Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and then “rendered” by the U.S. to multiple countries (such as Morocco); held incommunicado (no access to lawyers, the International Red Cross or anyone else) and interrogated by U.S. agents until 2004; and then shipped off to Guantanamo, where he has remained ever since.
In May, 2008, Mohamed was accused in a Guantanamo military commission with various acts of Terrorism that carry the death penalty if he’s convicted. The key evidence against him are the confessions the U.S. obtained during that 2002-2004 time period. After charging him, the U.S. Government refused to provide his lawyers with documents and other evidence that would enable Mohamed to prove that those confessions were obtained via torture.
Both the Bush administration and the Obama administration leaned on the British government to stop the publication of documents that showed the US tortured Mohamed. Right wingers claimed that releasing this information would result in fire and brimstone falling from the sky, cats and dogs sleeping together, the end of the world as we know it.
But on 10 February 2010, the British courts ruled the documents must be released, that the fact that the US tortured Mohamed must be made public.
Now, I grant you that it’s only been a week, but it would appear that the world hasn’t come to an end. Though, my cat and my dog have been getting along better than usual.
From the Department of Public Relations, Nobel Peace Prize winning President Barack Obama ordered a missile strike in Yemen and the strike ended up killing 49 civilians. Al Queda has already issued a statement thanking the US for improving its recruiting drive.
Obama is going to build a new supermax facility in Thompson, Illinois. It will be used to house some of the prisoners who had previously been held at Guantanamo, specifically, it will hold prisoners who aren’t going to get a trial, who are going to be held indefinitely without trial, or who will be put before a military commission.
So, this prison has exactly the same problems as Guantanamo. When Obama pledged to close Gitmo, many assumed that meant he was going to return the US to a nation based on law and due process and rights for the accused. But apparently, Obama just meant that he was going to change its address.
In January, Obama supported the release of photos showing Americans torturing prisoners. By May, Obama had reversed his position, signing into law a specific exemption preventing the photos from being made public. In November, a US court overturned a lower court’s decision to release the photos, saying the new law needed to be taken into account.
Less than a year into his presidency, Obama has won the Nobel peace prize.
This same day, Glenn Greenwald notes the accomplishments that Obama has achieved in those few months:
In February, the Obama DOJ went to court to block victims of rendition and torture from having a day in court, adopting in full the Bush argument that whatever was done to the victims is a “state secret” and national security would be harmed if the case proceeded. The following week, the Obama DOJ invoked the same “secrecy” argument to insist that victims of illegal warrantless eavesdropping must be barred from a day in court, and when the Obama administration lost that argument, they engaged in a series of extraordinary manuevers to avoid complying with the court’s order that the case proceed, to the point where the GOP-appointed federal judge threatened the Government with sanctions for noncompliance. Two weeks later, “the Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, [tried] to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.”
In April, the Obama DOJ, in order to demand dismissal of a lawsuit brought against Bush officials for illegal spying on Americans, not only invoked the Bush/Cheney “state secrets” theory, but also invented a brand new “sovereign immunity” claim to insist Bush officials are immune from consequences for illegal domestic spying. The same month — in the case brought by torture victims — an appeals court ruled against the Obama DOJ on its “secrecy” claims, yet the administration vowed to keep appealing to prevent any judicial review of the interrogation program. In responses to these abuses, a handful of Democratic legislators re-introduced Bush-era legislation to restrict the President from asserting “state secrets” claims to dismiss lawsuits, but it stalled in Congress all year. At the end of April and then again in August, the administration did respond to a FOIA lawsuit seeking the release of torture documents by releasing some of those documents, emphasizing that they had no choice in light of clear legal requirements.
