The “Crushing Irony” of Interpol’s Red Notices and the tangles web that the Obama administration has woven to cover the Bush administration cabal of criminals and crimes, may soon come to a new reality.
Julian Assange is wanted by Sweden and a “red notice” issued by Interpol for his arrest. The Obama administration would love nothing more than to see Assange silenced. Now the Nigerian government is asking Interpol to issue a international warrant, a “red notice”, for the arrest of former US Vice President Richard Cheney for his alleged role in a bribe scandal in which Halliburton-owned company KBR gave $180 million to Nigerian officials between 1994 and 2004 in exchange for lucrative natural gas contracts.
This presents quite a dilemma for “restoring the rule of law” President Obama. There is no way that he will be able to save face in the international community if he supports Assange’s arrest and not Cheney’s. The other “sticky” problem for Obama and his DOJ is that there is an extradition treaty between the US and Nigeria. How much longer can Obama and his DOJ protect Cheney, or for that matter George W, Bush, from justice?
Jonathan Turley, George Washington University Law professor and Constitutional law expert, gives his analysis of international legal problem for the Obama justice department.
The US has in the past deported ill, elderly, war criminals to other countries to face trial for their crimes. Just because Dick Cheney has a serious heart condition should not be a deterrent to his extradition to Nigeria to face these charges.
The rule of law and justice won yesterday when, terrorist suspect, Ahmed Ghailani, was was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He was acquitted of four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill Americans and to use weapons of mass destruction in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Mr. Ghailani will be facing a prison term of 20 years to life based on that one charge. All the evidence was circumstantial and Mr. Ghailani’s attorneys argued he wad been duped into participating.
The prosecutors in this case were not able to bring a key witness in to testify because because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court, who presided over the trial, pointed out that a military commission judge would have excluded that testimony, too. The prosecutors also did not submit any statements made by Mr. Ghailani while he was in custody of the CIA and in Guantanamo because as his lawyers argued those statements were made under coercion and inadmissible. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, has said he will ask for a life on January 25 when Mr. Ghailani will return to court for sentencing.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent, detailed analysis of how our criminal justice system has worked very well in this case:
But the most important point here is that one either believes in the American system of justice or one does not. When a reviled defendant is acquitted in court, and torture-obtained evidence is excluded, that isn’t proof that the justice system is broken; it’s proof that it works. A “justice system” which guarantees convictions — or which allows the Government to rely on evidence extracted from torture — isn’t a justice system at all, by definition. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson made this point quite well today:
Let’s be clear: if time in the extra-judicial limbo of black sites, and the torture that caused some evidence to be excluded, makes prosecutors’ jobs harder, the problem is with the black sites and the torture, and not with the civilian trials that might eventually not work out quite the way everyone likes. It’s a point that bears some repeating. Our legal system is not a machine for producing the maximum number of convictions, regardless of the law. Jurors are watching the government, too, as well they should. Ghailani today could be anyone tomorrow.
Not good enough for Rep. Peter King (R-NY ) who decried that this was a “wake up call” for the Obama administration to abandon its plan to try terrorist suspects in civilian courts. Instead of blaming confessed war criminal George W. Bush and his co-conspirator, Dick Cheney, for using torture to coerce confessions, Mr. King chose to blame the President and the Justice Department for its “failure”. Mr. King needs to read the Nuremberg Principles and understand that since he has not called for an investigation of the war crimes that Mr.Bush and Mr. Cheney have openly admitted, that he, too, can be charged as a war criminal. Such is the rule of law.
Up Date: It is clear that our criminal justice system worked despite the obstacles thrown in the way. Both President Obama and Attorney General Holder should be commended for sticking to the principles of law and should continue to try these cases in our courts. The verdict should also be a message for Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, our NY Senators and Representatives that these trials can and should be held in New York. If there is a “failure” here, it is that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are not in a prison cell awaiting trial for war crimes.
