War Handwavium

The ACLU is starting a campaign to restore the rule of law in America. They’ve brought together numerous documents showing the extent that Americans committed torture and the suspension of rule of law to cover up that torture.

http://aclu.org/accountability/

They have a massive list of torture documents obtained through the Freedom Of Information Act.

http://aclu.org/accountability/released.html

They have a list of all the high level Bush administration officials who had a hand in creating America’s torture program.

http://aclu.org/accountability/tortureprogram.html

And they have a list of things that citizens can do to help restore the rule of law in America.

http://aclu.org/accountability/action.html

Good stuff.

As always, you can write your representatives here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/officials/congress/?lvl=C

After more than 7 years, Lakhdar Boumediene was released from Guantanamo on May 15, 2009.

He had worked in Sarajevo for a humanitarian organization when he was picked up by the Bosnians in October of 2001. The US had told the Bosnians that he and five other Algerians were planning to bomb the US embassy. Bosnians said that U.S. officials exerted heavy pressure to round up suspects, threatening to withdraw U.S. peacekeeping troops if Bosnian officials didn’t act. After 3 months of investigations, the Bosnian supreme court said there was no evidence of any bombing and ordered their release. The six were picked up by US personel and transferred to Guantanamo.

In late 2004, the six men were sent before Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) of three military officers. The CSRTs concluded that the six men were properly classified as “enemy combatants” based on classified evidence, which justified their contineud detention at Guantanamo. In 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, US military tribunals declared that Boumediene and the other five men were still a threat and needed to be kept as prisoners.

Three British prisoners at Guantanamo described how the Algerians were treated:

They were treated particularly badly. They were moved every two hours. They were kept naked in their cells. They were taken to interrogation for hours on end. They were short shackled for sometimes days on end. They were deprived of their sleep. They never got letters, nor books, nor reading materials. The Bosnians had the same interrogators for a while as we did and so we knew the names which were the same as ours and they were given a very hard time by those. They told us that the interrogators said if they didn’t cooperate that they could ensure that something would happen to their families in Algeria and in Bosnia.

In 2006, The Washington Post wrote an article about the Algerian Six, stating that the original allegations about the embassy attack have been discredited and dropped but that the men were still being held. U.S. officials have pressed Algeria to take back the prisoners on the condition that they be confined or kept under surveillance there. The Post reports that the Pentagon knows the men are not guilty but is unwilling to let them go free because that would be an acknowledgment of a grave error.

At one point, the US military accused one of the Algerian Six of assisting Bin Ladin in Tora Bora in December of 2001. But he was being held by the Bosnian police at the time. Later, the US accused him of having ties to Hamas because of the ring he wore. But it was an anniversy ring common to Bosnian muslims.

The Defense Department declined to answer specific questions about the case, saying that some evidence against the men remains classified.

In 2005, when Bosnia asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to have the six men returned to Bosnia, Rice replied that it was not possible to free the six Algerians because “they still possess important intelligence data” and pose a threat to the security of the United States.

What is important to note here is how much the US government used the “We have evidence to prove their guilt, but we can’t show you because it’s classified, so you’ll just have to trust us” approach to justify keeping these six innocent men in prison for over 7 years. What’s important to note is that the military “tribunals” that were claimed to be superior to civilian courts year after year declared these men to be a threat and insisted on their continued imprisonment. What’s important to note just how much of a nightmare the US created simply becaues bureaucrats and military personel were willing to imprison innocent men simply to cover their own asses.

And why this is important to note is because Obama is using the exact same excuses today to justify keeping people imprisoned in Guantanamo. We cannot convict these men in any court of law that has any requirement for real evidence, so Obama tells us we must create a different kind of system that doesn’t need evidence to keep human beings imprisoned indefinitely. Trust us, Obama says, this is a different kind of extra-judicial process. Trust us, Obama says, we won’t imprison anyone who is innocent. And yet, these exact same excuses were used to justify torturing hundreds of innocent people at Guantanamo for years and years.

Boumediene says he wants to sue Bush and the others in the US government who made sure he stayed imprisoned in Guantanamo. Whether Obama has the courage to let the truth of Boumediene’s tale be known has yet to be seen. Whether Obama has the courage to the level of transparancy that would be needed to allow Boumediene to get justice in a court of law remains to be seen as well. When Obama says that now is the time to look forward, not back, he’s asking you to ignore Boumediene. He’s asking you to pretend that the US didn’t wrongly imprison and torture Boumediene for the last 7 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhdar_Boumediene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_Six

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/20/AR2006082000660_pf.html

I think it contains every single excuse used by a torture apologist.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/torture-apologia-chart-by-batocchio-it.html

