War Handwavium

The CIA has refused to release further documents related to its controversial terrorist rendition, detention and interrogation programs, saying doing so would threaten national security.

In other words, they lawyered up and pled the fifth on the grounds that it would incriminate them.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?

Oh, if only they had given the thousands of innocent prisoners they tortured these very same rights.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090902/pl_afp/usattacksciaintelligenceprobe

excerpt:

In one of the cases mentioned, two women and three children were standing in front of their home after a soldier ordered them outside. At least three of them were holding pieces of white cloth when a soldier opened fire, killing two girls aged two and seven and wounding the third girl and their grandmother.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/08/200981335844986966.html

(that we know of)

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.

And apparently, he was tortured in American custody.

I thought we all “learned our lesson” about torture? I thought we were never going to torture again? What about the international backlash that will endanger American lives?

Enough is enough. Release the photos. Prosecute the law breakers. Stop endangering American lives.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/11/target-of-obama-era-rendi_n_256499.html

The US has a bunch of photos of prisoners held by Americans being tortured. The Bush administration and now the Obama administration are arguing that these photos cannot be released because they will create international backlash and cause terrorists to attack Americans.

Let’s assume for the moment, that this backlash argument is true. Let’s assume that these photos are never released. Let’s assume that the American Government is able to torture prisoners for years, including killing at least 100 of them, and are never prosecuted for those crimes.

Are we saying that these Americans who authorized, ordered, and executed the torturing of prisoners have learned their lessons? That they’ll never do it again? Are we saying that the US Government will never again overstep its bounds?

Because if the government did NOT learn it’s lesson, if the people who authorized, ordered, and executed the torture of prisoners are simply waiting to torture again, then doesn’t that mean there could be another torture incident? Maybe more photographs that will have to be suppressed because it will create an international backlash that could kill Americans?

Obama is currently working on a way transfer prisoners from Guantanamo but keeping them in a due-process-free zone identical to Guantanamo. He’s working on a way to imprison people without due process, who have not committed a crime, indefinitely and without recourse to law.

We still have massive domestic spying going on. We still have a massive chunk of rights ripped up and thrown to the ground.

And now Obama is looking to ramp up the military presence in Afghanistan, from 30,000 troops when he got into office to 120,000 by the end of his first year in office.

This is the same Afghanistan where CIA predator drones have repeatedly killed Afghan civilians, Afghan civilians at wedding parties. This is the same Afghanistan where Afghan General Abdul Rashid Dostum working with our military and paid by the CIA committed a massive attrocity of killing some 2,000 prisoners by suffocating them in container trucks.

Are we really saying that the US government will stop committing attrocities that will create international backlash? Are we really saying that these torture photos are the only ones we have to worry about?

If backlash is the true concern here, then the long view is that we must make sure that these incidents stop. Because if the US government continues to violate humanitarian laws and cause incidents that generate international backlash that threatens American lives, then we’re in for serious trouble in the long term.

And how do we make sure the US government does NOT commit more attrocities in the future? How do we prevent more backlash in the future? We have been given two options: (A) Bury the evidence or (B) Air the evidence and prosecute those who violated the law.

If we bury the evidence, that may reduce the backlash from that one particular incident. But it enboldens the government to continue its behaviour of law breaking. And if the US government continues to break humanitarian law in the future, then that can do nothing but create far more backlash than any single incident.

The alternative is to release the evidence and prosecute the law breakers. Make it known to future Americans that using the government’s power to commit attrocities will not be tolerated.

The “we must keep the photos secret to prevent international backlash and protect American lives” only works if you are short-sighted. It only works if you think the American Government has somehow “Learned its lesson”.

Tell me, has Dick Cheney learned his lesson? Has he had a change of heart? Has he shown regret and remorse for his hand in the torture of thousands of prisoners for years, many of whom were innocent?

I don’t think so.

In fact, it seems fairly apparent that Dick Cheney is trying to exert influence on the US government to get it to continue his lawless and inhumane methods. And Cheney isn’t the only one, just the most visible and the most cranky.

If we want to prevent international backlash and protect American lives, then we must think of the long-view of American behavior. Covering up this one attrocity and letting the criminals get away with breaking the law will only enable and encourage more law-breaking in the future, creating more attrocities, and creating more international backlash, endangering more lives.

If the Government were truly interested in saving American lives, they would publish all the photos and prosecute those who broke international law.