Up Date 2: Constitutional lawyer and law professor, Jonathan Turley, was a guest today on “Hard Ball” with Michael Smerconish, sitting in for Chris Matthews, to discuss the verdict. Former Gov. George Pataki presented the argument that because Mr. Ghailani was not convicted on all counts that this was a failure and future trails of terror suspects should be held by military tribunals. My advice before viewing is secure all objects that could damage your monitor if thrown. Mr. Pataki is quite infuriating.
So much for promises to restore the rule of law. Obama Justice Department was supposed to be non-political and independent of the White House. Yeah, right and that bridge in Brooklyn is still on the market.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, will probably remain in military detention without trial for the foreseeable future, according to Obama administration officials.
The administration has concluded that it cannot put Mohammed on trial in federal court because of the opposition of lawmakers in Congress and in New York. There is also little internal support for resurrecting a military prosecution at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The latter option would alienate liberal supporters.
The administration asserts that it can hold Mohammed and other al-Qaeda operatives under the laws of war, a principle that has been upheld by the courts when Guantanamo Bay detainees have challenged their detention.
And that’s why this decision almost guarantees that the AUMF just became a forever war-at least one lasting the next twenty to forty years of KSM’s life. Because the government has apparently decided to hold KSM with no more solid legal justification than the war, which judges have interpreted to be the AUMF. Which means the government is going to have to sustain some claim that that AUMF remains in effect, even if we go broke and withdraw from Afghanistan as a result (that seems to be the only thing that will make us withdraw, in spite of the fact that we’re not going to do any good there).
As long as the war against terrorism in the widest sense continued, the US/UK would have rights to continue to detain those they had been fighting against (even if the fighting in Afghanistan itself were over). [Redacted] conceded that the strength of such a case would depend on the plausibility of the argument that the war was continuing.
The decision to hold KSM indefinitely has now flipped that equation: so long as the only justification for holding KSM is the claim we’re at war, we’ll have to remain at war.
And all those bonus powers a President gets with the claim that we’re at war? They’re all wrapped up now, in the necessity to hold KSM forever.
Back in January of 2009, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate wrote in the NYT Op-Ed
INSTEAD of looking closely at what high-level officeholders in the Bush administration have done over the past eight years, and recognizing what we have tacitly permitted, we would rather turn our faces forward toward a better future, promising that 2009 and the inauguration of Barack Obama will mean ringing out Guantanamo Bay and ringing in due process; it will bring the end of waterboarding and the reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions.
And America tends to survive the ugliness of public reckonings, from Nixon to Whitewater to the impeachment hearings, because for all our cheerful optimism, Americans fundamentally understand that nobody should be above the law. As the chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, warned: “Law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power.”
(emphasis mine)
The Obama administration intentionally chose to not just turn its back on the evidence but to use the power of the executive to hide it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder a has let an investigation into the destruction of taped evidence of torture to languish and has announced that there will be no charges.
President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.
Now, apparently feeling emboldened by the Obama deference and complicity, George W. Bush is proudly proclaiming in his “cowboy-fashion” that he approved and authorized the use of illegal torture techniques. Bush has been all over the media spewing lies about his claims to have kept
By covering up torture evidence and allowing those who destroyed the taped evidence, Obama and Holder are shielding war criminals which according to the Nuremberg Principles is a war crime.
The conclusion of Ms. Litwick’s article, she sums up the consequences:
Those of us who have been hollering about America’s descent into torture for the past nine years didn’t do so because we like terrorists or secretly hope for more terror attacks. We did it because if a nation is unable to decry something as always and deeply wrong, it has tacitly accepted it as sometimes and often right. Or, as President Bush now puts it, damn right. It spawns a legal regime that cannot be contained in time or in place; a regime that requires that torture testimony be used at trials and that terror policies be from public scrutiny. It demands the shielding of torture photos and the exoneration of those who destroyed torture tapes just a day after the statute of limitations had run out. Indeed, as Andrew Cohen notes, when the men ordering the destruction of those tapes are celebrated as “heroes,” who’s to say otherwise? Check, please.
