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.”
The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position. The British Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, denied that there was any threat from the U.S.
But, in a statement last week, the State Department said that the United States “thanks the U.K. government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information” and that “the United States investigates allegations and claims of torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment such as those raised by Binyam Mohamed.”
After Mohamed was captured, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohamed, and last October all charges against him were dropped.
The ACLU last week sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to clarify the Obama administration's position on the Mohamed case and to reject what it described as the Bush administration's policy of using false claims of national security to avoid judicial review of controversial programs.
The ACLU’s Romero said, "The latest revelation is completely at odds with President Obama's executive orders that ban torture and end rendition, as well as his promise to restore the rule of law."
It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege. During the Bush Administration, government lawyers invoked the “state secrets” privilege more often than any prior administration to stop cases from proceeding.
Among such cases was that of whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, who was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to U.S. security. Her case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. And in 2007, the Supreme Court refused to review the "state secrets" privilege in a lawsuit brought by ACLU client Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to detention, interrogation and torture in a CIA "black site" prison in Afghanistan.
President Barack Obama yesterday cast doubt on his promise to put an end to secret government by allowing his Justice Department to follow a path frequently taken by his predecessor.
Before a Federal appeals court in San Francisco, lawyers from the Obama Department of Justice invoked the same “state secrets privilege” used by the administration of President George W. Bush to argue that a lawsuit brought on behalf of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyan Mohamed and four other alleged victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program should not go forward because revealing the evidence would harm national security
If the appeals court agrees, it will mean that the alleged victims will not have their day in court. The court has not yet ruled on the case.
The defendant in the civil lawsuit is known as Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing, which is alleged to have knowingly provided the CIA with the chartered aircraft used to “render” terror suspects to countries where they were tortured.
ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, who argued today on behalf of Mohamed and the other appellants, told us, "To date, not a single alleged torture victim has had his day in court. In this case, most of the evidence is already public. There are no 'state secrets' here. And if there were, our federal courts are well prepared to handle this issue. This is a betrayal of the rule of law. It is not the standard we expected from the Obama Administration."
The ACLU was encouraged to believe that the Obama Justice Department would break from the practices of the Bush Administration. Eric Holder, recently confirmed as President Obama’s new Attorney General, said at his confirmation hearing, “I will review significant pending cases in which DOJ has invoked the state secrets privilege, and will work with leaders in other agencies and professionals at the Department of Justice to ensure that the United States invokes the state secrets privilege only in legally appropriate situations.”
This appeared to be at odds with testimony by Obama’s nominee for Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who told Senators at his confirmation hearing that the practice of rendition would be continued, but that “extraordinary rendition” – sending terror suspects to countries where they are likely to be tortured – would end.
In a statement, Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director, said, “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same.”
He added, “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”
The Mohamed case stems from a federal lawsuit filed in 2007 by the ACLU against Jeppesen on behalf of five victims of the United States government's "extraordinary rendition" program. The suit charged that Jeppesen knowingly participated by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly “disappear” the five men to detention and interrogation.
According to the ACLU, shortly after the suit was filed, “The government intervened and inappropriately asserted the “state secrets privilege,” claiming further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public.”
The case was dismissed in February 2008, and the ACLU then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the San Francisco Bay area.
According to published reports, Jeppesen had actual knowledge of the consequences of its activities. A former Jeppesen employee informed Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine that, at an internal corporate meeting, a senior Jeppesen official stated, "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights - you know, the torture flights. Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way."
The case has also caused a furor in the United Kingdom and a problem for the U.S. State Department. In a separate case brought on behalf of Mohamed, who is a legal British resident, Britain’s High Court refused to release seven paragraphs that the court had redacted in an earlier opinion. The High Court said that the redacted material lent credence to the torture allegations by Mohamed.
The court said it reached its decision because of what it called a threat from the United States to reconsider sharing intelligence with the U.K.
But, in a highly unusual criticism, the High Court expressed dismay that a democracy “governed by the rule of law” would seek to suppress evidence “relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.”
The court said the Bush administration had made the threat in a letter to the Foreign Office last September. It called on the Obama administration to reverse that position. The British Foreign Secretary, David Milliband, denied that there was any threat from the U.S.
But, in a statement last week, the State Department said that the United States “thanks the U.K. government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information” and that “the United States investigates allegations and claims of torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment such as those raised by Binyam Mohamed.”
After Mohamed was captured, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said that he had been complicit with Jose Padilla in a plan to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States. Padilla was never charged with this plot, but was convicted on other terrorism-related charges by a federal court in 2007. Last year, the Justice Department said it was dropping the dirty-bomb charges against Mohamed, and last October all charges against him were dropped.
The ACLU last week sent a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to clarify the Obama administration's position on the Mohamed case and to reject what it described as the Bush administration's policy of using false claims of national security to avoid judicial review of controversial programs.
The ACLU’s Romero said, "The latest revelation is completely at odds with President Obama's executive orders that ban torture and end rendition, as well as his promise to restore the rule of law."
It has been 50 years since the United States Supreme Court last reviewed the use of the "state secrets" privilege. During the Bush Administration, government lawyers invoked the “state secrets” privilege more often than any prior administration to stop cases from proceeding.
Among such cases was that of whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds, who was fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI's Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to U.S. security. Her case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. And in 2007, the Supreme Court refused to review the "state secrets" privilege in a lawsuit brought by ACLU client Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was kidnapped and rendered to detention, interrogation and torture in a CIA "black site" prison in Afghanistan.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
A No-Brainer for the Supremes?
By William Fisher
In what promises to be the first major test of the Obama Administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history. It will be asked to answer the question: Can an American president declare a legal U.S. resident an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold him indefinitely without charge or trial?
The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an "enemy combatant." He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri's indefinite detention. The defendant in the case is Navy Commander Daniel Spagone, who runs the Navy brig in South Carolina where Al-Marri is being held by the military.
The central pre-Supreme Court question is what position the new Obama administration will take when it files its brief, currently due on March 23.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments during the last week of April and is expected to hand down its ruling in June. The brief filed by the government in the lower courts during the Bush Administration defended the president’s authority to designate ‘enemy combatants’ and to detain them indefinitely.
The ACLU says that the Al-Marri case “provides the Obama administration with an early and critical opportunity to repudiate the abuses of the past eight years and restore the rule of law."
Jonathan Hafetz, ACLU’s lead attorney on the Al-Marri case, told IPS, “This is one of most extreme examples of the Bush Administration’s abuse of executive power. It is a case where President Bush sought to push the outer limits of the Constitution. It is legally and morally indefensible.”
A separate case, Al-Marri v. Gates, is contesting al-Marri's abusive treatment and conditions of confinement at the Navy brig.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national, came lawfully to the United States in September 2001with his wife and five children to pursue a master's degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was arrested by the FBI at his home that December and subsequently indicted for credit card fraud and false identification.
