Category: Human rights

I need, as a US citizen, to place on record that I am completely sickened that my government continues to hold detainees in Guantanamo and other locations in complete defiance of the norms of human decency and international law.
Over the weekend, three of the Gitmo detainees committed suicide, an act that can be thought of or described in many different ways. (Several reports of the loading of enslaved African persons onto transatlantic transports in previous centuries spoke of a number of the enslaved people either hurling themselves into the water or sitting quite still, refusing to eat, and dying through the sheer will to do so… The legal status of the Gitmo detainees under the US’s much-vaunted legal code seems little different from that of the enslaved persons.)
But the death of a human person– by his own hand or that of anyone else– is always, first and foremost, a tragedy.
What has happened to the souls of people in the Bush administration that they can respond to these tragedies in Gitmo with such unabashed hostility? Various administration officials have described the suicides as “a PR stunt” or even “an act of (asymmetrical) war“? Has Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Colleen Graffy, who made the accusation about the suicides being “a PR stunt” completely lost her humanity?
People who speak in such a way seem deeply soul-sick to me. How on earth can we end their ability to wreak their present, quite immoral havoc on the world?

The New York-based organization Human Rights First has done consistently excellent work of fact-finding, analyzing, and seeking official accountability regarding the US government’s use of torture since 9/11.
I see that they have been “doggedly” following the trial of Abu Ghraib dog handler Sgt. Santos Cardona. Their coverage of this trial even includes a fascinating and informative blog about being kept about it by HRF staff attorney Hina Shamsi, who has been observing it inside the coutroom.
For example, last Friday Shamsi wrote,

Capt. [Carolyn] Wood is one of the “Where’s Waldos” of the abuse puzzle; she was posted to both Afghanistan and Iraq, and some of the worst abuses that have yet come to light appear to have been committed under her watch. In late 2002, Capt. Wood was in charge of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Afghanistan.Soldiers under her command were implicated in the deaths by torture of two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar… Capt. Wood and members of her battalion were then transferred to Iraq, where, in July 2003, they were assigned to Abu Ghraib…

And in last Thursday’s post, Shamsi wrote about the appearance at the trial– as a defense witness!– of the infamous Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Commander of the Guantanamo prison who later became head of all “detention operations” in Iraq.
The whole blog makes fascinating reading. Shamsi has put lots of links to relevant documents right into the posts. And the side-bar contains many very useful links. Including one simply tagged Torture Facts, and one tagged Where are they now?
In “Torture Facts” you can learn this:

* Over 15,000 people are currently in U.S. detention in just Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. As of February 16, 2006, in Iraq, there were 14,389 detainees in U.S. custody; as of December 2005, the U.S. was holding approximately 500 detainees in Afghanistan; as of February 10, 2006 there are approximately 490 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and one enemy combatants held in the U.S.;
* 36 prisoners are believed to be held in unknown locations;
* At least 376 foreign fighters detained in Iraq to whom the Administration has asserted the Geneva Conventions do not apply;
* There were up to 100 ghost detainees in Iraq;
* The U.S. transferred at least one dozen prisoners out of Iraq for further interrogation in violation of the Geneva Conventions;
* 8 percent of 517 Guantanamo detainees were considered al Qaeda fighters by the U.S. Government. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection to al Qaeda or Taliban.
* 5 percent of the 517 detainees held at Guantanamo were captured by the United States and the majority of those currently in custody were turned over by other parties during a time when the United States was offering large sums for captured prisoners.

These facts– for which footnotes are supplied on that HRF web-page– are even more shocking than I thought. (And several of them relate directly to the post I just put up here a short while ago.)
While I’m on the topic of human rights things, here is a version of the report that the UN Committee against Torture recently released about Bush administration’s many infractions of the Convention Against Torture, thanks to the BBC.

The number of Guantanamo detainees participating in the hunger strike there has now risen to 75.
That report, by AP’s Ben Fox, quoted Navy Commander Robert Durand as trying to downplay the seriousness of this action by the detainees by calling it an “attention-getting tactic”. Fox also quotes Durand as saying,

“The hunger-strike technique is consistent with al-Qaida practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield.”

