Cowardly, Stupid, and Tragically Wrong

The Obama administration's appalling decision to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a military trial. Dahlia Lithwick
Monday, April 4, 2011
http://www.slate.com/id/2290359

Today, by ordering a military trial at Guantanamo for 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants, Attorney General Eric Holder finally put the Obama administration's stamp on the proposition that some criminals are "too dangerous to have fair trials."

In reversing one of its last principled positions—that American courts are sufficiently nimble, fair, and transparent to try Mohammed and his confederates—the administration surrendered to the bullying, fear-mongering, and demagoguery of those seeking to create two separate kinds of American law. This isn't just about the administration allowing itself to be bullied out of its commitment to the rule of law. It's about the president and his Justice Department conceding that the system of justice in the United States will have multiple tiers—first-class law for some and junk law for others.

Every argument advanced to scuttle the Manhattan trial for KSM was false or feeble: Open trials are too dangerous; major trials are too expensive; too many secrets will be spilled; public trials will radicalize the enemy; the public doesn't want it.

Of course, exactly the same unpersuasive claims could have been made about every major criminal trial in Western history, from the first World Trade Center prosecution to the Rosenberg trial to the Scopes Monkey trial to Nuremburg. Each of those trials could have been moved to some dark cave for everyone's comfort and well-being. Each of those defendants could have been tried using some handy choose-your-own-ending legal system to ensure a conviction. But the principle that you don't tailor justice to the accused won out, and, time after time, the world benefited.

Now the Obama administration—having loudly and proudly made every possible argument against a two-tier justice system—is capitulating to it.

But make no mistake about it: It won't stop here. Putting the administration's imprimatur on the idea that some defendants are more worthy of real justice than others legitimates the whole creeping, toxic American system of providing one class of legal protections for some but not others: special laws for children of immigrants, special laws for people who might look like immigrants, different jails for those who seem too dangerous, special laws for people worthy of wiretapping, and special laws for corporations. After today it will be easier than ever to use words and slogans to invent classes of people who are too scary to try in regular proceedings.

Say what you want about how Congress forced Obama's hand today by making it all but impossible to try the 9/11 conspirators in regular Article III courts.* The only lesson learned is that Obama's hand can be forced. That there is no principle he can't be bullied into abandoning. In the future, when seeking to pass laws that treat different people differently for purely political reasons, Congress need only fear-monger and fabricate to get the president to cave. Nobody claims that this was a legal decision. It was a political triumph or loss, depending on your viewpoint. The rule of law is an afterthought, either way.

It may not matter to you today that the U.S. government has invented a new class of criminals fit for a new class of trials. It may bother you a lot more when special rules are created for unions, or corporations, or the poor, or the children of illegal immigrants, or eco-terrorists. Today's capitulation will just embolden Congress to do all that and more.

A year ago, Holder told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would serve as "the defining event of my time as attorney general." Sadly, he's probably right. He will be remembered for having sacrificed what he knew to be right for some payoff to be named later. We will, all of us, in the long run bear the costs of that choice.

Torture Shrink Hired by Obama

From Salon.com:
One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush's worldwide torture regime. Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was -- and is -- Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, "with great pride," that he has now been selected to serve on the "White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family." In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday.

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio. Those complaints -- 50 pages long and full of detailed and well-documented allegations -- were filed by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program, on behalf of veterans, mental health professionals and others. The complaints detailed how James "was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners." Specifically:

During his tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted. The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice. . . .
Writing in 2009, Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described James' role in this particularly notorious incident:

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired Col. Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a US prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming, near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women's panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort "to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown." As he recounts in his memoir, "Fixing Hell," Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He "opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason ..."

Although he claims to eventually find "good reason" to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.


James treated numerous detainees who were abused, degraded, and tortured, yet never took any steps to stop or even report these incidents. Last year, Steven Reisner -- senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, who also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University -- told Democracy Now: "there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantánamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists" and that psychologists were at these facilities "to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees..."

Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH's newest appointment
Glenn Greenwald
Friday, Mar 25, 2011
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/03/25/james/index.html

This shameful abuse of Bradley Manning

The WikiLeaks suspect's mistreatment amounts to torture. Either President Obama knows this or he should make it his business
Daniel Ellsberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 March 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/11/bradley-manning-wikileaks

President Obama tells us that he's asked the Pentagon whether the conditions of confinement of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with leaking state secrets, "are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are."

If Obama believes that, he'll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they've been behaving appropriately. I can just hear President Nixon saying to a press conference the same thing: "I was assured by the the White House Plumbers that their burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's doctor in Los Angeles was appropriate and met basic standards."

When that criminal behaviour ordered from the Oval Office came out, Nixon faced impeachment and had to resign. Well, times have changed. But if President Obama really doesn't yet know the actual conditions of Manning's detention – if he really believes, as he's said, that "some of this [nudity, isolation, harassment, sleep-deprivation] has to do with Private Manning's wellbeing", despite the contrary judgments of the prison psychologist – then he's being lied to, and he needs to get a grip on his administration.

If he does know, and agrees that it's appropriate or even legal, that doesn't speak well for his memory of the courses he taught on constitutional law.

The president refused to comment on PJ Crowley's statement that the treatment of Manning is "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". Those words are true enough as far as they go – which is probably about as far as a state department spokesperson can allow himself to go in condemning actions of the defence department. But at least two other words are called for: abusive and illegal.

Crowley was responding to a question about the "torturing" of an American citizen, and, creditably, he didn't rebut that description. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity – that's right out of the manual of the CIA for "enhanced interrogation". We've seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It's what the CIA calls "no-touch torture", and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralise someone to the point of offering a desired confession. That's what they are after, I suspect, with Manning. They don't care if the confession is true or false, so long as it implicates WikiLeaks in a way that will help them prosecute Julian Assange.

That's just my guess, as to their motives. But it does not affect the illegality of the behaviour. If I'm right, it's likely that such harsh treatment wasn't ordered at the level of a warrant officer or the brig commander. The fact that they have continued to inflict such suffering on the prisoner despite weeks of complaint from his defence counsel, harsh publicity and condemnation from organisations such as Amnesty International, suggests to me that it might have come from high levels of the defence department or the justice department, if not from the White House itself.

It's no coincidence that it's someone from the state department who has gone off-message to speak out about this. When a branch of the US government makes a mockery of our pretensions to honour the rule of law, specifically our obligation not to use torture, the state department bears the brunt of that, as it affects our standing in the world.

The fact that Manning's abusive mistreatment is going on at Quantico – where I spent nine months as a Marine officer in basic school – and that Marines are lying about it, makes me feel ashamed for the Corps. Just three years as an infantry officer was more than enough time for me to know that what is going on there is illegal behaviour that must be stopped and disciplined.

Child soldier Omar Khadr coerced into plea-bargain

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/khad-o27.shtml

Child soldier Omar Khadr coerced into plea-bargain
Keith Jones
27 October 2010

With Canada’s Conservative government acting as their accomplice and in violation of international law, the Obama administration and US military have coerced child soldier Omar Khadr into a plea bargain.

Khadr, who was captured after a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002 when he was just 15 years old, has spent the last eight years in the legal black holes that are the Bagram and Guantanamo Bay detention camps. This summer he became the first person to be dragged before a Military Commission—a special military court where the normal rules governing evidence do not apply.

No sooner did Khadr’s trial begin last August, than the military judge ruled that “evidence” obtained from Khadr when he was lying severely wounded in the Bagram prison hospital was “not coerced” and could be used against him in court. Similarly, the judge discounted testimony showing he had been threatened with rape, subject to sleep deprivation, and other “aggressive” interrogation techniques—techniques that his military-appointed lawyer, himself a US colonel, categorized as torture.

Under the plea bargain, Khadr pled guilty to murdering a Delta Special Forces soldier during the firefight and to four other charges: spying, attempted murder, conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism. He also had to declare in open court that he had “voluntarily” agreed to an eight-page, 50-paragraph “stipulation” or statement “of facts,” that portrays him as an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent”—i.e., a war criminal—who was eager to kill Americans and Jews and was fully cognizant of the import of his actions.

In exchange for his guilty plea, the US government has agreed that Khadr will be incarcerated for one year in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay, then transferred to Canada, where he was born and his family now resides, to serve out the remainder of a sentence of no more than eight years imprisonment.

