American War Crimes

Obama reverses course on alleged prison abuse photos
CNN News

President Obama said Wednesday he told government lawyers to object to a court-ordered release of additional images showing alleged abuse of detainees because the release could affect the safety of U.S. troops and "inflame anti-American opinion."

I think being in a fracking war zone, engaged in an illegal occupation is affecting their safety far more than this. But, that aside, they are big boys and have guns and know how to look out for themselves.

For Obama to pull a 180 and renege on his promise of transparency reeks of soulless political expediency. Obama does NOT want to see Bush investigated, as it will cause great controversy and detract from his place in history as the great "uniter". Obama knows that these pictures are so bad that he will not be able to stop an investigation, and that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the rest of the mob will be facing trial. He figures that such a trial will "split" the country in half between the right and left (it would but the only folks who'd be pissed at seeing Bush and Cheney in a Supermax are the 20% who worship these clowns) and that he could be facing a civil war given that lunatic Republicans like Rick Perry are already talking "secession".

By protecting war criminals and suppressing evidence of their crimes, Obama places this country, its soldiers and citizens, in far greater peril than he faces for releasing photos showing Americans committing war crimes. By actively shielding these people from prosecution he sends a clear and unambiguous message to terrorist fanatics: We are above the law, and only ruthless acts of extreme violence will ever make us pay. He makes what the mullahs tell these zealots demonstrably true. Americans are evil, and killing them will be the will of god and an act of justice.

Obama is ordering the Justice Department to defy a court order and appeal the ruling in order to prevent the pictures from coming out. The government's case for preventing release of the pictures is that, as mentioned above, it will subject soldiers to reprisals. Well, NOT releasing the pictures and helping obstruct justice and protect the guilty will ALSO result in reprisals, and we will have no moral foundation to object. At least by releasing the pictures and ordering an investigation Obama can stand on the high ground and say, "Yes, crimes were committed and the guilty will be punished." Personally, I think that would piss them off less than his current stand, "The guilty are never going to spend a day in punishment while I'm president."

The second defense the government invokes is that releasing the pictures, even with the identities of the prisoners obscured would "violates the privacy" of the victims and thus violates the Geneva Conventions prohibition against subjecting prisoners of war to humiliations and/or indignities.

Where do you start with this specious argument? (If I were a judge, I would have to refrain from stepping down from the bench and slapping the lawyer who dared mouth this objection).

Torture is a violation of the Geneva Convention. Yet, they (Bush, Yoo, Cheney, Bibey, etc) claimed that these people weren't subject to the Geneva Convention because they weren't "prisoners of war", but "enemy combatants".

So, let's parse this argument. When we want to illegally torture you, the Geneva Convention, a "quaint" document, doesn't protect you. However, when we are facing prosecution for war crimes, that same document does cover you so we can suppress the evidence of our guilt.

Wow! How often do you get to sodomize the victim, the law, the language and the entire concept of logic with a single argument? I think you would have to go back to the Spanish Inquisition to find the last time such a legal argument was offered

Speaking of tortured logic:

Releasing the photos could have a "chilling effect" on further investigations of detainee abuse without adding to the understanding of past abuses, he said.

No, suppressing the photos stops a lot of investigations in their tracks, and prevents us from learning the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Bush administration.

The photos "are not particularly sensational, especially when compared with the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib," Obama said, referring to the Iraqi military prison where photographs released in 2004 of detainees being abused and humiliated sparked widespread outrage.

See, this is where Obama just committed and error that will rank right up their with Clinton's decision to entertain Monica Lewinsky.

These photos are eventually going to come out. And unless doctored or swapped with other photos, they will show things far more "sensational" than the early photos and this lie will be exposed for what it is, a craven political calculation.

Obama reiterated that any future abuse of detainees is "unacceptable" and "will not be tolerated."

You also said you would comply with the court's order to release these photos. So some of these statements are lies. Care to tell us which ones?

"The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals," Obama said.

I would prefer that a judge and jury be the judge of that, if you don't mind.

Obama has been weighed and found wanting. While some will argue that this is some subtle ploy by Obama to trick these war criminals into letting their guard down, I find this highly doubtful. "Dick" Cheney has confessed ON TELEVISION, and fingered Bush, saying, "Yes, I did it, I'm proud I did it, and I would do it again. And yeah, Bush knew about it and approved of it, so sucks to be you!"

This is going to the Supreme Court, and I can tell you how Fat Tony, Alito, Roberts and Thomas are going to vote. Kennedy will be the deciding vote on whether America embraces justice or tyranny.

I am fully prepared to be wrong on this, but the disturbance in the cynical side of the Force™ is quite strong and the darkness grows.

Pelosi says Bush team misled her on waterboarding
Associated Press

Under strong attack from Republicans, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA and Bush administration of misleading her about waterboarding detainees in the war on terror and sharply rebutted claims she was complicit in the method's use.

