Tag: War Crimes

Most of us remember the novel by Alexander Dumas’s, “The Count of Monte Cristo“. The novel’s hero, Edmond Dantès, is falsely accused of being a traitor, denied a trial and imprisoned at the château on the Isle d’If off the coast of France.

This same fictional scenario has been the reality for the detainees at the detention camp at the US Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba. As of November, 2010, there are 174 detainees many of whom have yet to see the evidence against them. There are 48 detainees that President Obama the Obama administrative wants to hold indefinitely and that number may increase as The White house drafts an executive order that should be ready for President Obama to sign early on January.

(The) order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

Nearly two years after Obama’s pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo, more inmates there are formally facing the prospect of lifelong detention and fewer are facing charges than the day Obama was elected.

That is in part because Congress has made it difficult to move detainees to the United States for trial. But it also stems from the president’s embrace of indefinite detention and his assertion that the congressional authorization for military force, passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, allows for such detention.

After taking office, the Obama administration reviewed the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay and chose 48 prisoners for indefinite detention. Officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that number will likely increase in coming months as some detainees are moved from a transfer category to a continued detention category.

As David Dayen st FDL noted

I would rather this remain as an executive order than through a statute; at least it would be easier to overturn that way. But I don’t think any future President would choose to overturn it, and a statute could come anyway in a new, more conservative Congress. This is basically indefinite detention, an unheard-of policy prior to 9-11, with a bit of a smiley face. And to those who say this is limited to the 48 detainees designated for indefinite detention right now, here’s Tom Malinowski:

Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, said such an order could provide additional safeguards for those prisoners who are already being held in as wartime detainees, but worried that it could be used to entrench the idea of detention without trial.

   “My sense and my hope is that it would be limited to the detainees whom Obama inherited from the Bush administration, rather than serving as a permanent regime for the detention of anyone the government may decide is dangerous in the future,” he said.

Consider the detention of Bradley Manning, in solitary confinement without being charged with a crime. There’s been credible speculation that Manning is being held to break him and give up some information about Julian Assange. I just think this will become more of the norm, especially with a codified indefinite detention standard.

Cenk Uygur had a live interview on Dylan Ratigan Show with Julian Assange who denied any contact with Pvt. Manning, or that he was even the source of the information.

How far down will this country go? Apparently this far

(Washington, DC) – The US Senate’s passage on December 22, 2010, of a ban on the use of government funds for the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US, even for prosecution, will severely undermine US efforts to fight terrorism, Human Rights Watch said today.

“The Senate vote banning the transfer of Guantanamo detainees is a reckless and irresponsible affront to the rule of law and efforts to protect the US from terrorism,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “By hindering the prosecution of Guantanamo detainees in federal court, Congress has denied the president the only legally sustainable and globally legitimate means to incarcerate terrorists.”

The provision in the National Defense Authorization Act changes a prior funding ban that blocked the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the US except for prosecution, thereby preserving the Obama administration’s option of trying Guantanamo detainees in US federal courts. The new provision completely strips the government of the federal court option until September 2011 or until a new authorization bill is passed, effectively blocking closure of the Guantanamo detention facilities in the near future. The House of Representatives passed a similar provision on December 17, 2010. The Senate made unrelated changes to the bill, requiring it to be sent back to the House where it is expected to be passed immediately.

Democracy Now hosted a debate about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. The guests were Glenn Greenwald, a constitutional law attorney and legal blogger for Salon and Steven Aftergood, senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists. He directs the Project on Government Secrecy and runs Secrecy News. The transcript is in this link to Democracy Now.

Is WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange a Hero? Glenn Greenwald Debates Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News

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.

Opposition to U.S. trial likely to keep mastermind of 9/11 attacks in detention

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.

More Bush. More War forever

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).

Nine years ago, a British Embassy employee  wrote,

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.

h/t emptywheel @ FDL

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.

Ms Litwick in her latest article at Slate, chronicles baby steps that have taken the United States from decrying torture to celebrating it. In it she point out President Obama’s lack of understanding of the consequences of ignoring the Bush administration war crimes

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

“America safe” by torturing which have been debunked long ago.

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.

There will be no investigation, there will be no prosecution and there will be no rule of law.

