Obama Moves to Massively Expand Covert Military Abroad

Via The New York Times, President Obama has just ordered a “broad expansion of clandestine military operations” in an attempt to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda”. The ‘covert operations’ will likely include anything from target assassinations, ‘drone’ attacks in Pakistan, secret bombing campaigns, money transfers to client states (a la Karzai and Maliki), and many things in-between. This is a significant move for a variety of reasons, not least of which stands the utter lack of public consultation for such a policy.

Mr. Greenwald has a timely essay on why Mr. Obama can undertake such extreme actions in the absence not only of opposition to his imperial policy, but indeed, any discussion whatsoever. Our major news outlets have reported the order in classic ‘objective’ style, assigning as little controversy to it as possible and treating it instead as a run-of-the-mill executive action. But it is interesting to examine why, in this year 2010, after nine continuous years of war, public opinion is such that a unilateral expansion of our secret military complex can occur with as little discussion as imaginable.

First, Mr. Greenwald notes, because this military expansion is taking place under a “Democratic” President, it creates the illusion of so-called ‘bipartisan support’. Back when President Bush was carrying out covert operations in Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc., they were painted as the actions of an ‘extremist’ administration, one which regards the opposition with disdain and made a point of treating international law with utter contempt. However, after 18 months of military escalation, these wars are as much Mr. Obama’s (that is, “Democratic” wars), as they were Mr. Bush’s. As such, the number of “Democrats” willing to risk their political futures by opposing military action has dropped precipitously, as have the number of war-opposers in the general population. Specifically, the subset of people for whom Mr.Obama can do no wrong will automatically agree with his war policy – or if they disagree, put forth some excuse as to how Mr. Obama ‘has no choice’.

The biggest reason Mr. Greenwald identifies, however, is the complete lack of documented impact these wars have on our livelihood. It has been often mentioned that, unlike in Vietnam, very few Americans have had to go to war against their will. Our press is largely censored as to the true cost of our warfare not only on the beleaguered people of Iraq and Afghanistan, but even our own soldiers. Recall the recent dust-up when our Secretary of War, Robert Gates, “harshly condemned” the media’s display of a flag-draped coffin. And that was just one soldier, who had admittedly died in combat, but whose grisly death we had been totally shielded from.  As much as possible, we citizens are encouraged not to think about our military “commitments” abroad, and instead to simply carry on with our daily lives, a few dollars shorter than the day before, a little more ragged perhaps, but still inestimably “proud” of our “commitment” to “democracy in the Middle East”. One wonders just how far that pride would take us if more than 1% of the US population was involved in our military escapades, as the statistic stands now.

But beyond that, what Mr. Greenwald hints at but never explicitly states, is the psychology of powerlessness to which we citizens are routinely subjected. We literally have no say in what our government does abroad, and we have less and less of a say in even its domestic policies. In the 2008 elections, both candidates were unabashedly pro-war, Mr. Obama more so than even his most fervent supporters might have dreamt. For whom are we to vote if we wish to exit Iraq and Afghanistan immediately? Which Congressman, which Senator would even entertain such a possibility? To whom do we donate that we can be sure our paltry $50 will not be rendered irrelevant by the millions of dollars industry interests donate in order to keep these wars going? It is an implacable question, one made all the more urgent by President Obama’s dramatic escalation of our already over-stretched ‘commitments’.

The feeling of powerlessness can lead to apathy, but also to fear. When one recalls the brutality to which previous “anti-war protesters” have been subjected in the US, including savage beatings with nightsticks, water-cannons, ear-splitting sound emitters, tear gas and rubber bullets, it is not hard to imagine from whence this fear of dissent arises. Recall, also, that since the Homegrown Terrorism Act of 2007 passed, civil disobedience – the mere act of peaceful protest – has been defined as ‘terrorism’. And once you are accused of ‘terrorism’, citizen or no, you are immediately stripped of every right you think you have.

This latest move towards military hegemony is particularly insidious, and I suppose it follows that Mr. Obama merely announced his policy, in true decree style, with little or no discussion. With one stroke of a pen, Mr. Obama has resserved the right to carry out military operations anywhere around the globe, from “surgical strikes”, bombing campaigns, ground incursions, assassinations, or, indeed, anything his enigmatic mind may wish. It is worth remembering at this point that Mr. Obama also reserves the right to assassinate US citizens in their beds (that is, far from a battlefield), and ‘render’ accused terrorists to a global prison complex where no defense attorney dares enter. There, they can be beaten, tortured, or even murdered, far from the watchful eye of the Red Cross.

It is easy to imagine this latest move on the part of Mr. Obama is merely a continuation of Mr.  Bush’s odious policies. It is that, of course, but its implications go far deeper. Mr. Bush’s covert actions were largely piecemeal: an assassination here, a few ‘drone’ attacks there, maybe some ‘cash assistance’ to some friendly dictator or another for spice. In contrast, Mr. Obama’s new ‘national security strategy‘ systematizes these covert acts of aggression, and sets up, in essence, a new governmental body, with no congressional or popular oversight, to carry out his murderous will around the globe. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this ‘overhaul’, yet it is even more difficult to convince anyone of that significance.