When Khadr returns to Canada, he will become subject to that country’s more liberal parole laws. It is anticipated, moreover, that his Canadian lawyers will aggressively fight for his early release from prison on multiple grounds. These include that under international law child soldiers are not legally responsible for their actions and therefore not subject to prosecution, that the Military Commission process does not meet basic juridical norms, and that under Canadian law Khadr should be deemed a “young offender,” making him subject to more lenient treatment, given his age at the time of his reputed crimes.

The prosecution and conviction of Khadr via plea-bargain is a legal and political travesty.

As a child who became implicated in a military conflict while under the care of his father, Khadr is by rights a “victim” under international law. And that is before any consideration is given to the abuse that he has suffered at the hands of the US military over the past eight years.

The crimes for which has been convicted are standard practice in the Afghan war or any other military conflict. Those who have prosecuted Khadr—the US government and military—are themselves guilty of horrific war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In July, Khadr defiantly and courageously rejected a plea bargain, saying it would “give [an] excuse for the government for torturing and abusing me when I was a child.”

But Khadr’s lawyers clearly felt compelled to warn him that under the rules fashioned for the Military Commissions by the Bush and Obama administrations he could expect no justice. If he did not accept a plea bargain, he would effectively be placing himself at the mercy of a US military that had shown it was eager to lock him up for life as part of a vendetta against his father, reportedly a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative.

In an interview Monday, Khadr’s Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney, declared, “Had Omar refused [the plea bargain offer] he would have faced an unfair trial, based on evidence that would have been inadmissible in any real court and he would have been exposed to life in Guantanamo Bay or even … worse … if there is such a place.”

Edney added that Khadr and his lawyers “all feel unhappy, sad—that this process is an absolute sham.”

“International lawyers, international judges, international governments have all said that this Military Commission process … is just designed to make findings of guilt.

“In our view, it is clear that Omar admitted to things he clearly didn’t do.”

Then in a pointed reference to Canadian authorities’ role in the prosecution and persecution of Khadr, Edney said, “You can’t say this is a fair process and a viable outcome … We have got to look at why no one came to his rescue.”

It had been rumored for months that the Obama administration was seeking to end the Khadr case with a plea bargain. For Obama, who during the 2008 presidential campaign had claimed that he would shut down Guantanamo Bay and criticized the Military Commissions, it was something of an embarrassment that the first Military Commission trial involved a child soldier.

As the same time, the Obama administration and the military can now hold up Khadr’s coerced guilty plea, claiming that it legitimizes the ordeal to which he has been subjected over the past eight years.

This was the line taken by the chief prosecutor at Kahdr’s trial. Navy Capt. John F. Murphy told reporters Monday after the plea bargain had been presented in court, “Omar Khadr is not a victim. He’s not a child soldier. He’s not a product of any kind of abuse. He’s convicted on his own words.''

In all of this the Canadian government, its national-security apparatus and political establishment, have played an especially shameful role.

Under Liberal and Conservative governments alike, Canada failed to press for Khadr’s release from the patently illegal Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. Earlier this year Canada’s Supreme Court found that the Canadian government had violated Khadr’s fundamental constitutional rights by having members of its national security forces interrogate Khadr at Guantanamo Bay when they knew he had been “softened up” by sleep-deprivation torture.

Canada’s current Conservative government enthusiastically supported his prosecution by a Military Commission, repeatedly challenging court rulings that it should seek Khadr’s repatriation and publicly declaring its support and confidence in the drumhead courts. Indeed, it effectively signaled that its preference would be for Khadr to be kept in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely.

From all accounts, the Canadian government only agreed to the plea bargain under strong pressure from Washington. Last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called up Canada’s Foreign Affair Minister Lawrence Cannon to insist that Canada facilitate the plea bargain deal by allowing Khadr to complete his sentence in Canada.

Administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials

http://salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/19/obama/index.html

Thursday, Nov 19, 2009
The administration guts its own argument for 9/11 trials
By Glenn Greenwald

"What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism" -- Barack Obama, yesterday.

"Holder said five other Guantanamo detainees would be tried by military tribunals. The five include Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of masterminding the 2000 attack on the USS Cole warship in Yemen; and Canadian Omar Khadr, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan" -- NPR, yesterday.

"'Administration officials say they expect that as many as 40 of the 215 detainees at Guantanamo will be tried in federal court or military commissions . . . . and about 75 more have been deemed too dangerous to release but cannot be prosecuted because of evidentiary issues and limits on the use of classified material' . . . If true, that means that there are 75 so-called 'Fifth Category' detainees who might be subject to indefinite detention without trial" -- The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, yesterday, quoting The Washington Post.

Can anyone reconcile Obama's homage to "our legal traditions" and his professed faith in jury trials in the New York federal courts with the reality of what his administration is doing: i.e., denying trials to a large number of detainees, either by putting them before military commissions or simply indefinitely imprisoning them without any process at all?

During his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, Eric Holder struggled all day to justify his decision to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial because he has no coherent principle to invoke. He can't possibly defend the sanctity of jury trials in our political system -- the most potent argument justifying what he did -- since he's the same person who is simultaneously denying trials to Guantanamo detainees by sending them to military commissions and even explicitly promising that some of them will be held without charges of any kind.

Once you endorse the notion that the Government has the right to imprison people not captured on any battlefield without giving them trials -- as the Obama administration is doing explicitly and implicitly -- what convincing rationale can anyone offer to justify giving Mohammed and other 9/11 defendants a real trial in New York? If you're taking the position that military commissions and even indefinite detention are perfectly legitimate tools to imprison people -- as Holder has done -- then what is the answer to the Right's objections that Mohammed himself belongs in a military commission? If the administration believes Omar Khadr belongs in a military commission, and if they believe others can be held indefinitely without any charges, why isn't that true of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? By denying jury trials to a large number of detainees, Obama officials have completely gutted their own case for why they did the right thing in giving Mohammed a trial in New York.

Even worse, Holder was reduced to admitting -- even boasting -- that this concocted multi-tiered justice system (trials for some, commissions for others, indefinite detention for the rest) enables the Government to pick and choose what level of due process someone gets based on the Government's assessment as to where and how they're most likely to get a conviction:

Courts and commissions are both essential tools in our fight against terrorism . . . On the same day I sent these five defendants to federal court, I referred five others to be tried in military commissions. I am a prosecutor, and as a prosecutor, my top priority was simply to select the venue where the government will have the greatest opportunity to present the strongest case with the best law. . . . At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is a federal court.


Does that remotely sound like a "justice system"? If you're accused of being a Terrorist, there's not one set procedure used to determine your guilt; instead, the Government has a roving bazaar of various processes which it, in its sole discretion, picks for you based on ensuring that it will win. Even worse, Holder repeatedly assured Senators that the administration would continue to imprison 9/11 defendants even in the very unlikely case that they were acquitted, citing what they previously suggested was their Orwellian authority of so-called "post-acquittal detention powers." Is there any better definition of a "show trial" than one in which the defendant has no chance of ever being released even if acquitted, because the Government will simply thereafter assert the power to hold him indefinitely without charges?

I understand that sending even a limited number of Terrorism suspects to federal court is politically difficult and controversial, as the last couple of days have demonstrated. But by refusing to embrace and defend the core principle of justice at stake here -- that a distinguishing feature of our political system is that we don't imprison or kill people without charging them with a crime and proving their guilt in a real court, and that military commissions and indefinite detention are un-American (which Democrats argued under Bush) -- the Obama administration has made it far more difficult for it to defend what it is doing, as well as for those who want to defend their decision to give trials to 9/11 defendants.

To see how that works, here is part of the exchange I had on MSNBC this week with George Pataki, while debating trials for 9/11 defendants:

MR. GREENWALD: If you look at how the British treated the people who did the London subway bombings, the Spanish who treated the people who did the Madrid subway bombings -- even India just put on trial the sole surviving terrorist who perpetrated the Mumbai massacre last year. Even Indonesia gave trials in their real cities to the people who blew up the nightclubs in Bali.

It's only the American conservatives who are feeding the terrorist agenda by saying that we're too scared to hold trials --

MR. RATIGAN: Hold on, Glenn.

MR. PATAKI: Can I respond to that, Dylan? Only the -- only the -- only the American conservatives? Then tell me why Obama and Holder are using military tribunals against those who blow up Americans in acts of war overseas? They're just picking these particular terrorists for trial in New York because they blew up civilians in New York. So what their logic is, "Kill thousands of civilians and you can get a civilian trial; kill one or two overseas, and we're going to use military tribunals."

That makes no sense.