But the government isn’t interested in that at all. It’s interested in maintaining its power. Obama is interested in his own agenda and doesn’t want prosecutions to be a distraction. He wants to get reelected in 2012. Much lower on his priority is protecting American lives. And the neo-conservatives don’t give a damn about anything but themselves and their power. Like Cheney, they want to continue exerting their power and want nothing to be a restraint on their power, including an American public that would be aghast by their behaviour if it were revealed in the photos of their crimes.

Release the photos. Prosecute those who violated international law. Protect American lives.

It’s 60 years old.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/europe/2009/08/200981212154828506.html

Go here to demand the Attorney General investigate those who approved this tortured logic:

http://www.aclu.com/torturedlogic/

Hillary Clinton recently demanded that Kenya set up a special tribunal to bring to trial the perpetrators of political violence in that country that killed over a thousand civilians over its presidential elections.

Wait. Clinton wants Kenya to investigate its war crimes?

Maybe Kenya doesn’t want to look back but instead wants to focus on looking forward? Maybe the President of Kenya is reading from President Obama’s playbook: don’t investigate your own government’s past.

Clinton told Kenya that not investigating will result in perpetuationg the nation’s “culture of impunity”.

Well, duh. Isn’t that what the US is doing?

I think if I were a Kenyan politician, listening to Clinton berate me and my government about it’s lack of investigations into obvious war crimes, I’d probably stand up and shout, “Right back at you!”

Maybe Clinton should give a speech to Obama and demand that he investigate American war crimes, such as torturing prisoners against the Geneva Convention. Maybe Clinton should warn Obama about the “culture of impunity” that not investigating will perpetuate.

Otherwise, it’s hard to take seriously these sorts of demands by the US for other countries to investigate their war crimes.

I’m just sayin’.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/world/africa/06diplo.html?hp

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:

January: 47/188
February: 19/150
March: 52/323
April: 136/1214
28 April 2004: Photos appear on “60 Minutes”
May: 80/757
June: 42/589
July: 54/552

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.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003143986&cpage=1

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm

Khalid El-Masri was a German citizen when he was detained on 31 December 2003 by Macedonian officials because his name was on a terrorist list. American security officials, described as a “black snatch team”, renditioned El-Masri on 24 January 2004.

El-Masri alleges that they beat him, stripped him naked, drugged him, and gave him an enema. He was then dressed in a diaper and a jumpsuit, and flown to Baghdad, then immediately to “the salt pit”, a covert CIA interrogation center in Afghanistan. El-Masri states that he was beaten and sodomized while in American custody.

In March, 2004, El-Masri went on a hunger strike to demand that he be given due process. He managed to get a meeting with the prison director and a CIA officer known as “The Boss”. They conceded he should not be imprisoned but refused to release him.

28 May 2004, El-Masri was released in the middle of the night on a desolate road in Albania with no funds to get home.

December 2005, El-Masri described an account of this whole experience in the Los Angeles Times.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/18/opinion/oe-masri18

December 2005, the ACLU helps El-Masri file suit in the USA against former CIA director George Tenet and the owners of the private jets, leased to the US government, that the CIA used to transport him. May 2006, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis, III dismissed the lawsuit, invoking the “state secrets privilege”. June 2007 the ACLU filed a petition for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court. October 2007, the petition was denied by the Supreme Court without comment.

The “state secret” that the government is apparently protecting? The fact that America kidnaps and tortures people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_el-Masri

I succumbed to Bush’s war handwavium without realizing it. The Bush administration refused to use the term “prisoners” because it would tie into the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Instead, Bush and his pals invented a non-existent class of humans called “detainees” who were not Geneva Convention “prisoners” of war. Thereby justifying through legal handwavium that these human beings captured during a time of war and held in American prisons were not prisoners of war.

It is similar in concept to the way Israel refuses to refer to the West Band and Gaza Strip as “occupied territories” because the Geneva Convention also has requirements as to how a military force must treat civilians in an occupied territory. Israel doesn’t want to follow these requirements, and indeed, has not followed these requirements since it captured and occupied these territories since the 1967 war. So Israel calls them “disputed” territories, not “occupied”, because they don’t want the linguistic connection to the Geneva Convention. Because they haven’t been following the Geneva Convention.

But today, I realized I have been duped. I’ve been referring to people being held in Guantanamo as “detainees” rather than “prisoners”. So, going forward, I will be refering to the people held in Guantanamo, and the even larger number of people held in Bagram, Afghanistan, as “prisoners”. It is an effort to remove the war handwavium put in place by the Bush administration and continued by Obama.

They are prisoners, not “detainees”.