Mr. Hitler once coined the term for the Germans as a ‘sleep-walking people’, but the same could easily be said of Americans (or, for that matter, anyone else). We face, in our generation, a confluence of crises of which we are only just beginning to see the magnitude, and unfortunately the first step to solving a crisis is to realize it exists, something for which, at least with regards to our present constitutional crisis, we still have quite some ways to go.

Lieberman Wants to Revoke NYC Bomb Suspect’s Citizenship

At Harper’s, Scott Horton makes a great catch:

Senator Joseph Lieberman has developed a knack for craven fearmongering. His latest proposal was born from the police operation by New York’s finest that led to the capture of Faisal Shahzad last weekend. Shahzad, a financial analyst, is a United States citizen and, as a long-time resident of Bridgeport, one of Lieberman’s constituents, which Lieberman considers a troublesome complication. Lieberman says he will sponsor legislation under which the president will be given the power to deprive a person of his citizenship simply by bringing certain charges.

Lieberman is vague about the proposals, and he offers no explanation of how a citizen could be stripped of his citizenship by executive fiat consistently with the Constitution,a step that would have all the traditional badges of tyrannical government. He also apparently believes, incorrectly, that only U.S. citizens have a right to receive aMiranda warning. (That’s the sort of mistake that a young lawyer sitting for the bar would never make, although Lieberman has been a lawyer since 1967 and was a former Connecticut attorney general.)

Though obviously legislative adventures such as those of Mr. Lieberman should be avoided at all costs, I think it is important to remember that the “facts” of the Times Square incident are now murky and inconclusive at best. We have a “suspect”, but no idea if he actually did it; we have a confession, but no idea how it was extracted. For all the front-page accusations of his supposed “links” to “The Taliban”, we know only for sure that

1) – A crude, incompetent bomb consisting of M-88 firecrackers (the sort children play with), a sealed tank of propane, and a couple bags of fertilizer was placed at the back of an SUV in Times Square. This is not how you make a bomb, and given that the sort of firecracker he bought cannot undergo self-reignition (one M-88 can’t set off another M-88 with its detonation), I have real doubts that the “explosion” would have even broken through the car. It was hardly the sort of device one envisions upon hearing the phrase “car bomb”, particularly as the citizens of Baghdad have come to know it.

2) – A Pakistani-American citizen was picked up at an airport attempting to leave the country with a ticket he paid for in cash. The Times sent its reporters scurrying to find his relatives the moment the NYPD released his name, and they emerged with a hit piece on how the suspect, Mr. Shahzad, “fit the profile of a Terrorist”. Rife with circumstantial evidence, the article describes his “‘money woes”, his newfound “zeal for Islam”, his “strong religious identity” and so forth. The article does not mention the evidence against Mr. Shahzad, and takes his guilt as a foregone conclusion.

3) – The suspect confessed. But I should stress emphatically that that is all we know of his confession. Mr. Shahzad has been accused of five terrorism-related charges, according to the New Statesman, and apparently gave his interrogates “the goods” – that is, he confessed to having trained in Pakistan, having “links” with “The Taliban”, etc – precisely what our policy planners might have wanted. The AFP was kind enough to note that Mr. Shahzad has not been in a court, and has in fact, “disappeared” since his “dramatic arrest” 4 days ago. We don’t know where he was taken, who interrogated him, or what exactly he confessed to.

I do not wish to be called a “conspiracy theorist”, but it is well known (and given the tone of coverage, tragically well accepted) that if you are accused of the crime of Terrorism, you will be interrogated in secret and tortured at the very least by days or weeks of sleeplessness (try it, reader!). I have no idea how Mr. Shahzad was interrogated, except that it was done by the military. Unless I see documentary evidence to suggest otherwise, I think that given the military’s past experiences with interrogation, we can assume Mr. Shahzad was tortured.

Then what is his confession worth? Very little, it would seem, and even less given the almost hilarious nature of his “crime”. The contents of his car were essentially inert. Is it a crime to have firecrackers, a sealed propane tank, and a few bags of fertilizer in your car at Times Square on a Saturday night? Evidently, if you happen to be on a particular list, everything is a crime.

It would be difficult to overstate the danger of Mr. Lieberman’s proposal and those like it. By classifying a certain class of crime (“Terrorism”) as one for which normal rules do not apply, one creates a dangerous precedent. Who, after all, is a Terrorist? Mostly Muslims, for now, but the Administration has given indications for years that it plans on expanding the definition to, say, civil disobedience.

This is an unhealthy trend, and ought to be stopped. To have two sets of laws – one for people accused of “Terrorism” and the other for everyone else – is illogical and absurd; and worse, it demolishes the idea of whether or not we can conclusively ascertain a “Terrorist’s” guilt. Precisely because Mr. Shahzad likely confessed under torture, we shall never know whether or not he was actually guilty.

Bush Administration Officials Knew Guantanamo Detainees Were Innocent

We had been routinely subjected to pronouncements from the Bush Administration that those held in Guantanamo were the “worst of the worst” for some time, and many wondered whether any of them were aware that most of the detainees were totally innocent – that is, tortured for no reason.

