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Obama Returns to Bush Era on Guantánamo

May 6, 2009

Andy Worthington | The Future of Freedom Foundation, May 6, 2009  

Two distressing pieces of news emerged last week regarding the Obama administration’s plans to close Guantánamo, and both were delivered by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Discussing what would happen to the remaining 241 prisoners, Gates announced that the question was “still open” as to what the government should do with “the 50 to 100 — probably in that ballpark — who we cannot release and cannot try.” He also announced that the much-criticized military commission trial system, suspended for four months by Barack Obama on his first day in office, was “still very much on the table.”

Both admissions indicate that when it comes to Guantánamo, it is beginning to appear that the much-vaunted change promised by Barack Obama on the campaign trail has actually involved nothing more than imposing a closing date on Guantánamo while maintaining the Bush administration’s approach to the men still held there.

Back in Bush’s day, for example, those “who we cannot release and cannot try” were sometimes referred to as those who were “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute” — essentially because the supposed evidence against them was the fruit of torture or other abuse.

As someone who has studied the story of Guantánamo and its prisoners in detail over the last three years, I’m aware that much of the information compiled by the Bush administration for use against the prisoners at Guantánamo was obtained through torture or coercion and is, therefore, unreliable, and that other, equally unreliable information was secured through the bribery of other prisoners.

As a National Journal investigation revealed in 2006, one prisoner, described by the FBI as a notorious liar, made false allegations against 60 prisoners in Guantánamo in exchange for more favorable treatment, and in February this year the Washington Post published the sobering tale of another informant, whose copious confessions should have set alarm bells ringing. In both cases, however, there is no indication that the officials responsible for compiling the information examined by the president’s review team have acknowledged that a substantial number of allegations against the prisoners are actually worthless.

Moreover, the defense secretary’s talk of 50 to 100 suspicious prisoners (above and beyond those regarded as demonstrably dangerous) is at odds with repeated intelligence assessments reported over the years, which have indicated that the total number of prisoners with any meaningful connection to international terrorism is between 35 and 50. To this should be added the recent revelation by Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff, that “no more than a dozen or two of the detainees” held in Guantánamo ever had any worthwhile intelligence.

In addition, the defense secretary’s talk of reviving the military commissions is a distressing development for the many critics of the novel trial system invented by Dick Cheney and David Addington, who hoped that the administration would resist all calls to reinstate them, and would, instead, move the relatively few prisoners regarded as genuinely dangerous to the mainland to face trials in federal court.

However, on Saturday, after speaking to Obama administration officials, the New York Times reported that, despite declaring that, as president, he would “reject the Military Commissions Act,” and stating that “by any measure our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” President Obama was indeed considering reviving the commissions.

As the Times described it,

Administration lawyers have become concerned that they would face significant obstacles to trying some terrorism suspects in federal courts. Judges might make it difficult to prosecute detainees who were subjected to brutal treatment or for prosecutors to use hearsay evidence gathered by intelligence agencies.

As a result, they said, decision-makers were considering whether to tinker with the rules regarding the use of coercive interrogations and hearsay, in what the Times described as “walk[ing] a tightrope of granting the suspects more rights yet stopping short of affording them the rights available to defendants in American courts.”

The “tightrope” analogy, though apt, is also something of an understatement. Almost universally derided in their seven-year history, the commissions demonstrated, above all, that inventing a legal system from scratch was a poor substitute for respecting the laws which have served the Republic well for over 200 years.

Nor can it be claimed that the federal court system is incapable of dealing with terrorism cases. As was explained in a 2008 report by Human Rights First, “In Pursuit of Justice: Prosecuting Terrorism Cases in the Federal Courts” (PDF), over 100 terrorism cases have been prosecuted successfully in the federal courts in the last 15 years.

Moreover, last Thursday, as Robert Gates was telling the Senate that the military commissions were still “on the table,” the Justice Department was taking a very different line in the case of Ali al-Marri, a legal U.S. resident who was held in extreme isolation for nearly six years without charge or trial as an “enemy combatant” in a U.S. naval brig, until he was returned to the federal justice system by the Obama administration.

As al-Marri accepted a plea agreement and admitted that he had been sent to the United States as an al-Qaeda “sleeper agent,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the result “reflects what we can achieve when we have faith in our criminal justice system and are unwavering in our commitment to the values upon which this nation was founded and the rule of law.”

To remove the stain that Guantánamo has left on the reputation of the United States as a nation founded on the rule of law, Mr. Holder’s words should be repeated to him every time that the administration attempts to turn back the clock to the days of George W. Bush, with its dangerous talk of finding new ways to justify holding prisoners without charge or trial and its willingness to revive a trial system despised as nothing more than a “kangaroo court.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

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Photo evidence bring new claims US abused prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan

April 25, 2009

Tim Reid, Washington | The Times, UK, April 25, 2009

The Obama Administration is to release up to 2,000 photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a move that will intensify pressure on the White House to back the prosecution of Bush-era officials for authorising alleged torture.

The release of the pictures, forced on the White House by a freedom of information lawsuit lodged five years ago, will complicate President Obama’s desire to move on from the abuse issue, which has begun to bedevil his presidency. The images are proof that the brutal treatment of detainees went far beyond the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. They must be made public by May 28.

