by Derek Davison
The CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) have been embroiled for several weeks in a dispute over the declassification of a sweeping Senate report, the product of an investigation into the George W. Bush-era CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. The SSCI’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has accused the CIA of [...]]]>
by Derek Davison
The CIA and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) have been embroiled for several weeks in a dispute over the declassification of a sweeping Senate report, the product of an investigation into the George W. Bush-era CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. The SSCI’s chair, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), has accused the CIA of removing documents related to the investigation from the committee’s computers, and of attempting to intimidate committee staffers by requesting a Justice Department review into how the committee was able to obtain an internal CIA review of the program. Now, as the White House and CIA review the SSCI report for declassification, its major findings have been leaked to the public, and they reveal that the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and the conditions under which it held its detainees, were “brutal and far worse than the agency communicated to policymakers.”
While the public still does not know what the committee’s report says (the committee voted 11-3 on April 3 to declassify its executive summary and conclusions, but the CIA and White House must conduct a final review before it can be released), members of the committee have talked openly about its findings. Senator John McCain said that the report “confirms…that the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience, but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.” Defenders of the program, like Fox News contributor Liz Cheney, argue that it produced important intelligence that helped the United States to thwart terrorist plots and to degrade Al-Qaeda’s capacity to sponsor further attacks, but what we know of the findings of the SSCI report contradicts that argument. Not that it should matter; any debate over the enhanced interrogation program must, as Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights has argued, reckon the morality of torture, not its effectiveness.
It is torture that we’re talking about, euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation” aside. In a remarkable editorial in the April 11 Washington Post, former contract interrogator Eric Fair described what he saw and did during his time in Iraq:
In April 2004 I was stationed at a detention facility in Fallujah. Inside the detention facility was an office. Inside the office was a small chair made of plywood and two-by-fours. The chair was two feet tall. The rear legs were taller than the front legs. The seat and chair back leaned forward. Plastic zip ties were used to force a detainee into a crouched position from which he could not recover. It caused muscle failure of the quads, hamstrings and calves. It was torture.
Fair concludes that the “stain” of the torture program demands a full accounting, for the sake of the nation as well as those who participated in the program directly.
History tells us that we should not be surprised by the Obama administration’s reluctance to fully investigate allegations of wrongdoing by its predecessor. Barack Obama made it very clear, even before he took office, that he preferred to “look forward as opposed to looking backward” when it came to the subject of investigating potential Bush administration crimes, and he has adhered to that position over the past five-plus years.
Obama is not the first president to turn a blind eye to possible transgressions by a former administration. The obvious example of this phenomenon was Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon for any crimes related to the Watergate scandal, in 1974. But Ford had been Nixon’s Vice-President, making his act somewhat understandable. Bill Clinton’s decision not to investigate alleged crimes that took place under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations was, as Robert Parry notes, motivated by the same desire to focus on advancing his own agenda, to “look forward as opposed to looking backward,” which Obama intimated as president-elect.
While it may behoove a particular administration to avoid the appearance of vindictiveness toward previous administrations, the decision not to investigate something as pernicious as the officially sanctioned torture of prisoners sacrifices the US’ credibility in the long run. It should not go unnoticed, for example, that while the US Ambassador to Kosovo is urging that nation to conduct a tribunal over the issue of organ trafficking by Kosovar Albanian militias in order to “build up its international credibility,” two branches of the US government are openly at odds over whether to even publicly acknowledge the past abuses of our “interrogation” program. It probably doesn’t go unnoticed that while the US refuses to reckon with its abuse of detainees, it is also refusing to issue a visa to Iran’s newly appointed UN Ambassador on the grounds that he was a background participant in the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran (he’s now part of Iran’s “reformist” camp). If the US can’t honestly reflect on its own past, how does it have the standing to demand the same of other nations?
The CIA’s resistance to a candid assessment of its torture program, even under an administration that firmly and officially disavowed that program upon taking office, speaks to an overall unwillingness to face accountability for any excesses wrought by the US’ ongoing “War on Terror.” While the Senate has investigated the failures in pre-war intelligence that led to the Iraq War, there has been no consequence to anyone involved in those failures. It is safe to say that there will be no consequences for anyone involved in the torture program as well, given the Obama administration’s deference to CIA efforts to stonewall even the release of a report detailing what actually took place.
It is impossible to imagine, then, that any future administration will have any interest in reckoning with other morally and legally questionable national security policies of this period, like the use of drones or the enlargement of the surveillance state. When it comes to the “War on Terror,” the rule seems to be “what’s past is past.”
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Edward Snowden has left Moscow for an “undisclosed location” in Russia, with a one-year freedom-of-the-country pass. The US government is naturally incensed with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To borrow a Russian phrase coined by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and plagiarized by V. I. Lenin, Что делать? (Chto delat), or, “what [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Edward Snowden has left Moscow for an “undisclosed location” in Russia, with a one-year freedom-of-the-country pass. The US government is naturally incensed with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
To borrow a Russian phrase coined by Nikolai Chernyshevsky and plagiarized by V. I. Lenin, Что делать? (Chto delat), or, “what is to be done?”
Case Snowden is not an isolated event involving a felon who stole secrets that were properly and necessarily classified and willfully leaked them, knowing this would be detrimental to the country whose security he had sworn to protect. Nor is he a whistleblower who was rightly — in his view — trying to promote a national debate on things that have “gone too far.”
What is taking place is the coming together of two strands. And understanding context is necessary to understanding current events.
The first strand is the fact that “9/11” is now almost 12 years in the past, and, except for a few isolated instances — a shoe bomber, an underwear bomber, a nutcase in Times Square and the horrendous bombing at the Boston Marathon (not part of organized terror) — the United States has been more-or-less free from terrorism in the homeland. How much of that is due to the actions of US security institutions and personnel, no one can tell, but it’s probably considerable.