"To the contrary ... we were told explicitly that waterboarding was not being used," she told reporters, referring to a formal CIA briefing she received in the fall of 2002.

Pelosi said she subsequently learned that other lawmakers were told several months later by the CIA about the use of waterboarding.

"I wasn't briefed, I was informed that somebody else had been briefed about it," she said.

Enough of this horseshit!

Let's have an investigation, put people under oath and find out exactly who knew what and when. I hear a lot of stammering from Pelosi and excuse making on the Left, but to be honest, I find it damned hard to believe that Pelosi didn't know. When you are sitting across from Bush and his thugs and they start talking about torture using Doublespeak, any person with even a flicker of intelligence knows that is what is happening. In fact, many on the Left, myself included, said that we would be torturing people and committing other war crimes as soon as "Dick" Cheney made this remark:

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."

"Dick" Cheney
9/16/2001

I am not an Washington insider, nor a fabulously paid political pundit, yet I knew as soon as I heard those words that these people were going to commit war crimes, especially torture, and probably murder. I have been proven 100% correct. At the time, many people sneered at my paranoia (I also said that American citizens would be illegally wiretapped to equal scorn).

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Jane Harman, et al, KNEW this was going on, and yet they kept their mouths shut. Why? Not because they approved, but because they thought it would be political suicide to speak up. Nothing in the world, up to and including war crimes, is more important that these people hanging on to that $170,000 a year paycheck and all the ego-stroking glory that goes with the job.

Each one of these people made excuses to themselves as to why they couldn't speak up. Each one of them has blood on their hands and should be in prison. The absolute truth of the matter is that for eight years Bush and his band of thugs committed crime after crime with the tacit approval of the Democratic leadership whose WILLFUL neglect allowed the utter destruction of the rule of law. Now, they are quite prepared to obstruct justice and prevent any meaningful investigation of these crimes in order to protect themselves from being seen as the collaborators they really were.

These people aren't even worth spitting on.

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate
New York Times

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times.”

During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

On “World News,” ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding.” Still, he told ABC that the actions had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

I seriously doubt this jackass read any "field reports". I think his information came via office gossip, from people who were repeating seventh- hand accounts of the bragging thugs actually doing the torturing.

Mr. Kiriakou subsequently granted interviews to The Washington Post, The New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and other media organizations. A CNN anchor called him “the man of the hour.”

Eight months after the interview, Mr. Kiriakou was hired as a paid consultant for ABC News. He resigned last month and now works for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Which just goes to show you that self-aggrandizing lies are an outstanding way to get ahead in the media.

At the time, Mr. Kiriakou appeared to lend credibility to the prior press reports that quoted anonymous former government employees who had implied that waterboarding was used sparingly. In late 2007, Mr. Ross began pursuing Mr. Kiriakou for an interview, “leaning on him pretty hard,” he recounted.

Yeah, leaned "hard" on him for an interview, but failed to ask any "hard" questions about his credibility.

Mr. Kiriakou was the only on-the-record source cited by ABC. In the televised portion of the interview, Mr. Ross did not ask Mr. Kiriakou specifically about what kind of reports he was privy to or how long he had access to the information. “It didn’t even occur to me that they’d keep doing” the waterboarding, Mr. Ross said last week. “It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

He added, “I didn’t give enough credit to the fiendishness of the C.I.A.”

Your too modest. You don't credit your fiendish credulousness and status as a super-hack in the media.

Mr. Kiriakou refused an interview request last week. In a statement to ABC, he said he was aware only of Mr. Zubaydah’s being waterboarded “on one occasion.”

Again, that would be because he really didn't know jack about anything, but because he was prepared to feed the press the lifeline they desperately to defend Bush's war crimes, this was not a problem.

The C.I.A., which considered legal action against Mr. Kiriakou for divulging classified information, said last week that he “was not — and is not — authorized to speak on behalf of the CIA.”

The CIA has no intention of prosecuting someone who helped cover the agency's back. This is just face-saving on their part.

In the days after Mr. Kiriakou’s media blitz, his claims were repeated by an array of other outlets. For instance, the Fox News anchor Chris Wallace cited the 35 seconds claim to ask a congressman whether the interrogation program was “really so bad.”

Months later the claims continued to be amplified; the National Review editor Jonah Goldberg used Mr. Kiriakou’s assertions in a column last year to argue that the waterboarding was “right and certainly defensible.”

Mark Danner, a journalist who has written extensively about the covert program for The New York Review of Books, said the news reports had fed the idea that brutal interrogations could instantly glean information about terrorist plans.

“There was a completely mistaken impression put about that this technique was not cruel because it could break detainees so quickly,” he said.

It also played right into the fantasies of the people who masturbate to 24, and think Jack Bauer is a great American.