Al-Marri asserted his innocence and prepared to contest the charges. But on June 23, 2003, on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence and less than a month before trial, President George W. Bush declared al-Marri an al Qaeda agent and designated him an "enemy combatant" in the "war on terrorism." That same day, the military took custody of al-Marri and incarcerated him in the Navy brig, where he has been detained without charge ever since.
At stake in Al-Marri v. Spagone is whether the President can order the military to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, individuals lawfully residing in the United States, including American citizens, based on government assertions that they planned to commit terrorist activities.
In 2007, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the government cannot hold individuals arrested in this country in military detention without charge.
But in July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a narrowly divided decision that the President had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge based on the facts alleged. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government's claim of extraordinary detention power would have "disastrous consequences for the Constitution-and the country."
The ACLU says Al-Marri's detention represents “one of the gravest expansions of executive detention power since September 11.” The United States was founded on the principle that “individuals living in this country cannot be imprisoned without charge and that civilian government must remain supreme over the military. Al-Marri's detention represents a radical departure from that celebrated legal tradition—one that was never authorized by Congress and that violates the Constitution.”
According to the ACLU, documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that standard operating procedures developed for Guantánamo Bay “were secretly applied at the Navy brig in an effort to create a prison beyond the law within the United States. Today, al-Marri remains in virtual isolation at the Brig, denied even meaningful communication with his family.”
In its brief, the ACLU asks the Court to overturn a federal appeals court decision giving the president sweeping power to deprive individuals living in the United States of their most basic constitutional rights by designating them "enemy combatants." “It is clearly illegal to imprison legal residents of the United States without trial. It is also the type of false choice between our safety and our ideals that has pervaded America’s approach to fighting terrorism for the past eight years,” said the ACLU’S Hafetz. “We are confident that upon review, the Court will strike down this radical departure from our nation's most basic values and traditions.”
Former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions and numerous former generals, admirals and diplomats joined the ACLU in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the president's authority to indefinitely imprison a legal resident of the U.S. without charge or trial. These and other top military and civilian leaders have filed friend-of-the-court briefs.
The former diplomats argue in their brief that, “Based on our professional experience in the diplomatic service of this country, American diplomatic credibility and effectiveness in many areas of international relations suffer from the widely shared perception that the U.S. has abandoned the rule of law. Indefinite detention without criminal charge or trial is, for most people, the essence of this abandonment.”
They add, “Accordingly, a decision upholding our government’s right to arrest and imprison anyone within its borders, without charge, will not only undercut our ability to convince dictatorial regimes to abandon similar practices, it will substantially undermine efforts to restore our international reputation and to obtain more cooperation from our allies in combating terrorism.”
The second Al-Marri case, Al-Marri v. Gates, contests al-Marri's treatment and conditions of confinement since he was declared an "enemy combatant." During the first sixteen months of his military confinement, al-Marri was held incommunicado and subjected to a range of highly coercive interrogation measures, including being held in total isolation, exposed to painful stress positions, shackled in a freezing cell for hours at a time, and threatened with violence and death.
Al-Marri is the second U.S. person to have been held as an enemy combatant within the United States. The first was José Padilla, a United States citizen. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts.
Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an "enemy combatant" after his arrest on suspicion of plotting a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack. That charge was dropped when his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.
In August 2007, Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.
What does the Padilla case tell us? It, and dozens of other similar cases, tells us that federal courts are more than capable of conducting trials of people accused of terrorism. It tells us that there is no need – let alone any Constitutional right of the president of the United States – to toss any U.S. citizen or lawful resident into a military prison and hold him for years without charge or trial.
And it tells us that our government needs to be a lot more careful about how our interrogators obtain “evidence” – because if it’s coerced, no court will allow it.
We can only hope the Supremes will share that view.
In what promises to be the first major test of the Obama Administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history. It will be asked to answer the question: Can an American president declare a legal U.S. resident an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold him indefinitely without charge or trial?
The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an "enemy combatant." He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri's indefinite detention. The defendant in the case is Navy Commander Daniel Spagone, who runs the Navy brig in South Carolina where Al-Marri is being held by the military.
The central pre-Supreme Court question is what position the new Obama administration will take when it files its brief, currently due on March 23.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments during the last week of April and is expected to hand down its ruling in June. The brief filed by the government in the lower courts during the Bush Administration defended the president’s authority to designate ‘enemy combatants’ and to detain them indefinitely.
The ACLU says that the Al-Marri case “provides the Obama administration with an early and critical opportunity to repudiate the abuses of the past eight years and restore the rule of law."
Jonathan Hafetz, ACLU’s lead attorney on the Al-Marri case, told IPS, “This is one of most extreme examples of the Bush Administration’s abuse of executive power. It is a case where President Bush sought to push the outer limits of the Constitution. It is legally and morally indefensible.”
A separate case, Al-Marri v. Gates, is contesting al-Marri's abusive treatment and conditions of confinement at the Navy brig.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari national, came lawfully to the United States in September 2001with his wife and five children to pursue a master's degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was arrested by the FBI at his home that December and subsequently indicted for credit card fraud and false identification.
Al-Marri asserted his innocence and prepared to contest the charges. But on June 23, 2003, on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence and less than a month before trial, President George W. Bush declared al-Marri an al Qaeda agent and designated him an "enemy combatant" in the "war on terrorism." That same day, the military took custody of al-Marri and incarcerated him in the Navy brig, where he has been detained without charge ever since.
At stake in Al-Marri v. Spagone is whether the President can order the military to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, individuals lawfully residing in the United States, including American citizens, based on government assertions that they planned to commit terrorist activities.
In 2007, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the government cannot hold individuals arrested in this country in military detention without charge.
But in July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a narrowly divided decision that the President had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge based on the facts alleged. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government's claim of extraordinary detention power would have "disastrous consequences for the Constitution-and the country."
The ACLU says Al-Marri's detention represents “one of the gravest expansions of executive detention power since September 11.” The United States was founded on the principle that “individuals living in this country cannot be imprisoned without charge and that civilian government must remain supreme over the military. Al-Marri's detention represents a radical departure from that celebrated legal tradition—one that was never authorized by Congress and that violates the Constitution.”
According to the ACLU, documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that standard operating procedures developed for Guantánamo Bay “were secretly applied at the Navy brig in an effort to create a prison beyond the law within the United States. Today, al-Marri remains in virtual isolation at the Brig, denied even meaningful communication with his family.”
In its brief, the ACLU asks the Court to overturn a federal appeals court decision giving the president sweeping power to deprive individuals living in the United States of their most basic constitutional rights by designating them "enemy combatants." “It is clearly illegal to imprison legal residents of the United States without trial. It is also the type of false choice between our safety and our ideals that has pervaded America’s approach to fighting terrorism for the past eight years,” said the ACLU’S Hafetz. “We are confident that upon review, the Court will strike down this radical departure from our nation's most basic values and traditions.”