The leading anti-torture envoy at the United Nations stoked the controversy by insisting that the US was obligated by the UN’s Convention on Torture to prosecute lawyers in the Bush Administration who justified harsh interrogations.

For the first time the photographs are believed to provide images of abuse at Guantánamo Bay, as well as at facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to US officials who have seen the pictures, some show American service members intimidating prisoners by pointing weapons at them, an offence that in the past has brought courts martial.

One official said that the pictures were not as shocking as those that emerged from Abu Ghraib but were “not good”. The Abu Ghraib photographs showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, intimidated by dogs, beaten and piled naked in sexually embarrassing positions.

Since his decision to release four CIA torture memos last week that detailed the harsh interrogation techniques approved by the White House under President Bush, Mr Obama and his aides have faced anger from both liberals and Republicans.

The move dismayed officials inside the CIA, despite Mr Obama’s initial assurance that neither CIA agents nor Bush-era policymakers would face prosecution.

Then this week Mr Obama appeared to raise the possibility of the possible prosecution of officials. That triggered such an uproar from Republicans, led by the former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is calling for more documents to be declassified to prove that methods including simulated drowning worked, that Mr Obama has retreated from the idea.

Mr Obama said on Thursday that he did not favour congressional hearings or a “truth commission” into alleged abuses, but he has no power to block such moves on Capitol Hill. Momentum is rapidly building there for bringing senior members of the former Administration before House and Senate committees.

Liberals, meanwhile, are expressing anger that Mr Obama is not backing prosecutions, and the release of the new photographs will increase their demands for retribution.

Amrit Singh, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the freedom of information lawsuit, said of the photographs: “This will constitute visual proof that, unlike the Bush Administration’s claim, the abuse was not confined to Abu Ghraib and was not aberrational. This disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorising or permitting such abuse.”

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Obama Caves to Right-wing in Boycotting UN Anti-Racism Conference

April 24, 2009

by Stephen Zunes | Foreign Policy In Focus, April 24, 2009

In boycotting the United Nations conference on racism, the Obama administration demonstrated that just because an African American can be elected president doesn’t mean the United States will be any more committed than the Bush administration in fighting global racism. Rejecting calls by liberal Democratic members of Congress, leading human rights groups, Pope Benedict XVI, and most of the international community to participate, the Obama administration instead gave into pressure by Congressional hawks and other anti-UN forces by joining a handful of other nations refusing to participate in the historic gathering.

The five-day conference, which is taking place this week in Geneva, assessed international progress in fighting racism and xenophobia since the UN’s first conference in Durban, South Africa eight years ago. The Bush administration withdrew from that gathering, but there had been hope the Obama administration wouldn’t continue its predecessor’s ideology-driven opposition to the UN and its human rights agenda.

With pressure from the United States and some other countries, the draft declaration prepared for this year’s conference dropped a call to ban “defamation of religion,” which raised concerns regarding restricting free speech, as well as any references to Israel and Palestine. State Department spokesperson Robert Wood acknowledged that the draft was “significantly improved,” and that the United States was “deeply grateful” that requested changes had been made. Yet he announced the United States would boycott the conference anyway because the document reaffirmed the final declaration of the 2001 meeting in Durban right-wing critics had labeled “anti-Israel.”

Anti-Israel?

Despite ongoing claims to the contrary by various right-wing pundits, however, the final document didn’t contain any anti-Israel statements or language equating Zionism with racism. Efforts by some participating states to include that and similar objectionable language were defeated.

Indeed, the only mention of Israel in the final 61-page document was as follows:

We are concerned about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State and we recognize the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and call upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion; We call for a just, comprehensive and lasting peace in the region in which all peoples shall co-exist and enjoy equality, justice and internationally recognized human rights, and security.

Why would the Obama administration find such a statement so reprehensible that it would boycott a conference whose focus isn’t on Israel, but on ending racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerances? Since the document explicitly recognizes Israel’s right to security, the Obama administration apparently objects to its formal recognition that Palestinians are under foreign occupation, and that they have a right to self-determination and statehood. Yet virtually the entire international community – including the United Nations, the World Court and a broad consensus of legal scholars – recognizes this reality.

According to the State Department, the Obama administration believes the 2001 declaration “prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.” In other words, it appears the Obama administration believes that assuming the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and statehood, and calling for a Middle East in which all peoples “shall coexist and enjoy equality, justice and international recognized human rights, and security” should not be givens.

During the more than 15 years of these U.S.-facilitated negotiations, the Palestinians have seen illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank more than double, their freedom of movement restricted, their human rights deteriorate, and their social and economic standards plummet. Moreover, the new Israel government with which the Palestinians need to negotiate is led by a coalition of far right-wing parties that have refused to acknowledge Palestinian rights, and have threatened further war against its neighbors. Its foreign minister is an outspoken anti-Arab racist who has proposed the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population in Israel and the occupied territories.

Yet the Obama administration insists that rather than the international community reiterating the longstanding international legal principle of the right to self-determination, the Palestinians’ future should instead be placed on the bargaining table under an ongoing U.S.-led “peace process,” which has thus far only worsened their suffering.