Right…. Hunger-striking also happens to be “consistent with the practice of” Mahatma Gandhi, the courageous British women activists who were campaigning for the right to vote, etc etc.
Durand doesn’t mention this. I wonder why not.
Nor does he see fit to mention the violation of the fundamental right of habeas corpus that the detainees are campaigning against.
Habeas corpus is a bedrock of personal liberty in the Anglo-American system of law and society. Since I studied Latin for five years, I always knew that habeas corpus means “that you may have the body”, and I’d always assumed that it meant that individuals were thereby somehow given the right to have control over their own bodies (i.e., to enjoy personal liberty). Well, on reading that Wikipedia article linked to there, it seems clear that it does mean that– but it means it in a way even more profound than I had thought.
It’s not that through habeas corpus “the system” gives individuals the right to control their own bodies, but rather that antecedent to that the individual is assumed to already have the right to her or his own body, and that it’s the state, when it wants to infringe on that right, that needs to show ironclad due cause for doing so.
This concept of personal liberty was of course fully enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence, which states,

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Note that this speaks about “all Men”, not merely “all US citizens”. Also, of course, these days– thanks in good part to those suffragist hunger-strikers of 95 years ago– “men” also includes “women”…
So the issue for the detainees in Guantanamo– and in Bagram and all the other places where my government holds detainees who have not had the benefit of a trial, is give them liberty, or give them a trial that will show them and everyone else why it is right that they be deprived of their liberty for some period of time.
Some of these detainees have now been deprived of their liberty for 54 months. 54 months of treatment that has often been inhumane, brutal, and by design extremely disorienting. 54 months of their loved ones often not knowing whether they are dead or alive. 54 months of isolation, psychological attack on their personhood, and uncertainty.
Give them liberty, or give them a trial. It’s as straightforward as that.
The only circumstance under US (or international) law in which there would legally be a third alternative is if these detained individuals are classified as POWs, in which case they could continue to be held without trial for the duration of the relevant hostilities. But in return for the detaining government having that power, it has to guarantee a separate set of rights to the detainees: that they not be subjected to interrogation, and that the phsyical and psychological conditions of their detention meet the standards defined in the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration chose not to designate these detainees as POWs. Instead, it has used the category of “unlawful enemy combatants” in an attempt to deny them access both to the protections for POWs, and to the normal protections they would have under civilian law. That move deeply violated the US Constitution, as well as all relevant international law.
The Bushites cannot simply continue to hold these men– who between Gitmo, Bagram, and other extra-legal holding centers could well number more than 1,000 individuals– in this state of legal limbo forever. In fact, it should not continue for a day longer– for any of them.
Why do they not bring these men to trial? Cmdr. Durand accused the men of seeking to be released so they could “return to the battlefield.” But if they have trials and are found guilty of serious crimes, then they wouldn’t be released any time soon, would they?
Actually, the problem for Cmdr. Durand and the whole machinery of the Bush administration above him is that bringing these detainees to any form of a fair trial would be hugely problematic for the administration. For reasons including these:

* In a fair trial, we the public would learn that for many of these detainees the evidence against them doesn’t amount to very much (and for many, might not actually amount to anything.) Therefore, the justification for having held them so long and treated them so badly would not live up to what the administration’s people have claimed until now.
* In a fair trial, the detainees would be able to speak to the broaoder public about the way they have been treated for the past many months.

Would it reassure the apparatchiks in the administration to know that these are not new issues and concerns? That every European colonial power in recent history also faced them as it tried to “square” its commitment to a version of liberal politics at home with the brutality of its attempt to suppress anticolonial movements overseas?
Maybe not. But anyway, this current dilemma is one for the Bush administration to face.
As for the rest of us, all we can say is, “Give them liberty, or give them a decent trial.”