This very success has led to the attenuation of fear in the US about more terrorism here. Except for New York City, that fear hovers around like what scientists call “background radiation” — something that is always there but not worried about in our own lives. Furthermore, the average American has tuned out of the two wars that were spawned by 9/11, one that has been dubbed a “war of necessity” — Afghanistan, though that is a debatable proposition, beyond the initial spasm response in later 2001 — and the other “war of choice” in Iraq, which has helped create the mess in Syria and a general Sunni-Shite low-grade civil war throughout the center of the Middle East.
Against this background is questioning around whether a second look should be taken at the balance struck after 9/11 between “homeland security” and civil liberties, including the adequate and fair functioning of the US criminal justice system.
This questioning has had several parts, including the continued incarceration of alleged terrorists at Guantanamo; the use of military tribunals rather than civilian courts for Guantanamo inmates who have had trials; the holding of Private Bradley Manning in solitary for a long time before his court martial this month on multiple counts, including “aiding the enemy;” revelations about US spying on allies including the European Union missions in Washington and New York; surveillance activities by the National Security Agency, about which we still have been told very little; and even the appearance of NSA Director General Keith Alexander at the Black Hat hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.
Case Snowden is only one element of this overall picture and is playing out against the failure of the US government to makes its case in public that its activities in the sphere of intelligence-gathering and protecting pass muster and are indeed needed to keep us all safe. Indeed, a Quinnipiac poll indicates that a majority of Americans surveyed believe that Snowden is just a whistleblower.
Strand two is in Russia. When the Soviet Union came to an end, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton worked hard to prevent the principal successor state, the Russian Federation, from being stigmatized as a loser: “Costa Rica with nuclear weapons.” For a long time, it was a country whose GDP was equivalent to that of the Netherlands, save for oil and gas, where Russia was bursting at the seams but which, any economist can tell you, made Russia a “rentier” state, able to sell stuff that comes out of the ground but not able to do much else. The Russian military even took five days to gain the upper hand in its 2008 mini-war with Georgia, a country well down the league table in military terms — simultaneously with the Beijing Olympics, which showed off an economic powerhouse.
Russia has also objected to US (and NATO) plans to extend anti-ballistic missile systems to part of Central Europe. The Russian elite has to know that this in no way would pose a threat to Russian offensive nuclear missile systems; at least part of Moscow’s objection must be due to the sense that, somehow, the US is taking advantage of its relative weakness. We can reject that reasoning but we should not just dismiss the possibility that it could be real psychologically and hence politically for the Russians.
Something we do have to take more seriously is Russia’s interest in being more directly engaged in the Middle East. In major parts, our interests are at least compatible; in others (Syria, and beneath the surface of a supposed agreement on Iran) far less so; and, in general, we have to deal with one another at a structured, strategic level, beyond the often episodic nature of current US-Russia relations regarding this region. Snowden is grist to this particular Russian mill.
Despite what Presidents Bush and Clinton tried to do to provide Russia with at least some (limited) role in the European strategic future, it was natural that the new Russia was portrayed negatively by a lot of people, some who had (legitimate) scores to settle with the Soviet Union. A lot of Americans did likewise; it even took 20 years for the US Congress to repeal the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which had been designed to encourage the Soviet Union to permit the emigration of Soviet Jews; and the US and others did not permit Russia until August 2012 to join the World Trade Organization, despite urging by some of us, then serving in the US government in the 1990s, to do this instantly — WTO membership criteria be damned. We urged this in order to help give the average Russian a sense that, despite having lost so much, their country could become engaged in the global economy, with benefits for their daily lives and thus perhaps helping to engender a more positive attitude toward working with the West.
The Clinton administration did the right thing in balancing NATO enlargement, designed to provide confidence to Central European states, with the NATO-Russia Founding Act in 1997; and the George W. Bush administration took a small added step at the Rome NATO summit in 2002. But there was still no real acknowledgement, whether earned or not, that, like Pinocchio, Russia had become a “real boy” in the international political and economic system.
Case Snowden also has come at a time when the US, in particular, has been objecting to certain human rights practices in Russia, including limits not just on non-governmental organizations that are exclusively Russian, but also those which have foreign ties, like the Carnegie Moscow Center and the German political party foundations. And there have been the show trials of people who have fallen out with Putin and his supporters. The US Congress has even passed condemnatory legislation, an ultra vires action if there ever were one — except that, as the principal successor state to the Soviet Union, Russia is still bound by the 1976 Helsinki Final Act, with its human rights and activities provisions, even within the territory of sovereign states.
Take me seriously, as well as my country, Vladimir Putin is saying; and surely most Russians agree. And given that the Snowden affair at least raises issues of “fairness” and “human rights,” Putin is enjoying the chance to play games with the United States. (Of course, Putin might have more serious business in mind, which may be detrimental to US and Western interests, and this needs to be tested).
These two strands — U.S. Post-Terrorism-Stress-Rebalancing and Putin/Russia’s search for a renewed place in the sun — come together and at least in part explain the current imbroglio in US-Russian relations over Edward Snowden’s fate.
Chto Delat?
Since even in the medium-term, neither Russia nor the US really has very much to gain by this continuing controversy except mutual headaches, some way out needs to be found.
The first thing is for the US to make clear that President Obama will take part in next month’s G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg and will not make the Snowden business hostage to his being there. Of course, as host, Putin has a stake in helping the president save face. Experience from 33 years ago counsels this approach. President Jimmy Carter pursued a “Rose Garden Campaign Strategy” in 1980 because of the Iranian hostage crisis. It cost him at the polls. And the US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This also cost Carter at the polls.