When Mr. Kiriakou was later hired by ABC to provide commentary on terrorism cases, Mr. Ross said that network officials had been concerned about the appearance of a tie between the interview and the job. For that reason, “I felt that we should sort of wait,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone to think that he was promised something for the interview. He was not.”

No, but he WAS given the job because he was a useful propaganda tool for the network to trot out and he was rewarded for defending torture.

Mr. Ross, who received a George Polk Award for a series on interrogation, expressed no regret about the Kiriakou interview and praised him for speaking publicly. He said ABC was preparing a story that would address the previous reporting.

“Kiriakou stepped up and helped shine some light on what has happening,” Mr. Ross said. “It wasn’t the huge spotlight that was needed, but it was some light.”

This pretty much says it all. This guys gets on the news, tells lie after lie, about an issue he has ZERO first-hand knowledge of, and which has now been thoroughly exposed as false, and/or out of context, and yet, he is still praised like some kind of hero.

The "light" that this guy provided was that the CIA is staffed with war criminals without an ounce of human decency who think torture is OK, as long as we, you know, the "good guys" are the ones doing it. For some reason, a news story with that view hasn't materialized.

Mr. Ross is saying, in essence, "I have no regrets that I gave prime time attention to, and portrayed as an expert, a man who was completely incompetent to offer an informed opinion on the issue of torture, and who lied to the American public in order to justify monstrously illegal conduct."

"And that's OK by me."

Hard as it is to imagine, Jonah Goldberg actually tops this smug arrogance with his own remarks.

“I’ve always been on the fence about whether waterboarding constituted torture,” Mr. Goldberg of the National Review wrote last week, but if the figures are true, “then I think the threshold has been met.”

He added: “Debating whether it was worth it still seems open to debate, depending on the facts.”

Words fail. At least ones that don't make extensive reference to speculations about Mr. Goldberg's lineage and the effects of inbreeding.

An essay at Salon.com re-heats the torture debate by claiming that while morally wrong, we may not claim that torture doesn't work, because it does.

The argument that torture works cannot simply be dismissed. During World War II, for example, the Gestapo used torture with considerable effectiveness on captured agents working for Britain's Special Operations Executive, the top-secret organization dedicated to sabotage and subversion behind Axis lines. A number of agents, unable to withstand the pain or, in some cases, even the prospect of pain, told their captors everything they knew, including the identity of other agents, the arrival time of flights, and the location of safe houses. During France's brutal war in Algeria, the colonial power used torture effectively. As historian Alistair Horne, the author of the classic analysis of the French-Algerian war, "A Savage War of Peace," told me in a 2007 interview, "In Algeria, the French used torture -- as opposed to abuse -- very effectively as an instrument of war. They had some success with it; they did undoubtedly get some intelligence from the use of torture." That intelligence included information about future terrorist strikes and the infrastructure of terror networks in Algiers.

So the easy argument against torture, that it is ineffective, is wrong. Torture can work. Nor can one simply dismiss the philosophical "ticking bomb" debate. Even ethicists bitterly opposed to torture acknowledge that if that hypothetical situation -- endlessly depicted in Fox's TV show "24" -- actually existed, there would be a compelling moral and philosophical argument for torture in that instance.

But in the real world, the "ticking bomb" situation never arises. It is never the case that we know we can automatically avert mass slaughter by torturing someone. Reality is not that neat. Guilt and knowledge are not established in advance. Those whom we torture may or may not be planning nefarious deeds. As the British political scientist Henry Shue pointed out in his classic 1978 essay "Torture," "Notice how unlike the circumstances of an actual choice about torture the philosopher's example is. The proposed victim of our torture is not someone we suspect of planting the device: he is the perpetrator. He is not some pitiful psychotic making one last play for attention: He did plant the device. The wiring is not backwards, the mechanism is not jammed: the device will destroy the city if not deactivated." Shue concludes that "The distance between the situations which must be concocted in order to have a plausible case of morally permissible torture and the situations which actually occur is, if anything, further reason why the existing prohibitions against torture should remain and should be strengthened by making torture an international crime."

Where to begin.

This is one of those legalistic arguments that are used by torture advocates (like Alan Dershowitz) to actually justify morally unforgivable conduct.

Torture "works"?

Well, certainly it can work, depending on how you define "work" and how low you are prepared to sink and what your ultimate purpose is. Torture is VERY effective at extracting false confessions, getting people to implicate other people, even family members, of crimes they may, or may not, be guilty of.

Murder "works", rape "works", child rape "works" given the correct definition of "works". In Kamiya's example, torture "worked" for the Nazis, in that they were able to torture confessions and the identities of members of the Resistance, or OSS. His definition of "works" is that information was extracted that led the Gestapo to arrest other agents (some of whom were even guilty). Of course, later, these same Gestapo torturers faced the gallows or harsh prison sentences. If we overlook that little detail, if we overlook the fact that one must become a de facto Nazi in order for it to "work", that one must become a criminal for it to "work" then yes, torture "worked". Torture allowed "bad guys" to torture "good guys" so they could learn information in order to kill more "good guys".

