"I feel like one of the trees that used to be outside the stadium...but I don't want to get cut down quite yet." - John Yoo
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September 2008 Archives
Unfortunately, the world now thinks of Cal as the place where the man who justified torture for the Bush administration has tenure.
John Yoo Again Reminds Us of His Charms, East Bay Express, April 9, 2008
An innocent man held as a terror detainee for years talks about how Americans tortured him in Afghanistan and Gitmo.
At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America's shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one. The story Kurnaz told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government's own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately five years of his life.
click on photo for video
By Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News, April 16, 2008
Continue reading A tortured defense.
"we just can't get this issue behind us," even with the Bush administration on its way out of office, because "issues like this, like torture, still define who we are as a country. It's still unfinished business." - MSNBC's Rachel Maddow
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Torture_film_director_discusses_White_House_0926.html
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently became the first Bush administration official to admit that high-level discussions of the use of torture had taken place in 2002 and 2003.
According to a written statement provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month and released on Wednesday by committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), officials were told that waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation measures" routinely used in a survival training program for US soldiers would not cause "significant" harm if used on prisoners.
Rice's statement is the first acknowledgment of those meetings by any of the officials involved. Rice did not name the other officials who were present, but reports last spring based on anonymous sources mentioned Vice President Dick Cheney, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Continue reading "a soul of the nation story...".
by Andy Worthington
09/19/08
Photo: Amnesty International Canada
Today, Omar Khadr, the sole Canadian citizen in Guantánamo, marks his 22nd birthday in isolation. Seized in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old, Omar has now spent nearly a third of his life in US custody, in conditions that ought to be shameful to the US administration responsible for holding him, and to the Canadian government that has abdicated its responsibilities towards him.
Continue reading Seized at 15, Omar Khadr Turns 22 in Guantánamo.
to say the least!
Yesterday's lecture was a huge disappointment to me; surely experts in her position can do much more. It's up to us, folks.
Anna Hiatt/Staff
Linda Greenhouse, former Supreme Court correspondent for The New York Times, lectures in Barrows Hall on the Bush administration's legal handling of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The audience asked questions about what Greenhouse thought of Boalt Hall School of Law professor John Yoo, who wrote memos for the Bush administration that provided the legal basis for detention and interrogation techniques such as torture.
Greenhouse responded by quoting Sen. Barack Obama, saying, "You're asking profound questions that are above my pay grade."
P A Y G R A D E ?
http://www.dailycal.org/article/102684/former_new_york_times_correspondent_gives_lecture
For Immediate Release: September 15, 2008
WASHINGTON--Thirty-eight retired generals and admirals today appealed to the United States Senate to enact legislation ending the practice of holding "ghost detainees" by requiring that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be notified of and given access to all prisoners in the custody of the U.S. intelligence community, including those held in secret prisons.
The retired military leaders, convened by Human Rights First, wrote in support of a bipartisan amendment to the pending defense authorization bill. The amendment (#5369), co-sponsored by Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), would bring the intelligence community in line with U.S. military practices regarding ICRC access to detainees, effectively ending the current policy permitting the CIA to hold "ghost prisoners."
The full text of the letter and list of signers can be found here.
The letter from retired generals and admirals underscores the importance to the safety of American military personnel of upholding the norm of ensuring Red Cross access to all prisoners held in international armed conflict. It states: "When we violate this norm ourselves, by holding prisoners in secret--'off the books' -- denying that they are in our custody and refusing to permit the Red Cross access to them to monitor their treatment, we dangerously undermine our ability to demand that our enemies adhere to it, now and in future wars." The full text of the letter, along with a list of signatories, with biographic information, follows this release.
Continue reading 38 Retired Military Leaders Call on Congress to End Secret Prisons.
On Saturday morning in Andover, Massachusetts... about 120 activists, adademics, constitutional scholars, public officials and legal experts gathered... [for] a landmark war crimes conference, the goal of which was to plan the prosecution of Bush Administration officials.
"This is not a campaign event," said Professor Christopher Pyle of Mt. Holyoke College, during his speech to the conference. "It is a conference about how to restore governmental accountability in the wake of a criminal administration. It addresses the most serious crisis in our nation's history -- the claim that the president and his secret agents can get away with torture, kidnapping, and even manslaughter."