For those wanting to defend the administration, what's the answer to that? The same thing happened when Rep. Nadler, as part of the same segment, tried to defend the Obama administration's decision to try the 9/11 defendants in New York:

REP. NADLER: I think that our tradition is that people accused of heinous crimes get trials, and they get trials in the area in which the crime is committed, which is right here. And I think it's exactly the right thing to do. . . .That's the way it ought to be, and we ought to show the world that we adhere to our traditions of justice and that these terrorists are not going to cause us to abandon the law.

MR. PATAKI: ... We are going to use military tribunals. They're saying they're perfectly fine for some terrorists, but these terrorists they're going to try here. What's the justification for that, Jerry?

REP. NADLER: Well, I -- well, I don't think there is any justification.

MR. PATAKI: I don't either.


The administration should have the courage of its convictions and defend jury trials as a linchpin of American justice, which would entail giving them to all Terrorism suspects not captured on any battlefield. But by refusing to do so -- by exhibiting the very cowardice of which Holder accused Republicans, i.e. denying Terrorism suspects a trial -- the administration has no cogent argument to make in its own defense. It's just another case of the administration wanting to bask in the rhetorical glory of "the rule of law" while simultaneously trampling on it for petty political convenience.

Obama to Use Current Law to Support Detentions

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/24/us/politics/24detain.html

Obama to Use Current Law to Support Detentions
By PETER BAKER
September 23, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.

Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

But President Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress.

The Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday night that “the administration would rely on authority already provided by Congress” under the use of force resolution. “The administration is not currently seeking additional authorization,” the statement said.

The department pointed out that courts would continue to review the cases of those held without charges through habeas corpus hearings. The Washington Post first reported the decision.

The legal interpretation applies to detainees whom the government concludes should be held because they are a continuing danger to national security but who cannot be brought to trial for various reasons, like evidence tainted by harsh interrogations. Although it has not determined definitively how many detainees that applies to, officials said it would probably be about 50 of the more than 200 men still held at Guantánamo. The government plans to bring the others to trial or send them to other countries.

Officials said the decision applies only to those already held at Guantánamo. They said it remained an open question whether the administration would seek legislation or establish a new system for indefinite detention of suspected terrorists captured in the future.

Justice Department officials informed representatives of human rights and civil liberties groups about the decision not to seek the new legislation for the current detainees at a meeting last week. Officials said Wednesday that the position was in keeping with the evolving arguments being made by the administration in court over recent months.

“The position conveyed by the Justice Department in the meeting last week broke no new ground and was entirely consistent with information previously provided by the Justice Department to the Senate Armed Services Committee,” the department’s statement said.

Still, the position surprised some critics who had expected after a speech by Mr. Obama in May that he would seek legislation to put the system of indefinite detention on firmer political and legal ground. In that speech at the National Archives, Mr. Obama said that he was considering continuing indefinite detention in some limited cases but that he would not act unilaterally.

“We must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded,” he said at the time. “They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone.”

He said he would “work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.”

Officials said Wednesday that working with Congress did not mean the president would seek legislation, only that he would consult lawmakers.

Given the opposition in Congress to Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo, especially if it means transferring detainees to prisons on American soil, the prospect of writing legislation that would pass both houses appears daunting at best.

Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study about closing Guantánamo, said forgoing legislation was "overall a good step" because it prevented Congress from making things worse. "We don’t know if it closes the door definitively on efforts to institutionalize detention without charge," she added, "since the White House might seek to do this by itself."

A version of this article appeared in print on September 24, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.

Guantánamo Bay: the inside story

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6725411.ece

The Times
July 25, 2009
Guantánamo Bay: the inside story
There’s a McDonald’s on the high street, suburban houses, rats the size of dogs, and 229 of the world’s most high-profile prisoners. Six months after President Obama declared that he would close it down, Naomi Wolf heads to Guantánamo Bay to see whether anything has changed
Naomi Wolf

Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word?

I went to Guantánamo last month to see for myself what difference, if any, Obama’s election had made. My trip was surreal from start to end. I was in line for the rotating junket to the island, and had been given a date by a nervous-sounding and very young Lieutenant Cody Starken. I signed papers that committed me to not reporting classified information — on pain of prosecution. Then I got on a tiny aircraft — unmarked on any announcement board — out of Fort Lauderdale airport.

On the aircraft were bland-looking contractors, male and female, who deflected my small talk, and two young staffers from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the organisation representing the detainees when no one else would touch the work, and which now co-ordinates hundreds of lawyers from across the country doing so: Pardis Kebriaei, a staff lawyer, and Jess Baen, a legal worker, tried to answer all my questions until my military handler determinedly parted us on our arrival. Lawyers are kept in a compound on one side of the military base at Guantánamo, journalists housed on the other side; they may never communicate with or run into one another. As a journalist, a handler sticks within 18in of you at all times, standing outside when you go to the bathroom and near by when you buy personal items at the commissary; your phone calls and e-mail are monitored.

Passport check was followed by our descent over the glittering curve of the sea on to the edge of Cuba, which was studded with lights. A tired, courtly Navy media specialist, MC1 Mapp, whisked me through security checks; I took in the heat, humidity, mosquitoes and languid crowds of Filipino and Jamaican contractors. We stepped into a ferry; then a young, chipper Sergeant Hillegass — in his other life, a 911 dispatcher — met us in a van and drove us to a street of identical townhouses. I was left alone in the house.

My mobile phone could not call out directly, my BlackBerry did not work, there was no internet access for my computer. My press kit had a scene of a lush sunset on the cover, and a speedboat.

Breakfast — with a TV crew from Poland and another from Russia, and our military handlers — was at a lively mess hall that looked like something out of summer camp, except that all the tired, strapping young people were in pressed fatigues. Then two African American soldiers, Petty Officer Bennet, a genial woman in her thirties who wanted to be a graphic designer, and a charming man a bit older, Petty Officer Dwight, took us to our first stop, Camp X-Ray.

As the military handlers made pleasant jokes about the heat, I took in a low-tech vision of Hell. This was the site of the first scenes from Guantánamo, where men sweltered in kennel-like cages. These were the cages themselves: about 50, each about 8ftx12ft, an aisle down the centre for guards to move in, a slab of corrugated iron on top of each cell, and a pipe with a funnel at groin level, in which to urinate; open to the elements; no walls, no true shade. Concrete floors. There had been buckets for defaecation, MC1 Dwight told us; but the prisoners had thrown the faeces at the guards. There was a communal shower, now crumbling — but the prisoners had not liked to shower in groups, naked.

The scene was being reclaimed by nature: vines and brambles were swallowing the wire, twisting around the doors. At 10am the humidity was so intense that sweat was pouring down our faces. The temperature was close to 40C. I went into a cell; grinding heat, drenching humidity, pure exposure to the sun. It was as if you were being cooked in a man-sized convection oven. “Look out!” shouted Petty Officer Dwight. “Banana rats!”

I looked up and shrieked, staggering to my feet: climbing across the wire walls and on to the roof of the cell was a 40lb rodent, with a long wiry tail, the size of a bulldog. Another one scurried along the base of the wall, a baby on its back; a third made itself at home in the undergrowth of the neighbouring cell — big, grotesque creatures with no fear. I imagined what it must have been like to try to sleep in that black heat, these animals slipping in and out of the cages with their great claws and teeth.

Behind the cages was the interrogation hut — a plywood shack painted with a red cross. A one-man cage stood near by. From Human Rights Watch reports and documents in Michael Ratner’s book Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, I knew that this was the notorious isolation cell. Prisoners in a detention camp are so cowed by the sight of the isolation cell and those held in it that they become compliant, since isolation is far more damaging psychologically to many prisoners than anything else.

“This is the isolation cell?” I asked Petty Officer Dwight. “Yes,” he said. Then he advised us that the detainees themselves had requested it. “They asked that other detainees who were disruptive and disturbing them be taken here for a ‘time out’. This was a ‘time-out’ area ... if someone was to act up and they needed a ‘time-out’.”

It was the first of many times I would look at PO Dwight — a decent guy whose true passion was hairstyling — and wonder if he believed what he had been trained to say. But he gave this, and other “facts”, with a kind of innocence. He took us into the interrogation rooms. About 25 chairs were stacked in a corner — unusual chairs for a military setting. The seats were padded; the structure itself was made of a bamboo material; and, oddest of all, each of the arms of the chairs curled into an elaborate spiral. I leant in more closely: on each chair’s arms was a clear mark from what appeared to have been several layers of gaffer tape. I looked at the legs of the chairs, where a prisoner’s ankles would be: the same apparent gaffer-tape marks.

I went into the interrogation room. A table, two chairs. Gaffer tape remained in long strips on the plywood walls, not holding anything together, but positioned near by like an office supply; a pile of wadded-up grey gaffer tape remained on the floor.

