Tag: Torture

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 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.

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Docudharma

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.

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.

This week Wikileaks again made public more of the  documents that had been classified as secret to cover up the atrocities that were carried by the Iraqis themselves on their own people with American troops turning a blind eye. Thousands of deaths were revealed in these documents which have been methodically mapped to provide a “unique picture of every death.

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.

Maybe President Harry S. Truman should have invited Hideki Tojo to the White House for tea and advice. President Obama thinks that it is just fine to invite former Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, to the Oval Office to consult with her on Russia, disarmament and other issues. This woman should be in a cell in the Hague for the rest of her life along with George W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.

It was Condoleeza Rice who was Bush’s National Security advisor at the time, said in 2003 during the run up to the Iraq war that Sadaam Hussein had “the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon,” and

“The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

It was with Rice’s blessing in Situation Room meetings that included Cheney Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft that water boarding and other methods of “enhanced interrogation” were approved and became the norm.

So as Glenn Greenwald points out that instead of prosecuting the “Bush officials who broke the law and instituted a worldwide torture regime”, President Obama has appointed “some of them to occupy the highest positions in my administration and then meet with others in order to drink from the well of their wisdom on a wide range of foreign policy matters.”

No, Glenn, it is not “very childish, shrill and unpragmatic” of you or anyone else to demand that

“the person who presided over the Bush White House’s torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War” be held accountable by this President and the Justice Department which is so hell bent to uphold laws that are discriminatory, unpopular and, most likely, unconstitutional.

But, Ms. Rice gets to have tea in the Oval Office and is consulted by President Obama. All is forgiven.

Sounds great only problem is that headline is from England. It seems that Liberal Democrats in Britain have far less problem “looking back” in order to “look forward” than the US.

The Liberal Democrats today set out what they think the terms of the government’s upcoming inquiry into torture should be.

In July David Cameron announced a judicial inquiry into Britain’s role in torture and rendition since the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in September 2001.

The three-person inquiry panel will be headed by Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge who is currently commissioner for the intelligence services. He will be assisted by Dame Janet Paraskeva, the head of the civil service commissioners, and Peter Riddell, the former Times political commentator who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for Government.

Most of the inquiry will be held in secret, but victims of torture and their representatives will be able to give evidence during open sessions, as will representatives of human rights groups.

In a letter to Gibson, Cameron set out the “parameters” of the inquiry, but the final terms have yet to be made public. These parameters included the changing attitude of “other countries” towards counterterrorism detainees, although it makes clear that “this is an inquiry into the actions of the UK, not any other state”.

Meanwhile despite all his campaign rhetoric, Pres Barack Obama defends torture, rendition, indefinite detention and denies detainees habeus corpus, claiming national security concerns and using state secrets to cover up war crimes.

The President has used the courts and the power of his office to not only defend these horrific policies of the Bush/Cheney administration but has expanded them to include targeting American citizens for assassination and manipulating the law to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of this practice that denies the victim not only his rights as a US citizen under the Constitution but the victim’s human rights .

The administration’s legal team is debating how aggressive it should be in a brief responding to the lawsuit, which is due Sept. 24. The suit, filed last month, seeks an injunction that would prevent the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who is accused of playing a leading role for Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

Justice Department lawyers are circulating a draft brief with several potential arguments for dismissing the case, and lawyers from national security agencies have met to discuss what should go into the final version. But they have not reached a consensus, according to officials familiar with the discussions, because the arguments seen as strongest also carry significant political and legal risks.

“There are a lot of cross-cutting things going on here, and they have to be very careful about how they litigate this,” said Jack Goldsmith, who was a senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush administration. “It’s not just a question of winning the case. There is the public diplomacy side, and there are implications for everything else they are doing in the war on terrorism: detention and targeting and other things, too, I imagine.”

The US is still in the shadows and descending even deeper into the darkness.