The title should be “Cookies or Waterboarding?” but Eddie Izzard really gets credit for pointing out the assinine stupidity of those defending torture as more effective that normal interrogation techniques.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNjcuZ-LiSY

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

TIME spoke with several interrogators who have worked for the U.S. military as well as others who have recently retired from the intelligence services (the CIA and FBI turned down requests for interviews with current staffers). All agreed with Soufan: the best way to get intelligence from even the most recalcitrant subject is to apply the subtle arts of interrogation rather than the blunt instruments of torture.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/09171190149100

Obama is the first president to suggest that he ought to be able to preventively detain anyone, for any reason, for as long as he wants, without any evidence of an actual crime, just in case that person might commit a crime in the future.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/05/22/preventive_detention/index.html

Some people with a sense of civil liberty saw this coming.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/12/09/guantanamo/

This isn’t saying we want to hold POW’s until the end of the war. POW’s are captured on a battlefield. POW’s do not include civiliians and are limited to armed combatants. And the “War On Terror” is a propaganda campaign with no end in sight. We’re still waging a “War on Drugs” decades after it started. Politicians will be waging a “War On Terror” for decades into the future.

This is Obama saying he wants to detain anyone, foreign or American, whether they committed a crime or not, whether there is evidence or not, on the grounds that maybe, perhaps, possibly, they might commit a crime in the future.

Obama is proposing America’s first Pre-Crime unit.

The reason, and I mean the only reason, anyone is proposing this is because every single detainee in Guantanamo has been tortured, and torture makes evidence inadmissable, which means none of these detainees can be convicted in any legal court of law. Not to mention that torture creates a demand that the torturers be prosecuted for torturing. Had Bush and Company not been so hot to trot to cut a man’s testicles and repeatedly bring men close to death via drowning, we wouldn’t have this problem now.

But now it’s Obama’s problem. And the right thing to do is to return to the rule of law, not invent laws that say there is no law. Obama wants to maintain his popularity, and Cheney and other psychopaths will howl murder if a single detainee is released from Guantanamo. And because Darth Cheney has tainted the evidence against every detainee, we cannot secure any convictions unless we submit to Darth Cheney’s notion of Rule of Law: It’s legal if I say so.

If this becomes “law”, America is doomed.

http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/05/20/worse-than-waterboarding/

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Yvonne Bradley was the lawyer for Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national who was arrested by the Pakistani government in April 2002 on suspicion of being a member of al Qaeda. He was then shuffled through a series of CIA “ghost prisons” before being imprisoned at Guantanamo for five years.

According to Bradley, when Mohamed was first held at a CIA prison in Morocco, they would torture him by cutting his genitals with a razor blade. During this torture, Mohamad confessed that he had attended an al Qaeda training camp and discussed plans to make a dirty bomb

But then, someone figured out that Mohamad was innocent, had no associations with terrorism, and had only confessed under duress from torture. After years of detention, he was released and returned to the United Kingdom.

Another stunning victory for torture and skipping due process.

This is a list of statistics relating to people being tortured at Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other sites as of May 2009.

Date started: October 2001, after 9/11, after invasion of Afghanistan

total detainees ever in custody: at least 775
detainees released without charge: 420
current number of detainees: 245
predicted to be put on trial: 60 to 80
predicted to be released: 170

attempted suicides: hundreds
successful suicides: at least 4

Number of cases of abuse: at least 330
Number of detainees involved in abuse case: at least 460
Number of US personnel involved in abuse cases: at least 600
Number of US personnel convicted of abuse: 54
Number of US personnel serving prison time for abuse: 40

Number of detainees who have died while in US custody: at least 100
Number of detainees deaths ruled a homicide: at least 30
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/06/18/ex-state-dept-official-hundreds-of-detainees-died-in-us-custody-at-least-25-murdered/

Number of tapes made by CIA showing torture of detainees: at least 92
Number of tapes destroyed by CIA: At least 92
Number of hours of video footage of CIA torture: hundreds of hours

American lives saved from torture-induced confessions: Zero

Number of detainees convicted of terrorist activities as of 21 May 2009: three

http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2006/04/25/numbers-0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagram_torture_and_prisoner_abuse

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/washington/03web-intel.html?_r=1

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obama_analysis

A list of documents obtained by the ACLU using the Freedom of Information Act are listed here:

http://www.aclu.org/accountability/released.html

A list of autopsy reports of prisoners in US custody is here:

http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/102405/

Senate report on torture of prisoners in US custody:

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=305735

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. In his report, he stated “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture.”