Well, wonder no more. (Via Harper’s), the Times of London reports today that senior Bush officials, including, presumably, President Bush himself, were well aware that a majority of the 743 inmates of Guantanamo Bay were there for no reason other than bad luck, but that it would be “politically impossible” to release them.

Behold:

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.

This is outstanding work from The Times of London, and yet further evidence in favor of war crimes prosecution for senior Bush administration officials, including, one hopes, President Bush himself. These guys knew as far back as 2002 (the year Guantanamo opened) that they were torturing and imprisoning people for no reason, yet they continued to spout for almost a decade that the inmates of Guantanamo were all hardened terrorists, “the worst of the worst”, etc., etc.

As Scott Horton notes, this would explain why Dick Cheney has been running a massive propaganda campaign to harden American public opinion against an investigation into the previous administration’s conduct at Guantanamo. If any official inquiry got a hold of the documents The Times of London describes in its article, then Mr. Cheney would necessarily have to appear for questioning, and would likely end up in jail.

And how ironic that even if he were sent to jail, he wouldn’t be tortured.

John Yoo and the Self-Satisfied Defense

John Yoo, the primary author of the legal memoranda that gave President Bush the power to detain and torture anyone he likes, has written a slimy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending his ethical lapses. I know that Mr. Yoo is a big-shot Berkeley Law professor (and I’m just a 22-year-old nothing), so for fear of sounding ignorant I suppose I won’t give his article too much time. But it does beg for comment.

He begins, detailing the marvelous gift he bestowed upon President Obama:

Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

He sure didn’t make it easy. When Mr. Obama took office a year ago, receiving help from one of the lawyers involved in the development of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies was the furthest thing from his mind. Having won a great electoral victory, the new president promised a quick about-face. He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and moved to restore the law-enforcement system as the first line of defense against a hardened enemy devoted to killing Americans.

This is confusing for so many reasons. As I’m sure Mr. Yoo knows, President Obama has endorsed kidnapping “terrorism suspects” and holding them indefinitely at various sites around the globe. He’s opposed to any further investigation into our torture policy (something for which I imagine Mr. You would be quite grateful), and has, in fact, expanded the legal black hole at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where no defense attorneys, judges or prosecutors can set foot.

Mr. Yoo mentions that President Obama has ordered Guantanamo closed (actually, Obama hasn’t closed it yet, and probably never will), but no other evidence to suggest President Obama has endorsed a meaningful review of executive power. I just don’t understand how one promise that anyway went unfulfilled  means Obama is “[determined] to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism”, as Yoo later writes.

Then Mr. Yoo complains of being “hounded” in the form of a superficial Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) review. I admit I have not read the report, but Mr. Yoo claims:

OPR’s investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department’s own standards that last week the department’s ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

Which says more, perhaps, about the Office of Professional responsibility than it does about the tactics which Mr. Yoo authorized, which include being forced to stand for weeks while shackled to the ceiling. And, of course, Mr. Yoo doesn’t deign to mention that the very “enhanced interrogation techniques” that he advised Presidents Bush and Obama to use, and defends in this article, are unconstitutional according to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Yoo lauds himself for sitting through the tedious hearings, even though he was under “no legal obligation to do so” and even though they had no impact on his lucrative professional career. Why should he make such a non-sacrifice?

I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge. I did it to help our president—President Obama, not Bush. Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda.

Forgive me, but if one of the wars is specifically against al Qaeda, whom are we fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are those merely “wars” in the general sense of the term, with no clear enemy or end? If they are, Mr. Yoo’s lengthy and repeated defenses of executive rule-by-decree during “wartime” means he advocates for a vast and permanent expansion of the President’s power. I don’t get it. Is that what he’s trying to say?

He ends his “op-ed piece”, which was really a self-serving polemic, with a bizzare example from five years ago:

n 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts.

The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow. In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission.

So, according to John Yoo, those few American deaths justify the indefinite detention of any and all goathearders (and anyone else we might happen not to trust). Do not bother asking Mr. Yoo why it is we’re in Afghanistan in the first place, who it is we’re fighting, or what our ultimate goals are. That’s not his department.

New “Enemy Belligerent” Act Allows for Indefinite Detention of US Citizens

Lilliana Segura of Alternet reports:

The bill is only 12 pages long, but that is plenty of room to grant the president the power to order the arrest, interrogation, and imprisonment of anyone — including a U.S. citizen — indefinitely, on the sole suspicion that he or she is affiliated with terrorism, and on the president’s sole authority as commander in chief.

…

A subsequent section, titled “Detention Without Trial of Unprivileged Enemy Belligerents,” states that suspects “may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.” In a press conference introducing the bill earlier this month, Sen. Joe Lieberman said, “I know that will be — that may be — a long time, but that’s the nature of this war.”

I’ve never seen a piece of legislation so baldly committed to subverting the rule of law. Remember, former Chief of Defense Staff has explicitly stated that the War on Terror (‘hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners’) could last 50 years. Or forever! No one knows!

