Lt. Cdr. Diaz is the man who got the list of the Gitmo detainees out when Bush and His Evil Minions™ were illegally concealing this information from the International Red Cross (It’s called “disappearing”).
The National Press Club just gave him the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling.
He spent 6 months in the brig, and now the Pentagon is trying to take his law license.
Read the article from the always compelling Scott Horton.
Read Vanity Fair’s article on how created their gulags and their torture regime. Of interest is the dispatch of senior administration lawyers to Gitmo to ensure that torture was done.
It’s chilling.
While I’m sure that Bush and His Evil Minions™ think that fair trials, much like military service, are for losers, it comes as no surprise that the torture and subsequent destruction of the torture tapes is making holding something resembling a fair trial difficult.
We can’t have kangaroo courts if we expect anything but a further souring of our already toxic relations with the rest of the world, but after an orgy of law breaking and ass covering by people working in our name, it looks like kangaroo courts is all we got.
Morons.
It turns out that the military has dozens, if not hundreds of tapes of interrogations, and that some of them do show “harsh tactics”, including FBI agents participating in torture.
I want my country back.
I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed.
Anyone who voted to uphold the veto, which includes 3 Dems, and does not include 5 Republicans are criminally complicit.
The times is saying that he’s cementing his legacy, and I would agree.
George W. Bush is to good government what Jeffrey Dahmer was to fine dining.
We really need to send all of his senior people to the Hague for trial in 2009.
It appears that a significant amount of the evidence against two Canadians was from Abu Zubaydah, the clinically insane man tortured by the CIA.
As a result Mohammed Harkat, and Adil Charkaoui are now free on bail.
Either they never will terrorists, or they are free on bail and are terrorists.
They are so lucky that they are in the custody of Canada, a country with the rule of law and a functioning justice system.
A hundred miles further south, and they would be in Gitmo now.
That torturing mentally ill al Queida travel agent thing worked out great, didn’t it.
He is the defense department general council who said that we “had to” get convictions, and he authorized torture.
He is “returning to private life”, which is nicer than Bush’s desire to make him an appellate court federal judge.
This is very interesting:
Last week, a team of faculty and students from Seton Hall Law School—the folks who’ve worked tirelessly for years to document the government’s best evidence (PDF) against the Guantanamo prisoners—released a new report suggesting that the government has recorded all of the interrogations at Guantanamo. Using documents prepared by the government and obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the team established that all of the 24,000 interrogations conducted at the camp since 2002 were taped. This jibes with reports from the detainees themselves, who came forward to dispute CIA Director Michael Hayden’s claim last winter that the videotaping had been halted in 2002.
There is a very good that Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’ makes in this interview:
Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.
So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you. Likewise, the techniques that appeared in the War on Terror were already documented in INS lockups in Miami in the 1990s. There is no bright line between domestic and foreign torture; the stuff circulates.
Next time you talk with a wingnut, mention that.
And go read the full interview.
Following his disgraceful interview with the BBC, the National Lawyers Guild has requested that Antonin Scalia recuse himself from any torture related cases, as he has clearly prejudged this case, and shown himself not to be impartial in this matter:
Justice Scalia’s remarks inevitably pre-judge the issues in every case in which the Constitution might dictate suppression of evidence because of illegal police interrogation techniques, or the right to compensation of a person subjected to a violation of civil rights. We therefore call upon Justice Scalia to recuse himself from any case which comes before the Court in which such issues are at stake.
Increasingly, we have heard these outrageous statements from Scalia, the case of the obscene gesture in church comes to mind, and I’m wondering if we are seeing early onset Alzheimer’s.
Yep, ths striaght talker has voted against making torture illegal. He wants to be president, and that means that he has to make nice with pro-torture Neanderthals.
Additionally, McCain has Bo Harmon as his national political director. If you recall, Harman ran the 2002 Saxby Chambliss campaign against Max Cleland of Georgia, which questioned the courage of a man who lost an arm and both legs in military service to this country.
At the time, John McCain called it, “Worse than disgraceful,” but it now appears that it was not so disgraceful that he can’t hire this pig felching rat bastard.
As is clear from his BBC interview.
According to him, torture is fine to extract information, you just can’t use it in a sentence.
The depressing thing is that a deeply evil man such as this will live his life in luxury and comfort, and never be forced to confront the evil he supports.
Well, we now have the White House assurting that waterboarding is legal, simply because they say so, and you have our So-Called Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, saying that if the political hacks appointed by Bush and His Evil Minions™ in the Justice department said that it was OK, then there is no crime, so he will not investigate warrantless wiretapping or torture.
Seriously, these folks really hate most basic founding principal of the Republic, a nation of laws, and not men.
Well, we now know that the CIA tortured at least three suspects with waterboarding.
I looked around at some other articles, and found this on CNN:
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, who also testified at the hearing, said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA’s arsenal, according to The Associated Press. He said it would require the president’s consent and legal approval from the attorney general, the AP reported.
I think that he just pretty much admitted that George W. Bush personally authorized torture, and that the AG signed off on it.
The Hague, bitches.
Judge Richard W. Roberts of the DC court has given the Justice Department 3 weeks to explain how the tape destruction in November 2005 did not violate his July 2005 order not to do so.