Step two is for both countries to lower the rhetoric and, at the same time, transition to grown-up diplomacy, with an aim to get this matter resolved by the time of the G-8 summit. From the US perspective, the objective should be Snowden’s either deciding to return voluntarily to face the music, or showing himself unwilling to take any responsibility for his declared ambition and goals as a whistleblower.
For the US to achieve this means doing things about the two strands, noted above. On the role of the US intelligence community and government secrecy, it means getting on top of the controversy now rather than later and coming clean about what it is doing and what it is not doing and what it is prepared to place off-limits in the future. That includes revisions to the secret FISA Court (one that might actually turn down more than a tiny handful of government requests for surveillance authority); coming clean with Congress and the public about surveillance activities that affect Americans (where some small steps toward reassurance have been taken); and creating a process with congressional and public participants to ensure that civil liberties will indeed be protected; in effect, to strike a new, valid and enduring balance between security and citizens’ civil liberties and privacy rights.
At the same time, the Justice Department, along with the security agencies, needs to make clear that if and when Snowden returns to the US, he will be properly tried in a civilian court with a limited number of charges directly related to the real damage he (allegedly) has done to US security. No “secret list” of supposed damage to national security, where US government credibility has suffered so much. No piling on of charges, with potential consecutive sentences that add up to multiple lifetimes. And no overreaching, which even the military judge in the Manning court-martial decided the government had done by charging him with aiding the enemy.
If Snowden is thus assured of a fair trial, maybe he would then come home. Certainly, Russia could not detain him. If instead he decided to remain a “man without a country,” he would lose in the court of public opinion. Further, the damage he can cause to national security has already been done; but a standard for whistleblowing could be reset, with reasonable protections for those who do see misfeasance and malfeasance, but no free pass for those who cross the line.
Then, about Russia. Here, Putin has as much of a role to play as the US. While we need to show that we respect legitimate Russian interests that are not in conflict with ours, Putin and company have to recognize that, to be taken seriously in the outside world, they have to play by the international standards that have been developing over the last half-century. Cracking down on foreign NGOs has to be beyond the pale, as well as trying and convicting dead people (Sergei Magnitsky) who have challenged Putin’s authority or who have had the temerity to try running for Mayor of Moscow next month as a Putin critic (Alexei Navalny). What’s the point of Putin’s doing all this? These actions, while “sending signals” to other Putin opponents, should be small beer for him compared with the needs of an aspiring great power to be taken seriously by other countries.
The “Snowden part” of this drama cannot be brought to resolution unless and until he decides that he will return home. The “Putin part” can be bought to resolution when grown-ups in Moscow and Washington get together and understand why the needs of their mutual relationship should not be held hostage to anything that is not genuinely important to one side or the other.
We shall see if both sides have the wit and wisdom to proceed in this way.
]]>by Jared Metzker
By now millions of people have seen the video of Yasiin Bey (a hip hop artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def) being strapped to a chair and force-fed in a manner similar to that used daily to treat hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
The video was [...]]]>
by Jared Metzker
By now millions of people have seen the video of Yasiin Bey (a hip hop artist and actor formerly known as Mos Def) being strapped to a chair and force-fed in a manner similar to that used daily to treat hunger-striking inmates at Guantanamo Bay.
The video was produced by the UK group Reprieve, which advocates for prisoners’ rights worldwide and represents a number of the detainees being held in Gitmo.
Last week, along with releasing the video, Reprieve unveiled a report that collates unclassified testimonies of those who are being subjected to the procedure.
These testimonies describe experiences far worse than what Bey endured. Reprieve concludes that they amount to compelling evidence of “unnecessary force” being used on strikers.
In Bey’s video it’s clear that the end of the tube shoved through his nose all the way down into his stomach (traversing his esophagus along the way) is plastic. In the report, prisoners complain that the tips of the tubes used by Guantanamo doctors are metal.
Multiple prisoners say that the tips tear at their noses and throats as they pass through, causing bleeding and vomiting during and after feeding. They also say that doctors intentionally insert the tube too far, which makes it rub painfully against the bottom of the stomach as it discharges the liquid meal.
Strikers who attempt to remain in their cells and resist the force-feeding are given a treatment that the military has abbreviated as FCE — short for forcible cell extraction. This method of compelling the inmates to accept the tubes is by all accounts violent. One striker claims to have had his ribs broken and re-broken by separate FCEs.
The World Medical Association, as well as the American Medical Association, rejects the practice of force-feeding and medical professionals note that it is an unethical way (especially if done through unnecessary force) of ending strikes.
Other methods, such as compromising to address certain remediable prisoner complaints, are considered ethical ways of persuading strikers to quit. Indeed, over half of the forty-five strikers quit on Sunday, reportedly after being given more communal time for Ramadan-related observations.
The large number of views garnered by the Bey video alone is evidence that Americans care about the Guantanamo issue. This on-going concern may put pressure on President Obama to make good on his renewed promise to shut down the prison.
It may also motivate his counterparts in Congress to facilitate the process. (A letter sent by Senators Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin last week was a sign that this is already occurring.)
While it is questionable whether force-feeding can be labelled “torture”, that’s how the strikers in Reprieve’s report describe it.
It is nevertheless undeniable that the strikers, none of whom have ever been charged and all of whom have been cleared for release, are experiencing severe pain on a daily basis.
Still awash in the controversy over the Edward Snowden affair, Obama likely doesn’t want to see the public support he won by ending waterboarding at Guantanamo recede due to new accusations of torture.
Faced with enough outrage he might step up his efforts to finally have the prison shut down.