Former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions and numerous former generals, admirals and diplomats joined the ACLU in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the president's authority to indefinitely imprison a legal resident of the U.S. without charge or trial. These and other top military and civilian leaders have filed friend-of-the-court briefs.
The former diplomats argue in their brief that, “Based on our professional experience in the diplomatic service of this country, American diplomatic credibility and effectiveness in many areas of international relations suffer from the widely shared perception that the U.S. has abandoned the rule of law. Indefinite detention without criminal charge or trial is, for most people, the essence of this abandonment.”
They add, “Accordingly, a decision upholding our government’s right to arrest and imprison anyone within its borders, without charge, will not only undercut our ability to convince dictatorial regimes to abandon similar practices, it will substantially undermine efforts to restore our international reputation and to obtain more cooperation from our allies in combating terrorism.”
The second Al-Marri case, Al-Marri v. Gates, contests al-Marri's treatment and conditions of confinement since he was declared an "enemy combatant." During the first sixteen months of his military confinement, al-Marri was held incommunicado and subjected to a range of highly coercive interrogation measures, including being held in total isolation, exposed to painful stress positions, shackled in a freezing cell for hours at a time, and threatened with violence and death.
Al-Marri is the second U.S. person to have been held as an enemy combatant within the United States. The first was José Padilla, a United States citizen. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts.
Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an "enemy combatant" after his arrest on suspicion of plotting a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack. That charge was dropped when his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.
In August 2007, Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.
What does the Padilla case tell us? It, and dozens of other similar cases, tells us that federal courts are more than capable of conducting trials of people accused of terrorism. It tells us that there is no need – let alone any Constitutional right of the president of the United States – to toss any U.S. citizen or lawful resident into a military prison and hold him for years without charge or trial.
And it tells us that our government needs to be a lot more careful about how our interrogators obtain “evidence” – because if it’s coerced, no court will allow it.
We can only hope the Supremes will share that view.
GITMO’S CHILD SOLDIERS
By William Fisher
Legal experts and human rights advocates are challenging the public to remember Guantanamo’s “child soldiers” when GITMO detainees are characterized as “the worst of the worst.”
Since the iconic detention center in Cuba opened in 2002, some 22 juveniles have been imprisoned there. And contrary to the UN’s Rights of the Child protocol, all but three have been housed with the general population, despite their being obliged to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict."
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and many other senior Bush Administration officials have repeatedly described all the Guantanamo detainees as “the worst of the worst.”
Two “child soldier” cases in particular are being highlighted by human rights advocates.
Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national and Saudi resident, was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in October 2001, in a raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, 700 miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
El-Gharani’s defense lawyers charge he was treated with appalling brutality. They say that, after being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier "would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he'd cut it off."
They claim his treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of "enhanced" techniques to prepare him for interrogation -- including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions -- that clearly constitute torture.
As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani became deeply depressed, and tried to commit suicide on several occasions.
But last month, just days before President Barack Obama’s inauguration, a federal judge, Richard Leon, ruled that the government had not proven that el Gharani was an enemy combatant and said he must be released and sent home “forthwith”. Judge Leon said the government had relied mainly on information from two other detainees at Guantánamo Bay whose reliability and credibility was questionable. He is unlikely to be released soon, however, because it is not clear if the government of Chad will accept him.
Over the past month, federal judges in Washington have been moving ahead with case-by-case reviews of about 200 detainee legal challenges. The review by civilian courts on the U.S. mainland are happening because of a Supreme Court ruling in June 2006 which gave terror suspects the right to challenge their detention in federal court.
The administration of President George W. Bush had said that Gharani had stayed in an al-Qaeda guest house in Afghanistan, had fought in the battle of Tora Bora -- from where Osama bin Laden escaped in late 2001 -- and had served as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives. He was also accused of being a member of a London-based al-Qaeda cell.
The other "child soldier" at Gitmo is Omar Khadr. He was taken into custody in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen, and was in the midst of his trial when President Obama’s first executive orders suspended all Military Commission proceedings for 120 days pending a case-by-case review of all GITMO cases and mandated an inter-agency task force to review the Military Commission system and alternatives for prosecutions.
Khadr was born in Toronto, and is the only citizen of a Western country currently detained by American authorities in Cuba. He was captured after a four-hour firefight in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan, and has spent the past six years at Guantanamo. He is charged with war crimes, providing support to terrorism and throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier.
But, according to Gabor Rona, International Legal Director for Human Rights First, “The case against him was unraveling as the trial proceeded.” Unintentionally released US Military documents revealed that original reports said that Kadr was not the person who threw the grenade, and additional testimony by government witnesses has proven "unreliable.”
But Rona told us that “There was little expectation that the mere failure to prove its case would cause the prosecution much trouble. A verdict of ‘Guilty’ was almost assumed.”
He said Khadr’s case “should be dismissed in its entirety.” He points out that Khadr was 15 years old at the time he was taken into custody. “If his trial proceeds -- and no matter in what forum it proceeds -- it will be the first instance of a child soldier being prosecuted in a U.S. court for conduct in wartime. This would be contrary to international legal principles, which counsel rehabilitation and protection, rather than punishment of, child soldiers.”
He added, “The conduct with which he is charged – defending against an attack by American soldiers – is not a crime under the laws of war. Prosecution an individual for conduct that was not a legal violation at the time of its commission is, itself, a war crime in international law, as well as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has steadfastly refused to intervene in the Kadr case, and has declined to seek extradition to Canada while legal proceedings were on-going. However, Rona told IPS that Canada and the U.S. are now reported to be discussing Khadr’s possible repatriation to Canada. “Whether this will happen and if so, under what conditions, is uncertain,” he said.
According to recent reliable polling, 64 per cent the Canadian people have expressed the desire to have Kadr returned to Canada, and international and domestic organizations such as Amnesty International and the Canadian Bar Association have pressed the Conservative minority government to bring Kadr home.
Rona told us, “The issue of Child Soldiers is notable mainly when Western societies take umbrage about the recruitment of adolescents to fight in civil wars. The outrage curiously subsides when the child is one of our own, ‘recruited’ in this case by his father, a notorious Al-Qaeda sympathizer. Prime Minister Harper, however, appears deaf to the entreaties of UNICEF and other advocates for children.”
He added, “As Americans contemplate a decade of abuse of their Constitution and increasingly urge that Mr. Bush and his associates be held accountable for their illegal actions at home and abroad, Canadians should also hold Mr. Harper accountable for trampling on the rights of one of his fellow-citizens.”
Legal experts and human rights advocates are challenging the public to remember Guantanamo’s “child soldiers” when GITMO detainees are characterized as “the worst of the worst.”
Since the iconic detention center in Cuba opened in 2002, some 22 juveniles have been imprisoned there. And contrary to the UN’s Rights of the Child protocol, all but three have been housed with the general population, despite their being obliged to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict."
Former Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and many other senior Bush Administration officials have repeatedly described all the Guantanamo detainees as “the worst of the worst.”