In May, after the British High Court ruled that a torture victim had the right to obtain evidence in the possession of British intelligence agencies documeting the CIA’s abuse of him, the Obama administration threatened that it would cut off intelligence-sharing with Britain if the court revealed those facts, causing the court to conceal them. Also in May, Obama announced he had changed his mind and would fight– rather than comply with — two separate, unanimous court orders compelling the disclosure of Bush-era torture photos, and weeks later, vowed he would do anything (including issue an Executive Order or support a new FISA exemption) to prevent disclosure of those photos in the event he lost yet again, this time in the Supreme Court. In June, the administration “objected to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security.” In August, Obama Attorney General Eric Holder announced that while some rogue torturers may be subject to prosecution, any Bush officials who relied on Bush DOJ torture memos in “good faith” will “be protected from legal jeopardy.” And all year long, the Obama DOJ fought (unsuccessfully) to keep encaged at Guantanamo a man whom Bush officials had tortured while knowing he was innocent.
It’s kind of difficult to reconcile that Obama won the peace prize after doing all of THAT. Then I read a FAQ that reveals some of the myths about the Nobel peace prize:
Myth: The Nobel peace prize is awarded to recognize efforts for peace, human rights and democracy only after they have proven successful.
Fact: More often, the prize is awarded to encourage those who receive it to see the effort through, sometimes at critical moments.
So, maybe the Nobel commission is hoping Obama will stop continuing Bush’s torture doctrines. But the headliner reason given is because of Obama’s initives to reduce nuclear weapon stockpiles. Maybe the torture stuff might be a nice bonus.
A little while ago, Obama said that he wasn’t going to do a knee-jerk reaction to Afghanistan and simply send more troops without a good strategy to go with a surge. Within the next day, someone leaked a military report that said America will “fail” in Afghanistan if we don’t add more troops.
The gossip going around is that someone in the Pentagon leaked the report to put pressure on Obama to do the knee-jerk reaction and send more troops.
What has been leaked *since* is that the report says that Afghanistan will need a total of half a million American troops and will take at least 5 years
If true, I’m definitely in the “need a strategy” camp before sending more troops. Half a million troops and five years is just plain crazy.
Obama is living in a fantasy world regarding the Mideast peace process.
Netanyahu knows that nothing Israel does will ever threaten the billions of dollars that the US sends Israel every year. Nothing. Therefore Netanyahu continues to build illegal israeli settlements on palestinian land, knowing that there are no real repurcussions to his actions.
Netanyahu is like the schoolyard bully who has to go to the principal’s office once in a while to listen to some pointless lecture about being nice, and then he goes back out into the schoolyard and bullies other students again. A stern lecture from Obama is of no significance to Israel so long as the money keeps coming in.
It looks more and more like the only way to break this chain is for the rest of the world to bring Israel up on war crime charges from it’s 2008 bombardment and invasion of Gaza, and force the US to face it’s inaction (and monetary support) around Israel being a bully.
So long as the US continues sending billions of dollars to Israel every year, so long as the US uses its veto power on the Security Council to prevent the UN from condemning Israel’s actions, there will be no peace in the middle east.
Obama is pushing to stop the release of torture photos. He says it’s because the photos will be a recruiting poster for terrorists and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be killed.
CQPolitics has an article today (16 June 2009) that questions this claim with evidence. The Abu Ghraib photos were first seen on “60 Minutes” on 28 April 2004. The image above shows American deaths in Iraq over time. For 2004, the numbers of dead/wounded are:
The one thing these numbers show is that the number of deaths and wounded drop after the photos are released. It is doubtful that the photos caused the numbers to drop, but to say the photos caused the number of attacks to rise would first require the numbers to actually be higher from before to after, and second would require that the photos were what actually caused the rise in numbers.
Since the numbers actually fell after the photos were made public, one cannot assert that the release of photos would cause attacks to rise without disregard to the historical evidence to the contrary.
The CQ Politics article states:
Defense Department data and independent experts confirm there is no clear link between the Abu Ghraib scandal and violence in Iraq.
Drawing a connection between the Abu Ghraib photos and the lethal violence that occurred afterward in Iraq “is opinion, not analysis,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Simpler reasons exist for why Obama does not want the photos of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners to be released than the fabrication that it will cause more attacks. Americans might finally demand that Obama prosecute Americans who committed torture and the Bush administration people who authorized torture. And Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to “look forward, not back” on torture. He has made clear that he doesn’t want to investigate criminal activity.