Addressing Anti-Semitism

Legitimate concerns about Israeli policies regularly appear at international forums sponsored by the United Nations. But they have sometimes been contaminated by sweeping statements condemning the state of Israel itself, and portraying some of the most racist and chauvinistic aspects of Zionism as representative of Jewish nationalism as a whole. However, these kinds of discriminatory resolutions have been declining in recent years, as countries have become more willing to recognize that, while some governments may pursue racist policies, no state should be singled out as inherently racist in and of itself. Efforts by anti-Israel delegations at the 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban were defeated and weren’t considered a realistic threat at the Geneva Conference either. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that Israel was a “racist state” during a speech on the opening day of this year’s conference was not well-received, prompting many delegates to walk out in protest.

Still, even some of the more reasonable resolutions critical of Israel proposed at the 2001 conference distracted attention from the broader issues at stake. Such efforts often result in dividing Jews – themselves a historically oppressed people – from their natural allies among people of color. Furthermore, other governments that have as bad or even more racist policies than Israel have not been subjected to as much attention at such conferences.

The Israeli government has been able to inflict its racist policies on neighboring Arab populations largely as a result of the unconditional diplomatic, economic, and military support of the United States. Any country with a history of war with its neighbors that found itself effectively immune from sanctions, or any other negative repercussions for violating international norms, would likely behave the same way, regardless of whether it were Jewish, “Zionist,” or anything else. Were it not for the United States providing Israel with protection from international pressure to end its illegal occupation and colonization of neighboring lands, the “just, comprehensive and lasting peace” called for in the 2001 declaration the Obama administration apparently finds so objectionable could have by now been a reality.

However legitimate some of the concerns regarding anti-Semitism at international forums, nothing in the final 2001 declaration at Durban – the alleged reason for the U.S. boycott this year – appears to have been even remotely anti-Semitic. Indeed, the final declaration states:

We recall that the Holocaust must never be forgotten…We recognize with deep concern the increase in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, as well as the emergence of racial and violent movements based on racism and discriminatory ideas against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities…We condemn the persistence and resurgence of neo-Nazism, neo-Fascism and violent nationalist ideologies based on racial or national prejudice, and state that these phenomena can never be justified in any instance or in any circumstances.

Even if the 2001 declaration was as problematic as the Obama administration depicted it, participation in this year’s conference would not have implied an endorsement of every single phrase of a lengthy and wide-ranging declaration hammered together by representatives of more than 200 governments.

Reaction to the Decision

The Congressional Black Caucus, which strongly encouraged U.S. participation in the international meeting, stated that it was “deeply dismayed” by Obama’s decision. “Had the United States sent a high-level delegation reflecting the richness and diversity of our country, it would have sent a powerful message to the world that we’re ready to lead by example,” the statement reads. “Instead, the administration opted to boycott the conference, a decision that does not advance the cause of combating racism and intolerance, but rather sets the cause back.”

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) observed how the U.S. decision to boycott the conference was “inconsistent with the administration’s policy of engaging with those we agree with and those we disagree with.” She added that “the United States is making it more difficult for it to play a leadership role on UN Human Rights Council as it states it plans to do. This is a missed opportunity, plain and simple.”

A spokesperson for Human Rights Watch noted how the meeting would lack the diplomatic gravitas it deserved as a result of Washington’s absence. “For us it’s extremely disappointing and it’s a missed opportunity, really, for the United States,” she said.  Other human rights groups, as well as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also expressed their disappointment.

By contrast, the right wing applauded Obama’s decision. A bipartisan group of congressional hawks, which pressured Obama to boycott the conference, sent him an open letter applauding Obama’s decision. The letter claims that the meeting “undermines freedom of expression and is tainted by an anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic agenda that questions the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.” The effort was led by such influential members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as Ron Klein (D-FL), Mike Pence (R-IN), Shelley Berkley (D-NV), Eliot Engel (D-NY), and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (D-FL), as well as Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, all of whom previously attacked the United Nations, the World Court, and various human rights groups for challenging certain U.S. and Israeli policies.

By accepting the recommendation of these congressional militarists and unilateralists to boycott the conference, while rejecting calls to participate by the Black Caucus, reputable human rights groups, UN officials, and world religious leaders, Obama has given the clearest indication yet as to who he will listen to in determining how his administration approaches the United Nations and other international initiatives in support for human rights.

© 2009 Foreign Policy In Focus

Stephen Zunes is Middle East editor for Foreign Policy In Focus. He is a professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco and the author of Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Common Courage Press, 2003.)

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Torturers Should Be Punished

April 23, 2009

By Amy Goodman | Truthdig, April 22, 2009

Spokane, Wash. – George W. Bush insisted that the U.S. did not use torture.

But the four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memos released last week by the Obama administration’s Justice Department paint a starkly different picture. The declassified memos provided legal authorization for “harsh interrogation techniques” used by the Bush administration in the years following Sept. 11, 2001. They authorized (as listed in the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee) “walling … facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, insects placed in a confinement box, and the waterboard.”

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the OLC under Bush “became a facilitator for illegal government conduct, issuing dozens of memos meant to permit gross violations of domestic and international law.”