How do we know the Gestapo were "bad guys"? Well, they TORTURED people. (Oh, and you can be damned sure they never called it "torture", they called it "harsh interrogation").

Of course, I could argue that torture has "worked" for the Bush administration, since the people committing the actual torture are being shielded from prosecution from by the Obama administration, which excuses such things with phrases like "acted in good faith that their actions were legal", a defense also known as "I was just following orders", which, as I recall, did not help anyone at Nuremberg.

It also "worked" in that "confessions" were extracted which supported the Bush Administration's justification for torture in the first place. That the information was false, useless, years out of date seems immaterial to the folks making the argument that torture "works".

Once again, in this essay we find ourselves confronted with the straw man "ticking bomb" scenario that people like Dershowitz and other torture defenders LOVE to cite as a morally defensible use of torture.. Kamiya does have the good grace to heap scorn on the scenario, but still offers it to us as "justification".

I have addressed this silly scenario in the past, but let me re-iterate a few points I made about this scenario:

In the final analysis, the "ticking bomb" scenario is a false argument. If I found myself in the VERY contrived situation where someone held my wife's life in his hands, and if he refused to give me the information I needed to save her, I would beat it out of him (but only after begging on my hands and knees and pleading to his humanity). Afterward, regardless of the outcome, I would sign a full confession and submit to just punishment. I would not appeal, beg or whine. I would have broken the law and must take responsibility for doing so. Nothing stops ANY of our soldiers or intelligence agents from torturing anyone they please, as long as they are willing to be punished accordingly. What these folks want is permission to torture LEGALLY, to behave inhumanely without consequence. This strikes me as rather cowardly.

If you are going to put forth the proposition that there are some things worth torturing people for, then you should be willing to go to jail for them as well.

If we legalize torture, no matter what the reason, we are just like Saddam Hussein. Actually, we are WORSE than Saddam as the only thing more evil than torture, is making excuses to justify torture.

Dershowitz argues that we should formalize the process with a "torture warrant":

[A] torture warrant, which puts a heavy burden on the government to demonstrate by factual evidence the necessity to administer this horrible, horrible technique of torture. I would talk about nonlethal torture, say, a sterilized needle underneath the nail, which would violate the Geneva Accords, but you know, countries all over the world violate the Geneva Accords. They do it secretly and hypothetically, the way the French did it in Algeria. If we ever came close to doing it, and we don't know whether this is such a case, I think we would want to do it with accountability and openly and not adopt the way of the hypocrite.

Dershowitz seems to believe that by "legalizing" torture and creating a formal process to follow, torture is suddenly hunky dory.

Am I the only one who sees this view as utterly bankrupt of morality, ethics and humanity? Am I the only who needs to point out that many things, up to and including the gas chambers in Germany were "legal" under the law? With this statement, Dershowitz has become one of the "little Eichmanns" that Ward Churchill falsely ascribed to employees at the World Trade Center.

Torture is absolutely cowardly. You are attacking and abusing a person who is restrained and completely incapable of defending themselves. You can claim that such situation is no worse than the situation innocent men, women and children find themselves in terrorists attacks, and you might be right, provided the person you are torturing is actually guilty and actually possesses the information you think they have, and you are willing to take personal responsibility for the act and call it TORTURE. As all of these things have yet to be true, we come back to the fact that people who commit torture are cowards.

In order for torture to "work" you have to become a monster as vile as, or worse than the monster you are prepared to torture. Dershowitz, for example, is prepared to use any method as long as it is not fatal (though he offers sticking a needle under an fingernail as an example, he talks about the government's "horrible, horrible techniques", so far worse is at hand). Once you cross the line, there is no turning back. Once torture is permissible as long as it is not lethal, it will be taken right to that line, if not immediately, then shortly after immediately. With that basic guideline, men, women and children may be raped for example. After all, while a terrorist might not care about the fate of "infidels", he may certainly care about his wife and children. And if raping them gets him to talk, and to save innocent AMERICAN lives, then torture "works".

Of course the main people making the argument that torture "works" Dick Cheney, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bibey, Yu, etc, are utter cowards, in the more traditional sense of being yellow and unmanly. None of them believe in anything deeply enough to allow themselves to be subject to even minor discomfort, never mind actual pain. They know that if they were held prisoner and threatened with torture, you wouldn't be able to shut them up.

So, since they know that they are cowards, and that they would tell an enemy anything to avoid torture, they believe everyone else is as spineless as they are.