– Jared Metzker is a reporter for IPS and studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies. He can be reached by email.
]]>by Victoria Brittain
via Tom Dispatch
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are [...]]]>
by Victoria Brittain
via Tom Dispatch
A four-month hunger strike, mass force-feedings, and widespread media coverage have at last brought Guantanamo, the notorious offshore prison set up by the Bush administration early in 2002, back into American consciousness. Prominent voices are finally calling on President Obama to close it down and send home scores of prisoners who, years ago, were cleared of wrongdoing.
Still unnoticed and out of the news, however, is a comparable situation in the U.S. itself, involving a pattern of controversial terrorism trials that result in devastating prison sentences involving the harshest forms of solitary confinement. This growing body of prisoners is made up of Muslim men, including some formerly well-known and respected American citizens.
At the heart of these cases is a statute from the time of the Clinton presidency making it a crime to provide “material support” to any foreign organization the government has designated as “terrorist.” This material support provision was broadened in the USA PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress just after the 9/11 attacks, and has been upheld by a 2010 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project. Today, almost any kind of support, including humanitarian aid, training, expert advice, “services” of all sorts, or “political advocacy” undertaken in “coordination” with any group on the State Department’s terrorist list, can lead to such a terror trial. The Court has never defined what “coordination” actually means.
In that Supreme Court ruling, Justice Stephen Breyer was joined in dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Justice Breyer proposed a narrower interpretation of material support: individuals should not be subject to prosecution unless they knowingly provided a service they had reason to believe would be used to further violence. At the time, the position of the dissenting judges was backed by key editorials in major newspapers. In the three years since, however, more material support cases have resulted in long sentences with very little public notice or critical comment.
Pre-Trial Punishment
In the U.S. these days, the very word “terror,” no less the charge of material support for it, invariably shuts down rather than opens any conversation. Nonetheless, a decade of researching a number of serious alleged terrorism cases on both side of the Atlantic, working alongside some extraordinary human rights lawyers, and listening to Muslim women in Great Britain and the U.S. whose lives were transformed by the imprisonment of a husband, father, or brother has given me a different perspective on such cases.
Perhaps most illuminating in them is the repeated use of what’s called “special administrative measures” to create a particularly isolating and punitive atmosphere for many of those charged with such crimes, those convicted of them, and even for their relatives. While these efforts have come fully into their own in the post-9/11 era, they were drawn from a pre-9/11 paradigm. Between the material support statute and those special administrative measures, it has become possible for the government to pre-convict and in many cases pre-punish a small set of Muslim men.
Take the case of Ahmed Abu Ali, a young Palestinian-American who is now serving life in the Administrative Maximum Facility, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, and is currently under special administrative measures that restrict his communications with the outside world. A university student in Saudi Arabia, he was arrested in 2003 by the Saudi government and held for 20 months without charges or access to a lawyer. The Washington Postreported that the U.S. government finally asked for his return just as his family filed a lawsuit in Washington.
At the time, it seemed like a victory for the family and the various human rights organizations that had supported them, but on arrival Ahmed was charged with material support for al-Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. The evidence to convict him came from an anonymous alleged co-conspirator and from taped confessions he made, evidently after being tortured in Saudi Arabia, a common practice there. The evidence of his torture wascontested at his trial. The case was described by a staff member of Amnesty International USA as “unusual in the annals of U.S. outsourcing of torture.” An appeal of Ahmed’s 30-year sentence actually resulted in the imposition of an even more severe sentence: life without parole.
In addition, special administrative measures have been applied to him. These were originally established in 1996 to stop communications from prison inmates who could “pose a substantial risk of death or serious risk of injury.” The targets then were gang leaders. Each special administrative measure was theoretically to be designed to fit the precise dangers posed by a specific prisoner. Since 9/11, however, numerous virtually identical measures have been applied to Muslim men, often like Ahmed Abu Ali with no history of violence.
A question to Ahmed’s sister about how her brother is doing is answered only with a quick look. She is not allowed to say anything because special measures also prohibit family members from disclosing their communications with prisoners. They similarly prevent defense lawyers from speaking about their clients. It was for a breach of these special measures in relation to her client, the imprisoned blind sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, that lawyer Lynne Stewart was tried and sentenced to 10 years in prison in the Bush years.
Although these measures have been contested in court, few have ever been modified, much less thrown out. Those court challenges and evidence provided to the European Court of Human Rights by American lawyers have, however, provided a window into what one of them described as a regime of “draconian and inhumane treatment.”
Under such special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City, a prisoner lives with little natural light, no time in communal areas, no radio or TV, and sometimes no books or newspapers either, while mail and phone calls are permitted only with family, and even then are often suspended for minor infractions. Family visits are always no-contact ones conducted through plexiglass.
“The conditions have quite simply wreaked havoc on Mr X’s physical and mental well-being,” one lawyer wrote for the European Court of Human Rights, describing a seven-month period in which a prisoner at the Metropolitan Correction Center was allowed no family phone calls. Another highlighted his client’s lost concentration, which made it impossible to work on his case effectively. “Their world shrinks dramatically,” was the way Joshua Dratel, a lawyer who has represented several men under these measures,described the situation.
In cases where special administrative measures are in place pre-trial, such as the well-documented ordeal of American post-graduate student Syed Fahad Hashmi, lawyers have often been obliged to prepare cases without actually sitting with their clients, or being able to show them all court materials. After three pre-trial years mainly in solitary confinement under special administrative measures at the Metropolitan Correction Center, Hashmi accepted a government plea bargain of one count of material support for terrorism and was given a 15-year sentence.