The memos authorize what the International Committee of the Red Cross called, in a leaked report, “treatment and interrogation techniques … that amounted to torture.”

These torture techniques were developed by two psychologists based in Spokane, Wash.: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Their company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, provided specialized training to members of the U.S. military to deal with capture by enemy forces. The training is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Mitchell and Jessen, both psychologists, were contracted by the U.S. government to train interrogators with techniques they claimed would break prisoners.

They reverse-engineered the SERE training, originally developed to help people withstand and survive torture, to train a new generation of torturers.

The memos provide gruesome details of the torture. Waterboarding was used hundreds of times on a number of prisoners. The Bybee memo includes this Kafkaesque authorization: “You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect. You have informed us that he appears to have a fear of insects. In particular, you would like to tell Zubaydah that you intend to place a stinging insect into the box with him.”

After President Barack Obama said there should be no prosecutions, he was received with great fanfare at the CIA this week. Mark Benjamin, the reporter who originally broke the Mitchell and Jessen story, said when I questioned him about Obama’s position: “If you look at the president’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and Eric Holder, the attorney general … you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal-even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t-none of those people will ever face charges. The attorney general has announced that … the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys … they have been given this blanket immunity … in return for nothing.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein asked Obama to hold off on ruling out prosecutions until her panel finishes an investigation during the next six months. Though Obama promises to let the torturers go, others are pursuing them. Bybee is now a federal judge. A grass-roots movement, including Common Cause and the Center for Constitutional Rights, is calling on Congress to impeach Bybee. In Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzon, who got Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet indicted for crimes against humanity, has named Bybee and five others as targets of a prosecution.

For years, people have felt they have been hitting their heads against walls (some suffered this literally, as the memos detail). On Election Day, it looked like that wall had become a door. But that door is open only a crack. Whether it is kicked open or slammed shut is not up to the president. Though he may occupy the most powerful office on Earth, there is a force more powerful: committed people demanding change. We need a universal standard of justice. Torturers should be punished.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

© 2009 Amy Goodman

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Gen. Odierno: US May Ignore Iraq Deadline Because of al-Qaeda

April 10, 2009

Missing June Deadline Likely a Further Setback to Obama ‘Withdrawal’ Plan

Antiwar.com, April 9, 2009

In yet another sign that the Obama Administration’s “pullout” timeline for Iraq is not set in stone, General Ray Odierno told The Times today that US combat troops may remain in Iraq’s cities beyond the June 30 deadline mandated by the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). He pointed to increased trouble from al-Qaeda as the justification.

From some of its earliest leaked drafts the SOFA mandated that all US troops would be out of cities by the end of June, 2009. Lt. Gen. Lloyd Austin has previously said he thought the deadline was unlikely to be met, but this appears to be the first time the top commander in Iraq has publicly acknowledged that things are not going according to schedule.

In February, the Obama Administration revealed its new drawdown strategy, which planned to declare an official end to combat operations in August of 2010 (though up to 50,000 troops would remain, and continue to engage in combat). That already dramatically scaled back timeline, however, seems to have been predicated on a best-case scenario from a military perspective, and a delay in June could well mean a deal in August.

Related Stories

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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Wrong on Afghanistan!

April 4, 2009

By Bill Fletcher Jr. | ZNet, April 4, 2009
Source: BlackCommentator.com

Sometimes I feel like I am reliving the era of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The era of ‘guns and butter,’ as they called it. At the same time that Johnson was launching his ‘War on Poverty’ he was escalating the US war against the people of Vietnam and Laos, as well as carrying out the criminal invasion of the Dominican Republic (1965). Not only did these interventions (and others!) isolate the USA and set back the efforts of these various countries at self- determination, but they wrecked the US economy, siphoning off badly needed resources.

So, here we are today with the Obama administration carrying out a cautious and VERY partial withdrawal from Iraq (50,000 US troops will remain), while at the same time escalating the US troop presence in Afghanistan. Compounding this situation are US military attacks within Pakistan, an activity that is the equivalent of pouring kerosene on an open fire.

And just like President Johnson, President Obama has an ambitious domestic agenda.

It has been difficult for many liberals and progressives to outright oppose the Afghanistan war. This was true when Bush first invaded in 2001, and it remains true today. Following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, many people in the USA, including but not limited to the Bush administration, were looking for revenge. In fact, there were those who said quite explicitly that revenge should take precedence over justice. And so we got it- revenge that is.

The Afghanistan war was never a ‘good war.’ Yes, Al Qaeda had bases in Afghanistan. So, let’s think about another situation and how it was handled. The Nicaraguan Contras, the US-backed terrorists who waged a war against the Sandinista government in the 1980s, were based in Honduras. The Honduran government did not control those bases, even if they turned a blind-eye to them. And, to emphasize the point, the Contras were supplied, resupplied, and further supplied by the US government. In fact, the USA mined Nicaraguan harbors, a clear act of war by one government against another.

So, should the Sandinistas have attacked Honduras, overthrown the Honduran government, and perhaps have attacked Miami for good measure? How do you think that much of the world would have responded? In fact, the Sandinistas went to the World Court and brought charges against the USA. The Nicaraguans prevailed in the Court, to the surprise of everyone, yet it did not matter because the USA ignored the judgment of the Court.

