They are huntind down the genicidal Hutu Militias that fled Rwanda in the 1990s.
These folks, and in particular the refugee camps that serve as their logistical bases, should have been shut down a decade ago.
Category: Crimes Against Humanity
They Tried to Declare an 11 Year Old an Enemy Combatant?
Seriously, it’s nice that the judge ordered the release of Mohammed El Gharani, who is now 21, because there was no credible evidence to hold him, but among their accusations was this gem.
The government also accused Gharani of belonging to a London-based al-Qaeda cell in 1998, an accusation that Leon questioned. Gharani was 11 at the time, living with immigrant parents in Saudi Arabia, his attorneys said.
(emphasis mine)
So they discovered that they had no evidence, and so they accused him of being a terrorist at age 11???
He was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, when he was apparently 14.
So, he has been at Gitmo for something like 6 years, and doubtlessly tortured “subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques”…For a 14 year old boy, who was accused of being an 11 year old terrorist.
I can’t see this as anything but monstrous, and everyone involved in this process needs to go to jail for a very long time.
I don’t see how you describe anyone involved in the process without invoking Eichmann and the banality of evil.
It’s Official, It’s Torture
So says Bush administration official Susan Crawford, the convening authority for the military kangaroo court at Gitmo:
“We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani,” said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.
Now could we please get Barack Obama to assign Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate this?
The Juxtaposition of Electrodes and Genitals Is Not the Best Way to Make Friends
So, the Pentagon is reporting that 61 ex-Guantanamo detainees have engaged in terrorism after being released from our Southern Gulag.
Remember, this is under the auspices of the regime established by Bush and His Evil Minions™ that worked from guilty before innocent, accepted torture derived information, and used torture routinely on these folks.
So, the ones that they let go? They were not playahs in terrorism, if they were, they would still be locked up.
On the other hand, when you torture people, if they get out, they tend to take it personally:
The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed and 43 suspected of “returning to the fight.”
We will be seeing blowback from what we did to these people for years.
We also know that Guantanamo is only a part of the problem. Bagram probably has 10 times as many people that we are mistreating, and a non zero percentage of them, and their friends and family, and their countrymen and coreligionists, will be outraged and moved to action by this.
This is a Pleasant Surprise
If true….
We now have reports that Barack Obama will issue an executive order closing Guantánamo in his first week in office.
It would be nice. It would be nicer still if it were implemented immediately.
I think that the former is likely, but I think that the shut down process will take 12-18 months.
Additionally, Glenn Greenwald notes increasing indications that the closing of the camp won’t result in real trials for real criminals, and that they are still working on an extrajudicial trial system which will allow the use of torture evidence.
Busted
The ACLU just got an FBI email through an FOIA request where the agent in question specifically states that Bush issued an executive order to torture Iraqi detainees.
PDF of email here
What a Twofer from the WaPo Editorial Page
So today, on the last day of the year, they give us Amity Shlaes and Ruth Marcus.
Let’s start with the skinny on Ms. Shlaes: she is simply the beneficiary of wingnut welfare. After graduating with a bachelors in English, she proceeds to spout the most predictable right wing economic theory imaginable, and following her marriage to the right wing founder the New York Sun, gets herself columns, and becomes a senior fellow at the CFR. As Matthew Yglesias notes:
I have a really, really, really hard time imagining the CFR doing something comparable for a liberal with so little in the way of relevant qualifications or track-record outside an ideological cocoon.
That being said, some of the beneficiaries are not outright stupid, and Amity Shlaes is either naturally or deliberately so.
Because in her WaPo OP/ED, she continues with riffing on her thesis, pulled from lord knows where, that the the 1937 recession was a result of rich people tucking their money back in their mattresses.
Not even Milton Friedman believed that. He blamed then Fed Chairman Marriner Eccles for tightening credit requirements.
The stupid, it burns us.
That being said, Amity Shlaes is in this instance not the columnist most deserving of opprobrium today, that honor belongs to Ruth Marcus, who does not merely set herself up as an advocate for stupidity and ignorance, but instead advocates for the aggressive protection of evil.
After getting what I am sure is hundreds of outraged emails for her last justification of letting the architects of a torturer regime go free, she thinks that she step up to the plate again 11 days later.
How, some readers asked, could future law-breaking be prevented if past misdeeds go unpunished?
First, criminal prosecution isn’t the only or necessarily the most effective mechanism for deterrence. To the extent that they weigh the potential penalties for their actions, government officials worry as much about dealing with career-ruining internal investigations or being hauled before congressional committees. Criminal prosecution and conviction requires such a high level of proof of conscious wrongdoing that the likelihood of those other punishments is much greater.
Second, the looming threat of criminal sanctions did not do much to deter the actions of Bush administration officials. “The Terror Presidency,” former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith’s account of the legal battles within the administration over torture and wiretapping, is replete with accounts of how officials proceeded despite their omnipresent concerns about legal jeopardy.
This is because there is already a culture of impunity among Republicans in Washington, DC, and it’s been there ever since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon before even an indictment was handed down.