His crime? He allowed an acquaintance to stay at his student apartment in London, use his cell phone, and store a duffel bag there. The bag contained ponchos and waterproof socks that were later supposedly delivered to al-Qaeda, while the phone was used by that acquaintance to make calls to co-conspirators in Britain.
Silencing Palestinian-Americans
Just as the Bush administration found the Geneva Conventions “quaint” and ignored them, so the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” a part of Western civilization since Roman times, has all but disappeared for Muslims who face accusations of “material support” for terrorism.
Such cases have, at times, involved high-profile men and once received significant media attention. Civil rights activist and University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, accused of being a leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (a State Department-designated terrorist organization), was, for instance, treated like a man already being punished for his crime even before his trial. Previously, he had been a respected American-Muslim political leader with contacts in the White House and in Congress. Now, walking to pre-trial meetings with his lawyers, his arms were shackled behind him, so that, humiliatingly, he had to carry his legal papers on his back.
Amnesty International described Al-Arian’s pre-trial detention in Coleman Federal Penitentiary as “gratuitously punitive.” It cited his 23-hour lockdown in his cell, the strip searches, the use of chains and shackles, the lack of access to any religious services, and the insistence on denying him a watch or clock in a windowless cell. He was transferred to 14 different prison facilities in 6 states. He ended up spending three and a half years in solitary confinement without being convicted of anything. At his trial, the government called 80 witnesses, including 21 from Israel, while his counsel called no defense witnesses, only citing the U.S. Constitution. A Florida jury nonetheless acquitted him on half of the counts, and deadlocked on the other half. (Ten out of 12 jurors wanted to acquit him on all charges.) He later struck a plea deal on one minor charge.
Today, the Palestinian-American professor is still in legal limbo, under house arrest, awaiting a judge’s ruling on whether he has to testify in a separate case. An articulate U.S. Muslim political leader, who helped bring in the Muslim vote for George W. Bush after the candidate came out publicly against the use of secret evidence in trials, when the Gore campaign did not and so contributed to his Florida victory in the 2000 presidential campaign, has been silenced for his openly expressed pro-Palestinian opinions.
Successful and influential Palestinian-American Ghassan Elashi, a founder and the chairman of what was once America’s largest Muslim charity, the Holy Land Foundation, and Shukri Abu Baker, its president, were similarly silenced along with three other foundation officials. The two of them received prison sentences of 65 years for giving charity to orphanages and community organizations in Gaza (also supported by the European Union and the U.S. Agency for International Development). The Holy Land leaders were accused of giving “material support” to a foreign terrorist organization: Hamas, the elected government in Gaza. There were no accusations of inciting or being involved in acts of violence. This case, like Professor Al Arian’s, would never have been possible if Justice Breyer’s views had prevailed at the Supreme Court.
Even then, it took a second trial before a jury returned a guilty verdict against the Holy Land leaders. Nancy Hollander, counsel for one of the men, summed up the situation this way: “The thought that somebody gets sixty-five years for providing charity is really shameful, and I believe this case will go down in history, as have others, as a shameful day.” In 2012, the Supreme Court refused to rehear the case, and four of the five convicted men remain confined to the especially restrictive “communications management unit” at the U.S. penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the inmates.
There were also 246 unindicted co-conspirators named in the Holy Land Foundation case, including major Muslim organizations. The case and the particularly long sentences sent a shot of fear through Muslim communities in the U.S., as was surely intended.
The men’s daughters still speak out on their fathers’ case. Noor Elashi, for example, told me, “His is the poster case for ‘material support.’” In the meantime, 15-minute weekly prison phone calls, monitored in real time from Washington, are the thinnest of threads to hold family relationships together, as are rare visits to distant prisons. Mariam Abu Ali once described to me her annual visit to her older brother Ahmed Abu Ali. The expense was difficult to absorb: two flights, a rental car, and a motel for a three-day visit of about four hours a day, for a family already shouldering heavy debts for legal fees.
The real ordeal, though, was emotional, not financial. “They bring him in shackled at the waist and legs,” she told me. “We see them take off the handcuffs as he puts his hands out through a gap in the door. It’s emotionally draining… he’s there but so far away behind the glass. Only one of us can hear him at a time as he speaks though a phone… I’ve tried to lip read when it isn’t my turn, but it really doesn’t work. I feel very exhausted and sometimes I fall asleep during the visit. I cry every time, especially when he leaves… It’s not like a death. You don’t grieve and then finish, because this is not in the past. In fact, it is not even in the back of my mind — it is always there… This is chronic after nine years and it is not going to end.”
In itself, solitary confinement has devastating effects, as Dr. Atul Gawande has vividly pointed out, and is becoming ever more common in U.S. prisons in breach of internationally recognized norms on the humane treatment of prisoners. It tends to break the will of inmates, sometimes even robbing them of their sanity. However, in its most extreme use, combining those special administrative measures with the isolation imposed in prison communication management units, it is mainly applied to American Muslims.
The stories of what happens to Muslim men today in U.S. prisons and of the judicial cases that land them there under the harshest of conditions bear a startling resemblance to the cages at Guantanamo Bay and the charade of a legal system that is still in operation there.
Miscarriages of Justice
In addition to the examples of prominent, formerly successful Palestinian-Americans, there are a series of haunting cases of newer Muslim arrivals in the U.S., each of them an evident miscarriage of justice. These include the Fort Dix Five, originally from Albania, and that of Imam Yassin Aref, an Iraqi Kurd. Their entrapment cases, typically based on “sting” operations manufactured by FBI informants, sent men respected in their communities into solitary confinement for long years on what were probably trumped-up charges. In such cases, the only “plot” is often manufactured by the government itself.