All this was done in the name of moving us forward, turning down the temperature, painting over the rot that had overtaken the rule of law. Yet having denied any kind of reckoning for every actor up and down the chain of command, we are now farther along the road toward normalizing and accepting torture than we were back in November 2005, when President Bush could announce unequivocally (if falsely) that “The United States of America does not torture. And that’s important for people around the world to understand.” If people around the world didn’t understand what we were doing then, they surely do now. And if Americans didn’t accept what we were doing then, evidently they do now. Doing nothing about torture is, at this point, pretty much the same as voting for it. We are all water-boarders now.
The Justice Department has decided not to bring criminal charges for the destruction of Central Intelligence Agency videotapes of tough interrogations of terrorism suspects, including videos of waterboarding.
“In January 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed Assistant United States Attorney John Durham to investigate the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations,” Justice Department spokesman Matt Miller said in a statement e-mailed to reporters Tuesday afternoon. “Since that time, a team of prosecutors and FBI agents led by Mr. Durham has conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. As a result of that investigation, Mr. Durham has concluded that he will not pursue criminal charges for the destruction of the interrogation videotapes.”
An attorney for the former CIA official who ordered the tapes’ destruction, Jose Rodriguez, expressed satisfaction with the DoJ’s decision.
The stature of limitations was let expire on November 8 and “crickets” from the press.
This inquiry started long before Obama started looking forward, not backward. It started before the White House allowed the Chief of Staff to override the Attorney General on Gitmo and torture. It started before we found out that someone had destroyed many of the torture documents at DOJ-only to find no one at DOJ cared. It started before the Obama DOJ made up silly reasons why Americans couldn’t see what the Vice President had to say about ordering the leak of a CIA officer’s identity. It started before the Obama White House kept invoking State Secrets to cover up Bush’s crimes, from illegal wiretapping, to kidnapping, to torture. It started at a time when we naively believed that Change might include putting the legal abuses of the past behind us.
This inquiry started before the Obama Administration assumed the right to kill American citizens with no due process-all the while invoking State Secrets to hide that, too.
This inquiry started before Bush and then Obama let BP get away with serial violations of the laws that protect our workers and environment, and then acted surprised when BP ruined our Gulf.
This inquiry started before Obama helped to cover up the massive fraud committed by our banks, even while it continued to find ways to print money for those same banks. It started, too, before the Obama Administration ignored mounting evidence that banks-the banks employed by taxpayer owned Fannie and Freddie-were foreclosing on homes they didn’t have the legal right to foreclose on, going so far as to counterfeit documents to justify it. This inquiry started when we still believed in the old-fashioned principle of property rights.
This inquiry started before banksters got excused when they mowed down cyclists and left the scene of the crime, because a felony would mean the bankster would lose his job.
The ACLU’s Anthony Romero reacted to this news saying, in part, “We cannot say that we live under the rule of law unless we are clear that no one is above the law.”
I think it’s clear. We cannot say we live under the rule of law.
Reading the Times report next to its European counterparts is in many ways an illustration in the differences between mainstream American newspaper reporting and that of more partisan presses like Britain’s. Across the pond, the language is stronger, more inflammatory, and the reports plainly more hard-hitting. It’s a style that often doesn’t work for our sensibilities, and a non-partisan, scrupulously fair press is something to applaud.
But it feels that in its presentation of both WikiLeaks war dumps the Times has been tame to a fault; as if afraid of the material that it has been given by a man and organization they’ve sought to greatly distance themselves from, while working with both. As Greenwald says, the reporting seems a bit whitewashed.
Leaked documents on Iraq war contain thousands of allegations of abuse, but a Pentagon order told troops to ignore them.
These are but a few of the headlines and reports about US and coalitions war crimes. Where is the investigation? Where are the NYT and the Washington Post who were so instrumental in exposing the fraud of the Viet Nam War and the crimes of the White House? Not in the US but in Great Britain, the US partner in the crime.
