Tag: Torture

Good for the Canadians

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The Canadian government has decided to pay Can$ 10 million to Omar Khadr.

To recapitulate the story, he was taken to Afghanistan by his father as a 15 year old, and then threw a grenade in a firefight that killed a US soldier.

He was taken into custody, tortured repeatedly, and eventually pled guilty, he was later repatriated to Canada, and then released on bail in 2014.

Khadr filed suit against the Canadian government for depriving him of his rights, and illegally treating as an adult while in detention, and now Canada has settled with him, paying him Can$10 million settlement:

Canada’s Liberal government will apologize to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Omar Khadr and pay him around C$10 million ($7.7 million) in compensation, two sources close to the matter said on Tuesday, prompting opposition protests.

A Canadian citizen, Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at age 15 after a firefight with U.S. soldiers. He pleaded guilty to killing a U.S. Army medic and became the youngest inmate held at the military prison in Cuba.

Khadr later recanted and his lawyers said he had been grossly mistreated. In 2010, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that Canada breached his rights by sending intelligence agents to interrogate him and sharing the results with the United States.

The case proved divisive: defenders called Khadr a child soldier while the then-Conservative government dismissed calls to seek leniency, noting he had pleaded guilty to a serious crime.

The US took a child soldier and treated him as a criminal, they then tortured him abd coerced a confession out of him with the active support of the Canadian state security apparatus, a fact that Canada’s judiciary has repeatedly taken a dim view of.

This is a good thing, though I am not surprised that former PM Stephen Harper had to exit the scene for the right thing to be done.  Harper was to doing the right thing as Josef Stalin was to rule of law.

It’s nice that the Canadian government is doing the right thing.

It will never happen here, since Obama decided to normalize this behavior, (Looking forward, not backward) and then systematically promoted the people who aided and abetted crimes against humanity in the US state security apparatus.

There will never be an accounting for the torturers, much like there will never be an accounting for the banksters who blew up the world in 2008.

I Really Hope that Prosecutors Don’t Blink

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The new 2nd in command at the CIA is Gina Haspel, who was torturer-in-chief following 911, is now the target of a legal action against her for crimes against humanity in Germany:

In late March of 2002, Gina Haspel had very little time to prepare for the torture to come. Haspel ran the “Cat’s Eye,” a secret CIA jail located near Bangkok, the capital city of Thailand. It was very warm, 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit), with the kind of humidity that makes your clothes stick to you, but inside the black site, also known as “Detention Site Green,” the air conditioning had been cranked up to make it extremely cold. The cells had Spartan furnishings: a plank bed, four halogen lights, four meters by four meters (13 feet by 13 feet) of confinement with no windows.

America’s Central Intelligence Agency planned to use this site to test, for the first time, the new “enhanced interrogation” techniques President George W. Bush had approved six months earlier. Al-Qaida fighters’ will was to be broken through waterboarding, sleep deprivation or humiliation through forced nudity until they could be turned into valuable sources in the “war on terror,” which had been declared by the U.S. after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Haspel, a 45-year-old intelligence agent, was to carry out the first torture sessions in Thailand.

Fifteen years later, in 2017, President Donald Trump would appoint Haspel as the CIA’s deputy director.

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This week, human rights lawyers at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) in Berlin submitted a filing about former agent Haspel to supplement a December 2014 criminal complaint over the CIA’s extraordinary renditions and torture program it lodged with the Federal Public Prosecutor in Karlsruhe. The new information could create additional pressure for the Karlsruhe-based office to act. Thus far, the Federal Public Prosecutor has rejected calls to file any charges against Americans responsible for the torture – be it then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for incidents inside Abu Ghraib, former CIA head George Tenet or the intelligence agents at the National Security Agency (NSA) who eavesdropped on the German chancellor’s mobile phone. When it comes to relations with the United States, Germany seems to have a habit of looking the other way. That also extends to the Federal Public Prosecutor.

………

Months later, Abu Zubaydah and another prisoner from Cat’s Eye were taken to a secret jail in a forest in the Masuria region of Poland, and later to Guantánamo. Abu Zubaydah lost his left eye in detention. This, however, doesn’t seem to have done anything to hurt Gina Haspel’s career: She was appointed as chief of staff to the head of the directorate of operations at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in Langley – and took care in this new role to ensure that incriminating evidence of the torture disappeared. She ordered the destruction of all 92 videotapes showing the torture of prisoners at Cat’s Eye.

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The human rights lawyers would also like to see their criminal complaint force Germany’s top prosecutor to address the complex issue and its legal implications. If Gina Haspel or other suspects were to travel to Germany in the future, the Federal Public Prosecutor could issue an arrest warrant.

I really hope that the Germans put out an arrest warrant, but I see the possibility of that as being slim to none.

It’s pretty clear that there will never be any consequences for torturers in the United States, Barack Obama ensured this when he normalized their behavior, and not only looked the other way, but facilitated their rise in the US state security apparatus.

Another Stopped Clock Moment from Trump

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After years of litigation and stonewalling from the Obama administration, the Trump administration has handed over the full classified Senate torture report to a Federal Court:

Credit where credit is due: Trump has done more to preserve the full CIA Torture Report than Obama ever did. On his way out the door, the DOJ fought on his behalf in federal court, arguing against an order to deposit the full report with the court clerk for preservation in the ongoing trial of Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, who has alleged he was waterboarded while detained by the CIA.

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 Maybe it’s oneupmanship or maybe the Trump’s legal counsel feels it has too much on its plate already, but as the New York Times’ Charlie Savage reports, Team Trump is handing over a full copy of the Torture Report to the court as requested.

[A]s the Obama era came to an end, two Federal District Court judges for the District of Columbia ordered the executive branch to provide a copy of the report to the court’s security officer, and today, on the deadline set by one of them, the Trump administration complied rather than appeal.

A one-page notice of compliance [PDF] was issued by the White House on February 10th.

Respondents are filing this notice to advise the Court that, in accordance with the orders entered in the above captioned cases on December 28, 2016, and January 23, 2017,2 on February 6, 2017, the Government deposited for the Court Information Security Officers (CISOs) for secure storage a complete and unredacted electronic copy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program (2014). Specifically, the Government deposited the electronic copy that had been previously delivered to the Department of Justice Office of Legislative Affairs.

My guess is that this is a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason:  It is likely that Trump and  Evil Minions™ probably did this as a big “f%$# you” to Barack Obama.

Still, on this one issue, it does give the inverted traffic cone a leg up on the worst constitutional law professor ever.