This, then, is the state of so many cases of “terrorism” in the U.S. today in which disparate Muslim men have been swept up in a system in which guilt is assumed and people’s lives are quickly turned into waking nightmares in what used to be called the “justice system.” Some great miscarriages of justice do get overturned. Black Panther Robert King spent 31 years in prison, 29 in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. His release in 2001 came about by chance when his persistent letter writing attracted the attention of a young lawyer and the founder of The Body Shop, Anita Roddick, who became his champion alongside a grassroots campaign for his release. Since then, King has himself campaigned at home and abroad for the release of his two colleagues in “the Angola Three,” who still remain in prison, and against the system that could have broken him as it has so many others.
Thanks to the special administrative measures applied in his case, Ahmed Abu Ali cannot do what Robert King did, or what the lawyer and a friend of WikiLeaks informant Private Bradley Manning did to get his prison conditionswidely known, or what Mumia Abu Jamal has done throughout his 30 years in solitary confinement via his books and his talks on prison radio. Ahmed cannot contact the world outside in search of the support he and his family need, nor can his family members.
The painful impact of all this on the families is difficult to imagine. Chilean novelist and playwright Ariel Dorfman once wrote that torture “presupposes the… abrogation of our capacity to imagine someone else’s suffering, to dehumanize him or her so much that their pain is not our pain. It demands this of the torturer… but also demands of everyone else the same distancing, the same numbness.”
Perhaps such a state helps explain why people around the world are far more aware than most Americans of what happens to Muslim men in the post-9/11 “justice system.” The particular cruelty of the punishments they endure even before their unfair trials, will someday, like the abuses at Guantanamo, gain the attention they deserve.
Victoria Brittain, journalist and former editor at the Guardian, has authored or co-authored two plays and four books, including Enemy Combatant with Moazzam Begg. Her latest book, Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2013), has just been published. This is her second piece for TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Victoria Brittain
]]>by Robert E. Hunter
Last week, President Barack Obama gave a major address at the National Defense University, focusing on issues related to the war on terror. He presented new guidelines for the use of remotely-piloted vehicles (“drones”) against suspected terrorists and he made a renewed attempt to close the detention center [...]]]>
by Robert E. Hunter
Last week, President Barack Obama gave a major address at the National Defense University, focusing on issues related to the war on terror. He presented new guidelines for the use of remotely-piloted vehicles (“drones”) against suspected terrorists and he made a renewed attempt to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. These were useful pronouncements that will have an impact on US foreign policy and hopefully the way the US is perceived, especially in the Muslim world, but that was not the principal reason why the president gave the speech.
The president was responding more to US media clamor and to domestic pressures from both the Left and Right. Pressed from the Left, he had to show that the US will not endlessly be preoccupied with terrorism and engage in some practices that raise both moral and legal issues. Pressed from the Right, he had to show that he still takes seriously potential threats from terror groups. He also reflected on Congressional constraints on transferring prisoners from Guantanamo — even to move them to super-secure prisons in the United States.
Obama did a good job of threading these needles, though, predictably, he has been attacked from both ends of the spectrum, including one prominent columnist’s idiotic comment that he makes a better law professor than president.
But while the president’s speech met his immediate domestic political needs, it had little to do with something far more important: what matters to the United States in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, where, to put it mildly, there is still a gaping lack of clarity both about US interests and the means chosen to secure them.
Most obviously related to the president’s NDU speech are Afghanistan and Pakistan. Regarding the former, one would have to be blind not to realize that the United States is in the process of getting out and mostly leaving Afghanistan to its own devices. To be sure, the US wants to leave behind after 2014 as much capacity as possible for the Afghans to control their own territory and to minimize the risk that the Taliban, with all of their human rights horrors, will again take power in all if not just part of Afghanistan. But beyond these moral questions and the need to retain some capacity to scotch incipient terrorism against the American homeland, the US has little strategic interest in Afghanistan and never did.
What it had to do by invading in the fall of 2001 was conduct a punitive action in response to 9/11, focused on trammeling and uprooting Al Qaeda. This was more in the league of chasing Pancho Villa across the Mexican border than in countering continent-wide aggression by Japan and Nazi Germany after Pearl Harbor.
Pakistan is the real US strategic interest. It has nuclear weapons, but is instable. It is much more populous and developed as a society and hence more consequential than Afghanistan. It has a more important presence in the region and a long-festering “semi-conflict” with India. But it is in Pakistan where Obama faces his most important tactical problem with the use of drones. They can help counter the worst of the Islamist terrorists, including operations against Americans and others in Afghanistan, and they can help the Pakistani government in its not very successful efforts to control almost ungovernable tribal areas — whether or not Islamabad will say so publicly. Yet at the same time, the drone strikes appear to a broad mass of opinion in Pakistan and elsewhere in the region as intrusion, a form of latter-day imperialism. To us Americans, that charge is unfair, but it’s there.
At NDU, Obama tried to strike the right balance on drones and terrorism and continue clawing back America’s reputation that was so badly damaged by the 2003 Iraq invasion and other actions that are read by a large mass of people in the region as “anti-Muslim.” But “old sins,” as the saying goes, “cast long shadows.” Most Americans approved (as did this author) of US military actions in Afghanistan after 9/11, but whether what it continued to do there was a “war of necessity” is highly questionable. Certainly, the US ambition to do “nation-building” had little chance from the start, partly because the US and others never put in a serious amount of non-military resources or ended the stove-piping of US agencies, and partly because no outside country can foster the changes that only a society itself can make.
From a strategic perspective, the 2003 invasion of Iraq made even less sense and caused a crack in the dam of a rough Middle East security structure. This crack has widened; until now the US and others face the worst crisis in the region in living memory. It is far worse than the challenge posed by the post-1978 mullahs in Iran. Their revolutionary ethic had its day but then lost appeal as people elsewhere in the region decided they didn’t want to live the way Iranians have been forced to live by their antediluvian clerical masters.