DoJ: No charges for destruction of CIA interrogation videos

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.

Durham Torture Tape Case Dies, US Duplicity in Geneva & The Press Snoozes

And, The Obama Justice Department let it happen

Torture? Check. Covering Up Torture? Check. Rule of Law? Nope.

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.

What war in Yemen you ask. What Fourth War?

Foiled Bomb Plot Sparks Calls for Expanded Military Presence in Yemen

by John Hudson at the Atlantic Wire

The U.S. is seriously considering sending elite “hunter-killer” teams to Yemen following the mail bombing plot by militants in Yemen. The covert teams would operate under the CIA’s authority allowing them to kill or capture targets unilaterally, The Wall Street Journal reports. Support for an expanded U.S. military effort in Yemen has been growing within the military and the Obama administration, according to The Journal. Now pundits in the blogosphere are echoing calls to ramp up special operations in the country.

   * Expect a U.S. Escalation, writes The Economist: “You can be sure that the US will be seriously considering amping up its semi-secret military campaign in Yemen. And you can be almost certain the US military and the CIA will redoubling their search for Mr Al-Awlaki.”. . .

   * It’s Time to Get Serious About Yemen, writes Time’s Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer. . .

   * The Bomb Plot Demonstrates the Importance of Our Involvement in the Middle East, writes The Wall Street Journal editorial board. . . .

   * No Time for Complacency, writes Jed Babbin at The American Spectator.

Get the picture?

While we were all obsessed with the economy and the never ending election cycle, the US has established a base in Yemen, increased military operations by sending in the  JSOC to target an American citizen for assassination, huge increased military aid and increased CIA controlled drone attacks that are killing more Yemen civilians then alleged members of Al Qaeda. But, but there was the latest package bombs and the underpants bomber. No, these actions all started long before that, back before the underpants bomber. In mid-December of 2009, Obama authorized the launching of cruise missiles at suspected Al Qaeda training camps:

   On orders from President Barack Obama, the U.S. military launched cruise missiles early Thursday against two suspected al-Qaeda sites in Yemen, administration officials told ABC News …

   The Yemen attacks by the U.S. military represent a major escalation of the Obama administration’s campaign against al Qaeda.

About all we are certain that was accomplished by these attacks, as with most missiles and unmanned drone strikes, a lot of civilians were killed, mostly women and children.

Then in late January, as reported by Siun at Firedoglake, it was learned that it was more than a couple of missiles:

Back in December, before the underpants bomber, I had asked if Obama had launched his fourth war – in Yemen. Reports had appeared that just a few days before, he had apparently authorized drone attacks on reported Al Qaeda fighters.

Today we learn that Obama has done more than send in drones.

Dana Priest reports in the Washington Post:    

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

Priest goes on to report that the US military operation in Yemen involves attempts to assassinate US citizens considered “High Value Targets:”

That US civilian is American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who has been specifically targeted for assassination by President Obama without evidence or due process. That’s right no evidence because, despite the White House claims that the Awlaki is the person behind the bombs, they have no basis for the accusation other than speculation and hearsay.

This must be making the likes of David Broder, who advocates attacking Iran to cure our economic woes, and the war hawks, who justify the killing of civilians as necessary to keep us safe, happy as a flock of vultures with a fresh kill.

h/t Siun at FDL and Glenn Greenwald at Salon.

The Real Story the NYT’s ignored while instead engaging in a smear campaign on Julian Assange.

Salon media critic Glenn Greenwald hammers at a point we mentioned in our first read of the WikiLeaks coverage on Friday afternoon. That is, that as with the Afghanistan dump, there was an obvious disparity between the way that the Times reported out and framed its Iraq War Logs package and the way that Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and particularly The Guardian did. . . .

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.  

BBC:

Huge Wikileaks release shows US ‘ignored Iraq torture’

Wikileaks has released almost 400,000 secret US military logs, which suggest US commanders ignored evidence of torture by the Iraqi authorities.

The Guardian:

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse

• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war

Al Jazeera:

US turned blind eye to torture

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.

WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange on Iraq War Logs, “Tabloid Journalism” and Why WikiLeaks Is “Under Siege”

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.