Two “child soldier” cases in particular are being highlighted by human rights advocates.
Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national and Saudi resident, was just 14 years old when he was seized by Pakistani forces in October 2001, in a raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, 700 miles from the battlefields of Afghanistan.
El-Gharani’s defense lawyers charge he was treated with appalling brutality. They say that, after being tortured in Pakistani custody, he was sold to U.S. forces, who flew him to a prison at Kandahar airport, where, he said, one particular soldier "would hold my penis, with scissors, and say he'd cut it off."
They claim his treatment did not improve in Guantánamo. Subjected relentlessly to racist abuse, because of the color of his skin, he was hung from his wrists on numerous occasions, and was also subjected to a regime of "enhanced" techniques to prepare him for interrogation -- including prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation and the use of painful stress positions -- that clearly constitute torture.
As a result of this and other abuse, including regular beatings by the guard force responsible for quelling even the most minor infractions of the rules, El-Gharani became deeply depressed, and tried to commit suicide on several occasions.
But last month, just days before President Barack Obama’s inauguration, a federal judge, Richard Leon, ruled that the government had not proven that el Gharani was an enemy combatant and said he must be released and sent home “forthwith”. Judge Leon said the government had relied mainly on information from two other detainees at Guantánamo Bay whose reliability and credibility was questionable. He is unlikely to be released soon, however, because it is not clear if the government of Chad will accept him.
Over the past month, federal judges in Washington have been moving ahead with case-by-case reviews of about 200 detainee legal challenges. The review by civilian courts on the U.S. mainland are happening because of a Supreme Court ruling in June 2006 which gave terror suspects the right to challenge their detention in federal court.
The administration of President George W. Bush had said that Gharani had stayed in an al-Qaeda guest house in Afghanistan, had fought in the battle of Tora Bora -- from where Osama bin Laden escaped in late 2001 -- and had served as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives. He was also accused of being a member of a London-based al-Qaeda cell.
The other "child soldier" at Gitmo is Omar Khadr. He was taken into custody in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen, and was in the midst of his trial when President Obama’s first executive orders suspended all Military Commission proceedings for 120 days pending a case-by-case review of all GITMO cases and mandated an inter-agency task force to review the Military Commission system and alternatives for prosecutions.
Khadr was born in Toronto, and is the only citizen of a Western country currently detained by American authorities in Cuba. He was captured after a four-hour firefight in the village of Ayub Kheyl, Afghanistan, and has spent the past six years at Guantanamo. He is charged with war crimes, providing support to terrorism and throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier.
But, according to Gabor Rona, International Legal Director for Human Rights First, “The case against him was unraveling as the trial proceeded.” Unintentionally released US Military documents revealed that original reports said that Kadr was not the person who threw the grenade, and additional testimony by government witnesses has proven "unreliable.”
But Rona told us that “There was little expectation that the mere failure to prove its case would cause the prosecution much trouble. A verdict of ‘Guilty’ was almost assumed.”
He said Khadr’s case “should be dismissed in its entirety.” He points out that Khadr was 15 years old at the time he was taken into custody. “If his trial proceeds -- and no matter in what forum it proceeds -- it will be the first instance of a child soldier being prosecuted in a U.S. court for conduct in wartime. This would be contrary to international legal principles, which counsel rehabilitation and protection, rather than punishment of, child soldiers.”
He added, “The conduct with which he is charged – defending against an attack by American soldiers – is not a crime under the laws of war. Prosecution an individual for conduct that was not a legal violation at the time of its commission is, itself, a war crime in international law, as well as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
Canada's Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has steadfastly refused to intervene in the Kadr case, and has declined to seek extradition to Canada while legal proceedings were on-going. However, Rona told IPS that Canada and the U.S. are now reported to be discussing Khadr’s possible repatriation to Canada. “Whether this will happen and if so, under what conditions, is uncertain,” he said.
According to recent reliable polling, 64 per cent the Canadian people have expressed the desire to have Kadr returned to Canada, and international and domestic organizations such as Amnesty International and the Canadian Bar Association have pressed the Conservative minority government to bring Kadr home.
Rona told us, “The issue of Child Soldiers is notable mainly when Western societies take umbrage about the recruitment of adolescents to fight in civil wars. The outrage curiously subsides when the child is one of our own, ‘recruited’ in this case by his father, a notorious Al-Qaeda sympathizer. Prime Minister Harper, however, appears deaf to the entreaties of UNICEF and other advocates for children.”
He added, “As Americans contemplate a decade of abuse of their Constitution and increasingly urge that Mr. Bush and his associates be held accountable for their illegal actions at home and abroad, Canadians should also hold Mr. Harper accountable for trampling on the rights of one of his fellow-citizens.”
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
GITMO BY THE NUMBERS
By William Fisher
A prominent law professor is charging that the Defense Department is issuing questionable data on the number of Guantanamo detainees who have been released “and then returned to the battlefield” because the government “is now in a position where they have to find some bad guys -- even if they have to invent them by naming people who were never there.”
Their ultimate aim, Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall University law school told IPS, “is to foment fear among American voters and limit the freedom of the Obama Administration to release any of the detainees still imprisoned."
Denbeaux heads the law school’s Center for Policy and Research. The Center has issued a report which it says “rebuts and debunks” the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that 61 “former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.” The report is one of a series produced by the Center’s faculty and law students. Professor Denbeaux says the Center has determined that “DOD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong --this last time the most egregiously so.”
He told IPS, “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there.”
He added, “They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning -- except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.”Denbeaux charged that the Defense Department has issued numbers 43 times, and said these numbers conflict with each other. He noted that the government’s numbers are “seriously undercut by the DOD statement that 'they do not track' former detainees.”
“Time and time again, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, and other government officials have claimed publicly that Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been released have "returned to the battlefield" where they have then been re-captured or killed,” Denbeaux declared.
The Seton Hall report attempts to correct what it characterizes as errors in the latest DOD report, which was issued in mid-January. That report alleged that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield.
The Seton Hall report notes that in each of its 43 attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data.
It says that DOD’s most recent press statement identifies no names, dates, places nor any conduct by released detainees. “The raw numbers that are cited are unsupported, inconsistent with all other statements and appear to be presented to support the internal Department of Defense purposes,” the report says.
Previous DOD reports have said the numbers of recidivist detainees have been “one, several, some, a couple, a few, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 12-24, 25, 29, and 30,” the Seton Hall group contends.
But it adds that 82% of DOD’s publicly made claims “contain qualifying language,” including terms such as: "at least"; "somewhere on the order of"; "approximately"; "around"; "just short of"; "we believe"; "estimated"; "roughly"; "more than"; "a couple"; "a few"; "some"; "several"; and "about."