In an extended interview with Democracy Now!, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discusses the release of more than 400,000 classified U.S. military records on the war in Iraq, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history. The disclosure provides a trove of new evidence on the number of civilian casualties, violence, torture, and suffering that has befallen Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. While the Obama administration is defending the U.S. military’s record in Iraq, the allegations in the documents have sparked worldwide condemnation. Assange also describes WikiLeaks “under siege” and that “the real attack on truth” is by tabloid journalism in the U.S. mainstream media.
The really horrifying revelation from these documents is that there was a specific order to ignore the Iraqi abuse called FRAGO 242.
This is the impact of Frago 242. A frago is a “fragmentary order” which summarises a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, “only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ”.
Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.
Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.
The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein’s security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq’s detention cells for their private vendettas.
So basically, the Iraqis were given a free hand to torture and kill helpless prisoners while coalition troops, who were mostly Americans, walked away.
So far the White House and Pentagon have not said very much and no doubt will again try to spin the leaking of these new documents as treasonous war crime that will endanger the troops and hurt the “war on terror”. It would seem that the British are the only ones coming to their senses when Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg called for investigation of abuse claims but shying away from calling for the US to investigate these terrible revelations.
Clegg told BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show: “We can bemoan how these leaks occurred, but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious. They are distressing to read about and they are very serious. I am assuming the US administration will want to provide its own answer. It’s not for us to tell them how to do that.”
Asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, he said: “I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need to be looked at.”
He added: “People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking.”
The Obama Administration continues to add to its own sanctioning of war crimes as it continues to cover up and refuse to investigate the allegations of torture despite all the evidence.
This is no laughing matter. The Obama Justice Department is defending the worst Attorney General, John Ashcroft, from being sued by an American citizen whose Constitutional rights were clearly violated by AG Ashcroft’s stated policy to use the material witness law to prevent terror attacks by rounding up Muslim immigrants.
Last night on Countdown with Keith Olbermannn, Constitutional Law Professor, Jonathan Turley discussed the Prosecuting of John Ashcroft and the ramifications of a possible decision favoring the Obama administration’s support of abuse of the law by Ashcroft.
The amazing thing about this case is that there is an old expression of bad cases making bad law. This is a case of a bad guy making a bad law. They’re going to have to pitch this to the heart of the court to support one of the most abusive Attorney Generals in history. What will be left is truly frightening.
This is a case, as you have mentioned, where false statements were given to a Federal court to secure a warrant, a person was held without access to a lawyer, was held in highly abusive conditions and you have an Attorney General who was virtually gleeful during that period about his ability to round up people. This was at a time when material witness rationale was being used widely and rather transparently to simply hold people.
Smith, the judge, wrote a really incredible opinion, one of the better opinions I’ve read in the last ten years and he basically noted st the end, this is what the Framers fought against. And he right, we have become what the Framers fought against. What it is we defined ourselves against, this is what the Framers were talking about, arbitrary detention.
And my God, you have the Obama Administration arguing that you cannot hold an Attorney General liable for such an egregious and horrible act.
WASHINGTON – Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, citing lapses in compliance with surveillance orders, are pushing to overhaul a federal law that requires phone and broadband carriers to ensure that their networks can be wiretapped, federal officials say
The officials say tougher legislation is needed because some telecommunications companies in recent years have begun new services and made system upgrades that create technical obstacles to surveillance. They want to increase legal incentives and penalties aimed at pushing carriers like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to ensure that any network changes will not disrupt their ability to conduct wiretaps.
An Obama administration task force that includes officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, the F.B.I. and other agencies recently began working on draft legislation to strengthen and expand a 1994 law requiring carriers to make sure their systems can be wiretapped. There is not yet agreement over the details, according to officials familiar with the deliberations, but they said the administration intends to submit a package to Congress next year.
Never mind “1984”, we may as well be living in the USSR.
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