The ACLU’s Ben Wizner, who’s observing the Guantanamo Military Commission sessions that resumed last Wednesday, has been blogging his work there. It looks like good reading. You can comment either there or here.
Update, Sunday evening:
I hope you’ve all gone over and read some of Wizner’s blog. It’s the best window I’ve found so far into what’s going on inside Gitmo.
In this post from last Wednesday, for example, he says that the chief prosecutor in the “Military Commissions” there told him and his colleagues from three other NGOs that more than four years after the opening of Gitmo, interrogations there are still continuing. Of course, we don’t know whether these are still of the highly abusive sort reported from Gitmo earlier– the authorities have refused to allow the NGO reps to visit any prisoners or their living quarters; and I believe the ICRC also has problems getting access to detainees.
This, at the time that the former commander of the Gitmo detention center, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, has just recently taken “Article 31”, that is, the military-law equivalent of the Fifth Amendment, to justify his refusal to testify in a torture-related case.
In this post from Thursday, Wizner gives a good, fairly detailed description of two MC cases that he sat in on.
One was definitely Kafka-esque. The defendant, Yemeni Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, started off by citing nine reasons why he had decided to boycott the hearing. I guess Wizner was working with an interpreter, and he understood these reasons only partially. But one was “Because of discrimination based on nationality . . . . The British detainees were not subjected to military trials, because Britain refused to allow its citizens, even Muslims, to be tried”; another was because of “the secret evidence issue”.
Wizner reports that Presiding Officer Peter Brownback then said,

“Please, before you boycott… can I ask you one more thing?” Al Bahlul put his hands in front of his face, then removed his headset.
After a recess, Brownback formally denied al Bahlul’s previous request to represent himself – reasoning, oddly, that al Bahlul’s boycott rendered him “incompetent” to represent himself. (This was circular: the Commission’s refusal to permit al Bahlul to represent himself was almost certainly a principal cause of the boycott.) Brownback then ordered Tom Fleener to sit at counsel table and to state his credentials.
Fleener did so and then immediately moved to withdraw as defense counsel, explaining that al Bahlul didn’t want him as a lawyer, and ethical rules required that he not participate against the wishes of a client. Fleener had sought guidance from the state bars of Iowa and Wyoming, where he is licensed to practice, and had not yet received responses. Brownback denied the request. “You are de facto and de jure the only counsel Mr. Al Bahlul has, and as he pointed out earlier, it is him against the United States. You are the only one on his side.” The result is that proceedings in al Bahlul’s case will continue, though al Bahlul refuses to speak to — or even look at — his defense counsel.

Anyway: to have Wizner blogging a hearing like this is great. In near-real time, too. I’m sure that if Rebecca West or Hannah Arendt were alive today, they would be down at Gitmo blogging it. H’mm, maybe I should find a way to get there…. once I finish this Africa book.

Today’s WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001.
At least one branch of this gulag is in a Soviet-era compound in a newly ‘democratic’ country of Eastern Europe, she writes. She adds,

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network … depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Addendum, 9:40 a.m.: Of course, it is the mistreatment that the CIA can give to its detainees that Dick Cheney is currently trying to protect, by seeking a special exemption for the CIA from the anti-torture legislation now being considered by Congress. I heard a radio interview with Sen. John McCain yesterday in which he sounded very confident that the Senate would continue to uphold the principle of no special exemptions for the CIA or anyone else from the anti-torture provision. Let’s hope so…
Priest gives a lot of details about how, starting in the days immediately after 9/11, this program of completely secret, off-the-books detentions grew rapidly, and without either oversight or much planning. Some of the detention sites previously used in it were closed down, for various reasons. (That included the “super-secret” CIA unit at Guantanamo, though as we know the military-run portion of the prison there continues to hold hundreds of detainees.)
She writes:

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning…

So where are these helpful “host” countries? As described by Priest, one is still Afghanistan, where the CIA has run a secret detention camp called the “Salt Pit” at various different locations since 2001. Another was previously Thailand, where high-ranking Qaeda captives Abu Zubaida and Ramzi Binalshibh were both taken during 2002. “But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter.” (It is of course quite possible that the place held more those two CIA prisoners at the time.)
And which is the East European country that’s still involved in the program?
By my best reading of Priest’s report, it seems that while there may in the past have been more than one such country involved, at present there is at least one. She writes:

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

If I were a democrat in such a country and I suspected that my government was allowing the CIA to run such a prison system on the national soil , I would demand that my government cease its cooperation with this scheme immediately.
Let’s get this straight. As Priest writes straightforwardly and quite correctly, “It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States” (which was why they felt they had to seek sites not on US soil, in the first place.) So in order to save the appearance of the rule of law inside the US, the CIA has been quite happy to export its besmirchment to other, much more vulnerable countries.
For what it’s worth, if I were a democrat in Hungary, I would start asking a lot of questions about whether the CIA is running one of its “black” prisons in my country. Hungary, you will recall, was the place where in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the government rapidly acceded to US requests that it open up a training center for Ahmad Chalabi’s alleged thousands of supporters who needed some quick military training. (Fewer than 800 of them ever showed up.)
According to Dana Priest, the “black sites” have hosted the detention of “More than 100 suspected terrorists” take from various places– though she immediately notes that that number does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq. So if any significant portion of the detainees picked up in Iraq are put into the black system– as quite possibly happens to a large proportion of the non-Iraqis taken prisoner there– then the number of detainees may be quite a lot higher than simply 100.
Of the 100, Priest notes that more than 70 came to be deemed of less than high “significance”– hey, maybe some of them were completely innocent; we may never know– and those ones were “rendered” over to the untender mercies of other compliant governments.
She makes a couple of intriguing references in her piece to the emergence of some disquiet about the system among serving and former CIA officers familiar with it. (Which is no doubt what motivated some of them to seek her out and talk a little both about the program and about their doubts regarding it.)
Here’s how she concludes the piece:

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.
Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.
“It’s just a horrible burden,” said the intelligence official.

Look at that second paragraph there. Some CIA officers argue that the secrecy surrounding the program “is not sustainable.” What are their precise fears? That if the truth came out, the program would have to be ended? Or, that anyone who had been involved in administering it might be liable to prosecution under the laws of the countries they’ve been working in?
… At a broad level, though, you really have to wonder at the twisted logic of all the people involved in designing and running such programs. In the name of “democracy” you subvert the rule of law in other countries? In the name of “freedom” you deny even the most basic habeas corpus protections to detainees– quite possibly, for the entire rest of their lives?
Of course, it is not the “democrats” inside Hungary or any other non-American place who need to take the lead in ending this system. It should be all adherents of (small-d) democracy right here in the belly of the beast, here in the USA.

The rule of law: In a democracy, does it apply to everyone, including the highest in the land?
Lawyers for Maher Arar argue that it should. Arar is the Canadian citizen who was “rendered” to Syria by the Bush administration when he was passing through New York’s Kennedy airport in September 2002. He’s been seeking redress from the US government in a New York courtroom, for the foul torture he was subjected to as a result of that rendering.
(The term “rendering” is used for when slaughter-houses boil down excess animal products to make tallow, glue, etc. For that that reason I find it approproately distasteful as the word for what happens to the phsyical bodies of people treated in this atrocious way by the US authorities and their partners-in-torture in other countries.)
In that same article from the Toronto Star about Arar’s case, Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason tried to argue that what happened to Arar was no big deal– because “198 aliens have been sent to Syria in the past five years, 46 of them during the same year Arar was sent back to his country of birth.”
And that is an argument???
Arar is not testifying directly in the case because he is not allowed into the US. He is seeking a monetary settlement from the Bush administration. But, his lawyer says, more importantly, he wants a U.S. court to declare that what was done to him was wrong and “will never happen again.”
Good for the Toronto Star covering the story. Bad for the US MSM that hasn’t been. Hat-tip to a good friend for sending it to me.

Faiza’s son Khalid has been arrested in Baghdad.
His brother Raed wrote today,

If your child or sibling vanishes for two days then calls from the secret service jail in any other place on earth, that would be considered a disaster and a violation of human rights