Category: Crimes Against Humanity

Seriously, These People Should Be Thrown in a Hole So Deep That They Forget What the Sun Looks Like

No Comments

Well, the Senate report on torture is out, and it appears that Rumsfeld and His Evil Minions™ were authorizing torture before the infamous memos justifying such behavior had been drafted, despite the fact that numerous experts on interrogation said that it torture does not work.

Notably, it was based on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training which was used to allow captured Americans to resist torture designed to elicit false confessions.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et all did not care. They just wanted to torture out of a combination of sadism and machismo.

That being said, I do like the last line of the article, “If torture occurred before the memo was written, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on, and the writing of the memo is potentially criminal.”

In a related note, we now know the answer to the question, “Why waterboard someone 183 times in one month?”

They did it for propaganda purposes, specifically, in order to extract false statements linking al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein”

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Seriously, these people need to spend the rest of their lives in a SUPERMAX facility.

Prosecution of Torture Architects Has Evolved in Just 2 Days

No Comments

I started collecting links on Sunday, and it appears that the the news has developed in a rather interesting manner, with strong statements that there would be no prosecutions, followed by a retreat by the Obama administration following push back from multiple quarters.

On Sunday, we have appearances by administration officials saying that there will be no prosecutions of anyone involved in torture

I asked Emanuel: “The president has ruled out prosecution for CIA officials who believed they were following the law. Does he believe that the officials who devised the policies should be immune from prosecution?”

“He believes that, look, as you saw in that statement he wrote, let’s just take a step back. He came up with this and worked on this for about four weeks. Wrote that statement Wednesday night after he had made his decision and dictated what he wanted to see. And Thursday morning I saw him in the office, he was still editing it. He believes that people in good faith were operating with the guidance they were provided,” Emanuel said.

What about those who devised the policy, I asked?

“Yeah, but those who devised the policy, he believes that they were, should not be prosecuted either,” Emanuel said.

“And it’s not the place that we go, and as he said in that letter, and I would really recommend people look at the full statement, not the letter, the statement, and that second paragraph: “This is not a time for retribution. It’s a time for reflection. It’s not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution.’ We have a lot to do to protect America. But what people need to know? This practice and technique, we don’t use anymore. We banned it.”

(emphasis mine)

Then the pressure mounted to not bury everything, and Obama is now saying that investigating the people who crafted the policy is up to the Department of Justice, and Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas reporting that, “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has discussed naming a senior prosecutor or outside counsel to review whether CIA interrogators exceeded legal boundaries–and whether Bush administration officials broke the law by giving the CIA permission to torture in the first place.

Once again, showing that, when absolutely forced to by the weight of public opinion, the Obama administration can come around on this.

This is a good thing, because whoever was involved in waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, about 6 times a day, was not following even the Orwellian rules of Bush and His Evil Minions™.

US Tried to Silence Detainee to Cover Up Torture

No Comments

US Government lawyers attempted to get Binyam Mohamed, the Ethopian detained at Guantanamo, to sign an aggreement not to discuss his treatment as a condition for his release.

Since Mohamed is alleging illegal torture, and the lawyers in question had reason to believe that there was a possibility of criminal prosecution, I do not see how this could be anything but a slam dunk case of obstruction of justice:

U.S. government lawyers tried to get a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay to sign a deal saying he had never been tortured and that he would not speak to the media as a condition of his release, according to documents presented in Britain’s High Court.

U.S. lawyers also wanted Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen held at Guantanamo for more than 4 years, to plead guilty to secure his freedom, even though he was never charged with a crime, according to documents released by two judges who ruled in the High Court case.

The documents, relating to a ruling the judges made last October, reveal the U.S. military wanted Mohamed to agree not to sue the United States or any of its allies, and that any rights to compensation should be assigned to the U.S. government.

Any lawyers among my reader(s) want to weigh in on this?

Red Cross Uses the ‘T’ Word

No Comments

By the “T” word, I mean that they used the word torture to describe the treatment of detainees by the CIA:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

(emphasis mine)

When do we either start prosecutions, or turn them over the Hague?

Documentation of Turkish Knowledge of the Armenian Genocide

No Comments

The archives of the old Ottoman Empire are opening up, and fairly conclusive evidence of the direct knowledge of the authorities of the Armenian Genocide has been uncovered:

With his book, “The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha,” Bardakci (pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.

The documents, given to Bardakci by Talat’s widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Bardakci said.

To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute.

….

Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to eliminate the Armenians. “You have suddenly on one page confirmation of the numbers,” he said. “It was like someone hit you over the head with a club.”

Seriously, it’s reality, and it’s something that the Turkish people should acknowledge.

Suck on this Serdar Argıç.

OK, Now We Have Evidence of a Crim

No Comments

About a year ago, I noted that the CIA had destroyed 2 of their tapes of their torture sessions interrogations.

It appears that I was wrong, they didn’t destroy some of their tapes, they destroyed nearly 100 tapes, 92 in fact.

This is going to continue unless this is pursued up the chain of command, and those in authority at the deputy director, director, and presidential levels are prosecuted.