These people knew that George W. Bush would pardon them, like he pardoned Libby, because he was protecting his own neck.
The cycle of impunity, which appears to extend only to Republicans, needs to stop.
Third, punishment is not the only way to prevent wrongdoing. If someone is caught breaking into your house, by all means, press charges. But you might also want to consider installing an alarm system or buying stronger locks. Responsible congressional oversight, an essential tool for checking executive branch excesses, was lacking for much of the Bush administration.
I’m sure that the guy with the electrodes attached to his genitals is happy that you are considering closing that barn door after the arsonist has set fire to the cow.
There was no good will here. There were no honest mistakes. Waterboarding is torture, and has been considered so for hundreds of years, what’s more, the people with experience in the field have been saying consistently that torture does not work.
Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were torturing not because there was a ticking bomb, there wasn’t, and not because they were desperate for information, because it wasn’t getting good intel, they were torturing because it made them feel like they were taking it to the terrorists.
They authorized torture because it made them feel good, and they continued it after they were shown that it did not work because it made them feel good, this is a classic definition of sadism, and absent some jail time, the sadism will be institutionalized.*
*No intention to condemn the S&M crowd. Where informed consent is present, the moral equation is different.
Chinese Say it’s THEIR Turn to Torture Their Uighurs
Remember the Uighurs who were detainees at Guantanamo?
Our military has already tortured them at Chinese request, but it appears that the state security apparatus of the Peoples Republic of China wants in on some of the fun, because they are demanding that they be repatriated to China if they are ever released.
That sound you hear is Kafka rotating at 9700 RPM.
Zimbabwe Update
On the theory that if it bleeds, it leads, the lead story here is the shooting of the commander of the Zimbabwe Air Force known to be a close ally of Mugabe, in an apparent assassination attempt.
I would be unsurprised if there were more of this.
I am also unsurprised at the African Union’s decision to ratchet up measures against Mugabe and the ZANU-PF. There is a lot of, “There but for the grace of God, go I,” in what has been going on there.
In any case, some things stay the same, like Thabo Mbeki still working for power sharing, and never once laying an ounce of blame on either Mugabe or the ZANU-PF.
I have no clue why anyone in their right mind would treat him with anything but contempt.
Mugabe is attempting to put forward his false “unity government”, by publishing a the government law (it’s a parliamentary thing), though the MDC majority in parliament has no intention of ever taking taking it to the floor.
The same can be said for Mugabe’s “asking” Tsvangirai to allow himself to be sworn in as PM.
Under the current power sharing arrangement, both mean nothing.
In any case Mugabe is now suggesting that there be new elections, which would be even heavier on the violence than the prior ones no doubt.
Anyone who thinks that he will negotiate in good faith, need only look at the speech that he gave to the ZANU-PF annual conference, where he said, “Zimbabwe is mine.”
The only way we will see reform from him is if the sanctions against him are severe enough to coerce his agreement.
One sign that Mugabe is looking to step up the violence is that he is now claiming that the opposition is sponsoring a guerrilla war against him.
The idea of the state security forces of Zimbabwe being unleashed with the fig leaf of a counter-insurgency campaign is appalling.
It is thus no surprise that the MDC is threatening to leave unity talks, which I think is an attempt to get Mugabe to stop disappearing opposition leaders.
Finally, it appears that the cholera epidemic is getting worse.
New York Times Calls for Torture Special Prosecutor
NOT ON THE TABLE! NOT ON THE TABLE!
It’s about time, and I approve of the idea of criminal investigations of wrongdoing by Bush and His Evil Minions™, but because there is no impeachment, the leadership in the House of Representatives and the Senate of both parties are accessories to the crime.
Because of this, we are never going to see a meaningful investigation of what happened in the Bush White House.
Even his opponents are hip deep in the muck that he created.
The only way that this gets to trial is through the mechanism of the International Criminal Court, but the US is never going to sign that treaty, and that is the only duly constituted party out there that has even the remotest possibility of discovering the truth and delivering justice.
Maybe Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Soon Join Him
The United Nations court in Tanzania has convicted Colonel Theoneste Bagosora and two accomplices of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced them to live in prison.
Supreme Court Remands Gitmo Torture Damages Case
The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case of Rasul v. Rumsfeld, Myers, et al., in which 3 British citizens held at Guantanamo sued for torture and violations of their religious rights.
They vacated the dismissals of the Circuit and Appeals court, and sent the case back to the circuit for review with instructions to review it under the precedent of Boumediene v. Bush.
An interesting bit here:
In January, the federal appeals court decided that even if all their claims are true, the US officials are immune from suit because, even though torture, physical abuse and humiliation of prisoners violate domestic and international law, the officials were doing all this “within the scope of their employment” and so aren’t personally responsible. They were also immune, the court added, because it wasn’t clear when they authorized the torture that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had rights. As for the men’s religious rights, the court decided that as foreigners, they were not “persons” entitled to the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Note that the inimitable Janice Rogers Brown, who claimed that God’s law trumped the constitution when she was a judge, by which she meant that every zygote was a person no matter what the Supreme Court said, is now saying that the detainees were not “persons” entitled to the protection of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which means I guess, that Moslem fetuses are not people to her.