Continue reading Groups plan to force universities to mull firing Bush admin 'criminals'.
By Andy Worthington
Monday, 15 September 2008 
The Military Commissions at Guantánamo -- the trial system for "War on Terror" prisoners that was established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks -- are of enormous significance, as they are the only point at which the Bush administration's post-9/11 detention policies (focused, for the most part, on a disturbing legal limbo between the Geneva Conventions and the US court system, in which prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial) are tested in public.
Continue reading Guantanamo Trials: Arbitrary Lawlessness in "War on Terror".
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The Guantánamo Blog |
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and some faculty are willing to speak out, including Professors Plater and Brodin:
"Our students should know well that we love them. But they should know us well enough to know that when a matter of illegality, immorality, and oppression comes before us, standing up against it takes precedence. This is still the Boston College Law School of Father Drinan and a host of others who care about social justice."
Mark Danner, Author of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror and UC School of Journalism professor, on John Yoo's shoddy scholarship:
So in order to argue that in essence these are nonpolitical arguments, these are simply lawyers telling you what they believe, it seems to me you have to have at least a mildly convincing argument that the legal homework has been done. And if you look at these documents, as far as I can tell, the legal homework hasn't been done. What they are doing is arguing very strongly a particular position in the guise of giving you a neutral legal opinion...
If only there were a group of people ... nay, let us dream big ... if only there were an entire professional class of well-trained and dedicated people who would actually investigate claims such as the ones endlessly repeated by Yoo and his ilk. And during and after such investigations, perhaps they could report on what they found in regularly-published chronicles. Those chronicles could be purchased by everyday citizens, eager to educate themselves in the topics of the day, both as matter of personal curiousity and as part of their civic duty.
Oh, I know, it's a totally unrealistic fantasy. But I can dream, can't I?
I have tried to target each of my letters, sowing doubts about their colleague and remarking on how his association with the University is not only damaging to their reputation, but damaging their ability to raise money. I also try to personalize the letters to make personal association with Yoo radioactive.
PLANNING FOR THE PROSECUTION OF HIGH LEVEL AMERICAN WAR CRIMINALS
The conference is being live-streamed here through Sunday afternoon.
...what happened to me was very hard and my
personal situation is difficult. But when I think of those who are
still in Guantánamo, and their families that they miss very much and
who have no news at all of them, I tell myself that my situation, as
difficult as it is, is better than theirs. I cannot forget that in
Guantánamo I have left behind brothers who have been crushed, who
have gone mad. I am thinking in particular of a Yemeni doctor who
now lives naked in his cell because he has lost his mind.
Today torture survivor and journalist Sami El Haj is driven by the idea of bringing to the world's attention these tens of thousands of prisoners who are still suffering inhuman treatment in the prisons of Guantánamo, Bagram and
Robert Jay Lifton on APA, Torture, & "Socialization to Evil"
posted by Valtin to Invictus blog, September 3, 2008
Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and social activist, applies psychology and psychoanalysis to an understanding of psychologists' involvement in atrocity-producing situations and the interrogation of detainees at places like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
Continue reading "socialization to evil".
Rage Against the Machine in orange jumpsuits during RNC (photo: Tony Nelson)
The band more or less reunited to be here this week, a loud counter to the RNC's week-long power grab on popular culture... "They're concerned about a few people who broke a couple windows," said de la Rocha to the audience. "They just broke two countries."
...a "J.D." degree is just a tool, like a hammer. It can be used for a good purpose or a bad purpose, but is not inherently good or bad itself. - looseheadprop , Firedoglake blog, Saturday April 12, 2008
You can used that hammer to rehab a house in New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, or you can use it to crush a child's testicles to get his parent to answer during a Yoo-authorized interrogation.
Similarly, you can use that JD degree tool as a bludgeon to destroy the freedoms and protections that Framers described so eloquently in the Constitution, but which are inalienable rights bestowed on us by the Creator not by our government or by any piece of paper no matter how revered; or you can use that JD degree to rehab and rebuild the liberties, freedoms and justice that once were the hallmark of the American way of life.
Me, I want to use all my tools for rehabbing and rebuilding what has been broken or destroyed. So, when the time comes to rebuild our system of justice, call me, I have a hammer and I have a JD.