Thankfully we still have a half-way independent judiciary which has repeatedly struck down similar legislation; so the odds are that this bill, if passed, will eventually be found unconstitutional (which, of course it is). But until then, anyone caught up in the drag-net of police state action this bill recommends will find themselves very lonely indeed, while they wait for the ‘war on terror’ to end.

And can we drop all this nonsense about “well, if you’re not a terrorist, you don’t need to worry”? Tell that to the 90% of inmates at Guantanamo Bay who are totally innocent. Tell that to the taxicab drivers, bakers and welders who were sold for bounties and found themselves held and tortured for years at the various US “black sites” around the globe. This bill isn’t so much an “anti-terrorism” bill as it is an “anti-Muslim” bill.

Seeing that the guy who flew his plane into a Texas IRS building (the very definition of Terrorism) was labeled a “tax protester” by our government and media, and our own Homeland Security department is on record saying that Timothy McVeigh (who bombed an Oklahoma government building, killing 168 people, including children) “wasn’t a terrorist“, it should be clear who that epithet refers to.

And if there’s any doubt still remaining, just check Newsweek‘s “handy guide” as to who is and is not a “terrorist”:

Lone wolfish American attacker who sees gov’t as threat to personal freedom: bomber, tax protester, survivalist, separatist

Group of Americans bombing/kidnapping to protest U.S. policies on war/poverty/personal freedom/ – radical left-wing movement, right-wing separatists

All foreign groups or foreign individuals bombing/shooting to protest American gov’t: terrorists

So it should be clear that this bill is specifically designed to more easily arrest “foreigners” (even those who happen to be US citizens), hold them indefinitely without trial, and – what the hell, why not – torture them. White people cannot, by definition, be terrorists. Only brown people can.

US Holding 27,000 Secret Prisoners Around the World

Many people think that since Guantanamo only holds around 700 prisoners, and since that’s the only US secret prison that happens to be in the news, our crimes when it comes to torture and indefinite detention only extend to a few hundred prisoners. But Clive Stafford Smith, a valiant defense lawyer for many of the innocent US ‘ghost prisoners’, claims that the US is holding more than 27,000 secret prisoners in undisclosed hell-holes around the world.

Remember, 95% of detainees in US custody were seized randomly and brought to us to us by bounty hunters – sold, essentially, for a few thousand dollars –  and ex-Bush officials are already on record saying that most of them are innocent. Everyone who has the rotten luck to end up in US custody gets tortured in some manner or another, be it by sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, “stress positions” (being forced to stand, arms outstretched for days at a time), or whatever else the soldiers decide to do with you. There are no exceptions.

And lest we forget, at least 100 of these detainees, and likely far more, were horrifically tortured to death. The most terrifying part about this is that there’s no law. None. You can be a US citizen, minding your own business one day, and the next be transported to an unknown location, placed in sensory deprivation for 1,301 days, pumped full of LSD and PCP, beaten within an inch of your life, shocked with electrodes, mock-executed, water-boarded, etc. The ‘interrogators’ are limited only by their imaginations. There are no written rules.

“Sensory deprivation” is a rather euphemistic phrase for what I am convinced is the most horrifying and brutal torture ever devised. The procedure is precisely as it sounds – you are “deprived” of your senses – but that description fails to convey the sheer terror involved. Imagine: you are sitting there with blackout goggles, thick ear-pads, and heavy gloves. You float in a sea of nothingness, seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling nothing. You don’t know how long this will last – maybe a day, maybe a week – but what’s more, you feel your sensation of time and space breaking down. Just imagine it! Total silence and darkness for days, weeks at a time!

Jose Padilla, who remained this way for 1,301 days.

Donald O. Hebb, the psychiatrist who pioneered the technique, found that his subjects experienced “acute hallucinations” after just one day in the “deprivation chamber” and “total psychosis” after only two days. He estimated that six to eight days would be the maximum anyone could endure while keeping their sanity intact, and later claimed he had “no idea what a potentially vicious weapon this technique could be”. Jose Padilla was kept in sensory deprivation for 1,301 days – that is, 43 months. Can you imagine it – continuous silence and darkness for almost four years? They say “don’t try this at home”, but do try it! Sit in a room for just one day with blackout goggles and earmuffs on, wearing thick gloves, and preferably shackled to a fixed object. I have nightmares about this. But for Jose Padilla, a US citizen, it was all too real.

Finally, I should hasten to remind the Obama Administration, who has already endorsed kidnapping, interrogation by torture, and indefinite detention, that these practices are illegal via the Supreme Court’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, which stipulates that all detention practices must conform to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. I wonder if this constitutional lawyer cares with the Supreme Court thinks.

So You’d Like to Waterboard: A Step-By-Step Manual

Mark Benjamin at Salon reviews some CIA documents and emerges with the authoritative US Government Guide to Torture.

Some excerpts:

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood.

…

Interrogators were instructed to pour the water when a detainee had just exhaled so that he would inhale during the pour. An interrogator was also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s mouth and nose using his hands. “The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff,” the Bradbury memo notes. “In which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water.”