Unfortunately, (and as they have pointed out repeatedly), the religiously insane zealots who make up terrorist groups are a bit more fanatical. If you are prepared to die for your cause, if you have a pathological belief that "God" will reward you when you die as they do, then torture isn't likely to "work" against such folks.

Again, if you believe that torture is morally justifiable, then go ahead and do it, then make your case to a jury. If the jury agrees with you, then you will be acquitted and your view of the issue validated. Don't write essays, or spout off on talk shows about your beliefs, put your convictions were your mouth is.

And if you are wrong, so what? If you are prepared to torture to save America, isn't America worth going to prison for?

‘Holy Hell’ Over Torture Memos
Newsweek

As reported by NEWSWEEK, the White House last month had accepted a recommendation from Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify and publicly release three 2005 memos that graphically describe harsh interrogation techniques approved for the CIA to use against Al Qaeda suspects. But after the story, U.S. intelligence officials, led by senior national-security aide John Brennan, mounted an intense campaign to get the decision reversed, according to a senior administration official familiar with the debate. "Holy hell has broken loose over this," said the official, who asked not to be identified because of political sensitivities.

Brennan is a former senior CIA official who was once considered by Obama for agency director but withdrew his name late last year after public criticism that he was too close to past officials involved in Bush administration decisions. Brennan, who now oversees intelligence issues at the National Security Council, argued that release of the memos could embarrass foreign intelligence services who cooperated with the CIA, either by participating in overseas "extraordinary renditions" of high-level detainees or housing them in overseas "black site" prisons.

It is a a crying shame that Adolph Eichman, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Herman Goring, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and all the rest of Hitler's pals hadn't thought up this dodge. If they had only claimed that releasing information about war crimes will "embarrass" people who aided and abetted their criminal activity, they could have skipped that whole Nuremberg gig, not to mention the hangings that followed.

Brennan succeeded in persuading CIA Director Leon Panetta to become "engaged" in his efforts to block release, according to the senior official. Their joint arguments stalled plans to declassify the memos even though White House counsel Gregory Craig had already signed off on Holder's recommendation that they should be disclosed, according to an official and another government source familiar with the debate.

So much for Panetta being an ethical choice to clean up the CIA. As usual, it will be "business as ususal".

If the Justice memos were to be declassified, it would free up a host of former officials to talk about precisely what took place during White House and Justice Department meetings over the issue of interrogations. If the White House were to overrule Holder and side with Brennan and Panetta, it could essentially shut the door on attempts to have a full public airing of these issues, according to human-rights activists, lawyers and others who have followed the debate.

This is one of those key tests of character that will define Obama. If he suppresses the truth, then he becomes an accomplice to war crimes.

U.S. confirms it held 12 juveniles at Guantanamo
Associated Press

The U.S. has revised its count of juveniles ever held at Guantanamo Bay to 12, up from the eight it reported in May to the United Nations, a Pentagon spokesman said Sunday.

The government has provided a corrected report to the U.N. committee on child rights, according to Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon. He said the U.S. did not intentionally misrepresent the number of detainees taken to the isolated Navy base in southeast Cuba before turning 18.

"As we noted to the committee, it remains uncertain the exact age of many of the juveniles held at Guantanamo, as most of them did not know their own date of birth or even the year in which they were born," he said.

My Nine year-old nephew knows what year he was born in. A quick survey around the office found that all the children knew the year of their birth by age ten. This would seem to indicate that if these children didn't know what year they were born in, it should have been bloody obvious they were juveniles by just looking at them.

These people lie like other people breathe.

A study released last week by the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas concluded the U.S. has held at least a dozen juveniles at Guantanamo, including a Saudi who committed suicide in 2006.

Or so they say. Was an autopsy conducted?

Eight of the 12 juvenile detainees identified by the human rights center have been released, according to the study.

And we should believe you have released these kids because.....?

Rights groups say it is important for the U.S. military to know the real age of those it detains because juveniles are entitled to special protection under international laws recognized by the United States.

The Bush government does not obey international law, so I hardly see that this matters.

Statement of Brian Roehrkasse, Director of Public Affairs, on Today’s District Court Decision Ordering Release of the Uighurs Detained at Guantanamo Bay
US Department of "Justice"

“Today, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered that 17 Uighurs detained at Guantanamo Bay— individuals who have admitted to receiving weapons training at camps in Afghanistan— be released into the United States. Today’s ruling presents serious national security and separation of powers concerns and raises unprecedented legal issues.

“The government advised the court in its submissions that these Uighurs were captured near Tora Bora by the United States and its allies following military operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban, that the Uighurs were receiving weapons training in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and that, although the United States no longer treats these Uighurs as ‘enemy combatants’ of the United States and has been seeking to transfer them out of Guantanamo Bay and to appropriate foreign countries willing to accept them, the government does not believe that it is appropriate to have these foreign nationals removed from government custody and released into the United States.