And though Obama says he doesn’t want the photos released because of attacks, the facts don’t support that notion. So, it might be more accurate to say that Obama doesn’t want to release the photos so he doesn’t have to prosecute the people who committed and authorized torture.
For all you ignorant folks who are mad at Obama for apologizing to Iran because you don’t think we did anything wrong:
It’s called Operation Ajax. Learn about it. Deal with it.
In 1950’s, Iran had a democratically elected government. At that time, they were also under a colonial relic with the British that gave all (no, really, ALL) of Iran’s oil to Britain, and Britain paid Iran a pittance. And the Iranians decided it was their oil and they should get the money for it.
The British responded by telling the US that Iran was turning communist, which plugged into the cold war fear that gripped America in the 50’s. So, the US sent the CIA over to Iran and they purchased a revolution and installed a puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran.
The Shah ruled Iran for a quarter century. He stayed in power because America made certain that he had money and military equipment to crush any opposition. By the 1970’s, the Shah’s secret police had tens of thousands of Iranians in secret prisons and was torturing them to force their compliance and make the rest of the Iranian population think twice about opposing his rule.
In 1979, the Iranians had had enough and overthrew the Shah’s government while he was out of the country. The Iranian Revolution was supported by many Iranians across the political spectrum. The Iranians demanded that the Shah be returned to Iran to stand trial for his crimes of torture and murder. But the United States offered to host the Shah, which incensed the Iranians and reminded them of who had put the Shah in power in the first place. It was at this time that Iranians stormed the Embassy and took the Americans there hostage.
The Iranian students who stormed the embassy had three demands. The return of the Shah to Iran. That the US apologize for the 1953 overthrow of the democratic government of Iran. That the US release Iranian assets currently frozen in the US.
The US did none of those things.
The US overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 and installed the ruthless dictator the Shah of Iran for 25 years. This dictator radicallized the Iranian people and eventually sparked the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah. The resulting power vacuum was eventually filled by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the radical religious extremists that followed him.
This is what America did. This is the mess that America created. If you don’t think America should apologize for these actions and you don’t think Iran should need an apology, just imagine if our worst enemy came into America in 1953, overthrew our goverment, installed a dictator who tortured tens of thousands of people over 25 years. Just imagine that the Soviet Union somehow sent KGB spies who managed to overthrow Eisenhower and install a puppet government. Do you think Americans might be a little mad after 25 years of oppression? Do you think Americans might be a little mad if some foreign country was taking all our oil and paying us nothing for it?
The founding fathers fought the British back around 1776 because they were taxing our tea. Originally, there was a large portion of “loyalists”, people loyal to Britain, in the colonies. In earlier times, the “revolution” against the British was called “Boston’s fight” by colonialists in other parts of the land who wanted to remain British subjects. The Boston Massacre, an incident in which British troops killed 5 colonialists, radicalized a huge swath of the colonies against Britain.
The difference was that we were luckier than the Iranians after our revolution. The original constitutional convention was mostly a fight between state’s power and federal power. The constitution is mainly a functional document about who has power and how they get it. The Bill of Rights wasn’t added until later when some states refused to sign without it. There were some mention of our first president, George Washington, becoming the next “King George”. And our constitution wasn’t exactly the great document of freedom that we like to think of today: white male land owners had the political power. Women couldn’t vote. Blacks couldn’t vote. The instutition of slavery was codified into the Constitution as “other persons”.
It took America another hundred years to finally face the immorality of slavery, and even then, it took a civil war because half the country didn’t want to give it up. It took another hundred years before blacks had anything resembling true equality. Women didn’t get to vote until 1920.
America had a direct hand in overthrowing the democratic government of Iran in 1953. If you think the Iranian’s were supposed to just roll over and accept that, you don’t even know how our own nation began.