…

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown.

…

The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:

“NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

But yeah, you know – torture is no big deal. Especially since most of these people we’re torturing are innocent anyway.

The Times, Habeas Corpus, and those Bad Ol’ Terrorists

The Times continues its faux-reporting over the “controversy” that has erupted over whether we should act like tyrants and keep “terror suspects” in cages indefinitely without trial, or act like decent adults and follow the rule of law. Previously, The Times came out in support of the former option, happily announcing that “Detainees will be Held, but not Tried” – but as the political winds shift, so do does the leading newspaper, which now plumps for the worst aspects of both, much like President Obama. They even invoked the mysterious “experts”, who, apparently, do not include the Supreme Court.

As Jane Mayer expertly analyzed in a recent New Yorker, the Justice Department is now in a state of civil war. One one side, Attorney General Eric Holder, who advocates that “terror suspects” be vetted in a court of law to determine what, if anything, they’re guilty of. He is joined by a majority of our Supreme Court, human-rights activists, and other so-called sympathizers of terrorism. Opposing him stands Rahm Emanuel, the President’s chief of staff, who contends these “enemy combatants” deserve no quarter and should be tried, without evidence, before a “military tribunal” after being held indefinitely (after an interrogation by torture). Joining Mr. Emanual, ironically, is the Tea Party faction, along with “Republicans” in general, all of whom claim that allowing suspects of terrorism a fair trial stands tantamount to treason.

President Obama, as is his wont, has opted for a “middle path”, as The Times reports today. Some detainees, specifically those whom he is sure to convict, will be publicly tried, and the rest will just be held indefinitely because it’s impossible to convict anyone you’ve tortured a confession out of without looking like a butcher.

Granting civilian trials to some “terrorists” and secretly sentencing the others creates a multi-tiered justice system wherein only the suspects for whom conviction is assured will be allowed to go to trial. This is pre-judgment and worse.  It it is a system that does away with even the pretense of caring whether or not these detainees are actually guilty. The government clearly seeks a few nefarious-looking Terrorists to be convicted by a civilian jury – thus proving that “the system works” – and then machinery to convict the rest of the suspects who could not be tried by jury because they were interrogated by torture and their cases would be thrown out (as, indeed, many have already).

It’s worth remembering that a vast majority of Guantanamo detainees were guilty of nothing more than bad luck. An ex-Bush official is on record saying that most of the people we held there were totally innocent.

But beyond this, The Times completely neglects to mention that these military commissions are illegal. The Supreme court has ruled, in numerous landmark cases, that the whole military commissions process is unconstitutional.  Hamdan v. Rumsfeld effectively nullifies the necessary sections of the Military Commissions Act, and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld restored Habeas Corpus and Sixth Amendment rights (the right to a speedy trial) to detainees.

In fact, the majority opinion of Hamdan states that all detainees be given a “regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples“, and clearly states that the commissions system set up in Guantanamo does not fit that requirement.

Any article discussing discussing military commissions has the duty to mention these cases, but since they’re  inconvenient to the prevailing narrative, they become “non-newsworthy”. I’m sure the “experts” they quote (nearly all Bush flunkies) know better.

One hears often from opponents of civil liberties that it’s “borderline criminal” to read a terrorism suspect his rights, that such actions provide “comfort to the enemy”, or as Ms. Palin thundered in her memorable Tea Party speech, that we’re allowing Terrorists who “hate our freedoms” to “lawyer up”. As Scott Brown, Massachusetts Senator and Tea Party darling once remarked: “Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree.”

But of course it is not for this charlatan to decide, but for the Supreme Court, who, unfortunately for Mr. Brown, has consistently ruled in favor of detainee rights. And for the record, the Constitution prescribes the relevant clauses to protect the rights of people who have been accused of a crime but not yet found guilty, much like these so-called “terrorists”. Until convicted in a court of law, these people are, by definition, guilty of nothing.

The reasoning employed by the Palin-Brown faction makes the dangerous assumption that anyone the government accuses of terrorism magically becomes a terrorist. In the warped mind of a Tea Partier, suspicion is proof. This works fine for most people, so long as it’s only brown Arabs with weird squiggly writing whom we lock up in cages with no trial, but the danger of promoting totalitarian practices is that you never quite know against whom they’ll be used next.

Postscript:

It’s also worth mentioning that every other country that has had problems with terrorism – India, Greece, Spain, etc. – have all found ways to deal with it within their already existing legal structures. They saw no need to create new levels of “justice” wherein some suspects get trials and others simply go to jail forever.

Tasers and Ray Guns – The “Soft-Kill” Option

Harper’s has a sublime report on the Army’s latest weaponry, unfortunately accessible only to subscribers. Over the past decade and more, weapons manufacturers have been pushing the Pentagon on what they call “soft-kill”, non-lethal “crowd dispersal” machines. They can utilize sound (via ear-drum shattering frequencies), or, as Ando Arike describes in his report, intense microwave beams that heat one’s skin to 130 degrees, causing mortal pain – but, as the Pentagon hastens to point out, “non-lethal” pain.