President Obama repeated at NDU that the US is not against Islam, and this statement can arguably be true. But so what? So many people in the Moslem world don’t see it that way, and even evidence of protected civil liberties for Muslims in American society — what Obama correctly said is “the ultimate rebuke to those who say we are at war with Islam” — cannot on its own wipe out that widespread belief.
With his need to deal with the domestic clamor over drones and Guantanamo, the president’s speech was also a bit off point as measured against other developments in the region, about which he only made passing reference. Thus, while he addressed the issue of drones as it affects Pakistan, he said nothing (other than the need for “building schools”) about helping it deal with critical threats to governance and stability.
Farther West, the US and others now face a further consequence of the invasion of Iraq: a slow-rolling civil war across the Middle East heartland, pitting, at one level, Sunnis versus Shias. At another level, geopolitical competitions are at play, among Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey and, yes, Israel — itself not a Muslim country but a major contender for prominence.
The immediate locus of these competitions is the full-bore civil war in Syria, which has been turned into a super-Lebanon in terms of the activities of outside powers, in addition to the struggle between the Assad regime, based on the Alawite (Shiite) minority, and “rebels” who represent other factions, including the majority Sunnis. But in addition, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — among others — are also involved, with the three Arab Sunni governments also permitting — if not sponsoring — the intrusion in Syria of the worst elements of Islamist fundamentalism, terrorism by any measure. Of course, the Sunni governments are trying to offset, through Syria, the shift in the balance of regional sectarian influence that was caused by the end of Sunni dominance over Iraq’s Shiite majority, following the 2003 invasion.
Obama is right to want to keep the United States from getting more deeply embroiled in Syria. He knows that the American people oppose yet another Middle East war, with both the human toll and, in Iraq and Afghanistan, a cost in national treasure matched in US history only by the Second World War. Yet here, too, domestic constituencies are pressing Obama to “do something.” But the Right seem to have forgotten how much trouble they got the nation into over Iraq, and the Left erroneously conflates Syria with Libya and Egypt, which were mostly about the role of tyrants, not civil war and issues of region-wide geopolitical consequence.
In his effort to keep the United States from getting sucked into Syria, Obama did not help himself by calling in 2011 for Assad to go, or by pledging (unstated) consequences if the Assad regime crosses some ill-defined “red line” in the use of chemical weapons. These statements have made him more vulnerable to domestic activists pressing him to do things in Syria (but what?) that he knows do not comport with America’s political and strategic interests.
Even so, it can fairly be said that, whatever the outcome of fighting in Syria, it will never again be the same. The issues raised in the broader regional competition and conflict, including the spread of Islamist fundamentalism as part of Sunni-state efforts to shape the outcome in Syria, will not go away. All demand a comprehensive strategy for the region as a whole; yet, at least in public, there is no evidence that the United States has thought seriously about what will need to be done, if only to preserve US interests. It is one thing to stay out of war; it is another to delay in crafting strategies and seeking partners to meet the longer-run regional requirements, come-what-may on the ground in Syria (European allies, take note).
All this ignores what was the big unfolding regional crisis until Syria gained center stage: the Iranian nuclear program. The Israeli Ambassador to the US reminded us in the Washington Post this week that this is a central concern for the US and others and not just Israel. Whatever happens in Syria, this issue will be with us, but it is no nearer to resolution than before. Despite what seems to be Obama’s (and the US military’s) keen desire to avoid war, the US pledge to keep “all options on the table” still stands, but Washington lacks a viable strategy for moving forward. Like its two predecessors, the Obama administration refuses a sine qua non of successful negotiations: acknowledging that Iran, like every other nation on the planet, has some legitimate security concerns. The “Iran factor” must also be folded into longer-run regional requirements.
Furthermore, the US continues to act in the Middle East as though it is still 1991, following Western victory in the Cold War and after Saddam Hussein was thrust out of Kuwait, when George H.W. Bush could talk of a new era in which “…what we say goes.” At least in the Middle East, that era is passing, if it has not already disappeared; yet we continue to act as though we can call all the shots anytime we want.
If economically-rising China, which is interested in regional resources, disagrees, along with Russia, with its desire again to be seen as a great power, then they are stigmatized for “not playing the game.” While we rightly appeal to Moscow to help in stopping the war in Syria, one price is to accept it as a longer-run interlocutor whose interests (in some respects different from ours) must be taken into account, a status they now claim in part because the US proved unable to play the role of security-provider in terms that could command respect across the region.
All this calls into question whether Secretary of State John Kerry is spending his time wisely in focusing so much on trying to jump-start negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians — even though that could not possibly lead to a final settlement, so long as Israel is beset on three fronts (Egypt, Syria, and Iran), and as Gaza continues in its Israeli-imposed isolation. With his focus on this long-term process, he has not even had time to put together a team of people at the State Department able to do its daily business, much less to create the overarching strategies needed for the US to deal with the Middle East and Southwest Asia, beginning with the uncertain but so critical consequences of the Syrian conflict.
The same can be said for the team at the White House, which needs added intellectual and policy firepower if the president and the nation are to be well served.
The firebell in the night is sounding. It is time for President Obama to exercise the leadership needed to respond; and while his speech at the National Defense University was one step in the process, it was not the most consequential in terms of what must be done.
Postscript: it was ironic that Obama gave this important speech at the National Defense University, including his call for a “comprehensive strategy.” Last year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which “owns” NDU, heavily slashed its budget for research and also reduced its capacity to educate up-and-coming officers in necessary leadership skills. Here is a place where the president can begin, for a tiny amount of money, the necessary work of enabling his administration to meet the nation’s most critical strategic challenges.