Department of Defense statements about the number of recidivist detainees which do not identify the detainee, the act of recidivism, the place, or the time, are especially unreliable, Seton Hall’s report declares. It claims that in the two instances in which DOD provided written support –July 12 2007 and May 20 2008, their previous oral assertions were repudiated. For instance, the report says, in DOD’s July 12, 2007 press release, “the 30 recidivists reported by DOD in April 2007 is reduced to five.”
DOD’s report of July 2007 identified seven prisoners by name, but the Seton Hall group says that “as many as two of those seven named were never in Guantanamo, and two of the remaining five were never killed or captured anywhere. Of the three remaining, one was killed in his apartment in Russia by Russian authorities. None of them is alleged to have left their homeland or attacked Americans on a battlefield or otherwise.”
Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine is reporting that The Pentagon “is preparing to declassify portions of a secret report on Guantanamo detainees that could further complicate President Obama's plans to shut down the detention facility.”
The publication says that the report “will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities.”
One such example, involving a Saudi detainee named Said Ali Al-Shihri, who was released in 2007, has already received widespread media attention when Pentagon officials publicly asserted that he has recently reemerged as a deputy commander of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Newsweek reports..
Previously known publicly as Guantanamo detainee No. 372, Al-Shihri is alleged to have been involved in an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen last September.
Newsweek says, “The decision to release additional case studies from the report is in effect a warning shot to the new president from officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies who are skeptical about some of his plans. Some Pentagon officials, including ones sympathetic to Obama's goals, note the political outcry would be deafening should another example like Al-Shihri become public six months from now—and it turns out to be a Guantanamo detainee released under Obama's watch rather than by the Bush administration.”
It adds, "The last thing Obama wants is for one of these guys [at Guantanamo] to get released and return to killing Americans."
According to Newsweek, some counter-terrorism experts have raised questions about the significance of the Pentagon's figures, noting that the number of so-called "recidivist" detainees represents only a small portion, about 12 per cent, of the approximately 520 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo since the detention facility was opened in January 2002. This compares with recidivism rates of as high as 67 percent in state prisons in the United States, according to Justice Department figures.
“There have also been concerns that Bush administration holdovers were deliberately playing up the cases in recent weeks in an effort to undercut Obama. One former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official noted to Newsweek that the Pentagon waited until the day after Obama
signed his executive order mandating the closure of Guantanamo to confirm Al-Shihri's renewed Al Qaeda ties,” Newsweek reports.
Approximately 240 detainees remain at Guantanamo. Human rights groups and defense lawyers contend there is little or no evidence of terrorist involvement against scores of them. This is also the opinion of some federal judges who in recent weeks have ordered the Pentagon to release some of them.
The Obama administration has given itself a year to shut down the facility, and is hoping that European countries including Portugal, Spain and Germany, will agree to take some of these detainees. The Bush Administration was able to identify only two countries willing to take released detainees – Albania and Sweden.
A prominent law professor is charging that the Defense Department is issuing questionable data on the number of Guantanamo detainees who have been released “and then returned to the battlefield” because the government “is now in a position where they have to find some bad guys -- even if they have to invent them by naming people who were never there.”
Their ultimate aim, Professor Mark Denbeaux of the Seton Hall University law school told IPS, “is to foment fear among American voters and limit the freedom of the Obama Administration to release any of the detainees still imprisoned."
Denbeaux heads the law school’s Center for Policy and Research. The Center has issued a report which it says “rebuts and debunks” the most recent claim by the Department of Defense (DOD) that 61 “former Guantánamo detainees are confirmed or suspected of returning to the fight.” The report is one of a series produced by the Center’s faculty and law students. Professor Denbeaux says the Center has determined that “DOD has issued 'recidivism' numbers 43 times, and each time they have been wrong --this last time the most egregiously so.”
He told IPS, “Once again, they’ve failed to identify names, numbers, dates, times, places, or acts upon which their report relies. Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guantánamo—much less were they released from there.”
He added, “They have counted people as 'returning to the fight' for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival. The DOD has revised and retracted their internally conflicting definitions, criteria, and their numbers so often that they have ceased to have any meaning -- except as an effort to sway public opinion by painting a false portrait of the supposed dangers of these men.”Denbeaux charged that the Defense Department has issued numbers 43 times, and said these numbers conflict with each other. He noted that the government’s numbers are “seriously undercut by the DOD statement that 'they do not track' former detainees.”
“Time and time again, the Department of Defense, the Executive Branch, and other government officials have claimed publicly that Guantánamo Bay detainees who have been released have "returned to the battlefield" where they have then been re-captured or killed,” Denbeaux declared.
The Seton Hall report attempts to correct what it characterizes as errors in the latest DOD report, which was issued in mid-January. That report alleged that 61 detainees have returned to the battlefield.
The Seton Hall report notes that in each of its 43 attempts to provide the numbers of the recidivist detainees, the Department of Defense has given different sets of numbers that are contradictory and internally inconsistent with the Department's own data.
It says that DOD’s most recent press statement identifies no names, dates, places nor any conduct by released detainees. “The raw numbers that are cited are unsupported, inconsistent with all other statements and appear to be presented to support the internal Department of Defense purposes,” the report says.
Previous DOD reports have said the numbers of recidivist detainees have been “one, several, some, a couple, a few, 5, 7, 10, 12, 15, 12-24, 25, 29, and 30,” the Seton Hall group contends.
But it adds that 82% of DOD’s publicly made claims “contain qualifying language,” including terms such as: "at least"; "somewhere on the order of"; "approximately"; "around"; "just short of"; "we believe"; "estimated"; "roughly"; "more than"; "a couple"; "a few"; "some"; "several"; and "about."
Department of Defense statements about the number of recidivist detainees which do not identify the detainee, the act of recidivism, the place, or the time, are especially unreliable, Seton Hall’s report declares. It claims that in the two instances in which DOD provided written support –July 12 2007 and May 20 2008, their previous oral assertions were repudiated. For instance, the report says, in DOD’s July 12, 2007 press release, “the 30 recidivists reported by DOD in April 2007 is reduced to five.”
DOD’s report of July 2007 identified seven prisoners by name, but the Seton Hall group says that “as many as two of those seven named were never in Guantanamo, and two of the remaining five were never killed or captured anywhere. Of the three remaining, one was killed in his apartment in Russia by Russian authorities. None of them is alleged to have left their homeland or attacked Americans on a battlefield or otherwise.”
Meanwhile, Newsweek magazine is reporting that The Pentagon “is preparing to declassify portions of a secret report on Guantanamo detainees that could further complicate President Obama's plans to shut down the detention facility.”
The publication says that the report “will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities.”
One such example, involving a Saudi detainee named Said Ali Al-Shihri, who was released in 2007, has already received widespread media attention when Pentagon officials publicly asserted that he has recently reemerged as a deputy commander of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Newsweek reports..
Previously known publicly as Guantanamo detainee No. 372, Al-Shihri is alleged to have been involved in an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. embassy in Yemen last September.