PO Dwight reminded us of the scenes we had witnessed on TV of prisoners at Camp X-Ray being transported restrained, lying on stretchers — though no one had asked about it; the stretchers were, he said, for the wellbeing of the prisoners; to move them more easily. It was not, he was keen to assure us, that they had been sick, or hurt.

On to lunch at the mess hall. After lunch, we were taken on a bizarre tour of a baking facility, where an exuberant, smiling South Korean woman in a hairnet (“I love food service! I love my job!”) showed off trays of hot, fragrant buns and baklava. We heard for the third or fourth time from our military handlers that they, too, wished that they could have that delicious baklava, but that it was reserved for the prisoners’ discerning palates.

The food-service employee displayed a set table of detainees’ actual meals — meat, rice, sauce, salad, and those tasty buns and pastries. She pressed us to try them: the ground meat was spiced in a “culturally appropriate” Middle Eastern style and was not bad. Then she showed off a dozen fridges filled with fresh produce — strawberries, watermelon, maple syrup.

She politely refused to answer questions about what her role was, or who employed her. Private-sector contractors take care of the manual, building, cleaning and service work: to a casual observer, it is they, and not the military, who run Gauntánamo. Military men and women have, if minimally, to answer reporters’ questions; contractors do not even have to identify themselves. Contractors work in medical facilities; clear journalists’ video; deal with classified material; but they are answerable only to their employers. Their houses are far more luxurious, on the island, than are those of the military.

Military spokespeople must give answers, but the answers are maddeningly evasive. Can detainees get mail from their loved ones? I asked often. What if someone dies of natural causes, who notifies the family? If a loved one calls, can prisoners take the call? What happens to care packages from loved ones? What if a spouse asks to visit? Can I see the letter that tells her that she can’t? I put these questions “in writing” and asked them at least five times up the chain of command, and followed up multiple times on my return. Most of my questions were met — from higher-level “media specialists” such as Lieutenant-Commander Brook DeWalt or Major Haynie — with non-answers. “I don’t know, but I can ask for you.” “That is above my pay grade.”

The detainee handlers and the lawyers for detainees often flatly contradict each other. The handlers and my press kit claim that “Detainees get a call every couple of months” or quarterly, and that “they make phone calls on a regular basis — every few weeks”. But Kebriaei says that her clients can make calls “every six months if they are lucky”. “Detainees get mail all the time,” the handlers claim. “Care packages are destroyed,” says Kebriaei, who described the security-driven destruction of the orthopaedic shoes that her elderly client needed for his swollen feet.

And so, on we went in the afternoon, to Camps 5 and 6 — hulking state-of-the-art maximum-security prison edifices. But with a difference, as a smiling nameless blonde soldier said to us (name tags are stripped from uniforms when soldiers are inside the detention centres — the process is called “sterilising” — and the prisoners themselves are addressed by number, never by name). These soldiers looked as if they had been chosen from the coolest fraternity and sorority on campus. They were unusually physically attractive. Our guide, Lieutenant Fulghum, was a bright, charming Irishman with a twinkle in his eye and killer abs. When he greeted the twentysomething blonde soldier with the phrase, “Honour bound, Ma’am”, it was as good as a wink. (“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the motto). “Honour bound, Lieutenant,” she smiled back.

As we moved down the corridor the weird intimacy of the place — which had, according to many detainees and reports such as Broken Laws, Broken Lives, a study by Physicians for Human Rights, been the scene of so much abuse — hit me.

There in front of me was a shower stall fully fronted with glass, facing into a public central hallway where military men and women passed regularly. It forced male prisoners daily into a state of public nudity, which is illegal according to US and international law.

The guards showed us a demonstration cell: it was spotless. Hooks folded down so that no one could hang himself; there was a toilet in a corner, a plastic wedge of a bed, and high-tech mechanical doors that shut of their own accord. No sun, no sightlines, no natural light. I noted the guards’ use of facemasks. “Facemasks are to help protect soldiers,” our tour guide said. “We do have assaults — spitting, throwing faeces and urine.”

Another diorama was set up in another cell, of “comfort items”. It looked unchanged from photos of Guantánamo that I had seen in the Bush era. Here was a Koran; toiletries; a padded mattress the thickness of a yoga mat, for those who “co-operated”; a thinner mattress, fewer “comforts”, for those who did not.

Opposite this room was yet another cell, which the military handlers were most proud of. “The TV room is a big change,” one of the handlers said. There was a big blue squishy sofa facing a nice big flat-screen TV. We were told that the detainees get to watch TV three hours a day; that their favourite TV show is The Deadliest Catch, about fishing; and that they also love Harry Potter. There was a tray table where prisoners could eat baklava while watching Harry Potter — and there, at the base of the sofa, were leg shackles, bolted to the concrete floor.

At the end of the hall I opened a door. Before me was an unused cell, packed halfway to the ceiling with hundreds of cans of Ensure, the liquid nutrient used in force-feeding. (Jen Nessel, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, had told me that 24 detainees were being force-fed daily, in restraining chairs, because they were on hunger strike.) Lieutenant Fulghum came to get me, annoyed. “No one is supposed to go this far down the hall,” he snapped. I asked if anybody was on hunger strike. “We are not allowed to say. The medical staff handles that,” Lieutenant Fulghum said.

We were taken outside to Camp 6: there was a modest-sized recreation area surrounded by wire; and there they were, the causal heart of the whole monster. The detainees — Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi and Yemeni men in their twenties, thirties and forties, wearing white T-shirts and khaki shorts — milled about; one or two threw a basketball out of range. The journalists were moved back down the hallway before they could see us, as if we were on safari. I asked if I could speak to them. My handler smiled. “No way.”

Our handlers took us out of the first structure to the grassy area between the buildings. In the second building, our handlers promised, we would see — since Obama had taken office — art classes; English classes. A library.

Outside, all around us, we saw a facility — one scheduled to be closed by December 2009 — under massive new construction: dozens of labourers were digging, surrounded by the grinding noise of building. A facility that Congress thinks it is discussing the “how” of closing — and that the President has claimed for six months is already slated for closure — was metastasising under our very eyes. When I asked about this I was told that the money had been allocated already and so it would be more expensive to stop construction than to keep it going. Through that open causeway of construction, the detainees in their central cage caught sight of us.

A sharp, sudden roar arose from the knot of men who spotted us. One of the prisoners looked straight at me and, his face twisted with an emotion that I could not read, screamed: “Go! Go!”

“Why are they saying ‘Go?’” I asked.

The handler looked at me. The Muslim men in the cage were being managed by guards who were mostly African American, and who shouted in colloquial English to get their attention: “Yo! 289! Stop that!” “They learn English from the guards,” he explained. “They aren’t saying ‘Go’.”

What they had screamed out to us — across the greatest possible distance — was: “Yo!”

After these camps, our handlers showed us Camp 4, part of Camp Delta, used to house “more compliant” detainees. A dozen prisoners milled about in a bigger central space (“We call this ‘The Patio’ or ‘The Lanai’,” our handler said; the new talking points also refer to communal meals as “feast days”.) This cage, too, was surrounded by mesh and guards.

I asked a guard if he had formed any personal opinions about the men he was guarding. He paused for a moment. “They don’t complain. They are needy,” he said. I asked what he meant. “Emotionally needy,” he said. “It comes out as asking for things all the time — a certain brand of shampoo, extra blankets ... it is a kind of dependency.” The guard was suddenly whisked away. We were then taken to a medical bay. In the white-on-white bay was a military nurse — her name removed from her uniform; she refused to identify herself. And a psychologist stood ready to brief us, next to yet another diorama. Before us was a display of Ensure fanned out across a medical tray table. The nurse, a pleasant, pretty white middle-aged woman with a soft hairstyle and a rueful smile, gestured at the display like a car showroom model. She gave us a rundown of how they feed the prisoners who were on hunger strike.

The nurse confirmed that some detainees were on hunger strike and said that they were fed forcibly “when they refuse to take feeding fluids”. But she didn’t call it force-feeding: “We call it ‘enteral feeding’,” she corrected me. “It goes down the nose and into the stomach.The patients are given a variety of flavours,” she said, going back to her infomercial-style presentation and gesturing at the cartons. “Strawberry, French vanilla, butter pecan — they have a choice. Our admiral did this for a week and he gained four pounds,” she said fondly.

I turned to the psychologist, a dark-haired man in his late forties, heavily muscled, with the same featureless area on his chest where name tags ordinarily are. He, too, refused to give me his name when I asked. I asked him what happens if a detainee is depressed. “We will go see them. They can request the Behavioural Health Unit.” He said that they get “talk therapy” if they need it. “I can empathise,” he said. “I see it as being very similar to people who are detained in any correctional facility.”