The implications of a device of this nature are enormous. Ando cites a 60 Minutes piece, what he rightly calls “essentially a twelve-minute Pentagon infomercial” emphasizing the “huge numbers of  lives that could be saved” via this technology – the riots in Iraq we could quell peacefully, the protests we could “disperse” without firing a shot, etc. You know those darn Iraqis are always rioting over some fool thing or another.

More troubling is the recent deployment of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team from Iraq to various American cities to help with “crowd control” in the coming social unrest as oil and other resources become scarce.

The obvious danger of these weapons, and what almost no mainstream outlet has bothered to mention, is that they will eventually be used against the American populace. The First Amendment rather explicitly states our right to assemble, but these weapons render that right obsolete. Who decides which gatherings have become “unruly”, for which “limited force is necessary”?

Unless the nature of their “movement” changes radically, I have little doubt the “Tea Party” protesters will have very much to worry about, but what of the anti-war protesters? One needs only to recall the various “anti-globalization” protests on which the US government employed tear gas, rubber bullets, and sound guns to see how far the government is willing to go.

In earlier days, governments often had no choice to break up a gathering except by lethal violence, and an arms race has developed for the most effective method to disperse crowds without killing them. As Ando remarks, the proliferation of digital media has given truth to the phrase “the world is watching.” – and no one likes a massacre.

Enter the “Ray Gun”. That rather slavish MSNBC article presents it in the brightest possible light, but the result still looks pretty grim. The thing makes you feel like you’re on fire, as Fox News enthusiastically reports. You have no time to think or decide what to do. Your only instinct is “Run.”

The practical value of this for totalitarianism must be enormous, but our press has shown it nothing but enthusiasm. This article from Gizmodo must be read to be believed (emphasis mine):

The U.S. military has developed a non-lethal ray gun that makes people feel like they’re on fire. Yes! It’s supposed to be used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (where else?) in order to disperse crowds and get people to cooperate. It uses millimeter electromagnetic waves to penetrate the skin and raises body temperature to 130 degrees Fahrenheit near instantly. Combine this with other top notch U.S. military technology and it’s pretty easy to see why we’re number one, now and forever.

“Where else” indeed. I can just imagine some Pentagon hack writing with special care to inject some colloquialisms – to appeal to the kids, of course.

But even our hallowed institutions have succumbed to the Ray Gun’s unnatural charms, like the BBC, whose only quote is of a military flunky describing the device by saying:

“This is a breakthrough technology that’s going to give our forces a capability they don’t now have,” defence official Theodore Barna told Reuters news agency.

“We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010.”

Anyone who thinks these devices will only be used in Iraq or Afghanistan has some serious optimism. If the Army has already deployed several contingents to the US, and they have added this device to their repertoire, then I think it’s only reasonable to assume they will use it.

I’m not sure Ando mentions this in his article, but we can also drop this whole bit about the weapon being “non-lethal” and “harmless”. Anyone with a high-school knowledge of chemistry or physics knows that microwave frequencies are carcinogenic.

Flip-Flops and Assassinations

Is anyone even remotely surprised that President Obama reserves the right to assassinate US citizens for any reason (or no reason at all)? Should you be so unfortunate as to incur Mr. Obama’s displeasure, you may wake up one morning to find yourself on the business end of an M-16 assault rifle and a grimly determined marine dispatched to “take out the threat” (i.e. you). You need not be on a battlefield  or even have committed any crime – Mr. Obama merely has to label you an “enemy combatant”. You can gain this unfortunate moniker for such acts as speaking out against the American occupation of your country, consorting with “unknown elements”, or, indeed, no reason at all.

It is clear, as Mr. Greenwald repeatedly points out, that such extra-judicial presidential murders are unconstitutional and a dangerous new investment of power into the Executive Branch. One recalls the massive powers President Bush gave himself as a “war president” to craft legislation (via “signing statements), unilaterally declare war, imprison “enemy combatants” without trial or habeas corpus, interrogate by torture, and send CIA hit squads all around the globe. One wonders, however, if even Mr. Bush would have assumed the right to kill American citizens wherever, whenever, and however he wished.

During his campaign, Mr. Obama naturally spoke out against the vast powers accumulated under the Bush Administration. Mr. Bush was terribly unpopular, after all, and Mr. Obama had to distance himself from him as best he could. Let’s take a look at what he said then:

Regarding warrantless wiretapping and Telecom immunity:

1/28/2008, Campaign statement: “I strongly oppose retroactive immunity in the FISA bill. Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. The FISA court works. The separation of power works. We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight, and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend.”

Mr. Obama voted for the FISA bill (which he “strongly opposed”), only six months later.

Regarding separation of powers:

10/2/2007, Speech at DePaul University: “We face real threats. Any President needs the latitude to confront them swiftly and surely. But we’ve paid a heavy price for having a President whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuisance. Matters of war and peace are used as political tools to bludgeon the other side.”

We continue to pay that “heavy price”, as Mr. Obama has taken for himself powers which even Mr. Bush would have blushed to demand.