It should be interesting how it goes.
Free Muntader al-Zaidi, Again
Well it appears that the Iraqi shoe throwing journalist has been tortured in prison, with an arm and ribs broken, and the Lebanese television channel NTV has offered him a job retroactively, “from the moment the first shoe was thrown”.
Not surprisingly, he has become a folk hero across the Arab world (see here andhere)
What is a surprise is George W. Bush is so completely clueless:
‘I’m not insulted. I don’t hold it against the government,’ Bush told ABC News in an exclusive interview. ‘The guy wanted to get on TV and he did. I don’t know what his beef is, but whatever it is, I’m sure someone will hear it.’
(emphasis mine)
Doesn’t know what his beef is? After invading and occupying his country, and killing at least 100,000 of his countrymen, forcing about 2 million into exile, and internally displacing another 2 million, in a country of 30 million, you don’t know what his beef is? (link)
Well, it looks like he may be getting some American style torture soon, because it’s been reported that Muntader al-Zaidi has been transferred to the Camp Cropper prison, which is US run.
Least Shocking Headline of the Decade
Cover-Up Much?
It appears that Michael Mukasey and His Evil Minions™ are refusing to provide documents to the Obama transition team.
It appears that they are unwilling to supply the torture and snooping memos drafted by the Office of Legal Counsel for the CIA and the NSA:
The opinions, some of which have been released to Congress in redacted form, contain the legal rationale of the NSA’s warrantless spying program and the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies, among other intelligence initiatives.
The claim is that the spy agencies have, “own equity or interest in the information.”
Un-dirty-word-believable.
American Heros
I don’t know that I would be strong enough to argue for due process rights for terrorists who killed my family:
Two dozen people who lost loved ones in the September 11 attacks issued a statement on Wednesday denouncing the Guantanamo war crimes trials as illegitimate, shameful and politically motivated.
Seriously, these are people who are doing I’m sure is a very difficult thing.
When the Other Guy is About to Overrun Half Your Country, Don’t Screw Around
That seems to be basic common sense, but it appears that the government of the Democrat Republic of Congo don’t understand this.
It appears that talks between the government and the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) led by General Laurent Nkunda have broken down because they want to bring in other militias….You know, the ones that aren’t on a path to seizing half the country, because they do not have their act together:
The Democratic Republic of Congo government at the weekend invited around 20 other armed groups to participate in the talks, aimed at ending fighting in North Kivu province that has displaced a quarter of a million people since August.
The CNDP and the government of Congo are the only players here, and adding 20 people to the table is intended to simply diminish the CNDP.
Um….Hello? You need to get a clue: The CNDP is kicking the ass of your sorry excuse for the army, and can seize much of the region in a few weeks.
I would note that one of the 20 other groups invited is the genocidal Huto FDLR militia, who are the proximate cause of all this, because when they aren’t trying to kill Tutsi women and children in Rwanda, they are trying to kill Tutsi women and children in eastern Congo, though the governments of Congo and Rwanda have agreed to disband the militia.
Interesting Juxtaposition in the Media Coverage of Africa
We have this story alleging that Rwanda is behind the insurgency in the east of Congo, and we have this story discussing negotiations between the governments of Rwanda and Congo to disband the FDLR militias.
The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), are the genocidal criminals who massacred a significant portion of the Rwandan Tutsi population, and once driven from the country, set themselves up in “refugee camps” where their basic food and nature needs are provided for by the UN and NGOs, and have continued to wage genocidal campaigns against Tutsis, both in Congo and Rwanda.
A first step to fixing this is to close down the camps, and considering that the Tutsis have not engaged in mass reprisals in the 18 years since the genocide, these camps are not needed.
As to how to close down the camps? That’s simple, just stop delivering supplies.
I Wish Your Intelligence Had Been Adequate
Bush was interviewed by Charlie Gibson:
BUSH: I don’t know — the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
Let’s see, we have documents from the British saying that your intel was complete ballocks, the French thought that it was complete ballocks, the Germans thought that it was complete ballocks, the Israelis thought that it was complete ballocks.
You systematically excluded anything that did not support your wish to invade Iraq, and you, and the rest of your Evil Minions&trade should all be on your way to the Hague.
Torture Kills Our Guys
That is what an anonymous author of an editorial in the Washington Post wrote today.
He notes the breakthroughs that he made by using psychological measures designed to build rapport with the detainees, up to and including getting the information used to successfully hunt down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
But that was never the norm in Iraq.
He describes a situation where sadism for its own sake is actively encouraged. It is reports of torture that bring in the foreign fighters to Iraq:
Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
(emphasis mine)
The answer, of course, is that Republicans don’t count American soldiers as Americans, because, after all, “they all volunteered,” so they demand torture because it makes them feel smug and superior.