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/41514.html

In 2008, Taguba wrote a preface a Physicians for Human Rights report accusing the Bush White House of war crimes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/06/18/BL2008061801546.html

Dasht-i-Leili_massacre: between 250 and 3,000 (depending on sources) Taliban prisoners were shot and/or suffocated to death in metal truck containers, while being transferred by U.S. and Northern Alliance soldiers from Kunduz to Sheberghan prison in Afghanistan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dasht-i-Leili_massacre

Obama administration officials said that there were no grounds for a war crimes investigation around the Dasht-i-Leili_massacre, not because they said no crime occurred, but because they claim the prisoners were not killed by American forces. Rather, they claim the prisoners were killed by Afghan forces who were working with American military and the CIA.

Dostum, was the Northern Alliance general who is accused of overseeing the atrocities. A former U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, told the Times that the Bush administration was reluctant to investigate the deaths, even though Dostum was on the payroll of the CIA and his soldiers worked with U.S. special forces in 2001.

Dostum was suspended from his military post last year on suspicion of threatening a political rival, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently rehired him.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090711/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/us_afghan_war_crimes

RE: Torture tapes. “The existence and destruction of the tapes was first revealed on Thursday by CIA Director Michael Hayden in a letter to CIA employees. … Hayden made the improbable claim that the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA interrogators from retaliation by Al Qaeda. He wrote in his letter that the CIA halted the practice of taping interrogations in 2002, after only a few recordings had been made.”

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7579

The Obama administration finally released the last four secret torture memos from the Bush administration that clearly show the Bush administration approved the use of torture.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html

Obama then announced that “nothing will be gained” by prosecuting people who committed war crimes… because… they… were… Americans.

“Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/countdown-special-comment-future-us-depend

I can’t tell if Obama is naive and thinks that Bush was a singular bad apple the likes of which America will never see again. (Bush will not be the last tyrant America will have to suffer. Future tyrants will see Bush’s ability to get away with 8 years of torture and take that as a green light to more tyranny.) I can’t tell if Obama is avoiding a political storm and merely hopes that it all magically goes away. (It won’t go away. Ignoring it will only make it worse.) But what I realized is that it doesn’t matter what Obama’s motivations are. What matters are his actions, his deeds. And his deeds are that of a man who is suggesting that we should not prosecute war criminals because they happen to be American.

Glenn Greenwald goes into the legal details here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/17/prosecutions/index.html

To quote General Pace, http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hirsch.php?articleid=8678

“It is the absolute responsibility of everybody in uniform to disobey an order that is either illegal or immoral.”

Pace was saying this to Iraqi commanders before the US invaded, but it applies to everyone in uniform.

Anyone remember Abu Graib? The torture of prisoners by American soldiers? Ring a bell? Pfc. Lynndie England defended her part in the crimes committed at Abu Graib by invoking the “we were just following orders” defense. http://hnn.us/articles/5378.html

“We think everything was justified because we were instructed to do this and to do that.”

Abu Graib is not a precedence that America wants to continue with the crimes at Guantanamo and the crimes at the American base in Bagram, Afghanistan. We do not want to be a nation that acts solely on the moral compass handed to us by our superiors. We cannot.

And we become complicit if we allow our country to do that without strong vocal protest for justice, for transparancy, for rule of law, for democracy, for freedom, and for liberty. Because what is liberty if it is solely what our politicians decide they are willing to grant us? What is justice if it is solely what our politicians tell us? What is democracy if it is solely what our incumbent political leaders say it is, which they generally say is more of them.

Democracy only exists as long as it is sourced by “we the people”. If we sit back and allow this grand injustice to pass without comment, then we are no longer a democracy. We’re a volunteer tyranny.

Write your representatives and give them an earful. Let them know that Americans still demand rule of law, due process, and that criminals be prosecuted even if they were working for the government at the time. Tell them “I was just following orders” isn’t good enough. And tell them that the people in the Bush administration who gave the orders that others followed should be prosecuted first.

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/officials/congress/

From an article by Scott Horton in Harper’s Magazine:

The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgment that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes.

George W. Bush and company not only knew that US personel were anal raping detainees in secret prisons, they were trying to stop legislation for military contractors because the law specifically outlawed anal rape of detainees, and Bush-Co wanted to keep it legal.

The Bush administration attempted to create a legal loophole for military contractors to anal rape detainees.

If you’re mind is not boggling right now, you’re not paying attention.

Whatever Obama thinks about “looking forward” rather than “looking back”, there can be absolutely no doubt that Bush-Co committed massive violations of the Geneva Convention, Bush-Co committed massive War Crimes. Letting these activities go without any serious attempt to bring justice back to the country is morally unforgivable.

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004409

found via Hullabaloo:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/breaking-down-sense-of-impenetrability.html

To quote Hullabaloo: Are we really just going to let this stuff go? Really?