“Following today’s ruling, the government moved to stay the decision to enable the government to consider its appeal options and to consider how such a release might be effected. The court denied the motion, and ordered the government to bring the 17 Uighurs from Guantanamo Bay to the court in Washington, D.C., by Friday, October 10. The court also set a hearing for Thursday, October 16, to determine the conditions of release and ordered that an official of the Department of Homeland Security be present. During the time between the presentment of the Uighurs on October 10 and the hearing on October 16, the court ordered that the government have no supervision or oversight of the released individuals.

“In response to today’s ruling, we are filing an emergency motion for stay pending appeal tonight with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.”

Now I am sure there may be a few folks out there, who still don't understand how this works, and will look at this statement and say, "Hey, they were trained with weapons and found near bin-Laden's hidey hole. So, they must be guilty.

Here's the thing: The government keeps making this accusation, but won't file the charges so the evidence can be evaluated in court. Why is that? Because there is no such evidence. They made it all up, or distorted reality to the point of surreality. Rather than admit this, Bush prefers to keep innocent people locked up in a hell hole, because that's what America does under George W. Bush.

Judge orders release of Chinese Muslims into US
Associated Press

A federal judge ordered the Bush administration Tuesday to immediately release a small group of Chinese Muslims from Guantanamo Bay into the United States.

In a landmark decision, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said it would be wrong for the Bush administration to continue holding the detainees, known as Uighurs, since they are no longer considered enemy combatants.

The Uighurs have been in custody for almost seven years and have been cleared for release since 2004, but the government has not been able to find a country willing to take them in. Bush administration lawyers argued Tuesday that Urbina did not have the authority to order the Uighurs released into the United States.

Urbina called the detention unlawful saying the Constitution prohibits indefinite imprisonment without charges.

Bush will, of course, appeal, citing national security requirements that innocent people be locked up forever because they are Muslim.

Canada dismisses pressure over Guantanamo inmate
Reuters

Canada said on Wednesday it would not press for the return of a young Canadian inmate held at Guantanamo Bay despite the release of video footage that showed him weeping and calling for his mother.

The film prompted mounting calls from politicians and commentators for Ottawa to intercede with Washington on behalf of 21-year-old Omar Khadr, who is charged with killing a U.S. medic in Afghanistan in 2002 at the age of 15.

Here is the video under discussion:


This young man was a child when captured. He was tortured on the authority of George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. His treatment is a war crime. Even IF he is guilty of what BushCo claims (and that is highly dubious) there is NO justification for his treatment.

Adding to the obvious indications of misconduct by the government in this trial was the fact that the Pentagon removed the judge in the case when he started ruling against them.

Currently, the United States has placed 2,500 children in concentration camps since 2003, with 500 still in custody in a variety of locations in the U.S. (Guantanamo), Iraq, and Afghanistan. There are probably other being held in various "secret prison" sites, but that will take years to discover.

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Harper plays hardass.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Khadr faces serious charges and should go on trial.

"Our position has not changed and it's not going to. We're not going to blow in the wind on something as fundamental as this," Harper's chief spokesman Kory Teneycke told Reuters.

What a man.

Top Bush Advisors Approved 'Enhanced Interrogation'
ABC News

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

DICK Cheney condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.
Condileeza Rice condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.
Donald Rumsfeld condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.
Colin Powell condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.
George Tenet condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.
John Ashcroft condoned, and ordered torture, and is a war criminal.

At Nuremberg people convicted of torturing prisoners were hanged by the neck until dead.

Just like Saddam Hussein.

A Tale of Three Lawyers
Harper's Magazine

Matthew Diaz served his country as a staff judge advocate at Guantánamo. He watched a shameless assault on America’s Constitution and commitment to the rule of law carried out by the Bush Administration. He watched the introduction of a system of cruel torture and abuse. He watched the shaming of the nation’s uniformed services, with their proud traditions that formed the very basis of the standards of humanitarian law, now torn asunder through the lawless acts of the Executive. Matthew Diaz found himself in a precarious position—as a uniformed officer, he was bound to follow his command. As a licensed and qualified attorney, he was bound to uphold the law. And these things were indubitably at odds.

One of the crimes the Administration committed was withholding from the Red Cross a list of the detainees at Guantánamo, effectively making them into secret detainees. Before the arrival of the Bush Administration, the United States had taken the axiomatic position that holding persons in secret detention for prolonged periods outside the rule of law (a practice known as “disappearing”) was not merely unlawful, but in fact a rarified “crime against humanity.” Now the United States was engaged in the active practice of this crime.

The decision to withhold the information had been taken, in defiance of law, by senior political figures in the Bush Administration. Diaz was aware of it, and he knew it was unlawful. He printed out a copy of the names and sent them to a civil rights lawyer who had requested them in federal court proceedings.