The Taliban government of Afghanistan, as despicable as they were, did not carry out the assault on 11 September 2001. It was easier, however, for Bush to carry out a conventional assault against the people that only a few short months prior they had been treating as potential business partners. In carrying out that invasion the US walked into a quagmire that anyone who studied Central Asia could have (and many had) predicted. In fact, the Soviet Union had a horrific experience in Afghanistan a dozen years earlier.

So, now we are being told that the USA must continue its ‘good war’ in Afghanistan in order to crush the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The problem is that when something starts off wrong, it rarely gets much better. In fact, not only has the military situation been worsening due to a combination of bungling, corruption and cultural blindness by the invaders, but the regional political situation has been deteriorating.
A popular movement in Pakistan brought an end to the military regime of President Musharaff. At the same time, right-wing Islamists began their own military actions against the Pakistan government, the US, Pakistani Shiites, and, when they had some free time, the Indian government. It should be noted that these are not the same Taliban as are operating in Afghanistan, but these distinctions never seem to matter to the USA. Each time the USA carries out a drone attack on alleged terrorist positions in Pakistan, they strengthen the arguments and support of the right-wing Islamists.

Further US involvement in Afghanistan brings no assurance of victory. More importantly, the conflict must be resolved politically. The puppet regime in Kabul has so alienated the population that they have little control outside of the city itself. The population which, in some cases welcomed the US invasion has turned against the US and their NATO and warlord allies even if they have no love for the Taliban. There is nothing that should lead anyone to believe that this will change with the introduction of even more US forces, even if the USA spreads money around the way that they did in Iraq in order to buy off opposition.

It is not just that furthering the Afghanistan aggression takes badly needed funds away from domestic projects in the USA. That should be a given. More importantly, the Afghanistan situation is integrally linked to the internal situation in Pakistan as well as the Pakistani conflict with India (over the Kashmir). There is little that the Obama administration is currently doing that seems to recognize the extent of the potential spillover affect from further military escalation. This in a region where there are two nuclear powers within minutes of turning each other into ashes, and seem to be driven toward this end.

[BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA.]


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Judge Rules Some Prisoners at Bagram Have Right of Habeas Corpus

April 4, 2009

by Charlie Savage | The New York Times, April 3, 2009

WASHINGTON – A federal judge ruled on Thursday that some prisoners held by the United States military in Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment, dealing a blow to government efforts to detain terrorism suspects for extended periods without court oversight.

[Attiqullah 10, son of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel, an Afghan detainee shows documents proclaiming Hafizullah's innocence during an interview with Associated Press at his uncle's house on the outskirts of Kabul,Afghanistan, Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009. He is being held at Bagram Air Base.(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool) ]Attiqullah 10, son of Hafizullah Shahbaz Khiel, an Afghan detainee shows documents proclaiming Hafizullah’s innocence during an interview with Associated Press at his uncle’s house on the outskirts of Kabul,Afghanistan, Tuesday, Jan 20, 2009. He is being held at Bagram Air Base.(AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

In a 53-page ruling that rejected a claim of unfettered executive power advanced by both the Bush and Obama administrations, United States District Judge John D. Bates said that three detainees at the United States’ Bagram Air Base had the same legal rights that the Supreme Court last year granted to prisoners held at the American naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.The three detainees – two Yemenis and a Tunisian – say that they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to Bagram, and that they have been imprisoned for more than six years without trials. Arguing that they were not enemy combatants, the detainees want a civilian judge to review the evidence against them and order their release, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus.

The importance of Bagram as a holding site for terrorism suspects captured outside Afghanistan and Iraq has increased under the Obama administration, which prohibited the Central Intelligence Agency from using its secret prisons for long-term detention and ordered the military prison at Guantánamo closed within a year. The administration had sought to preserve Bagram as a haven where it could detain terrorism suspects beyond the reach of American courts, telling Judge Bates in February that it agreed with the Bush administration’s view that courts had no jurisdiction over detainees there.

Judge Bates, who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2001, was not persuaded. He said transferring captured terrorism suspects to the prison inside Afghanistan and claiming they were beyond the jurisdiction of American courts “resurrects the same specter of limitless executive power the Supreme Court sought to guard against” in its 2008 ruling that Guantánamo prisoners have a right to habeas corpus.

Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the administration was reviewing the decision and that it had made no decision about whether to appeal.

Judge Bates emphasized that his ruling was “quite narrow.” He said that it did not apply to prisoners captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and that a determination of whether prisoners might challenge their detention in court would depend on a case-by-case analysis of factors like their citizenship and location of capture.

“It is one thing to detain those captured on the surrounding battlefield at a place like Bagram, which respondents correctly maintain is in a theater of war,” the judge wrote. “It is quite another thing to apprehend people in foreign countries – far from any Afghan battlefield – and then bring them to a theater of war, where the Constitution arguably may not reach.”

Moreover, the judge has put off ruling that a fourth prisoner – also captured outside Afghanistan, but holding Afghan citizenship – had a right to challenge his detention. He said any order to release the detainee could lead to frictions with the Afghan government, and asked for additional briefings on that case.