Those below them need their clearances pulled forever if they cooperate, and jail time for those who do not cooperate.

Our intelligence services will continue to create more terrorists until this is rooted out of both the intelligence services and the body politic.

Hopefully Jail, Absent That, Disbarment

No Comments

Newsweek has gotten reports that the report from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) of the Department of Justice on the legal opinions of Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury is a strong condemnation of their legal reasoning.

Among other things, it looks like, “the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action.”

They pursued criminal charges against lawyers and judges in the Nuremberg trials, and they should do so here.

Bush Set Up Rape Rooms as a Part of the Torture Program

No Comments

Just when I thought that this group of criminals have gotten me so jaded about their venality and corruption that they can no longer shock me, it now appears that they instituted rape as a part of their torture regime:

Former Gitmo Guard Tells All

By Scott Horton

Army Private Brandon Neely served as a prison guard at Guantánamo in the first years the facility was in operation. With the Bush Administration, and thus the threat of retaliation against him, now gone, Neely decided to step forward and tell his story. “The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. It makes for fascinating reading.

…

Third, the Nelly account shows that health professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

(emphasis mine)

Oh my God.

Waterboarding is the least of it.
[ON EDIT: My bad, I left off the link]

Americans Want Accountability for Bush Torture

No Comments

Though, interestingly enough, USA Today runs with the lede of Most want inquiry into anti-terror tactics, while Gallup goes with No Mandate for Criminal Probes of Bush Administration.

38% want a criminal investigation, 24% want some sort of “truth and reconciliation” panel, and 34%, the “dead enders,” don’t want either.

Sounds like a mandate to me.

FWIW, the numbers for investigation Attorneygate and warrantless wiretapping are even more in favor of investigating the matters.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!?!?!?!?

No Comments

It appears that officials in the Department of Defense are denying Barack Obama access to information on Binyam Mohamed’s torture and abuse.

No, this isn’t a typo, someone in the DoD is refusing to turn over information to the President of the United States of America:

Clive Stafford Smith, the director of the legal charity Reprieve, which represents Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, sent Obama evidence of what he called “truly mediaeval” abuse but substantial parts were blanked out so the president could not read it.

In the letter to the president [PDF] , Stafford Smith urges him to order the disclosure of the evidence.

Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the “bizarre reality” of the situation. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment.

George Orwell and Franz Kafka are now spinning in their graves at sufficient velocity to power all of Belarus.

Genitals Sliced With a Scalpel; Irritating Liquids Poured in the Wounds

No Comments

This is what is alleged to have happened to Binyam Mohamed, and the British courts expunged the reports, because of threats from US intelligence that they would stop cooperating with UK intelligence if the information were released, and the is arguing to continue the complete and absolute privilege that Bush and His Evil Minions™ insisted upon:

“Is there anything material that has happened” that might have caused the Justice Department to shift its views, asked Judge Mary M. Schroeder, an appointee of President Jimmy Carter, coyly referring to the recent election.

“No, your honor,” Mr. Letter replied.

Judge Schroeder asked, “The change in administration has no bearing?”

Once more, he said, “No, Your Honor.” The position he was taking in court on behalf of the government had been “thoroughly vetted with the appropriate officials within the new administration,” and “these are the authorized positions,” he said.

(emphasis mine)

I Barack Obama decided that since he’s so awesome, we should just trust him.

We also have graphic depictions of what was done to the man (from the 2nd link):

The court papers describe horrific treatment in secret prisons. Mr. Mohamed claimed that during his detention in Morocco, “he was routinely beaten, suffering broken bones and, on occasion, loss of consciousness. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and the same scalpel was then used to make incisions on his body, including his penis. A hot stinging liquid was then poured into open wounds on his penis where he had been cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death.”

(again, emphasis mine)

Note that the precedent here, US v. Reynolds, is in fact based on a lie. There were no state secrets involved, the B-29 which crashed was not, as was claimed, on a secret mission or testing secret equipment.

They claimed privilege because the report indicated that the aircraft was in poor condition because of inadequate maintenance, and the USAF wanted it covered up. It was all a lie.

British the United States on Wednesday of Threats to Conceal Torture

No Comments

We now have a report that the UK government demanded that court proceedings detailing torture be suppressed because the United States on Wednesday was threatening to end intelligence cooperation if the details were releases:

Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation if Britain released evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

The judges quoted lawyers for British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as saying the U.S. government, by reviewing intelligence cooperation, “could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains.”

According to the ruling from High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones, Miliband’s lawyers said the threat had existed for some time and was still in place under President Barack Obama’s administration.

(emphasis mine)

If you think that your behavior is egregious enough that you need to threaten allies to keep it away from public view, that’s a pretty good sign that you should not be doing it in the first place, and that you should be looking at criminal prosecution of the perpetrators.

Speaking of Insubordination

No Comments

The presiding judge at Gitmo, Army Colonel James Pohl, is refusing to suspend one of the trials, and has scheduled the arraignment for February 9:

Hours after taking office last week, Obama ordered Guantanamo prosecutors to seek 120-day delays in all pending cases to give his administration time to decide whether to scrap the widely criticized tribunals created by the Bush administration to try suspected terrorists outside the regular U.S. court system.