Newsweek says, “The decision to release additional case studies from the report is in effect a warning shot to the new president from officials at the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies who are skeptical about some of his plans. Some Pentagon officials, including ones sympathetic to Obama's goals, note the political outcry would be deafening should another example like Al-Shihri become public six months from now—and it turns out to be a Guantanamo detainee released under Obama's watch rather than by the Bush administration.”
It adds, "The last thing Obama wants is for one of these guys [at Guantanamo] to get released and return to killing Americans."
According to Newsweek, some counter-terrorism experts have raised questions about the significance of the Pentagon's figures, noting that the number of so-called "recidivist" detainees represents only a small portion, about 12 per cent, of the approximately 520 detainees who have been released from Guantanamo since the detention facility was opened in January 2002. This compares with recidivism rates of as high as 67 percent in state prisons in the United States, according to Justice Department figures.
“There have also been concerns that Bush administration holdovers were deliberately playing up the cases in recent weeks in an effort to undercut Obama. One former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official noted to Newsweek that the Pentagon waited until the day after Obama
signed his executive order mandating the closure of Guantanamo to confirm Al-Shihri's renewed Al Qaeda ties,” Newsweek reports.
Approximately 240 detainees remain at Guantanamo. Human rights groups and defense lawyers contend there is little or no evidence of terrorist involvement against scores of them. This is also the opinion of some federal judges who in recent weeks have ordered the Pentagon to release some of them.
The Obama administration has given itself a year to shut down the facility, and is hoping that European countries including Portugal, Spain and Germany, will agree to take some of these detainees. The Bush Administration was able to identify only two countries willing to take released detainees – Albania and Sweden.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
What You May Not Know About That Famous Manual
By William Fisher
While applauding President Barack Obama’s recent executive orders banning torture and other harsh interrogation practices, medical authorities are calling attention to a little-reported section of the Army’s Field Manual on Interrogation that they say still allows the use of tactics that can constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under U.S. and international law.
The suspect section of the Manual is known as Annex M, which allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and isolation, termed “separation” in the Manual. Obama’s executive orders directed all government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to follow the Manual for interrogations.
But Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a Nobel laureate not-for-profit organization, is calling on the task force appointed by the president to review U.S. interrogation and transfer policies to revoke the Appendix and consult with human rights organizations as part of the review process.
John Bradshaw, Director of PHR’s office in Washington, DC, told IPS, “The technique of separation allowed by Appendix M sounds innocuous, but in reality it allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and isolation.”
“Particularly when used in combination, these techniques amount to psychological torture. The Obama Administration must close this loophole in the Army Field Manual by eliminating Appendix M, which leaves the door open to torture,” he said.
Legal experts agree. Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “President Obama’s announcement that the United States will not engage in torture is commendable. But cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment also violate U.S. law, as specified by three treaties we have ratified. The new administration should not use the Army Field Manual as the gold standard for interrogations since Appendix M sanctions techniques, including isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
PHR also called on President Obama and Congress to “immediately authorize a non-partisan commission to investigate the authorization, legal justification, and implementation of the Bush Administration’s regime of psychological and physical torture.” It added that “any accountability mechanism must include a subgroup tasked with investigating the participation of health professionals in detainee abuse.”
PHR also urged the Obama Administration to end the use of Behavioral Science Consultants (BSCs) in interrogations. “The continued use of BSCs violates medical ethics and subverts the traditions of the healing professions. Any procedures currently in place involving health professionals in interrogations which violate medical ethics should be prohibited,” said PHR’S Chief Executive Officer, Frank Donaghue.
“The past administration’s weaponization of the health professions to inflict harm on detainees constitutes a war crime unto itself,” said Donaghue. He added, “Despite all that has been disclosed so far about abuses committed by health professionals, many questions remain, chief among which is whether there will be any accountability for gross violations of medical ethics and the law.”
"The desire to turn the page on the past seven years of detainee abuse and torture by U.S. forces is understandable," Donaghue said. But he noted that "President Obama, Congress and the health professions will not have fulfilled their obligation to the Constitution and medical ethics if we settle only for reform without accountability."
Other health professionals are taking similar positions. One of the most outspoken, psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, points out that the AFM’s Appendix M “continues to allow use of isolation (called ‘separation’) on so-called ‘unlawful enemy combatants’.”
He told IPS, “After the Abu Ghraib scandal exploded, the U.S. government wanted to hide or forbid all types of treatment that became notorious due to press exposure, including the revelations around waterboarding. They pared down their torture program to the model laid down by the CIA's Kubark manual of the early 1960s. They twisted the meaning of the Geneva Conventions at their will, in order to implement this program of coercive interrogation, using the Army Field Manual and Appendix M as their primary device.”
He added, “This program relies on the production of psychological regression by using a combination of solitary confinement, fatigue, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and feelings of fear to produce dependency upon the interrogator. These techniques, allowed by the Army Field Manual, and implemented with the assistance of doctors and behavioral health specialists, like psychologists, are totally antithetical to existing law, and amount to torture and/or cruel, inhumane treatment of prisoners.”
Kaye contends that, “In many senses, isolation is the essence of U.S. detainee abuse. All else follows. Isolation can cause serious mental deterioration in many individuals.”
He adds that “This deterioration can occur within days, well under the 30 day initial period allowed by Appendix M. This 30 days can be followed by additional periods, if the proper approval is obtained.”
While ostensibly banning it, the AFM also allows sensory deprivation, he says. “As a last resort, when physical separation of detainees is not feasible, goggles or blindfolds and earmuffs may be utilized as a field expedient method to generate a perception of separation.“
In the Bush Administration’s only admission that it inflicted torture on a prisoner, a senior Pentagon official recently disclosed to the Washington Post that a combination of permissible techniques used on a Guantanamo detainee, plus the intensity and duration of these techniques, seriously endangered the health of a prisoner and constituted torture. She declined to refer him to Guantanamo Military Commission authorities for trial.
During the Bush Administration, a number of leading medical organizations called on the president to end the participation of health care professionals in detainee interrogations. The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution opposing “participation by physicians in the torture or inhuman treatment or punishment of individuals in relation to detention and imprisonment.”
Similar positions have been adopted by other organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Nurses Association.
However, there is ample evidence that some military medical personnel have participated in torture and abuse of detainees. Reports indicate, for example, that so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams -- known as "biscuit" teams – included medical personnel who were aware of prisoner abuse but failed to report or properly document it; that interrogators were given access to detainees’ confidential medical records; that health professionals participated directly in the development and implementation of abusive interrogation plans; and that doctors, other medical personnel, and “biscuit” teams of psychiatrists and psychologists may have facilitated abuse by giving interrogators information about detainees’ mental health and vulnerabilities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross described what it observed at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in June 2004 as a “flagrant violation of medical ethics.”
While applauding President Barack Obama’s recent executive orders banning torture and other harsh interrogation practices, medical authorities are calling attention to a little-reported section of the Army’s Field Manual on Interrogation that they say still allows the use of tactics that can constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under U.S. and international law.