Diaz was aware when he did this that he was violating regulations and that he could and would, if caught, be subjected to severe sanction. What he did was a violation of law, even as it was an effort to cure a more severe act of lawlessness by the Government. Diaz violated the law in precisely the same sense as Martin Luther King reminds us, in the Letter from Birmingham Jail, that his arrest was based on a violation of law. That everything the Nazis did in Germany was lawful. And that every act of the Hungarian freedom fighters was a crime. In terms of the moral law, however, Diaz was on the side of right, and the Bush Administration and the Pentagon had, by engaging in the conduct that the Supreme Court condemned, placed themselves on the side of lawlessness, corruption and dishonor.

Diaz was charged, tried and convicted for disclosing “secrets.” For the Bush Administration, any information which would be politically embarrassing or harmful to it is routinely classified “secret.” In this fashion the Administration believes it can use criminal sanctions against those who disclose information it believes will be politically damaging. The list of detainees at Guantánamo, which by law was required to be disclosed, was classified as “secret.”

Diaz spent six months in prison and left it bankrupt and without a job. In addition to his sentence, the Pentagon is working aggressively to have Diaz stripped of his law license so he will not be able to practice his profession.

In the week in which Diaz received the Ridenhour Prize, another Pentagon “secret” was disclosed. This “secret” was a memorandum made to order for William J. Haynes II, Rumsfeld’s General Counsel, and the man at the apex of the Pentagon’s military justice system that tried, convicted and sentenced Diaz. The memo was authored by John Yoo. This memorandum was designed to authorize the introduction of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading interrogation techniques to be used upon prisoners held at Guantánamo, and ultimately also used in Afghanistan and Iraq. The memorandum authorized waterboarding, long-time standing, hypothermia, the administration of psychotropic drugs and sleep deprivation in excess of two days in addition to a number of other techniques. Each of these techniques is long established as torture as a matter of American and international law. The application and implementation of these techniques was and is a crime.

The exact circumstances surrounding the dealings between Haynes and Yoo that led to the development of this memorandum are unclear. However, it is clear that Haynes had previously authorized the use of the torture techniques, and had secured an order from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld authorizing them.

Following the implementation of these techniques, more than 108 detainees died in detention. In a large number of these cases, the deaths have been ruled a homicide and connected to torture. These homicides were a forseeable consequence of the advice that Haynes and Yoo gave.

Their is no dungeon dark enough, no pit deep enough, to contain the evil of Yoo and Haynes.

One day in the future, school children will read of these days and the actions of these men. They will ask "Why did no one speak up and try to stop them?"

So few people will be able to answer with a clear conscience.

Guantanamo prisoner charged with war crimes
Associated Press

The U.S. has charged a Guantanamo prisoner with war crimes for the deadly 1998 al-Qaida attack on the American embassy in Tanzania.

The Pentagon said Monday that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani could receive the death penalty if convicted by a military tribunal at the U.S. military prison.

The charges against Ghailani include murder and attacking civilians for his alleged role in a bombing that killed 11 people and wounded hundreds.

He is the 15th person charged in the military tribunals at Guantanamo, where trials are expected to get under way in late spring or early summer.

People will confess to anything when you torture them.

On September 27th, 1943, Australian commandos paddled into Singapore harbor in the dead of night. With the greatest of skill, the men attached mines to the hulls of seven Japanese ships and then paddled back out to their boat, the Krait, a Japanese fishing vessel commandeered by the Allies in 1941. Shortly before dawn, the limpet mines detonated sending all seven ships to the bottom. The Allied force had traveled over 3,000 miles round trip from Western Australia, slipped into and out of Singapore harbor completely undetected by Japanese military forces and dealt a major blow to One Asia under Nippon¹.

Operation Jaywick was a roaring success.

On October 10th, in what was to become known after the war as The Double Tenth Incident, the Kempeitai, Japan's answer to the Gestapo, moved into action. Major Sumida Haruzo raided the Changi internment camp, long suspected of subversive activities, and rounded up 57 men and women, including an Anglican bishop, the Right Reverend John Leonard Wilson, Lord Archbishop of Singapore.

Major Haruzo set about getting what is now called "actionable intelligence" from the prisoners, so as to round up any other saboteurs and in order to prevent future attacks.

His methods were brutal, and direct, and in his mind, completely justified in the interest of "national security".

One of Haruzo's methods of torture was waterboarding, an interrogation technique dating from the enlightened days of the Spanish Inquisition. Today, waterboarding is touted by people who have never undergone the procedure as a "harsh" method of interrogation that is in no way torture, despite the extreme mental and physical pain it causes, and the risk of lung/brain damage, broken bones and death. Back in 1943, they didn't bother with word games. The security of Imperial Japan justified all.