I pointed out to the man that perhaps his patients were “depressed and anxious” because of what they had suffered in Guantánamo. (It is now well documented that detainees were subjected to “stress positions”, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and extremes of hot and cold. But for those working at Guantánamo, the talking points on torture seem to be that “abuse may or may not have happened, there is no way to know”: A Department of Defence spokesman, Joe Della Vedova, had called the claim that prisoners had been tortured at Guantánamo, “a posture of the defence”; Petty Officer Dwight called it “a matter of opinion”. And Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt called it “an assertion” and “a point of view”.) I would subsequently discover that the day before I met the psychologist and the nurse, a detainee, Muhammad al-Hanashi, had died, in what the Joint Task Force Guantánamo press office reported as an “alleged suicide”. Six weeks later, that death still has not have been investigated by an independent body.

But Andrew Selsky, of Associated Press, interviewed Binyam Mohamed, a former prisoner who knew the young man; Mr Mohamed said that suicide was “totally out of character” for Mr al-Hanashi. He was, according to Mr Mohamed, a positive person who had been elected by the prisoners as their representative. Associated Press reported that on January 17, 2009, Mr alHanashi had been summoned to a meeting with Admiral David Thomas, Commander of JTF Guantánamo, and the head of the Guantánamo guard force; Mr al-Hanashi never returned to his cell, but was taken directly to the psychiatric ward. Elizabeth Gilson, a lawyer for a detainee who was also in the ward, knows more about what happened; but she can’t tell anyone; it is classified.

The JTF Guantánamo press release reporting the death would be terse; the details nonexistent; there would be little follow-up in the media — because there was nothing the Guantánamo press office would release that would give anything to go on. His body would, presumably, go somewhere — but Mr al-Hanashi himself would, during the days I was at Guantánamo, simply disappear.

here was a final stop: another trailer inside the same area as Camp Delta, where the Combat Status Review Board takes place. There were security cameras in the corners of the room covered with towels for, we were told, “classification reasons”. There Captain Dan Bauer, another handsome, dark-haired, pleasant man, explained the combat status review tribunal (CSRT) process. Twenty serious-looking high-ranking military men sat to our right watching his presentation to us. In the room was his desk: and two chairs facing it. I turned on my little Flip camera and started recording. Captain Bauer claimed in his talk that witnesses were brought in from outside“whenever reasonable”. I looked at the base of both chairs. Both chairs had shackles. The process had been “formed”, Captain Bauer explained, “to afford the detainees the opportunity to attend and provide witness statements that were relevant and readily available on behalf of their own defence”. The system, he repeated several times, sorts them into those who are “enemy combatants” and those who are “no longer enemy combatants”.

He explained that “about 520 detainees were designated as enemy combatants, the remaining 40 or so are no longer enemy combatants”. Why, I wondered, was there no category for “never been enemy combatants”? A Russian reporter with us asked if the detainees have access to telephones or the internet, so that they can communicate with people in their country, to get documents and witnesses.“No,” Captain Bauer said. “In that case what would happen is that there was something that — if there was a process by which if they felt made their case, then what the board would do is the Dept of Defence works with the Department of State to contact, er . . . the nations of detainees to try to make arrangements just to get whatever information — er, that they need.” He said that detainees are taken “in the heat of the battlefield” and that there they “put the pieces together”.

I asked if everyone in the room with the detainee was employed by the US Government. Captain Bauer confirmed that.

“As I understand the process,” the Polish reporter said, “it is the detainee alone against the US Government?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Captain Bauer replied.

I asked why there were two different chairs with shackles. Captain Bauer explained that if the detainee had another detainee as his witness, then he would be present. In sources provided by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the American Civil Liberties Union I had read that prisoners had been abused to provide false confessions implicating other prisoners, in just this setting, and that their “enemy combatant” status had been based on these false confessions. Testimony of witnesses who were not from within the prison system, so not subjected to coercion, was of course crucial for the review to be effective. Have there ever been any, or were any witnesses there, on the island right now?

“I can’t confirm whether there have or not.”

“Would you fly them here?”

“The Department of Defence, the Department of State, work with foreign agencies to make those arrangements.”

“Have they made those arrangements — ever?”

“Ummm ... we afford the opportunity. Whether it’s been done or how often it’s been done, I don’t, I don’t know the answer.”

That afternoon we got to Guantánamo’s main street, which was like a main street anywhere in the US — McDonald’s, a Wal-Mart-style store: T-shirts for sale reading “It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This”, “Guantánamo Resort and Spa” and “Guantáanamo, Pearl of the Antilles”. You could get postcards of the banana rats.

Dinner was more salad displays; a pasta fiesta; a make-your-own sundae bar. It was like a food court in a really good mall. I tried to watch the sunset, under the scrutiny of my handler.

t six the next morning we awoke, dressed and convened outside, but — something was wrong. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet were looking sadly at a flat tyre on the white van in the driveway that was to transport us. I tried my computer in the backyard for the hell of it, and to my surprise found that I got a thin thread of access to the outside world. A friend in Egypt had sent me a bombshell news clipping about Mr al-Hashani’s alleged suicide. While we had been at the medical bay, the Guantánamo press office had been scrambling to word a bland press release. The whole world knew about this death.

Only we, the journalists actually present at the scene, had had no idea. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet eventually got us on wheels — taking us through the chic, upscale neighbourhoods of the contractors, with their barbecues, playstructures and verandas, through the boxy, hut-like quarters of the enlisted men and women — and back to the site of the military commissions.

There a new set of handlers showed us another sterile portable cell where detainees conferred with their lawyers. I asked our guide if there was lawyer-client privilege, or was the cell under surveillance? “I can’t answer that,” the guide said. (The defence lawyer Wells Dixon said that he always assumed that his conversations with his client were being listened in to.) We were taken in to the state-of-the art “courtroom” itself, where the ill-starred military tribunals meet. It is unbelievably expensive-looking: rows of gleaming wooden tables for the lawyers of the detainees — and seats with shackles at the base for the detainees at the end of each table; a raised dais where the “panel” — about 20 members of the military — sits facing the tables; and a raised platform in the front of the room, where the “judge” sits in the middle and on one side sits the detainee and on the other, the witness for the defence. Two contractors showed me around. One, “Mo”, showed me how you can put a $5 note under a light on a desk and it shows up onscreen behind the judge’s chair much magnified. I looked up: “In God We Trust”, the motto read.

Then he showed me the stop-motion button system on the audio feed that means that a censor can redact any information that comes out that he wishes to cut — so the press in the galley area behind glass at the back of the room, and down in the hangar, will never know what was redacted. The button system is in the same area as the “witness chair”, which seemed odd to me.

I asked if the chair had ever been used.

“Well ... no,” he said. Not to his knowledge. Then he showed me again with great pride the live feed that was hooked up directly into the “courtroom” that could “transmit witness testimony into the courtroom from anywhere in the world”.

“Has it ever been used to transmit actual witness testimony?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “But we have the capability.”

At the end of the trip, I asked Deputy Press Officer Major Haynie to respond to the statement that no witnesses had ever been called to the CSRT process. I did not get an answer. Five weeks later I asked the Pentagon spokesman Vedova for a response — no answer — and six weeks later I called Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt to confirm or deny that external witnesses had never been called to the CSRT process.

He said that the 9/11 families were coming down to witness motions at the military tribunals and they would be housed in townhouses or officers’ quarters. I asked if the families of defendants would be allowed to observe the motions as well. “I don’t believe there are defendants’ families on this visit.” I asked him if defendants’ families have ever been brought in. “Not to my knowledge,” he conceded. I asked DeWalt if, in the rebranded military commissions under Obama’s Administration, real witnesses will be flown in from outside the prison system. “It’s a fair question — I’ll get back to you,” he said. So far, he has not done so.

The next morning I was due to depart when word came that the one flight out was cancelled. Instead, I was to fly out on military transport. On the aircraft I chatted with those seated around me. To my right was a military doctor, who acknowledged that he had been flown to the island to attend to the post-mortem of the dead prisoner.

“Will there be an investigation?” I asked.

That was the investigation, he explained. When I later asked Lietenant-Commander DeWalt about the death of Mr al-Hanashi, he said that there was an ongoing investigation, and that he could not give “details of that situation — we are holding off on any speculation — because it would get in the way of investigators doing their job”.

