Category: Crimes Against Humanity

Within the Scope of Employment? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!

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It appears that the US Government is claiming that torture is in the normal scope of employment, which gives a new meaning to the term, “Banality of Evil,” which was coined to describe the actions of Adolph Eichmann and his motivations.

Citing the Westfall Act, [Barack Obama appointee Assistant Attorney General] Tony West wrote that “the type of activities alleged against the individual defendants were ‘foreseeable’ and were ‘a direct outgrowth’ of their responsibility to detain and gather intelligence from suspected enemy combatants.” In defending the government’s position, West cited case law stating that “genocide, torture, forced relocation, and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment by individual defendants employed by Department of Defense and State Department were within scope of employment” and similar cases justifying CIA torture as part of official duty.

“It is essentially saying torture is all in a day’s work when it comes to holding people in military detention,” says Shane Kadidal, who heads the Guantánamo project at CCR. In that case, the issue was not whether Rumsfeld and the others were “employees” but whether they were doing official business. Blackwater’s argument is a tougher sell, says Morrison. “Does it hold water?” he asks. “It holds Blackwater.”

Great Googly Moogly, within the scope of employment?

This is a Feature, Not a Bug

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Not a part of the pale elites. What a surprise.

So, victims of Paramilitary violence in Columbia, and their relatives, are celebrating a supreme court ruling forbidding the extradition of former paramilitaries to the United States on drug charges:

[Bela] Henriquez [shown] wants to find out as much as she can from the paramilitaries who murdered her father in 2001. Julio Henriquez was killed because of his work organizing poor farmers along a vital cocaine-trafficking corridor. In testimony two years ago, one of the commanders, Hernan Giraldo, confessed to ordering her father’s murder.

But she says the details were scant — and that the testimony didn’t mean that justice was served.

And then, Giraldo was extradited.

Giraldo and the other paramilitary commanders took with them a treasure trove of historical information about the links between Colombia’s elite and the paramilitaries, says Michael Reed, a lawyer with the International Center for Transitional Justice, a New York group that studies the efforts to unravel Colombia’s war crimes.

“Basically a political decision was made to trump human rights investigations and prosecutions with drug-trafficking prosecutions,” Reed says.

(emphasis mine)

No, Michael Reed is wrong. A political decision was made to make deport the paramilitaries to the United States in order to silence them. This is not about being nice to the United States, it is about silencing the professional killers hired to murder labor organizers, literacy volunteers, and anyone else who was trying to show the peons something beyond their stations.

I Bet They Didn’t Expect the Spanish Inquisition

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Two investigating judges in Spain who are investigating the torture of Spanish citizens by the United States are demanding more details regarding the Department of Justice investigation.

What is going on here is that the Spanish Judges would be obligated to drop their criminal investigation of if the DoJ was engaging in a credible investigation of Gonzales, Bybee, John, Addington, Feith, and Haynes:

Under Spanish law, the opening of a criminal investigation covering the same matters by the United States would probably lead to the termination or suspension of a case in Spain grounded on universal jurisdiction. However, the Spanish authorities tentatively concluded that suspension of their cases was not warranted at this point because Holder had placed so many limitations on Durham’s work and because it does not appear that Durham is being asked to examine the cases involving the Spanish subjects who were held at Guantanamo.

(emphasis mine)

You see, the problem here is that the Obama administration is just too busy kowtowing to Glenn Beck’s smallest and most delusional whim.

Here is a hint for Barack Obama and His Stupid Minions™: Americans are not that into ideology, but they hate wimps.

Marine Generals Call Cheney a Fearful Bitch

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Retired Marine Corps Generals Charles Krulak and Joseph Hoar have penned an OP/ED titled, “Fear was no excuse to condone torture

In the fear that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were told that defeating Al Qaeda would require us to “take off the gloves.” As a former commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps and a retired commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command, we knew that was a recipe for disaster.

But we never imagined that we would feel duty-bound to publicly denounce a vice president of the United States, a man who has served our country for many years. In light of the irresponsible statements recently made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, however, we feel we must repudiate his dangerous ideas — and his scare tactics.

….

Let’s be clear here. These are retired Generals, criticizing not only a former Vice President of the United States, but the entire administration he was in, and they have chosen their words carefully.

When they choose to describe the decisions made by Bush and His Evil Minions™as having been made out of fear, they are saying that these are evil acts made by cowards who are out of their mind with fear.

The Most Morally Reprehensible Thing that I Have Heard This Month

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As Spencer Ackerman notes in his review of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on torture, amidst all the redacted paragraphs, was this:

The number of detainees in CIA custody is relatively small by comparison with those in U.S. military custody. Nevertheless, the Agency, like the military, has an interest in the disposition of detainees and particular interest in those who, if not kept in isolation, would likely divulge information about the circumstances of their detention.

The translation from the Orwellian, or perhaps translation to the Orwellian, it’s kind of hard to determine here in this specific instance of extreme Newspeak, but it comes to this:

We can’t release torture victims, nor can we try them, because we tortured them, and they will confirm that they have been tortrued.