The suspect section of the Manual is known as Annex M, which allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and isolation, termed “separation” in the Manual. Obama’s executive orders directed all government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to follow the Manual for interrogations.
But Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a Nobel laureate not-for-profit organization, is calling on the task force appointed by the president to review U.S. interrogation and transfer policies to revoke the Appendix and consult with human rights organizations as part of the review process.
John Bradshaw, Director of PHR’s office in Washington, DC, told IPS, “The technique of separation allowed by Appendix M sounds innocuous, but in reality it allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and isolation.”
“Particularly when used in combination, these techniques amount to psychological torture. The Obama Administration must close this loophole in the Army Field Manual by eliminating Appendix M, which leaves the door open to torture,” he said.
Legal experts agree. Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “President Obama’s announcement that the United States will not engage in torture is commendable. But cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment also violate U.S. law, as specified by three treaties we have ratified. The new administration should not use the Army Field Manual as the gold standard for interrogations since Appendix M sanctions techniques, including isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”
PHR also called on President Obama and Congress to “immediately authorize a non-partisan commission to investigate the authorization, legal justification, and implementation of the Bush Administration’s regime of psychological and physical torture.” It added that “any accountability mechanism must include a subgroup tasked with investigating the participation of health professionals in detainee abuse.”
PHR also urged the Obama Administration to end the use of Behavioral Science Consultants (BSCs) in interrogations. “The continued use of BSCs violates medical ethics and subverts the traditions of the healing professions. Any procedures currently in place involving health professionals in interrogations which violate medical ethics should be prohibited,” said PHR’S Chief Executive Officer, Frank Donaghue.
“The past administration’s weaponization of the health professions to inflict harm on detainees constitutes a war crime unto itself,” said Donaghue. He added, “Despite all that has been disclosed so far about abuses committed by health professionals, many questions remain, chief among which is whether there will be any accountability for gross violations of medical ethics and the law.”
"The desire to turn the page on the past seven years of detainee abuse and torture by U.S. forces is understandable," Donaghue said. But he noted that "President Obama, Congress and the health professions will not have fulfilled their obligation to the Constitution and medical ethics if we settle only for reform without accountability."
Other health professionals are taking similar positions. One of the most outspoken, psychologist Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, points out that the AFM’s Appendix M “continues to allow use of isolation (called ‘separation’) on so-called ‘unlawful enemy combatants’.”
He told IPS, “After the Abu Ghraib scandal exploded, the U.S. government wanted to hide or forbid all types of treatment that became notorious due to press exposure, including the revelations around waterboarding. They pared down their torture program to the model laid down by the CIA's Kubark manual of the early 1960s. They twisted the meaning of the Geneva Conventions at their will, in order to implement this program of coercive interrogation, using the Army Field Manual and Appendix M as their primary device.”
He added, “This program relies on the production of psychological regression by using a combination of solitary confinement, fatigue, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and feelings of fear to produce dependency upon the interrogator. These techniques, allowed by the Army Field Manual, and implemented with the assistance of doctors and behavioral health specialists, like psychologists, are totally antithetical to existing law, and amount to torture and/or cruel, inhumane treatment of prisoners.”
Kaye contends that, “In many senses, isolation is the essence of U.S. detainee abuse. All else follows. Isolation can cause serious mental deterioration in many individuals.”
He adds that “This deterioration can occur within days, well under the 30 day initial period allowed by Appendix M. This 30 days can be followed by additional periods, if the proper approval is obtained.”
While ostensibly banning it, the AFM also allows sensory deprivation, he says. “As a last resort, when physical separation of detainees is not feasible, goggles or blindfolds and earmuffs may be utilized as a field expedient method to generate a perception of separation.“
In the Bush Administration’s only admission that it inflicted torture on a prisoner, a senior Pentagon official recently disclosed to the Washington Post that a combination of permissible techniques used on a Guantanamo detainee, plus the intensity and duration of these techniques, seriously endangered the health of a prisoner and constituted torture. She declined to refer him to Guantanamo Military Commission authorities for trial.
During the Bush Administration, a number of leading medical organizations called on the president to end the participation of health care professionals in detainee interrogations. The American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a resolution opposing “participation by physicians in the torture or inhuman treatment or punishment of individuals in relation to detention and imprisonment.”
Similar positions have been adopted by other organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Nurses Association.
However, there is ample evidence that some military medical personnel have participated in torture and abuse of detainees. Reports indicate, for example, that so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams -- known as "biscuit" teams – included medical personnel who were aware of prisoner abuse but failed to report or properly document it; that interrogators were given access to detainees’ confidential medical records; that health professionals participated directly in the development and implementation of abusive interrogation plans; and that doctors, other medical personnel, and “biscuit” teams of psychiatrists and psychologists may have facilitated abuse by giving interrogators information about detainees’ mental health and vulnerabilities.
The International Committee of the Red Cross described what it observed at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in June 2004 as a “flagrant violation of medical ethics.”
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Obama’s Executive Orders: Is Egypt Listening?
By William Fisher
You may have missed it because it was ignored by virtually the entire the American mainstream press, but there’s a really creepy irony that accompanied President Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo and end torture, secret prisons and extraordinary rendition.
The irony is that some of the most lavish praise for Obama came from the press in countries that most of us would find, what shall we say, paradoxical. Countries that for many years have been the poster boys for unlawful detention, torture, secret prisons and “disappeared” prisoners. Countries in a part of the world that has been a consistent destination for those rendered by our CIA.
That would be the Middle East, where most of the press is owned or controlled by authoritarian governments. Countries in which political dissent is about as welcome as a pandemic of the Black Plague.
Top of the poster-boy list has to be Egypt, a beautiful country full of gracious, hospitable people – and some not so much -- where my family and I lived for several years.
Egypt has been ruled by Hosni Mubarak since 1981, when the then vice-president took on the top job following the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Since then, the country’s now 80-year-old president has been a kind of caricature of old-style Arab potentates.
For all those years, Egypt has lived under so-called Emergency Laws. These laws give the government sweeping powers and give the citizens no powers. Public gatherings are banned unless they get government permits. And until recently -- when Bush’s democracy promotion mantra finally began exerting ever-so-gentle pressure on the Mubarak regime to clean up its act -- political parties were banned or otherwise prevented from participating in the annual referendums that reelected the president with math-like precision.
Egypt’s security services are omnipresent. Public intellectuals – including journalists and bloggers -- who dare to express dissent with the government wait, literally, for the knock at the door at 3 A.M. And the knock comes all too often. The security cops can and do take you away, destination often unknown, and can hold you indefinitely. You may never be charged with anything, nor have a lawyer represent you. The “justice system,” as we understand justice, is virtually non-existent. The security courts are in Hosni Mubarak’s pocket.