But the judge, Army Colonel James Pohl, said the law underpinning the tribunals gives the presiding judges sole authority to delay cases. He ruled that postponing proceedings against Abd al Rahim al Nashiri would harm the public interest in a speedy trial.

Note that al Nashiri appears to be one of the “high value” defendants who was water boarded, and he has been held for over 5 years…so much for speedy trials.

Seriously, Bush and His Evil Minions™ did their level best to politicize every level of government, including the military.

This will be poisoning the military and the civilian bureaucracy for decades to come.

White House Denies Non-Prosecution Promise

No Comments

An unnamed Holder aide is denying that he made any promise not to prosecute torture:

Eric Holder has not made any commitments about who would or would not be prosecuted. He explained his position to Senator Bond as he did in the public hearing and in his responses to written questions.

So it appears that Kit Bond’s statements to the Washington Times are now in dispute.

I really think that Eric Holder and Barack Obama both need to publicly disavow the news report.

Eric Holder Just Became a War Criminal, Will Barack Obama Follow? [With Update: Senate Dems Deny]

No Comments

Update: Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee have just denied that Holder said any such thing. I’d like to see Holder deny this too.

If this report in the Washington Times is accurate, Eric Holder just agreed not to prosecute people who engaged in torture:

Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.

Mr. Holder’s promise apparently was key to moving his nomination forward. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 17-2 to favorably recommend Holder for the post. He is likely to be confirmed by the Senate soon.

Sen. Bond also said that Mr. Holder told him in a private meeting Tuesday that he will not strip the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks of retroactive legal immunity from civil lawsuits–removing another potential sticking point among GOP senators.

When the United States ratified the Convention against Torture in 1994, it created an obligation to affirmatively act to prevent torture, and to prosecute torturers and co-conspirators through, “effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,” including taking steps to “ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law”.

If the report is true, and note that it’s the Washington Times quoting Kit Bond, so the possibility that the reporter or the Senator is lying is most assuredly non-zero, so, Holder could have said something as innocuous as, “There is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion,” and Kit Bond could have related this as, “there will be no prosecutions.”

Certainly, the Republicans have in the past fabricated promises in the hope that they would become accepted as the status quo…..It’s called poisoning the well.

That being said, if what Mr. Bond related is a true description of the discussions, then Eric Holder has entered into an illegal conspiracy to coverup torture, which is, under the convention against, a violation of the Convention against Torture in and of itself.

The pertinent sections of the convention are below (all emphasis mine, and but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*):

Article 2
  1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
  2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
  3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 4
  1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
  2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 5
  1. Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the following cases:
    1. When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
    2. When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
    3. When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.
  2. Each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction and it does not extradite him pursuant to article 8 to any of the States mentioned in paragraph I of this article.
  3. This Convention does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with internal law.
Article 7
  1. The State Party in the territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.
  2. These authorities shall take their decision in the same manner as in the case of any ordinary offence of a serious nature under the law of that State. In the cases referred to in article 5, paragraph 2, the standards of evidence required for prosecution and conviction shall in no way be less stringent than those which apply in the cases referred to in article 5, paragraph 1.
  3. Any person regarding whom proceedings are brought in connection with any of the offences referred to in article 4 shall be guaranteed fair treatment at all stages of the proceedings.

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

No Files?

No Comments

So, in their eagerness to torture people, it appears that Bush and His Evil Minions™ never bother to assemble files on the Guantanamo detainees, which makes an evaluation, much less a fair trial of the detainees.

As Hilzoy notes, “It takes, well, a special kind of administration to detain people for years on end without bothering to assemble case files on them. I’m just glad they’re finally gone.”(emphasis original)

Notwithstanding Bush’s insistence that the military commissions were the only way to try these folks, this makes it clear that they never wanted trials, just torture.

How bad was it? Here are the last two ‘graphs of the WaPo article:

In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was “strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks.”

He said he once accidentally found “crucial physical evidence” that “had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten.”

This is not a serious attempt at competent prosecution or trial.

UN Rapporteur Says Obama Bound by International Law to Prosecute

No Comments

Courtesy of the ever reliable Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine)

In an interview on Tuesday evening with the German television program “Frontal 21,” on channel ZDF Professor Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Rapporteur responsible for torture, stated that with George W. Bush’s head of state immunity now terminated, the new government of Barack Obama was obligated by international law to commence a criminal investigation into Bush’s torture practices.

“The evidence is sitting on the table,” he stated. “There is no avoiding the fact that this was torture.” He pointed to the U.S. undertakings under the Convention Against Torture in which the country committed that it would criminally prosecute anyone who tortured, or extradite the person to a state that would prosecute him. “The government of the United States is required to take all necessary steps to bring George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld before a court,” Nowak said.

I wanna see them in the Hague, because I think that you will have too many people willing to be a mole in the jury in the US.

Figure 20%+ dead-enders, that’s two per jury, and, because it’s going to be a long and complex trial, people who aren’t die hard Bush supporters won’t want to sit on the jury.