Seriously, I think that Eric Arthur Blair is spinning in has grave at the speed of a Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 hard drive.

Man Tortured and Renderd by Obama DoJ for….Defense Congract Fraud

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Unfortunately, this is not senior staff at Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, or SAIC, but rather a relatively low level employee of a construction firm:

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.”

This is why we need to prosecute Bush and His Evil Minions™, torture always comes home.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Dick Cheney’s Death Squad Emporium

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We now know, because DCIA Panetta has told Congress, that the CIA had a secret program running for almost 8 years, and that they did not inform Congress of this, as required by law, on the orders of Dick Cheney.

It’s even gotten Dianne Feinstein,* who is generally remarkably hospitable to secrecy and executive authority saying that this was a clear violation of the law.

At this point all indications are that Cheney was setting up a death squad that would answer only to him.

Theoretically, it would only be used against al Qaeda, but remember that Bush and His Evil Minions™ defined “returning to terrorism”† as publishing an OP/ED in the New York Times.

I have no clue as to why it did not go forward, but we can be thankful about that, because they would have gotten it horribly wrong, because that is what the Bush administration did time and time again.‡

The thing is though, this is precisely the sort of thing that Cheney wanted to do, because it made him feel powerful, whether it worked or not.

They tortured because it gave Cheney and Rumsfeld a stiffy.§

It’s torture all over again: Now that the reports are coming out, it turns out that sugarless cookies worked better than torture, and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Tennant knew this, but they were objectively pro-torture.

They wanted to do this, because it made them feel powerful, and ordering murders would have done the same thing.

The real question here is what stopped them, and the only answer that I have is that someone told them they could be in the cross hairs if they tried this, and that they, and theirs, were softer targets Osama.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

†Except, of course, the “Tipton 3” were never terrorists in the first place.

‡Once again, I am compelled to make the repeat the wisest thing that I’ve read this century:

But it does inspire in me the desire for a competition; can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

  1. It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
  2. It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
  3. It wasn’t in some important way completely f#$@ed up during the execution.

Seriously. I’ve yet to see anything wiser yet, and I’m using the loose definition of the 21st century which includes the year 2000.

§Sorry for that mental image.

Eric Holder and False Accountability

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Glenn Greenwald has the scoop, and it’s even lamer than what was clearly a set of deliberate leaks by Eric Holder and His Evil* Minions™ that were covered in the Newsweek article.

According to the Washington Post, which notes that, “The actions of higher-level Bush policymakers are not under consideration for possible investigation,” and the New York Times, which observes that, “The Justice Department official who confirmed the likelihood of an inquiry said it was not likely to focus on those legal opinions, the lawyers who wrote them or anyone who acted within the boundaries they set, even though the ground rules for interrogations have shifted,” it’s clear that real accountability for real crimes is not on the table.

For the small fry, “Just following [illegal] orders,” will be considered an absolute defense, and and the people who actually gave those illegal orders, and who did so without regard to the law or legal precedents, will not be subject to scrutiny.

I understand the possible political complications, though I think that they are stupid, because the Republicans will oppose Obama tooth and nail every step of the way regardless of his peace overtures, but even if non-prosecution were to produce a more bipartisan atmosphere, it would be wrong, because covering up a crime against humanity, and make no bones about it, torture is a crime against humanity, is a crime in and of itself.

*Evil is the only way to describe this concerted effort to ensure that the people who authorized, and enabled torture never face justice. By deliberately ignoring the law in this matter, Eric Holder, and Barack Obama have become co-conspirators for torture after the fact.

Eric Holder Agonistes

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So, Newsweek magazine has an article relating the internal struggle of Attorney General Eric Holder with regard to things like torture and illegal wiretapping. He is horrified at what has been done, but he understands Barack Obama’s desire to cover all this stuff up so that he violate the constitution and the supervision of congress too move forward and not look back (2nd and last graph of the article):

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”

…..

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general’s thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Department office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as “the dark side.” He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was “shocked and saddened,” he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America’s name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

Why are we seeing a report like this? What is driving the reports of how Eric Holder is agonizing over his dual obligations to enforce the law and to do the bidding of Barack Obama?

This is an attempt by Eric Holder to retain some dignity when he makes the wrong choice. He will not be appointing a special prosecutor, nor will he be authorizing any future investigations from within the Department of Justice on these matters, because it is politically inconvenient for Barack Obama and His Stupid* Minions™, and he wants to ensure that his reputation takes as small a hit as possible.

He is going to do the craven and political thing, and not the right thing, but he wants all of us to know, particularly those inside the Washington Beltway, that he really agonized over it.

*It’s stupid, because they do not realize that not prosecuting Republican law breakers will not create any bipartisanship, but rather, it will create a sense of impunity that will fuel ‘Phant attacks against the President. We only have to look at Bill Clinton’s experience, where his decision not to pursue Iran-Contra led to a heretofore unknown level of vitriol from the Republicans.

What Digby Said

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Seriously:

Today the ACLU and many bloggers who are concerned with the fact that the United States tortured prisoners and apparently has no intention of holding anyone responsible for it are blogging about a little known fact about the issue: the US Government didn’t just torture a bunch a prisoners, as bad as that was, and as horrible as it remains for those who survived it. The United States tortured many prisoners to death. This does not seem to be common knowledge, but the evidence is quite clear that this happened. Torture and death by torture was not isolated.