Sitting behind the doctor on the aircraft was a genial young clergyman, Chaplain Mubarak, who turned out to be one of four Muslim chaplains in the Navy. He, too, had been flown in for the death — from Chicago. He had been tasked with “culturally sensitive” treatment of the corpse. He explained that in Islam only another Muslim could wash the dead man’s body. Had he been allowed to give spiritual support to Mr al-Hanashi’s fellow prisoners? No.

I made my way down the aisle to join another lawyer, whom I had met in the waiting room: George Clarke, a corporate lawyer with Miller and Chevalier, a big law firm in Washington. He works pro bono for his clients who are detainees. “I represent two of the 17 Uighurs that are still here. They were all cleared to go — by the Department of Defence, by the courts, by the military . . . innocent guys. But they have been here for seven years.”

To explain why the detainees are not permitted to speak to reporters, Clarke says, the Department of Defence is citing the Geneva Conventions. “Which is kind of interesting because their position has been that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to these guys. If the Geneva Conventions applied they would be able to have a canteen from which to buy things, tobacco that they could have, a right to organise themselves and have a representative.”

“Remember,” Clarke says, “for a lot of these guys, there’s no evidence. The military said that of the 240 guys left here maybe 80 will eventually be ‘tried’ in some form. What about the rest? A lot of these people have been held because they stayed at a guest house or they had some supposed connections or affiliations [with al-Qaeda]. ‘Connections’ are like ... someone’s brother was a member. Or allegedly a member. The whole world has a misconception that these guys were picked up on the battlefield. And a whole lot of them were not.

“This country is based on the rule of law,” Clarke continued quietly. “If you truly have no reason to hold someone, you can’t hold them. National security cannot override freedom.

“At the end of the day our freedom is more important. If we lose our freedom — what are we trying to secure?”

What, indeed?

We landed, the lights of Washington now twinkling brightly below us, but the answer still unclear.

The 'Water Cure' for Mancow Disease

http://lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w95.html

The 'Water Cure' for Mancow Disease
by William Norman Grigg
May 28, 2009

It took all of six seconds to exorcise the unearned and unwarranted self-regard that had possessed Chicago rant radio personality Erich "Mancow" Muller: All that was necessary was a brief application of the "water cure," a torture protocol now commonly referred to as "waterboarding."

Mancow (as we'll refer to him) insists that he underwent the procedure, in its most benign form – he could call it off on his own terms at any time, and the purpose was to conduct a demonstration, not to break his will – in order to prove that it is relatively harmless, and that critics of its use are exercised over nothing.

Six terrifying seconds later, Mancow emerged from the experience a chastened and wiser man. "It is way worse than I thought it would be," Mancow admitted while the horror was still freshly imprinted in his mind and body. For him, the sensation – however brief – of being helpless as water filled his mouth and sinuses summoned palpable memories of a near-drowning he experienced as a child.

The Chicago radio personality is one of several media figures who have undergone a relatively domesticated and benign form of waterboarding.

Each of them experienced merely the mechanics of this torture method; in fact, Mancow's hands were left unbound and he was able to sit up and leave the table without the aid of others. As the subject of a "demonstration and exercise," Mancow and each of the other media figures who have undergone the "water cure" could end it at any time, and was surrounded by people who wanted to ensure that they avoided serious injury. None of them was helpless in the hands of a professional torturer who regarded them as a thing to be broken and humiliated.

The practice of torture reveals the elemental nature of the State even more effectively than does the summary killing of innocent people. The State is an entity claiming a monopoly of force over a given geographic region. And force, as Simone Weil so poignantly observed, is that mysterious influence "that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him."

It is possible for an individual to lose his life at the hands of those who enforce the State's will without losing what makes him human: Sovereignty over his individual choices, a sense of self-ownership, and self-possession, even in the hands of his enemies. This is precisely what the torturer seeks to strip from the individual, particularly when he leaves the victim alive.

Owing to its status as the world's largest and most powerful government, the Regime ruling us must also be regarded as the world's pre-eminent practitioner of torture. Yes, horrible things are done in the dungeons of Pyongyang, Beijing, Havana, Riyadh, and Tehran. But none of those governments can project its power halfway around the globe, or operates a global archipelago of "black sites" in which hired torturers – often foreign subcontractors from satellite regimes – ply their trade.

Compounding that grotesque irony is the fact that the most outspoken advocates of torture in the world today – perhaps in all of recorded human history – are Americans who profess to worship Jesus of Nazareth.

As a man, Jesus was subjected to every fiendish method of torture devised by the perverse ingenuity of professional sadists.

While Jesus was willing to endure those torments, including an ignominious death through torture on the cross, it is impossible to extort from His teachings, or the moral instructions of those who knew Him first-hand, anything resembling an endorsement of torture for any purpose, or so much as a hint that the practice may be morally acceptable.

Exercising a lamentable gift for casuistry, some "Christian" apologists for torture describe contemporary methods – such as controlled drowning, sleep deprivation, the use of stress positions, and the occasional beating – as relatively mild forms of "corporal punishment" meted out to captured "terrorists."

"The terrorist, worthy of death but given the plea-bargain of corporal punishment in exchange for life-saving information, should be awfully glad just to get beaten silly for plotting genocide, instead of being killed outright in the same way he was going to murder civilians," sneers one "Christian" defender of Torquemada's fraternity.

"Corporal punishment for capital crimes is only immoral if no valuable, life-saving information is ever gleaned," he continues. "If the United States were handing out beatings because we were too scaredy-cat to administer firing squads, yes, I would have a problem with it and call it immoral. But if we are negotiating a plea bargain by pummeling the guy who was going to set off a truck bomb at Chuck E. Cheese's, then I'd say the terrorist ought to be awfully grateful to us for, whack, being such gentle negotiators."

In his derangement this individual assumes that everyone accused or suspected of involvement in terrorism is guilty of that offense, and no proof beyond the accusation is necessary. This definitive question is similarly left begging by other "Christian" torture advocates, at least some of whom rummage through the severe penalties prescribed in the Law of Moses in the misguided belief that, first, the terms of the Old Covenant are still in force; and second, that we're discussing punishment for proven crimes, as opposed to the interrogation of people yet to be convicted of an offense.

Another torture apologist and professed Christian insists that torture is a valid wartime interrogation method, and that in any case waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation methods" institutionalized by the Bush junta don't amount to torture.

"`Torture' has been defined through the ages by the Mongols to the Spanish Inquisition to the Nazi Gestapo to the brutal Japanese of World War II," he writes, as is his wont, with much greater certitude than knowledge. Handicapped by an unremarkable mind filled to capacity with talk radio-caliber slogans and buzzwords, and eager to insulate his prejudices from exposure to uncongenial facts, this fellow dutifully regurgitates the Bush Regime's euphemism for torture – "enhanced interrogation" – in blissful ignorance of the fact that the phrase is the exact English translation of the same phrase used by the Nazis (verscharfte vernehmung) to describe almost exactly the same collection of torture methods.

Likewise, he is either unaware of or indifferent to the fact that waterboarding, known by its Spanish name El Tormento de Agua, was widely employed by the Spanish Inquisition, or that the use of water torture was among the war crimes for which many of the "brutal Japanese of World War II" were executed.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side," observed Orwell, "but he has the remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." In some cases, like the one presently under examination, the nationalist is vividly aware of atrocities only when they are committed by the "other side," and is hopelessly blind to them when they are carried out by the government he worships.

"[M]ake no mistake: We have non-fatal techniques available to scare the bejabbers out of those Muslim maniacs and get them to blabber, but that is not `torture,' folks,'" he insists. "We do not hack the heads off innocent prisoners like Daniel Pearl on videotape while those maniacal butchers chant, `Allah is great!'"

Indeed not: "We" – meaning the government ruling us, and those foolish enough to identify with it – drop high-yield explosives from high altitude, or fire cruise missiles at targets thousands of miles away, or deploy remote-controlled unmanned killer drones against targets halfway around the world, and the resulting carnage never makes a public impression, at least over here. "We" don't make and circulate videotapes of the civilian casualties – including women and children – that result whenever such selectively antiseptic methods of mass murder are employed.

Yes, the murder and mutilation of the heroic Daniel Pearl illustrates the utterly demonic depravity of which Jihadists are capable. How does that fact mitigate the murderous proclivities of the government ruling us, which – unlike Jihadism – is a tangible present threat to us, rather than an entirely hypothetical one? Are we to assume that the beheading of Daniel Pearl represents the outermost benchmark for permissible behavior, and that anything short of videotaped decapitation of helpless hostages is acceptable?

