With 21 ‘Phants voting against, largely, it appears, because the report in the Moonie Times saying that he would not prosecute torture was in error, and he actually has refused to rule out prosecutions.
Category: Torture
Speaking of Insubordination
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
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]
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
- Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
- 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.
- An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
Article 4
- 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.
- Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 5
- 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:
- When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
- When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
- When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.
- 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.
- This Convention does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with internal law.
Article 7
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!!!
Props to My Cousin
Who I’ve never met, Dianne Feinstein*, it appears that even though Obama has issued an executive order banning torture, she is proceeding with legislation to make it the law of the land:
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the committee, said that despite the executive orders she still planned to press for legislation mandating a single standard for military and C.I.A. interrogators. Such a law would be harder to reverse than Mr. Obama’s executive order, which he could alter or cancel at any time by issuing a new order.
Cool.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers.
Clinton Is Approved for State
94-2, but no vote on Holder yet.
Part of the delay on Eric Holder is because the ‘Phants want to bash Bill Clinton over pardons again, but it’s also because they want him to promise not to prosecute torture.
UN Rapporteur Says Obama Bound by International Law to Prosecute
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.
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.
I’m Sorry! Please Stop Beating Me!
It has now been reported that Muntader al-Zaidi, of shoe throwing fame, has apologized and pled guilty, along with asking for leniency from the court.
It is likely that if one were to review the court transcripts, that the translation from the Arabic would be, “Whatever you say. Please stop breaking my fingers.”
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
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.
5 Gitmo Detainees Ordered Released
This ruling is significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which that the judge used very strong language to express his displeasure with the government:
Ruling from the bench, Judge Richard Leon of U.S. District Court in Washington said that the information gathered on the men had been sufficient to hold them for intelligence purposes, but was not strong enough in court.
“To rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court’s obligation,” he said. He directed that the five men be released “forthwith” and urged the government not to appeal.
Also note that Judge Leon is a major wingnut, so this is not some wild eyed liberal “legislating from the bench.”