]]>via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against [...]]]>
via IPS News
Responding to growing criticism by human rights groups and foreign governments, U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday announced potentially significant shifts in what his predecessor called the “global war on terror”.
In a major policy address at the National Defense University here, Obama said drone strikes against terrorist suspects abroad will be carried out under substantially more limited conditions than during his first term in office.
He also renewed his drive to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which currently only holds 166 prisoners.
In particular, he announced the lifting of a three-year-old moratorium on repatriating Yemeni detainees to their homeland and the appointment in the near future of senior officials at both the State Department and the Pentagon to expedite the transfer the 30 other prisoners who have been cleared for release to third countries.
In addition, he said he will press Congress to amend and ultimately repeal its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) against Al-Qaeda and others deemed responsible for the 9/11 attacks “(in order) to determine how we can continue to fight terrorists without keeping America on a perpetual war-time footing.”
The AUMF created the legal basis for most of the actions – and alleged excesses — by U.S. military and intelligence agencies against alleged terrorists and their supporters since 9/11.
“The AUMF is now nearly 12 years old. The Afghan War is coming to an end. Core Al-Qaeda is a shell of its former self,” he declared. “Groups like AQAP (Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) must be dealt with, but in the years to come, not every collection of thugs that labels themselves Al-Qaeda will pose a credible threat to the United States.”
“Unless we discipline our thinking and our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight, or continue to grant presidents unbound powers more suited for traditional armed conflicts between nation states,” he warned.
His remarks gained a cautious – if somewhat sceptical and impatient – welcome from some of the groups that have harshly criticised Obama’s for his failure to make a more decisive break with some of former President George W. Bush’s policies and to close Guantanamo, and his heavy first-term reliance on drone strikes against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist suspects.
“President Obama is right to say that we cannot be on a war footing forever – but the time to take our country off the global warpath and fully restore the rule of law is now, not at some indeterminate future point,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Romero especially praised Obama’s initial moves to transfer detainees at Guantanamo but noted that he had failed to offer a plan to deal with those prisoners who are considered too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. courts for lack of admissible evidence. He also called the new curbs on drone strikes “promising” but criticised Obama’s continued defence of targeted killings.
Obama’s speech came amidst growing controversy over his use of drone strikes in countries – particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia – with which the U.S. is not at war. Since 9/11, the U.S. has conducted more than 400 strikes in the three countries with a total death toll estimated to range between 3,300 and nearly 5,000, depending on the source. The vast majority of these strikes were carried out during Obama’s first term.
While top administration officials have claimed that almost all of the victims were suspected high-level terrorists, human rights groups, as well as local sources, have insisted that many civilian non-combatants – as well as low-level members of militant groups — have also been killed.
In a letter sent to Obama last month, some of the country’s leading human rights groups, including the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights First, questioned the legality of the criteria used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to select targets.
Earlier this month, the legal adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Harold Koh, also criticised the administration for the lack of transparency and discipline surrounding the drone programme.
In his speech Thursday, Obama acknowledged the “wide gap” between his government and independent assessments of casualties, but he strongly defended the programme as effective, particularly in crippling Al-Qaeda’s Pakistan-based leadership, legal under the AUMF, and more humane than the alternative in that “(c)onventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage.”
“To do nothing in the face of terrorist networks would invite far more civilian casualties – not just in our cities at home and facilities abroad, but also in the very places – like Sana’a and Kabul and Mogadishu – where terrorists seek a foothold,” he said.
According to a “Fact Sheet” released by the White House, lethal force can be used outside of areas of active hostilities when there is a “near certainty that a terrorist target who poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons” is present and that non-combatants will not be injured or killed. In addition, U.S. officials must determine that capture is not feasible and that local authorities cannot or will not effectively address the threat.
The fact sheet appeared to signal an end to so-called “signature strikes” that have been used against groups of men whose precise is identity is unknown but who, based on surveillance, are believed to be members of Al-Qaeda or affiliated groups.
If the target is a U.S. citizen, such as Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric who the administration alleged had become an operational leader of AQAP and was killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, Obama said there would be an additional layer of review and that he would engage Congress on the possibility of establishing a secret court or an independent oversight board in the executive branch.
On Wednesday, the Justice Department disclosed that three other U.S. citizens – none of whom were specifically targeted – have been killed in drone strikes outside Afghanistan.
On Guantanamo, where 102 of the 166 remaining detainees are participating in a three-month-old hunger strike, Obama said he would permit the 56 Yemenis there whose have been cleared for release to return home “on a case-by-case basis”. He also re-affirmed his determination to transfer all remaining detainees to super-max or military prisons on U.S. territory – a move that Congress has so far strongly resisted. He also said he would insist that every detainee have access to the courts to review their case.
In addition to addressing the festering drone issue and Guantanamo, however, the main thrust of Thursday’s speech appeared designed to mark what Obama called a “crossroads” in the struggle against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and how the threat from them has changed.
“Lethal yet less capable Al-Qaeda affiliates. Threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad. Homegrown extremists. This is the future of terrorism,” he said. “We must take these threats seriously, and do all we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognise that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
“Beyond Afghanistan,” he said later, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.”
Obama also disclosed he had signed a Presidential Policy Guidance Wednesday to codify the more restrictive guidelines governing the use of force.
White House officials who brief reporters before the speech suggested that, among other provisions, the Guidance called for gradually shifting responsibility for drone strikes and targeted killings from the CIA to the Pentagon – a reform long sought by human-rights groups.
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