Regarding indefinite detention:

Q: Does the Constitution permit a president to detain US citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants?

A: No. I reject the Bush Administration’s claim that the President has plenary authority under the Constitution to detain U.S. citizens without charges as unlawful enemy combatants.

– Boston Globe Questionaire, December, 2007

Well, apparently he didn’t like that answer, because almost immediately after his inaguaration, he redacted it. Now, not only does he think the Constitution allows detention without charges, Mr. Obama has come to believe that under the Constitution, the President has the power to impose arbitary death sentances upon any of his subjects who dare incur his wrath.

Here is the most tragic part:

2/26/2008, Speech in Cleveland: “It’s time to give our intelligence and law enforcement agencies the tools they need to track down and take out terrorists, while ensuring that their actions are subject to vigorous oversight that protects our freedom. So let me be perfectly clear: I have taught the Constitution, I understand the Constitution, and I will obey the Constitution when I am President of the United States.”

You see, once upon a time, before being seduced by the Dark Side, Mr. Obama was an upstanding constitutional lawyer, and even taught classes on the subject. In fact, that was a major appeal to his candidacy – since he was a constitutional lawyer by profession he would surely have more respect for that document than his predecessor Mr. Bush, who likely had never once read it. I have no idea what happened to Mr. Obama between 2/26/2008 and his inauguration, but something has surely changed his mind on these issues.

POV: America’s Afghan Torture Stations

Anand Gopal takes a heart-wrenching look at America’s secret prisons in Afghanistan. He writes from the perspective of the Pashtun villagers who find themselves subject to violent and senseless American raids. This is definitely worth reading:

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. The Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of Al Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, US forces released Rahman’s cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

“We’ve called his phone, but it doesn’t answer,” said his cousin Qarar, the agriculture minister’s spokesman. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar’s family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were “enemy militants [who] demonstrated hostile intent.”

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. “Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government,” Qarar said. “Rahman couldn’t even leave the city, because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him.”

Let Them Eat Cake

Jeff Strabone waxes philosophic in 3 Quarks Daily:

It seems to me that over the past decade, in the United States, the state and a narrow circle of powerful interests—banks, energy companies, and private health insurers in particular—have simply given up trying to persuade the rest of us that their interests were our interests. Could we be moving in the twenty-first century to a state that practices domination without hegemony? Or, to put it in plain English, will the state shamelessly turn itself completely over to serving the interests of a powerful few without bothering to pretend that it’s not? And if it does, how should we respond?

…

Torture, of course, is nothing new. The United States has been implicated in torture before, most famously in Central America in the 1980s. See, for instance, the article on torture in Honduras by James LeMoyne in the New York Times Magazine for June 5, 1988. But until recently, torture was always part of covert operations. The people who ordered the operations felt they had something to hide. What torture and corporate kleptocracy have in common in the twenty-first century is the lack of shame that characterizes the responsible parties.

Bagram Detainee List Revealed

The State Department has finally decided to reveal the names of those being held indefinitely, without trial, at our infamous prison complex in Bagram, Afghanistan. The move toward “transparency” comes after numerous Freedom of Informaion Act (FOIA) requests on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union. The list of 645 names can be downloaded from the ACLU website here.

The New York Times, in its article, finds someone to state the obvious:

“While it’s very important in terms of U.S. government transparency, it means very little to the individuals named because the U.S. government still maintains that everybody whose name appears on that list is not entitled to any human rights under U.S. law,” Ms. Foster said.

Bingo! And given that the ACLU had to employ extraordinary persistence to gain what should be public knowledge – the names of those held illegally by the US government – it seems unlikely we will ever learn the real strategic information in this detention-imbroglio: why the ‘detainees’ are there in the first place.

Soon after 9/11 the most horrifying stories emerged of lawless bounty-hunters kidnapping whomever was convenient and selling them to the Americans as “enemy combatants” while receiving a hefty reward for their trouble. This ‘bounty scheme’ resulted in thousands of innocent citizens being falsely imprisoned for no reason other than unfortunate luck.  And once imprisoned they had to stay in jail – it looks very bad, after all, for a country to kidnap and torture innocent citizens and then let them go. The citizens have a tendency to tell stories, and that, of course, “wouldn’t do”. As long as the US government keeps the so-called ‘crimes’ of its detainees secret, they can forever trumpet that they only imprison “the worst of the worst”, as they had in Guantanamo. If it came out that a sizable portion of the detainees were actually innocent – well, that would be the real scandal.

Hats off to the ACLU for its tenacity in pursuing this, but the fight for justice for those illegally detained and tortured by US forces is still far from over. Should we be surprised the Obama Administration is opposed to releasing the names?

Immigrant Guantanamo

The Times with a great front-page report that just doesn’t go far enough. The article, about the official cover-up of immigrant deaths during detention, gives some fantastic reporting on the cover-up itself, but fails to emphasize how these poor immigrants actually died.