During his confirmation hearings, Mukasey said that he would not be able to make a determination as to whether waterboarding was torture until after he consulted with the DoJ and intelligence officials about what was going on, and what legal justifications were used.
Well, Mukasey is appearing before the Senate next week, and Senators have figured that he has had plenty of time to get their answer:
January 23, 2008
The Honorable Michael Mukasey
Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20530Dear Attorney General Mukasey:
On October 23, 2007, we wrote to you to ask you whether the abusive interrogation technique known as waterboarding is illegal.
On October 30, you responded that waterboarding and other abusive techniques “seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me.” You said that you could not offer an opinion on the legality of waterboarding based on “hypothetical facts and circumstances” because you had not been briefed on the government’s interrogation techniques: “Legal opinions should treat real issues. I have not been briefed on techniques used in any classified interrogation program conducted by any government agency.” However, you committed that, “if confirmed I will review any coercive interrogation techniques currently used by the United States Government and the legal analysis authorizing their use to assess whether such techniques comply with the law.”
You were confirmed as Attorney General on November 8, 2007. On November 9, Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham sent you a letter stating, “The scenarios you previously described as hypothetical are no longer so, and you now have the benefit of full access to classified programs and memoranda. We urge you to acquaint yourself immediately with these matters and take the opportunity to make clear that waterboarding is illegal and can never be employed.”
It has been over two months since then, ample time for you to study this issue and reach a conclusion. On November 27, State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger said you were giving “high priority” to reviewing interrogation techniques, claiming, “I think there is a growing recognition … about the need for greater clarity about what is permitted and what is prohibited.”
Your failure to say whether waterboarding is legal has placed Judge Mark Filip, the nominee for Deputy Attorney General, in a difficult position. When Judge Filip was asked at his confirmation hearing whether waterboarding was unlawful, he was unwilling to answer because you were studying the issue: “[T]he Attorney General of the United States is presently reviewing that legal question. … I don’t think I can, or anyone who could potentially [be] considered for his deputy, could get out in front of him on that question while it’s under review.”
We are concerned that your silence poses a more serious threat to American servicemembers. As we noted in our October 23rd letter:
Your unwillingness to state that waterboarding is illegal may place Americans at risk of being subjected to this abusive technique. If the United States does not explicitly and publicly condemn waterboarding, it will be more difficult to argue that enemy forces cannot waterboard American prisoners.
This concern was highlighted recently during “The Legal Rights of Guantanamo Detainees: What Are They, Should They Be Changed, and Is an End in Sight?” a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security on December 11. Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, Legal Advisor to the Convening Authority for the Office of Military Commissions, refused to say whether it would be legal for the Iranian government to subject an American citizen to waterboarding. He also testified that it is possible that information obtained through waterboarding could be introduced as evidence in a military commission.
In stark contrast to Brigadier General Hartmann’s refusal to say whether it would be illegal to waterboard an American, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell recently opined that waterboarding would be torture if used against him. According to The New Yorker, DNI McConnell said, “If I had water draining into my nose, oh God, I just can’t imagine how painful! Whether it’s torture by anybody else’s definition, for me it would be torture.”
Please respond to the following questions:
1. Is the use of waterboading as an interrogation technique illegal under U.S. law, including treaty obligations?2. Based on your review of other coercive interrogation techniques and the legal analysis authorizing their use, what is your assessment of whether such techniques comply with the law?
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
Patrick J. Leahy
Edward M. Kennedy
Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
Herb Kohl
Dianne Feinstein
Russell D. Feingold
Charles E. Schumer
Benjamin L. Cardin
Sheldon Whitehouse
The prosecution asked for life, and for the U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke to ignore the fact that he was tortured for 3½ years, but the judge disagreed, and further disagreed about the severity of the offense
“There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere,” Cooke said. “There was never a plot to overthrow the United States government.”
…
In arriving at Padilla’s sentence, Cooke said she took into account the harsh, isolated conditions he faced during his time in a brig as an enemy combatant after his 2002 arrest. Defense lawyers claim he was tortured by the military, but U.S. officials denied that and Cooke never used the word torture.
Sentencing guidelines had suggested a range of between 30 years and life for all three, but Cooke used her discretion to go below even the minimum. Besides Padilla’s sentence, Hassoun got 15 years and eight months and Jayyousi 12 years and eight months.
It’s nice to see the prosecutors getting slapped down, at least a little over torture.
While I understand that the protests of the Vermont congressional delegation (see also here) is largely an issue of local pride and economics for them, the idea that we are outsourcing this to a government that routinely imprisons dissidents, suppresses free speech, and aggressively uses the death penalty boggles the mind.
This isn’t from The Onion. This is a real story.
Happy Martin Luther King Birthday Holiday everyone.
Well, it appears that the Canadian Foreign Ministry will rewrite its training manual so that the United States will no longer be listed as a nation that tortures.
“We find it to be offensive for us to be on the same list with countries such as Iran and China. Quite frankly it’s absurd,” U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins told The Associated Press on Friday.
More absurd is that the United States does routinely torture people in its custody, and routinely sends people to other nations to be tortured.
I want my country back.