Editor's note: The photo atop the post, by takomabibelot, features a banner created and designed by Firedoglake reader BonnieT of Austin, Texas, where she operates OpposeTorture.org.]
The Iraqi government's plan to reopen Abu Ghraib, including a museum of crimes committed under Saddam is revisionist history.
The turning of Abu Ghraib prison into a museum chronicling the crimes of the former regime is seen as a feat by the current government.
But it will be merely a propagandist showcase if it does not chronicle the crimes the U.S. committed there as well as the atrocities perpetrated by the government itself.
The former regime has a legacy of 35 years of torture. But that long and dark history dwarfs the scale and horror of the atrocities that have taken place in the country in the five past years.
The prison on Baghdad's western outskirts has not been used since 2006. But in the years since the coming of Americans in 2003 horrendous crimes were committed there as well as in other U.S. and Iraqi protected jails.
I cannot understand why the government will not include the notorious and disgraceful page of what the U.S. did in Abu Ghraib when the Americans themselves have admitted it.
Abu Ghraib prison is not the only dark page in Iraq's history. Today's prisons and dungeons, whether run by the U.S. or the government, demonstrate that the atrocities the government wants to document have not ended but in fact have mushroomed.
Perhaps there are now more prisons in Iraq than factories, churning out new forms of torture and human rights abuses which the former regime was probably not aware of.
There are about 100,000 Iraqis languishing in Iraqi and U.S. jails on suspicion of "terrorism" or "violence." Almost all of them have been jailed without trial.
The power holders in Iraq -- whether the U.S. or the government -- would only talk about the fascism that was once there and are not willing or prepared to talk about their own fascist practices.
Susan Sontag's essay "Regarding the Tortures of Others," which appeared shortly after the Abu Ghraib photographs were revealed to the world, was an exception to the evasive -- sometimes apologist -- reactions to the images. In her essay, Sontag outlines the socially sanctioned and institutionalized behavior of violence that plagues American society:
The issue is not whether the torture was done by individuals (i.e. "not by everybody") -- but whether is it was systematic. Authorized. Condoned. All acts are done by individuals. The issue is not whether a majority or minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. . . . What is illustrated by these photographs is as much the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality. - Susan Sontag, New York Times Magazine, 5/23/04
Botero's Abu Ghraib Series and the American Consciousness
by Maymanah Farhat
In October 2006, internationally renowned Columbian artist Fernando Botero exhibited an important and jarring collection of new work at Manhattan's Marlborough Gallery. A visible departure from his whimsical robust figures popular in the international art market, Botero's Abu Ghraib series (2004-05) of paintings and drawings are overtly political, haunting and difficult to confront... Compelled to comment on the "horror" of the crimes, his images are taken directly from the reports of torture that surfaced from the notorious prison in 2004, specifically those documented by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker. Twenty miles outside Baghdad, Abu Ghraib was renovated and reopened as a detention center by American forces shortly after the US-led invasion and subsequent occupation in 2003, but soon fell under sweeping criticism when photographs of American soldiers torturing Iraqi detainees were leaked to the press.
Continue reading Regarding the Tortures of Others.
Lawrence R. Velvel, September 4, 2008
there is also a broader point, one that, at least morally speaking, and perhaps legally speaking too, is far more important. It goes something like this: Can a person, knowing that acts are unlawful, engage in those acts and then obtain immunity by exercising power over the legislative process and by finding lawyers who are willing to write the most incompetent and atrocious legal opinions designed to give the guilty a get out of jail free card?... It is evident that if these things can be done, then there is an end of law...
Continue reading Attempted Statutory Immunity For The Executive's War Crimes.
(detention center at Bagram Air Force Base)
Journalist detained for reporting
Thursday, July 24, 2008
If journalists in war zones must now fear indefinite detention by the U.S. military for routine reporting on an enemy, then there is a fundamental and crucial departure from both the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions in the manner in which the United States is perpetrating the war on terrorism.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/23/EDAN11NTQM.DTL
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Events & Calendars
Important Reading
Physicians for Human RightsBroken Laws, Broken Lives
NLG White Paper
ON THE LAW OF TORTURE...
The President's Executioner
Detention and torture in Guantanamo