The meat of the article states that:

The documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

Okay. So The Times revealed how immigrant officials tried to cover up this guy’s death. Pretty shocking. But how did he receive those “head injuries” in the first place? To me, it seems like that should be the crux of the article – not the cover-up. Unless this guy was somehow captured with pre-existing fatal head injuries, he must have been injured while in detention. Then who injured him? Shouldn’t we be trying to find the culprit? I mean, that guy is basically a murderer. Right?

The article also mentions that “unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey”.

Why was this 22-year-old in “unbearable, untreated pain”? Did he have some condition that causes constant pain? Was he tortured? Nobody knows!

The article suggests later that the detention facility tried various means of getting rid of Mr. Bah (the man with the mysterious head injury), including sending him back to his native Africa, but he died before they could.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

If it’s true that Mr. Bah was tortured and murdered while in detention, this lends a whole new cynicism to our treatment of “immigrant detainees”. I can imagine their dialogue: “We cracked this guy’s skull, and now they want us to pay $10,000 for a nursing home?” “You know, forget it – let’s just send him back to Africa and call it even.” That, I would think, is the true outrage – not the subsequent cover-up.

And come to think of it, The Times never once tells us why Mr. Bah was in jail. Was he some sort of lunatic? A violent sociopath? A petty thief? Was he innocent? The article doesn’t say! But to judge from The Nation’s (vastly superior) article on this matter, “illegal” immigrants often end up in detention for no reason at all.

As James Pendergraph, the director of our immigrant detention facilities once remarked, “If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Wouldn’t that be important for The Times to mention?

Nevertheless, this is a nice bit of muckraking from the generally orthodox Times. The article strongly hints that all these injuries were sustained while in detention, and I guess it expects us to connect the dots and conclude that many US prison guards are also brutal murderers. But by leaving the cause of these detainee’s deaths totally ambiguous (save for one reference to ‘abuses’) and by focusing instead on the subsequent cover-up, The Times does more than its part in condoning this sort of behavior.

The Spanish Conscience

Via Scott Horton and The Huffington Post: Spain demands to know how high the torture directive went.

The people of Spain, as you may remember, also threw their conservative government out of office shortly after that poor minister agreed to the Iraq War. They since provided a valuable European criticism of American policy all throughout the era of general acceptance. Now they have a serious mind to prosecute the authors of the famous “Torture Memos” which provided the legal groundwork for our abuses from Guantanamo to Bagram.

The Obama Administration has steadfastly refused to engage in “political” prosecutions, morality be damned – and no other country seems to want to bring the matter up, so little will likely come of this. But it is heartening to see such defiance of America (and on such a sensitive issue) amid the general obeisance one views from the rest of Europe.

Still more on Blackwater

From a local source in the Philippines: Blackwater is apparently training the Filipino military (for “counter-terrorism” purposes, of course).

Might this not have been relevant information for the Times‘ recent declamation of the Philippine military’s widespread human-rights abuses?

It looks as though the Philippines are learning from the best.

Two Views of the Philippines

In today’s issue of the Times one can read an article detailing gross human rights abuses in the Philippines. The opening anecdote is of a Filipino-American who traveled to her homeland in order to get in touch with her ancestral roots. Once there, she found herself under arrest, tortured, and repeatedly accused of “communism”. Her torture was lessened once the authorities learned of her American citizenship – indeed, that likely saved her life – but they continued to lash her for some time afterward, releasing her only after six full days.

After detailing such horrific treatment, the Times attributes the blame to the Filipino military, and particularly to president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Ms. Arroyo has “come under fire”, as the Time puts it, for “alleged human-rights violations” which have “hounded” the Arroyo presidency since 2001. Rights organizations in the Philippines estimate over 1,000 tortured or dead in “anti-communist” actions. Human Rights Watch claims “deep concern about routine and widespread use of torture and ill-treatment of suspects in police custody.”

One cannot, after reading the above article, come away with a positive picture of the Philippine government. It is therefore all the more surprising to see the below image, of President Obama laughing with the perpetrator of such “alleged human-rights violations”. Though the New York Times dares not mention it, our government has heavily invested in the Philippine military, and likely supplies the aforementioned torturers’ paychecks.

President Obama laughing with Philippine President Arroyo

Here are a few more facts The New York Times considers beneath its notice. This is straight from the Embassy of the Philippines website, May 13, 2009:

“In the proposed budget, an estimated total amount of US$667 million is to be allocated to the Philippines”

“The U.S. is the Philippines’ only mutual defense treaty partner and is the largest source of foreign military financing.”

“U.S. Foreign Military Financing to the Philippines, which contributes to the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ modernization efforts, is the 12th largest in the world.”

To be fair, I should mention the above article also makes mention of various “poverty-alleviation” donations, but it is clear from both its substance and tone that military expenditures comprise the bulk of US aid.  That is, for the same military The New York Times accuses of torturing “communists”.

The frightening aspect of all of this is the fact that if one were only to read the Times for their foreign news, they would be totally unaware of US support for the atrocities now occurring in the Philippines. The article I cite makes absolutely no mention of it. Eerily, however,  it quotes a Filipino Army Colonel, describing the communists: “They have perfected the art of deception”.

One could say no less of The New York Times.