The eagerness to advertise such exploits as the murder of Daniel Pearl demonstrates that Jihadists can at least be candid about exactly what they are. They don't indulge in sanctimonious prattle about such episodes not reflecting their ideals, or issue stern admonitions against releasing images that will put their "troops" at risk – as some American defenders of aggressive war insist in opposing publicity of atrocities at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The practice of torture, in the American experience, is usually an outgrowth of aggressive foreign war. It does nothing to enhance the safety of the country. And whether or not it is openly acknowledged and publicized, it undermines the safety of American troops on the battlefield. U.S. Army Major Matthew Alexander, who was among the most successful military interrogators in Iraq, asserts that torture and other abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, not Islamic ideology, served as the main recruiting theme for foreign Jihadists who gathered in Iraq. By his reckoning, torture contributed directly to the death of more Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan than occurred on September 11, 2001.

Assuming that the "Long War" abroad ever ends, torture will continue to exact a price from Americans unless it is definitively repudiated and its practitioners and enablers properly punished. It fell to Jesse Ventura, of all people, to underscore the reason why countenancing torture by U.S. officials anywhere threatens the rights of Americans everywhere.

During his recent Smackdown '09 Media Tour, Mr. Ventura devoted his imposing physical presence and testosterone-saturated rasp to their best and most commendable use: Pushing back against the official bullies who promote torture and the media lickspittles who parrot the official line. As someone who underwent waterboarding during SERE training as a Vietnam-era Navy SEAL, Ventura would abide no dishonest dissembling as to whether or not the practice constitutes torture.

As to whether the practice can be justified as a cruel but effective interrogation technique, Ventura asked a critical question: If it works so well, why don't police use it against criminal suspects?

What Ventura may not know is that roughly a century ago, following America's near-genocidal war to "liberate" the Philippines from the burden of self-government, water torture became a very commonplace method of administering the "third degree" in police departments from Los Angeles to New York, with special emphasis in Chicago and various parts of the Deep South.

The "water cure," notes Dr. Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, "migrated here after American troops returned from the Philippine insurgency in the early 20th century. By the 1930s, the water cure was favored by the Southern police." Police in Chicago preferred a variation they called the "ice-water cure," in which they sought to extract confessions from prisoners "by chilling them in freezing water baths."

During World War I, "American military prisons subjected conscientious objectors to ice-water showers and baths until they fainted." Indeed, prior to release of the report by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (the so-called Wickersham Commission) in 1931, the methods now known as "enhanced interrogation" were commonly called the "Third Degree" – "the infliction of physical or mental pain to extract confessions or statements," in the words of the report.

The practice was found to be "widespread throughout the country" and "thoroughly at home in Chicago." Third Degree tactics ranged from "beating to harsher forms of torture," reported the Commission. "The commoner forms are beating with the fists or some implement, especially the rubber hose, that inflicts pain, but is not likely to leave permanent visible scars.... [A]uthorities often threaten bodily injury ... and have gone to the extreme of procuring a confession at the point of a pistol."

Interestingly, these abhorrent practices thrived in large measure because of the policy the Wickersham Commission was assembled to review – alcohol prohibition, the early 20th Century version of the War on Drugs. And it may be the case that the wartime atrocities in the Philippines grew out of common practices in police departments, which were refined in foreign battlefields before being imported, in greatly amplified form, to the homeland.

In 1902, the Army convened a court-martial of Major Edwin F. Glenn (among other officers and enlisted soldiers) for war crimes, including the use of the "water-cure" against captured Filipino insurgents. Among Glenn's victims were a Catholic Priest named Fr. Bartolome Picson, who was "water-cured" to death under his supervision, and Fr. Picson's sister, who was bayoneted to death on his orders. Major Glenn's defense attempted to submit evidence showing that Brig. Gen. Frederick D. Grant (the son of Ulysses S. Grant), who presided over the trial, had employed or authorized water torture and similar practices in 1894 as a police commissioner in New York City.

In an example of self-serving institutional hypocrisy comparable to that depicted in the film Breaker Morant, the court-martial refused to allow evidence that would impeach the authority of its president.

Things worked out a bit better for Glenn than for Harry Morant and his comrade Peter Handcock: Glenn was convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to a one-month suspension and a fifty-dollar fine.

Following the counter-insurgency war in the Philippines, it took nearly three decades to purge the practice of officially sanctioned torture from America's law enforcement system. That war lasted about two years. The current conflict began more than seven years ago. The bi-partisan Establishment considers the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to be parts of a "Long War" that would last a generation or more.

What the government is permitted to do to suspected terrorists and insurgents abroad, it will eventually inflict on civilian criminal suspects here at home. This principle is clearly illustrated by the experience of the Philippine counter-insurgency war.

The prospect of a nationalized law enforcement system infused with a Cheneyite perspective on torture should be enough to cure any thinking person of what we might call "Mancow Disease": A crippling lack of moral imagination that leaves the victim unable to recognize torture for what it is until he has personally experienced the mildest possible sample under the gentlest possible conditions.

William Norman Grigg writes the Pro Libertate blog.

Watching Obama morph into Dick Cheney

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4727.shtml

Watching Obama morph into Dick Cheney
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 22, 2009

America has lost her soul, and so has her president.

A despairing country elected a president who promised change. Americans arrived from every state to witness in bitter cold Barack Obama’s swearing in ceremony. The mall was packed in a way that it has never been for any other president.

The people’s good will toward Obama and the expectations they had for him were sufficient for Obama to end the gratuitous wars and enact major reforms. But Obama has deserted the people for the special interests. He is relying on his non-threatening demeanor and rhetoric to convince the people that change is underway.

The change that we are witnessing is in Obama, not in policies. Obama is morphing into Dick Cheney.

Obama has not been in office four months and already a book could be written about his broken promises.

Obama said he would close the torture prison, Guantanamo, and abolish the kangaroo courts known as military tribunals. But now he says he is going to reform the tribunals and continue the process, but without confessions obtained with torture. Getting behind Obama’s validation of the Bush/Cheney policy, House Democrats pulled the budget funding that was to be used for closing Guantanamo.

The policy of kidnapping people (usually on the basis of disinformation supplied by their enemies) and whisking them off to Third World prisons to be interrogated is to be continued. Again, Obama has substituted a “reform” for his promise to abolish an illegal policy. Rendition, Obama says, has also been reformed and will no longer involve torture. How would anyone know? Is Obama going to assign a US government agent to watch over the treatment given to disappeared people by Third World thugs? Given the proclivity of American police to brutalize US citizens, nothing can save the victims of rendition from torture.

Obama has defended the Bush/Cheney warrantless wiretapping program run by the National Security Agency and broadened the government’s legal argument that “sovereign immunity” protects government officials from prosecution and civil suits when they violate US law and constitutional protections of citizens. Obama’s Justice Department has taken up the defense of Donald Rumsfeld against a case brought by detainees whose rights Rumsfeld violated.

In a signing statement this month, Obama abandoned his promise to protect whistleblowers who give information of executive branch illegality to Congress.

Obama is making even more expansive claims of executive power than Bush. As Bruce Fine puts it: “In principle, President Obama is maintaining that victims of constitutional wrongdoing by the U.S. government should be denied a remedy in order to prevent the American people and the world at large from learning of the lawlessness perpetrated in the name of national security and exacting political and legal accountability.”

Obama, in other words, is committed to covering up the Bush regime’s crimes and to ensuring that his own regime can continue to operate in the same illegal and unconstitutional ways.

Obama is fighting the release of the latest batch of horrific torture photos that have come to light. Obama claims that release of the photos would anger insurgents and cause them to kill our troops. That, of course, is nonsense. Those resisting occupation of their land by US troops and NATO mercenaries are already dedicated to killing our troops, and they know that Americans torture whomever they capture. Obama is fighting the release of the photos, because he knows the barbaric image that the photos present of the US military will undermine the public’s support for the wars that enrich the military/security complex, appease the Israel Lobby, and repay the campaign contributions that elect the US government.

As for bringing the troops home from Iraq, this promise, too, has been reformed. To the consternation of his supporters, Obama is leaving 50,000 US soldiers in Iraq. The others are being sent to Afghanistan and to Pakistan, where on Obama’s watch war has broken out big time with already one million refugees from the indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

Meanwhile, war with Iran remains a possibility, and at Washington’s insistence, NATO is conducting war games on former Soviet territory, thus laying the groundwork for future enrichment of the US military/security complex. The steeply rising US unemployment rate will provide the needed troops for Obama’s expanding wars.