In 1946 Lt. Col Haruzo and 20 others was tried by the Allies for war crimes. Among the crimes listed was waterboarding. In the course of the trial it was noted that a number of prisoners did, in fact, confess to involvement in the sabotage and implicated other people as accomplices. This, despite the fact that NO ONE picked up by the Kempeitai was involved in the attack, or even knew who had pulled it off.

Of the 57 men and women swept up in post 9/27 Singapore, 14 people would die, 12 from the torture and abuse they received at the hands of the Japanese, one from suicide and another by execution.

At the end of the trial, Sumida Haruzo and seven other members of his staff were sentenced to death by hanging, three were given life sentences, one 15 years and two eight year sentences.

And at the time, what lessons did the world take away from the Double Tenth Trial?

1) That the civilized nations of the world would not tolerate the barbaric torture of people in war time, even people suspected of what would today be called "terrorist acts".

2) That waterboarding was a war crime and warranted swift and severe punishment for those who used it.

3) That as a means of gathering "intelligence" to prevent future attacks and as a means of extracting confessions, torture was useless. None of the people tortured knew anything, but many told their interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to get the pain to stop. It wasn't until after the war that Haruzo learned that it was Australian commandos who destroyed the ships in Singapore harbor, not local partisans.

Despite these lessons, there are Americans today who believe that waterboarding is not torture, and even if it is, it is a perfectly useful tool in the "war on terror". Sadly, many of these Americans are in positions of leadership, up to and including the so-called president of the United States, who have debased our nation with this belief, and tainted the American soul with this belief.

The spirit of the Changi interment camp is alive and well today, and is called Guantanamo. In it, and in many other secret places, the heirs of Sumida Haruzo ply his trade in the name of "national security".

But, of course, what is happening now is completely different than what happened in Singapore. After all, we're the good guys!

But will history judge us any differently than it has the Spanish Inquisition and Imperial Japan?

¹ - Details from the book Trial of Sumida Haruzo and twenty others, Haruzo, S. (1951).

Abu Ghraib prison turned soldiers evil by design
AFP

The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed social psychologist said Thursday.

Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a "Lucifer effect" as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.

Weird venue for such a discussion, but it is California.

"If you give people power without oversight it is a formula for abuse," Zimbardo said to a stunned audience the included famous actors, entrepreneurs and politicians.

"Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months ... Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose."

Zimbardo, 75, is renowned for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the university's campus in Northern California.

The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for the students.

Zimbardo detailed stark parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people into heroes or demons.

Of course, what we saw in Abu Ghraib was to be expected, as this kind of stuff happens in US prisons all the time.

The use of sex and sexual humiliation as torture in Abu Ghraib and the other American prisons in Iraq is endemic to the American prison. Psychological and physical sexual torture is exacerbated by the underlying policy of denying prisoners any volitional sex, making the only two forms of sexual activity that are physically possible--homosexuality and masturbation--both offenses subject to punishment. Strip searches, including invasive and often intentionally painful examination of the mouth, anus, testicles, and vagina, frequently accompanied by verbal or physical sexual abuse, are part of the daily routine in most prisons. A 1999 Amnesty International report documented the commonplace rape of prisoners by guards in women's prisons.

Each year, numerous prisoners are maimed, crippled, and even killed by guards. Photographs could be taken on any day in the American prison system that would match the photographs from Abu Ghraib that shocked the public. Indeed, actual pictures from prisons in America have shown worse atrocities than those pictures from the American prisons in Iraq. For example, no photos of American abuse of Iraqi prisoners have yet equaled the pictures of dozens of prisoners savagely and mercilessly tortured by guards and state troopers in the aftermath of the 1971 Attica rebellion.

Even more appalling images are available in the documentary film Maximum Security University about California's state Corcoran Prison. For years at Corcoran, guards set up fights among prisoners, bet on the outcome, and then often shot the men for fighting, seriously wounding at least 43 and killing eight just in the period 1989-1994. The film features official footage of five separate incidents in which guards, with no legal justification, shoot down and kill unarmed prisoners.

Isn't it nice to know that the Roman tradition of gladiatorial combat lives on in American prisons and that the guards get to supplement their wages and reduce the prison population at the same time?

The US is breaking records for the number of people in prison with 2.3 million people now residing in federal or local prisons. That's 1 in 100 people for the adult population, 1 in 36 for Hispanics and 1 in 15 for black men.

Criminal Probe Opened Over CIA Tapes
Associated Press

The Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey appointed an outside prosecutor to oversee the case.

The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two al-Qaida suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.

"The Department's National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation," Mukasey said in a statement released Wednesday.

Yeah, they are making the right noises about "investigating" these crimes, but you will pardon me for being skeptical.

IF, the crimes are actually investigated, and IF the investigator is actually independent, and IF the investigator is actually allowed to see documents kept secret by the administration, then you might actually see a trial and conviction.

Of course, Bush will then simply pardon the offenders like he did Libby.