The United States is holding about 600 people at Bagram without charges and in spartan conditions. United States officials have never provided a full accounting of the prison population, but an American government official, speaking on condition of anonymity because it is against policy to discuss details of the Bagram prison, said that fewer than a dozen detainees fell into the category affected by the ruling – non-Afghans captured beyond Afghan borders.

Judge Bates has been involved in several high-profile executive power cases. In 2002, he sided with the Bush administration in a lawsuit over whether Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force records were required to be disclosed. But in 2008, he sided with Congress in an executive-privilege dispute over whether top aides to Mr. Bush were immune from subpoenas related to the firing of federal prosecutors.

David Rivkin, an associate White House counsel in the administration of the first President Bush, predicted that Judge Bates’s ruling would be overturned on appeal. He warned that the ruling “gravely undermined” the country’s “ability to detain enemy combatants for the duration of hostilities worldwide.”

But Tina Foster, the executive director of the International Justice Network, which is representing the four Bagram detainees, praised Judge Bates’s decision as “a very good day for the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Ms. Foster said that the Bagram ruling meant that changes to the Bush detention policies would go beyond merely closing Guantánamo and extend “to any place where the United States seeks to hold individuals in a legal black hole.”

The power of federal judges to review decisions by the executive branch to imprison a terrorism suspect was among the most contentious legal issues that arose after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Bush administration began a policy of holding prisoners indefinitely and without trials, arguing that federal judges had no authority to second-guess its decisions about whom to name an “enemy combatant.”

But human-rights lawyers challenged those policies, winning Supreme Court decisions in 2004, 2006 and 2008 that gradually expanded the reach of the American legal system over detainees.

After taking office, Mr. Obama ordered a review of the evidence against each of the roughly 240 prisoners at Guantánamo as a first step toward closing the prison within a year.

He did not extend the steps he was taking to resolve the fate of the Guantánamo prisoners to those held at Bagram, although a comprehensive review of detainee policies is due to be completed in July. Ms. Foster said that the Bagram case may force the administration to speed up its decisions.

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

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RIGHTS-US: New Name, Same Detainee Problem

March 17, 2009

By William Fisher | Inter Press Service

NEW YORK, Mar 16 (IPS) – Human rights activists and constitutional law experts were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the positions taken on prisoner detention and treatment in federal court last week by President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, which one group described as “a case of old wine in new bottles.”

While the Justice Department announced it would no longer use the term “enemy combatants” – one of the George W. Bush administration’s signature phrases – and distanced itself from Bush-era claims of unlimited presidential power, government lawyers urged the court to dismiss a lawsuit brought by four former Guantanamo detainees because “aliens held at Guantanamo do not have due process rights.”

The former detainees, who are British citizens or residents, are suing former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and several senior military officials for authorising and carrying out torture and depriving them of their religious rights while the Britons were in captivity. The case is known as Rasul v. Rumsfeld.

The government’s court brief called for a blanket ban on such lawsuits. Allowing them “for actions taken with respect to aliens during wartime,” it told the District of Columbia Circuit Court, “would enmesh the courts in military, national security, and foreign affairs matters that are the exclusive province of the political branches.”

Human rights advocates were quick to respond.

The Centre for Constitutional Rights, which has provided lawyers to defend many Guantanamo prisoners, said the Obama administration has “adopted almost the same standard the Bush administration used to detain people without charge.”

It called the government’s position “a case of old wine in new bottles,” adding, “It is still unlawful to hold people indefinitely without charge. The men who have been held for more than seven years by our government must be charged or released.”

Anthony Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he found it “deeply troubling that the Justice Department continues to use an overly broad interpretation of the laws of war that would permit military detention of individuals who were picked up far from an actual battlefield or who didn’t engage in hostilities against the United States.”

“Once again,” he said, “the Obama administration has taken a half-step in the right direction. The Justice Department’s filing leaves the door open to modifying the government’s position; it is critical that the administration promptly narrow the category for individuals who can be held in military detention so that the U.S. truly comports with the laws of war and rejects the unlawful detention power of the past eight years.”

Brian J. Foley, a visiting associate professor at Boston University law school, told IPS, “The Obama administration should stop this prison programme, which is actually harmful to U.S. intelligence-gathering.”

“Imprisoning people on flimsy evidence means we are interrogating, sometimes harshly and sometimes with torture, people who are not terrorists. These people will tell interrogators anything to stop the pain. That means they give us false leads and send our investigators scurrying around like chickens with their heads cut off, chasing imaginary monsters.”

“This waste of time keeps our investigators from developing real leads. It’s a policy based on fear – ‘What if there is actually a real terrorist among the hundreds of innocents? We better not let anyone go!’ – that is counterproductive and shameful,” he said.

Jonathan Turley, an internationally recognised constitutional scholar and a professor at George Washington University law school, said, “The (Obama) administration is still arguing that it can hold these individuals without federal charges and it is still trying to quash lawsuits filed by their counsel.”

“The biggest danger,” he said, “is that it is an effort to make Obama look principled on international law before he blocks any criminal investigation of war crimes by his predecessor.”

Human Rights Watch took a similar view. Joanne Mariner, HRW’s terrorism and counterterrorism program director said, “The Obama administration’s take on detainees is essentially the Bush standard with a new name. The Obama administration’s newly issued position on Guantanamo detainees is a disappointment. Rather than rejecting the Bush administration’s ill-conceived notion of a ‘war on terror,’ the Obama administration’s position on detainees has merely tinkered with its form.”

