Jefferson23
Jefferson23's JournalCourt of Appeal Orders Release of Bagram Prisoner by Scott Horton
December 19, 2011
In an important ruling that sheds light on the complications that American torture and abuse of prisoners presented for NATO allies attempting to support U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the English Court of Appeal has issued a writ of habeas corpus requiring the return to British custody of a prisoner it concluded was being held illegally by American forces. Yunus Rahmatullah, who was once thought to be connected to the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, was captured by British troops in Iraq, then turned over to American forces and brought to Bagram prison in Afghanistan in the spring of 2004. I discussed the Rahmatullah case previously, when British parliamentary inquiries first made public the underlying facts. The British legal charity Reprieve brought the habeas petition on Rahmatullah’s behalf.
The facts developed in the Rahmatullah case have clarified the circumstances surrounding one of the notorious Justice Department memoranda issued during the Iraq War. In March 2004, Jack Goldsmith, then head of Justice’s opinion-writing arm, the Office of Legal Counsel, was asked to give an opinion authorizing the removal from Iraq to Afghanistan of a prisoner who was to be rendered to American custody by British military authorities in the Iraqi south. Rahmatullah’s imprisonment was at least one case covered by this memo. The Geneva Conventions unambiguously forbid an occupying power like the United States from removing prisoners from an occupied country except in narrowly defined circumstances designed to ensure prisoners’ own safety. Nevertheless, Goldsmith issued an opinion arguing that they could be removed.
Later on, just as Goldsmith was seeking appointment as a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, a memorandum dated March 19, 2004, surfaced in the press. Several senior faculty members were outraged by it, and mounted an effort to block Goldsmith’s appointment, which was being advanced by the law school’s dean, Elena Kagan (now a Supreme Court Justice). Goldsmith defended himself by arguing that the memo was “never finalized,” a claim that was undermined when the Obama Administration published a finalized memo, signed by Goldsmith and dated March 18, 2004, offering a radically truncated understanding of who fell under the category of “protected persons” in the context of the Iraq War. The finalized memo was textually similar to the March 19 draft. Goldsmith also argued that the memo could not have been used to abuse anyone because “it stated that the suspect’s Geneva Convention protections must travel with him outside of Iraq,” a reference to an ambiguous footnote found at the bottom of the last page of the draft memo.
Unquestionably, the memo did attempt to justify the removal of prisoners from Iraq, notwithstanding the Geneva Conventions’ explicit prohibition of the deportation of prisoners from an occupied country. Was the memo solicited to justify Ramatullah’s removal from Iraq, and to back up U.S. assurances to the British that he would be treated consistently with the Geneva Conventions? That seems likely the case.
in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/hbc-90008364
THE OCCUPIED EYE: The war is pronounced dead
12/17/11
(Spoiler alert: this is the alternate remix of a New York Times original.)
BAGHDAD - The Pentagon officially pronounced its US$3 trillion-and-counting, "war on terror"-related invasion, occupation and decimation of the Iraqi nation dead on Thursday even as the country prepared for a low-intensity Sunni-Shi'ite civil war and the Muslim world wondered whatever happened to the George W Bush administration's Greater Middle East.
In an open-air cement bunker at the former Baghdad airport turned military base, Pentagon chief Leon Panetta praised more than one million Americans in uniform or in mercenary gear for "the remarkable progress" in death and destruction accomplished over the past nine years, but acknowledged the severe challenges that faced the virtually devastated country.
"Let me be clear: Iraq will be tested in the days ahead - by al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers, by al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, by al-Qaeda in the Arabic Peninsula, by the Taliban, by Iran, by Hezbollah, by the Assad dictatorship in Syria, by China, by Russia, by Occupy Wall Street.
"Challenges remain, but the US will be there to stand by the Iraqi people with the necessary amount of Hellfire missiles as they navigate those challenges to build a prosperous haven for neo-liberalism and US corporations."
in full: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ML17Ak02.html
With Liberty and Justice for Some: Six Questions for Glenn Greenwald by Scott Horton
December 16, 2011
In the wake of September 11, Glenn Greenwald emerged as the nation’s premier chronicler of the war that U.S. officials waged on the nation’s civil liberties under the pretext of battling terrorists. Persistent and technically skilled, he played a key role in unmasking shameless betrayals by government attorneys of their oath to uphold the law—exposing those who enabled the torture of prisoners, the introduction of a massive warrantless surveillance system, and the merciless war against loyal Americans who attempted to blow the whistle on such abuses. I put six questions to Greenwald about his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some, which examines the emerging doctrine of impunity for politically powerful elites in the United States:
1. You start your account of the doctrine of elite immunity in the United States with Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. How did this one decision, among the numerous incidents you describe, provide a point of rupture in the nation’s rule-of-law tradition?
American history is suffused with violations of equality before the law. The country was steeped in such violations at its founding. But even when this principle was being violated, its supremacy was also being affirmed: resoundingly and unanimously in the case of the founders. That the rule of law—not the rule of men—would reign supreme was one of the few real points of agreement among all the founders. Arguably it was the primary one.