Obama can give a great speech without mangling the language. He can smile and make people believe his rhetoric. The world, or much of it, seems to be content with the soft words, which now drape Dick Cheney’s policies in pursuit of executive supremacy and US hegemony.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

Obama, Wall Street & Guantanamo

Rob Sterling, Konformist.com

if you want the Obama Administration to punish Wall Street criminals and Guantanamo torturers, all you have to do is give them United Auto Worker union cards. Then he will quickly lose any sympathy for them and fuck them all in the ass...

Military tribunals still seen as flawed

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-military-commissions16-2009may16,0,975101.story

Military tribunals still seen as flawed
President Obama has outlined rule changes designed to bolster defendants' rights, but the commissions to try suspected terrorists will still suffer an image problem, experts predict.
By Carol J. Williams and Julian E. Barnes
May 16, 2009

Reporting from Washington and Los Angeles -- President Obama's decision Friday to revive military tribunals to try suspected terrorists will likely fail to erase the taint of illegitimacy over the courts despite efforts at reform, civilian and military legal experts said.

Obama outlined five rule changes aimed at bolstering defendants' rights, including strict limits on the use of coerced evidence, tougher restrictions on the use of hearsay evidence and more latitude for defendants to choose their own lawyers.

Still, experts said the tribunals, also known as military commissions, are seen as so flawed that no amount of improvement will be able to dispel impressions that they are rigged to deliver convictions.

"I believe that the rules and procedures can be fixed so as to provide an actual fair proceeding. But what I don't think they can salvage is the perception that the commissions are an illegitimate and unfair process," said Air Force Maj. David Frakt, a Western State University law professor who represents two prisoners held at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

During the presidential campaign, Obama himself criticized the commissions as an "enormous failure" and said he would prefer to try detainees in federal courts or in traditional military courts.

His turnaround has surprised some experts, given the years of discussions over how hard it would be to fix the system.

"To make the commissions truly fair and equitable, they would have to be so fundamentally reconfigured that I just don't really understand how they can go forward," said Amos N. Guiora, a national security law professor at the University of Utah.

Administration officials said they are still mulling over other reforms to the tribunal system, although White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs declined to detail them.

Gibbs defended the administration's decision to resume the tribunals, saying that "first and foremost, the president of the United States is going to do what he believes is in the best security interests of the people of the United States."

White House Counsel Greg Craig held a conference call with human rights leaders to explain the decision, but opponents said they remain concerned.

"I came away unconvinced that the case has been made for military commissions," said Elisa Massimino, executive director of Human Rights First, noting that the case-by-case evaluation Obama ordered on the 240 Guantanamo detainees has yet to be completed.

Obama has so far omitted any mention of where the resumed tribunals might take place. He has ordered the Guantanamo detention facility closed by Jan. 22, 2010, and the detainees who can be put on trial moved to U.S. locations. Those for whom there is no case must be released to their home countries or other states willing to receive them.

John B. Bellinger III, State Department legal advisor under President George W. Bush, said federal requirements for speedy trials, Miranda warnings and access to counsel probably prompted Obama to keep the military tribunals.

With the tribunals, "defendants have fewer rights, and it's easier to get convictions," Frakt said.

Despite that, the system has actually failed to produce many convictions. Persistent court challenges to the system have meant that only three cases were tried at Guantanamo Bay, while U.S. civilian courts have convicted more than 100 accused terrorists.

In the most high-profile terrorism cases, civilian courts have delivered guilty pleas, convictions and long sentences for defendants, including onetime accused "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla, thwarted hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui and Al Qaeda agent Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri.

"In practice, the military and civilian systems have been converging anyway because military judges have been trying to prove they can be fair, and civilian judges and juries are trying to prove they can be tough," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

Cmdr. Glenn M. Sulmasy, a national security law professor at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, suspected that the new tribunals are only a stopgap to get some trials going while work continues on creating a new court designed to try suspected members of terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.

"The best solution would be to create a unique system. I think they will at least be considering it" while reworking the commissions process, said Sulmasy, author of "The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror."

carol.williams@latimes.com
julian.barnes@latimes.com

Free John Walker Lindh

Robalini's Note: This may be the most important story of the year. Simply put, anyone who defends the continued jailing of John Walker Lindh has no reason to feign outrage over any of the Bush Team's war crimes of torture...

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/303

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh, Bush's and Cheney's First Torture Victim!
Fri, 04/24/2009

Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s “War on Terror,” and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.

Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for “carrying a weapon” in Afghanistan and for “providing assistance” to an enemy of the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all, it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government “no trade” list like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for the executives involved.

As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005 (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050214/lindorff), Lindh was put away for so long on these minor charges not because he was a traitor or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun, way back in late 2001, a program of brutal torture in the so-called “War on Terror.”

Lindh, in fact, was never really an enemy of the US. Son of middle-class white parents in suburban San Francisco, he had developed an interest in Islam which, following his graduation from high school, he decided to pursue by traveling to Pakistan. In 2001, still just 18, he began studying at a religious madressa. There he learned about the struggle of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan to free that nation of the influence of warlords who had collaborated with a brutal Soviet occupation. Attracted by what he saw as the nobility of that struggle, and with a youthful sense of adventure, Lindh volunteered. In August of 2001, at a time that Bush administration officials were negotiating about a possible oil pipeline deal with Afghanistan’s Taliban government, and talking about providing funds for a program to get farmers to shift away from opium cultivation to more useful cash crops—a time, that is, when the Taliban were not considered America’s enemy—Lindh crossed the border and started training to be a fighter.

A month later, of course, the World Trade Center in New York, and the Pentagon in Washington, were struck, and the US launched a war against both Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lindh, who was still just in training, found himself suddenly in the wilds of the Hindu Kush, with American planes bombing and with US Special Forces troops firing at him and his companions. Whether he wanted to be there or not, he was in no position at that point to change sides. You don’t just walk away from a group like the Taliban—especially if you are an American to begin with, and you’re deep in the bush.

Eventually, a malnourished, dehydrated, and wounded (in the leg) Lindh was taken prisoner along with a group of Taliban fighters by American forces.

At that point, when the Americans discovered they had an American amont their captives, Lindh’s situation worsened dramatically. Stripped naked and duct-taped, blindfolded, to a gurney, he was then placed inside an unheated metal shipping container. Left there for days in the cold and dark, Lindh was removed once daily and interrogated. His interrogators allegedly tortured him, as well as threatening him repeatedly with death. His pleas to see an attorney were mocked, and word that his parents had already arranged for representation was withheld from him (a situation that led a government lawyer involved in his case to protest and ultimately resign).

At some point during this abuse, Lindh caved in to his fears of death at the hands of his captors and signed a “confession” to being a traitor to America. At that point he was flown back to the US, where Attorney General Ashcroft touted him as the “American Taliban,” initially vowing to try him for treason (which carries a death sentence).

What changed things dramatically, as I reported in 2005, was a surprise decision by Federal District Judge T.S.Ellis (a Vietnam-era fighter pilot and Reagan appointee to the bench) to permit Lindh and his defense team—over strenuous government objections--to challenge that confession letter by introducing evidence that Lindh had signed it while being subjected to torture at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan. The judge ruled that Lindh would be able to call witnesses from Guantanamo and from among the soldiers where he had been held in Afghanistan. Suddenly, the Justice Department, in the person of Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division and in charge of terrorism prosecutions, offered a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it a plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in marked contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced, as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges in return for a guilty plea to the two minor charges, but only if—and this is the key—Lindh would cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing into torture. Under the offered deal, Lindh was also required to sign a letter stating that he had “not been intentionally mistreated” by his American captors, and waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the future. Lindh agreed, but following sentencing, Chertoff also added a gag order, technically a “special administrative measure,” barring Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried great lengths to completely silence Lindh. His wasn’t just the first trial in the “War on Terror.” Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney torture program.

Now that we have the trail of memoranda that set that wretched torture campaign in motion, it’s time for the Obama Justice Department to free Lindh. If President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder think Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens suffered from malicious prosecution and were willing to drop charges against him, they certainly should toss out the case against Lindh, who besides being innocent of the original serious charges leveled against him, was a victim of war crimes perpetrated by his own fellow Americans, and authorized by his own government. His arrest, conviction and sentencing are a travesty of justice, and perhaps, given that torture is a criminal offense in the US Code, even constitute a crime of cover-up. He should be the first witness in any official investigation by Congress or the attorney general’s office into the origins of the Bush/Cheney torture campaign.

Free John Walker Lindh!
__________________________
(Note: This article was offered to the Nation magazine, and rejected. It was also offered to Salon magazine, which never responded.)