“We urge the Obama administration to reconsider its views,” Mariner said. “The administration should be prosecuting terror suspects in the federal courts, not looking for ways to circumvent the criminal justice system.”

And Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who is currently defending several former Guantanamno detainees in a lawsuit against a subsidiary of the Boeing Company for its alleged involvement in their “extraordinary rendition,” told IPS:

“The new administration is interpreting the Authorisation for Use of Military Force (AUMF) largely as the Bush administration did: As giving the president broad powers to detain indefinitely individuals without charges or trial based on suspected terrorist activities.”

The Obama legal team “remains locked into the same misguided and illegal approach to fighting terrorism. The dropping of the ‘enemy combatant’ labels appears at this point more symbol than substance,” he said.

The AUMF resolution was passed by Congress on September 18, 2001, immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It authorized President George W. Bush to use the U.S. Armed Forces to pursue those responsible.

But not all constitutional experts agreed with the statements of human rights groups. For example, Prof. Peter Shane of the University of Ohio law school took a somewhat more nuanced view.

He told IPS, “If the Obama administration is abandoning the position that the president has exclusive and virtually unlimited authority to guide foreign and military affairs unilaterally, that may signal a willingness to collaborate with Congress in the development of future initiatives, which, in turn, could well have a moderating impact on American adventurism abroad.”

The Rasul case has had a difficult history in U.S. courts. The U.S. Circuit Court, in a ruling in January of last year, decided that Guantanamo detainees have no constitutional rights because they are “aliens without property or presence in the U.S.” It dismissed the case.

But in December of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case. The high court sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for further consideration.

The “further consideration” was triggered by a landmark Supreme Court decision nine months ago in a case known as “Boumediene,” which established that Guantanamo detainees do have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in federal court. It returned the Rasul case for a second look by the Circuit Court.

While President Obama has ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay to be closed by next January, government lawyers have taken positions in several current detainee court cases that do not propose fundamental change from that taken by the Bush administration. It has also invoked the so-called “state secrets” privilege to prevent cases from ever being heard in courts, on the grounds that public disclosure would jeopardise national security.

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Israel lobby humiliates Obama Administration

March 16, 2009

By Uri Avnery | Information Clearing House, March 15, 2009

Returning home from a very short visit to London, I found the country in the grip of uncontrollable emotions.

No, it was not about the looming danger of the radical right gaining control. It is now almost certain that the next government will consist of an assorted bunch of settlers, explicit racists and perhaps even outright fascists. But that does not evoke any excitement.

Nor was there much excitement about yet another interrogation of the (still) incumbent prime minister in his various corruption affairs. That is hardly news anymore.

All the excitement was about a “press conference” given by the former president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, after the attorney-general announced that he might be indicted for rape.

Katsav, it may be remembered by those who remember such things, was accused by several of his female staff of persistent sexual harassment and at least one case of rape. He had to resign.

An Iranian-born immigrant and a protégé of Menachem Begin, Katsav had made a career based on a kind of affirmative action. Begin believed that, for the sake of integration, promising young immigrants from Oriental countries should be promoted to positions of responsibility. Katsav, a rather nondescript right-wing politician with all the customary right-wing opinions, became minister of tourism and then was elected by the Knesset to the ceremonial post of president, mainly to spite the rival candidate, Shimon Peres. Wags said that the Knesset was reluctant to spoil Peres’s (then) unbroken record of lost elections.

Since his abdication two years ago, the Katsav affair has dragged on and on, almost to the point of farce. Revelations were leaked by the police, several women disclosed lurid details, the ex-president made a plea agreement admitting to lesser offences, he then revoked the deal, the attorney-general procrastinated and now he seems to have made up his mind about the indictment.

So Katsav called a press conference in his remote home town, Kiryat Malakhi (the former Arab village of Qastina, now within reach of the Qassams). It was an unprecedented performance. The ex-president spoke solo for nearly three hours, airing his grievances against the police, the attorney-general, the media, the politicians and almost everybody else. All this was, incredibly, broadcast live on all three of Israel’s TV channels, as if it had been a State of the Union address. Katsav rambled on and on, repeating himself again and again. No questions were allowed. Respected journalists, hungry for scoops, were evicted if they dared to interrupt.

So when I came back yesterday morning [13 March], I found this feat dominating the front pages of all our newspapers. Everything else was banished to the back pages.

Because o this, Charles Freeman got hardly a mention. Yet his affair was a thousand-fold more important than all the sexual activities of our ex-president.

Freeman was called by Barack Obama’s newly-appointed chief of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, to the post of Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. In this position, he would have been in charge of the National intelligence Estimates (NIE), summarizing the reports of all the 16 US intelligence agencies, which employ some 100,000 people at an annual cost of 50 billion dollars, and composing the estimates that are put before the president.

In Israel, this is the job of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the officer in charge has a huge influence on government policy. In October 1973, the then intelligence chief disregarded all reports to the contrary and informed the government that there was only a “low probability” of an Egyptian attack. A few days later the Egyptian army crossed the canal.