Since 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, Egypt has been one of the CIA’s favorite destinations for victims of “extraordinary rendition,” which is government-ese for kidnapping. Since that time, by the most conservative estimate, U.S. authorities have spirited at least twenty people off to Egyptian prisons. Many have been tortured. Some have died. Others have simply disappeared. Little wonder then that each and every year Egypt’s abuses are high on the list in our State Department’s annual human rights reports.
But, at the same time, in some other place in our government, foreign policy-makers are drafting the latest request to Congress for more billions in U.S. military and economic aid. U.S. aid to Egypt has averaged more than $2 billion every year 1979. It is second only to Israel.
U.S. aid to Egypt is its reward for making peace with Israel in 1979, following the Camp David Accords. And it continues because Egypt has been playing a peacemaker role between the warring Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, as well as between Israelis and Palestinians.
Since 9/11, the government has used George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” to suppress dissent from its leading opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But denial of the most basic human rights is not directed only at the Brotherhood; it applies to every Egyptian citizen.
Given that background, I found it more than a bit ironic that one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, Al Ahram, would be trumpeting President Obama’s GITMO executive orders as a huge victory for human rights.
Calling Guantanamo “a dark spot in U.S. history” and “a symbol of injustice and oppression,” the newspaper wrote, “The prison is arguably one of the worst mockeries of international law, which was itself drafted partly by American legal experts. Past U.S. administrations may not have been devoted followers of the Geneva Conventions, but neither have they ever discarded international treaties as openly and as arrogantly as the current one.”
“Former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, a personal friend of President Bush, mastered this art in a way that allowed his bosses to adorn their gratuitous actions with the air of legitimacy. Guantanamo was his ultimate masterpiece,” its story concluded.
There is little dispute among those of us George Bush has not terrorized into a perpetual state of fear that GITMO and what happened there is a disgrace to the United States. But offhand I can’t think of a hypocrisy greater than its denunciation by a country that invented its own Guantanamos many years before ours – and arguably even more brutal and law-free.
That said, there may yet be an upside for the Egyptian people in Obama’s decision to close the place down. Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper – one of the best in the region – captured the possible gain.
It wrote of the negative effects U.S. interrogation practices have had on the observance of human rights by Arab governments. “With public knowledge of the American use of waterboarding in Guantanamo and elsewhere, why would Arab leaders promote human rights and political reforms? The closing of Guantanamo will send an important message that torture will not be tolerated by the Obama administration,” the paper said.
Will Obama’s actions rob Mr. Mubarak of one of his most useful fig leaves? Maybe. But it’s a real longshot.
I wouldn’t take it to the bank just yet.
You may have missed it because it was ignored by virtually the entire the American mainstream press, but there’s a really creepy irony that accompanied President Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo and end torture, secret prisons and extraordinary rendition.
The irony is that some of the most lavish praise for Obama came from the press in countries that most of us would find, what shall we say, paradoxical. Countries that for many years have been the poster boys for unlawful detention, torture, secret prisons and “disappeared” prisoners. Countries in a part of the world that has been a consistent destination for those rendered by our CIA.
That would be the Middle East, where most of the press is owned or controlled by authoritarian governments. Countries in which political dissent is about as welcome as a pandemic of the Black Plague.
Top of the poster-boy list has to be Egypt, a beautiful country full of gracious, hospitable people – and some not so much -- where my family and I lived for several years.
Egypt has been ruled by Hosni Mubarak since 1981, when the then vice-president took on the top job following the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Since then, the country’s now 80-year-old president has been a kind of caricature of old-style Arab potentates.
For all those years, Egypt has lived under so-called Emergency Laws. These laws give the government sweeping powers and give the citizens no powers. Public gatherings are banned unless they get government permits. And until recently -- when Bush’s democracy promotion mantra finally began exerting ever-so-gentle pressure on the Mubarak regime to clean up its act -- political parties were banned or otherwise prevented from participating in the annual referendums that reelected the president with math-like precision.
Egypt’s security services are omnipresent. Public intellectuals – including journalists and bloggers -- who dare to express dissent with the government wait, literally, for the knock at the door at 3 A.M. And the knock comes all too often. The security cops can and do take you away, destination often unknown, and can hold you indefinitely. You may never be charged with anything, nor have a lawyer represent you. The “justice system,” as we understand justice, is virtually non-existent. The security courts are in Hosni Mubarak’s pocket.
Since 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, Egypt has been one of the CIA’s favorite destinations for victims of “extraordinary rendition,” which is government-ese for kidnapping. Since that time, by the most conservative estimate, U.S. authorities have spirited at least twenty people off to Egyptian prisons. Many have been tortured. Some have died. Others have simply disappeared. Little wonder then that each and every year Egypt’s abuses are high on the list in our State Department’s annual human rights reports.
But, at the same time, in some other place in our government, foreign policy-makers are drafting the latest request to Congress for more billions in U.S. military and economic aid. U.S. aid to Egypt has averaged more than $2 billion every year 1979. It is second only to Israel.
U.S. aid to Egypt is its reward for making peace with Israel in 1979, following the Camp David Accords. And it continues because Egypt has been playing a peacemaker role between the warring Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, as well as between Israelis and Palestinians.
Since 9/11, the government has used George W. Bush’s “global war on terror” to suppress dissent from its leading opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood. But denial of the most basic human rights is not directed only at the Brotherhood; it applies to every Egyptian citizen.
Given that background, I found it more than a bit ironic that one of Egypt’s leading newspapers, Al Ahram, would be trumpeting President Obama’s GITMO executive orders as a huge victory for human rights.
Calling Guantanamo “a dark spot in U.S. history” and “a symbol of injustice and oppression,” the newspaper wrote, “The prison is arguably one of the worst mockeries of international law, which was itself drafted partly by American legal experts. Past U.S. administrations may not have been devoted followers of the Geneva Conventions, but neither have they ever discarded international treaties as openly and as arrogantly as the current one.”
“Former attorney-general Alberto Gonzales, a personal friend of President Bush, mastered this art in a way that allowed his bosses to adorn their gratuitous actions with the air of legitimacy. Guantanamo was his ultimate masterpiece,” its story concluded.
There is little dispute among those of us George Bush has not terrorized into a perpetual state of fear that GITMO and what happened there is a disgrace to the United States. But offhand I can’t think of a hypocrisy greater than its denunciation by a country that invented its own Guantanamos many years before ours – and arguably even more brutal and law-free.
That said, there may yet be an upside for the Egyptian people in Obama’s decision to close the place down. Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper – one of the best in the region – captured the possible gain.
It wrote of the negative effects U.S. interrogation practices have had on the observance of human rights by Arab governments. “With public knowledge of the American use of waterboarding in Guantanamo and elsewhere, why would Arab leaders promote human rights and political reforms? The closing of Guantanamo will send an important message that torture will not be tolerated by the Obama administration,” the paper said.
Will Obama’s actions rob Mr. Mubarak of one of his most useful fig leaves? Maybe. But it’s a real longshot.
I wouldn’t take it to the bank just yet.
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