There’s an obvious element of hypocrisy in this fact; espousing a principle that one simultaneously breaches in action is hypocrisy’s defining attribute. But there’s also a more positive side: the country’s vigorous embrace of the principle of equality before law enshrined it as aspiration. It became the guiding precept for how “progress” was understood, for how the union would be perfected.
in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/hbc-90008356
Dasht-e-Leili, Ten Years Later by Scott Horton
December 13, 2:02 PM, 2011
In December 2001, Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, with strong U.S. backing consisting of special-forces units and CIA paramilitary operatives, were close to consolidating their control over the country. Kabul was occupied, and Kunduz, the last major Taliban stronghold in the north, had been crushed. Large numbers of Taliban forces and their allies had surrendered.
Then, in the north, as many as 2,000 prisoners who had surrendered to the Alliance or their American supporters were apparently shot to death or suffocated in sealed metal truck containers while being transferred to Afghanistan’s Sheberghan prison. The dead prisoners from this “convoy of death” were then buried in the northern Afghanistan desert, at Dasht-e-Leili. By the next year, many of the bodies had been exhumed and examined. Some of them bore clear signs of torture.
The incident is without doubt the most serious war crime arising out of the U.S. and Northern Alliance campaign to defeat the Taliban and establish a new regime in Afghanistan. To the best of our knowledge, Americans do not appear to have been involved in carrying out the atrocities, which were reportedly carried out by forces controlled by General Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek warlord who commanded forces in the vicinity of Mazar-e-Sharif, on the Uzbekistan frontier. The Rumsfeld Pentagon disclaimed the U.S. responsibility to investigate the incident on these grounds, and strained to cover up the incident. But it was later established that a significant number of American advisers were on hand at the time of the massacre.
Following these disclosures, in July 2009, CNN’s Anderson Cooper pressed President Barack Obama about the incident. Obama stated that he would ask his national security team “to collect the facts” and would “make a decision on how to approach it once the facts were known.” More than two years have passed since this pledge, but no further evidence has emerged, and no statement or report has been produced to show that an investigation was conducted.
remainder: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/hbc-90008349
Pakistan's legal fight to end the drone war
As civilian deaths in Pakistan mount from the US drone war, legal groups work to raise awareness - and impose justice.
Last Modified: 14 Dec 2011
"You cannot call me lucky," said Sadaullah Wazir as he recounted the events of a drone strike two years ago on his home in North Waziristan.
The strike killed his two young cousins and an elderly wheelchair-bound uncle. It also severed both of then-15-year-old Sadaullah's legs and cost him the use of an eye, turning a normal family dinner into an otherworldly nightmare and radically altering the path of his young life.
"I had a dream to be a doctor," he says. "But now I can't even walk to school."
Today, Sadaullah is one of an increasing number of Pakistanis who are seeking justice in the courtroom against the orchestrators of a drone campaign which is believed to have killed thousands of their fellow citizens; a huge number of whom recent studies have shown to be innocent civilians.
Increased US drone strikes questioned
Over the past three years, the steady buzzing of Predator drones overhead has become a grim and terrifying fact of life for many residents of Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KP). So pervasive is the sense of fear that doctors there report a huge upsurge in the usage of tranquilisers and sleeping pills among the civilian population. Drone strikes are believed to have been responsible for the deaths of a conservatively estimated 2,283 individuals over this period, and the injuries of thousands more, including Sadaullah.
remainder in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/20111213112743546541.html
Latin America's message to the Arab world
Latin Americans should share their experiences with democratisation with other countries in the global South.
Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 09 Dec 2011 10:10
Take a good look at this 1970 photo.
The 22-year-old woman in the photo is about to be examined by a bunch of subtropical inquisitors.
She has just been tortured, electrocuted and waterboarded - what Dick Cheney dismisses as "enhanced interrogation" - for 22 days.
Yet she didn't break down.
Today this woman, Dilma Rousseff, is the President of Brazil - the perennial "country of the future", the world's seventh-largest economy by purchasing power parity (ahead of the UK, France and Italy), a member of the BRICS, and exercising a soft power way beyond music, football and joy of living.
This photo has just been published, as part of a Rousseff-biography, exactly when Brazil finally launches a Truth Commission to establish what really happened during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Argentina, way ahead, already did it - judging and punishing its own surviving inquisitors in uniform.
remainder in full: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112694026340182.html
Inside the CIA’s Black Site in Bucharest by Scott Horton
Reporters for German network ARD’s Panorama newsmagazine and the Associated Press have pieced together key details surrounding the CIA’s operation of a black site in Bucharest, Romania. AP’s Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo write:
In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city, is a secret that the Romanian government has tried for years to protect. For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed Bright Light — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There, it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison until 2006, the year some were sent to Guantánamo Bay, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison…
Unlike the CIA’s facility in Lithuania’s countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA’s prison in Romania was not in a remote location. It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with trees and homes, along busy train tracks. The building is used as the National Registry Office for Classified Information, which is also known as ORNISS. Classified information from NATO and the European Union is stored there. Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and identified pictures of the building.
The facility’s address is Strada Mureș 4, according to the German account.
With typically wishful thinking, CIA general counsel Stephen Preston claimed in September that “the controversy has largely subsided.” In fact, criminal probes across Europe are just now exposing the full scope of the CIA’s black sites. Under the CIA program, which was terminated by President Bush in September 2006, terrorism suspects were held and questioned using waterboarding and other Justice Department–approved torture methods that the Bush Administration labeled “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Bush-era Justice officials continue to insist that the techniques were lawful; their successors at the Obama Justice Department disagree, but have declined to investigate or prosecute their predecessors, giving legitimacy to the “golden shield” memoranda of the Bush DOJ.
remainder in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/12/hbc-90008343
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