Throughout the 1990s, the man in charge of intelligence estimates, Amos Gilad, deliberately misled the government into believing that Yasser Arafat was deceiving them and was actually plotting the destruction of Israel. Gilad was later openly accused by his subordinates of suppressing their expert reports and submitting estimates of his own, which were not based on any intelligence whatsoever. Later, as the guru of Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Gilad coined the phrase “We have no Palestinian partner for peace”.

In the US, the intelligence chiefs famously supplied President George W. Bush with the (false) intelligence he needed to justify his invasion of Iraq.

All this shows how vitally important it is to have an estimates chief of intellectual integrity and wide experience and knowledge. Admiral Blair could not have chosen a better person than Charles Freeman, a man of sterling character and uncontested expertise, especially about China and the Arab world.

And that was his undoing.

As a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman is an expert on the Arab world and the Israeli-Arab conflict. He has strong opinions about American policy in the Middle East, and makes no secret of them.
In a 2005 speech, he criticized Israel’s “high-handed and self-defeating policies” originating in the “occupation and settlement of Arab lands”, which he described as “inherently violent”.

In a 2007 speech he said that the US had “embraced Israel’s enemies as our own” and that Arabs had “responded by equating Americans with Israelis as their enemies.” Charging the US with backing Israel’s “efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations” and to “seize ever more Arab land for its colonists”, he added that “Israel no longer even pretends to seek peace with the Palestinians”.

Another conclusion is his belief that the terrorism the United States confronts is due largely to “the brutal oppression of the Palestinians by an Israeli occupation that has lasted over 40 years and shows no signs of ending”.

Naturally, the appointment of such a person was viewed with great alarm by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington. They decided on an all-out attack. No subtle behind-the-scenes intervention, no discreet protestations, but a full-scale demonstration of their might right at the beginning of the Obama era.

Public denunciations were composed, senators and congressmen pressed into action, media people mobilized. Freeman’s integrity was called into question, shady connections with Arab and Chinese financial interests “disclosed” by the docile press. Admiral Blair came to his appointee’s defence, but in vain. Freeman had no choice but to withdraw.

The full meaning of this episode should not escape anyone.

It was the first test of strength of the lobby in the new Obama era. And in this test, the lobby came out with flying (blue-and-white) colours. The administration was publicly humiliated.

The White House did not even try to hide its abject surrender. It declared that the appointment had not been cleared with the president, that Obama had no hand in it and did not even know about it. Meaning: of course he would have objected to the appointment of any official who was not fully acceptable to the lobby. The portrayal of the power of the lobby by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, has been fully vindicated.

This has a significance which goes far beyond the already far-reaching implications of the affair itself.

Many people in Israel, who view the establishment of the new rightist government with apprehension, cite as their main fear the danger of a clash with the new Obama administration. Such a clash, they believe, could be fatal for Israel’s security. But the rightists deride such arguments. They assert that no American president would ever dare to confront the Israeli lobby. The captive congressmen and senators, as well as the supporters of the Israeli government in the media and even in the White House itself, would sink on sight any American policy opposed by even the most extreme right-wing government in Israel.

Now the first skirmish has taken place, and the president of the United States has blinked first. Perhaps one should not rush to conclusions, perhaps Obama needs more time to find his bearings, but the signs are ominous for any Israeli interested in peace.

It may be too early to call this episode the rape of Washington, but it is certainly vastly more important than Katsav’s sexual escapades.

By the way, or not by the way, a word about my trip to London.

I went there to lend support to a group of Jewish personalities, well-known in academic and other circles, who have set up an organization called “Independent Jewish Voices”.

Recently ,they published a book called “A Time to speak out”, in which several of them contributed to the debate about Israel, human rights and Jewish ethics. The views expressed are very close to those current in the Israeli peace camp. But when they offered their book for presentation in the Jewish Book Week, they were rudely rejected. In protest, they convened an event of their own, and that’s where I spoke.

I believe that it is of utmost importance that such Jewish voices be heard. In several countries, including the US, groups of brave Jews are trying to stand up to the Jewish establishment that unconditionally supports the Israeli right. In the US, several such groups have sprung up, some quite recently. One of them, called “J Street”, is trying to compete with the formidable and notorious AIPAC…

Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist.

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US Drone Strike Kills At Least 15 in Pakistan

March 13, 2009

Four Missiles Hit ‘Residential Building’

Antiwar.com

posted March 12, 2009

Last Updated 3/12/09 9:45 PM EST

At least 15 people were killed today when four missiles fired from US drones hit a residential building in Barjo, Kurram Agency. Local officials characterized the building as a “militant hideout” and said it had been completely destroyed.

One security official said that those killed were “mainly Afghan Taliban,” and that the facility was run “by local Taliban commander Fazal Saeed and training was underway at the time of the strike.” Militants cordoned off the area and have been retrieving bodies from the rubble. Officials say no “high-value” targets were believed to be among those killed

It was the second major US attack on the Kurram Agency in less than a month: in mid-February an attack killed 31 people including an alleged commander named Bahram Khan Kochi. The Obama Administration was reported earlier this week to be planning a dramatic escalation of the number and intensity of the US strikes into Pakistan.

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compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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