It should be noted that if the prisoner died, they were violating even the repulsive standards of Bybee and Yoo.

Gitmo Releases

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The US has sent 4 Uighur held at our gulag to Bermuda, which really pissed off the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, because, while they have home rule, they are supposed to consult with London over such things.

It sounds like the US threatened banking sanctions over their tax haven status, and the Bermudan government asked, “how high”.

Additionally, Mohammed El Gharani was freed, the Federal courts determined that there was no credible evidence against him, and in any case, he was 14 years old when captured (he is now 21) which should have meant that he was treated as an abused child, not tortured.

So, Just How Were We Better Than Saddam?

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It’s far far worse than I imagined.

When I wrote about Bush rape rooms, I cited Scott Horton, who detailed only rape by instrumentality, but the reality is that we are talking full genital rape here, including the rape of a boy:

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

What’s more the Telegraph‘s source on this is unimpeachable:

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

…

Maj Gen Taguba, who retired in January 2007, said he supported the President’s decision, adding: “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.

We also know that Barack Obama lied when he talked about this:

Mr Obama seemed to reinforce that view by adding: “I want to emphasise that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.”

I don’t think that he could say that you have pictures of a boy and a woman being raped, in additional to the forcible stripping of a woman detainee to humiliate her, any honest description would be almost as inflammatory as the pictures themselves, but saying that they are “no big” will make him less credible the next time something like this comes up.

Obama’s Guantánamo Show Trials

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It just gets better and better.

So, the details of the plan are dribbling out and it’s a distinction without a difference as was made clear when the New York Times obtained a filing made to the judges running the military commissions.

Remember the statement that, “The accused will have greater latitude in selecting their counsel?”

Not so much, Bush and His Evil Minions™ required that the defendants’ lawyers be appointed by the Pentagon, and, “assigned to a special office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo, which meant, among other things, that they had to be uniformed military, and in the filing to the judges, Obama and His Evil Minions™ say that a detainee would be allowed to select a lawyer of their “own choosing”, but that the, “requested lawyer must be assigned to the Pentagon’s office of military defense lawyers for Guantánamo.“

“Any color you want, so long as it’s black,” quoth Henry Ford.

Furthermore, the right to confront witnesses against them will be ignored by using a very broad hearsay rule, because, according to “senior administration officials” said that although federal courts bar many kinds of hearsay evidence, “the hearsay rule is not one of those things that is rooted in American values.”

The right to confront witnesses in court is one of the most basic of legal rights in our system since the excesses of the Star Chamber in England.

Note that while coerced testimony will not be allowed, that the defendant will not be allowed to question the primary source of the testimony, only their interrogator, or possibly just someone who reads the interrogator’s report, will confirm this.

The Smoking Gun For Dick Cheney

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And no, this is not from the Smoking Gun, it’s from The Daily Beast, and it’s a big one.

Specifically, Robert Windrem, formerly a senior investigative producer with NBC News, has uncovered information that the office of the Vice President specifically requested that the a senior Iraqi official be waterboarded so as to extract a statement that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in league and cooperating on terrorism:

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

…

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

Duelfer will not disclose who in Washington had proposed the use of waterboarding, saying only: “The language I can use is what has been cleared.” In fact, two senior U.S. intelligence officials at the time tell The Daily Beast that the suggestion to waterboard came from the Office of Vice President Cheney. Cheney, of course, has vehemently defended waterboarding and other harsh techniques, insisting they elicited valuable intelligence and saved lives. He has also asked that several memoranda be declassified to prove his case. (The Daily Beast placed a call to Cheney’s office and will post a response if we get one.)

(emphasis mine)

This isn’t about a ticking time bomb. This isn’t about ongoing plans. This is a request to torture someone until they say something that benefits you politically.

Can we put him on trial now?

Yes, I know that OVP does not necessarily equal Dick Cheney, but we also know that his office would not make such a request without his tacit or explicit approval.

So Much for “I Did It for the Judicial Appointment”

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Now Jay Bybee is actively defending the torture memos that he wrote, as opposed what was said by “friends” to the Washington Post, which is that he basically took the OLC job because he had to in order become a Federal Judge.

I think that the money quote is, “In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”

It’s an attempt to say that it’s reprehensible, but not criminal, and hence does not fall under the the bailiwick of, “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” though that might be small comfort, since the first impeachment and conviction was really because the subject was probably clinically insane, the charges were “drunkenness and unlawful rulings,” and the latter sounds a like Bybee.

Spanish Judges Opens Torture Inquiry On Gitmo

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So, it looks like the Spanish judges are ignoring the recommendation of the Spanish Attorney General, and proceeding with an investigation.

The best outcome of this investigation, IMNSHO, is that this forces the US government to pursue the perpetrators of these crimes, though the fact that this will tend to prevent Bush and His Evil Minions&trade from traveling freely around the world because of concerns regarding torture is an added plus in any case.