Another Obama Disappointment

First, no prosecution of his predecessor's admitted torture and now:

President Barack Obama announced Monday his decision to abandon for the moment, perhaps for good, his pledge to voters in the 2008 elections to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

And:

Mr. Obama apparently gave up, believing that he could not persuade Congress to agree either to trials in civilian courts or to imprisonment in America. It is easy to see how he could have reached that conclusion and decided to make the best of a situation that is discouraging, in terms of Americans' perception of U.S. justice, and of how it is seen by the rest of the world.

Even Ronald Reagan was against waterboarding and the use of military tribunals for terrorists. From a Harper's Magazine interview with Will Bunch:

Q: Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture, and his Justice Department indicted and prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding. How can his views about torture be reconciled with the current Republican pro-torture dogma?

A: It’s important not to nominate Reagan for sainthood in the arena of human rights. His “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure. That said, back on U.S. soil, Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

Another Obama disappointment.

More Torture Confirmation

This time from another lawyer on the inside:

A former State Department lawyer tells The Associated Press that the Bush administration panicked after 9/11 and tortured prisoners.

Former President George W. Bush denied anyone was tortured. But Vijay Padmanabhan is at least the second insider to publicly describe as torture the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by the U.S.

Padmanabhan was the department's chief counsel on Guantanamo litigation. He says it was "foolish" for the Bush administration to declare that detainees were beyond the reach of U.S. and international laws and the Geneva Conventions.

He told the AP Friday that "Guantanamo was one of the worst overreactions of the Bush administration."

When will the prosecutions begin?

More On Bush's Torture

From Lawrence Wilkerson at The Washington Note. Wilkerson lists some things that we, the American public, might not be aware of, regarding the "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay.

He first points out that the troops collecting said combatants were not as well trained as they should have been. But then he gets to a big nugget:

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces. [emphasis added]

I was curious about the reason why so many innocents were held for so long. Wilkerson explains:

The fourth unknown is the ad hoc intelligence philosophy that was developed to justify keeping many of these people, called the mosaic philosophy. Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.

Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot. [emphasis added]

After pointing out that at least 770 people were held at Guantanamo Bay and that Wilkerson said that at most two dozen of those "might well be hardened criminals", David Schuster summed it all up like this last night:

Twenty-four men. American principles sacrificed. America's image stained to hold twenty-four men. Meaning the United States kidnapped, detained and denied due process to at least seven hundred fifty six innocent people.

Prosecute the war crimes. It's the law.

But We'd NEVER Torture, Right?

From the Washington Post this weekend, we read a piece by an actual real-live military interrogator - but one who's against torture. The story begins in early 2006, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's forces blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra and "unleased a wave of sectarian bloodshed." The interrogator continues:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

So interrogations not based on torture led to Zarqawi? I guess so:

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But here's the sad part. Torture makes things worse for the American troops fighting in Iraq:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

But the last gasp Bush Administration is saying that "We did not torture." But considering the last 8 years, why should we believe anything coming out of such a criminal enterprise?

Obama: No Gitmo, No Torture, Will Start Drawing Down Troops in Iraq

Obama on 60 Minutes last night:


.

The US Supreme Court: Friends of the Terrorists!

From the AP:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

But these are THE TERRORISTS! These are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE who attacked us on 9/11!

Doesn't the Supreme Court KNOW that "Constitutional Rights" are only for US Citizens? LAW-ABIDING US Citizens? We all know that these terrorists are neither.

There is one bright spot in all this:

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."

Good for him! Nice to see that the conservatives (read: the real Americans) on the Court know what's at stake here in our righteous war against Islamofascism.

So what if a majority on the court says these people have rights! We've already been very generous with the "procedural protections" they already enjoy. In fact, we should be THANKED for our hospitality in taking care of these folks! Keeping them out of harms way and such. We fed them, right? Kept them out of the rain and snow, right? Only someone cowering behind the mother's skirt of "The Constitution" would think that that's NOT enough. THESE ARE THE TERRORISTS!!

Luckily, since Senator McCain is looking to appoint MORE Justices like John Roberts we can all take comfort in knowing that a vote for McCain will be (indirectly) be a vote for the continued practices of interrogation and detention that have made us safer since 9/11.

PS if you're not getting the joke by now, you're reading the wrong blog.

How's This for Hypocrisy?

From the McClatchy papers:

President Bush implored the United Nations on Tuesday to recommit itself to restoring human decency by liberating oppressed people and ending famine and disease.

Speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, the president called for renewed efforts to enforce the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a striking point of emphasis for a leader who's widely accused of violating human rights in waging war against terrorism.

Bush didn't mention the U.S. prisons in Afghanistan or at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. practice of holding detainees for years without legal charges or access to lawyers, or the CIA's "rendition" kidnappings of suspects abroad, all issues of concern to human rights activists around the world.

For those of you who don't (or won't) remember, here are some reminders.

At Gitmo, it took a decision by the Supreme Court to change dubya's policy of imprisoning terror suspects indefinitely - without trial or access to lawyers. And that was only a year ago.

The Bush administration has agreed to apply the Geneva Conventions to all terrorism suspects in U.S. custody, bowing to the Supreme Court's recent rejection of policies that have imprisoned hundreds for years without trials.

The Pentagon announced yesterday that it has called on military officials to adhere to the conventions in dealing with al-Qaeda detainees. The administration also has decided that even prisoners held by the CIA in secret prisons abroad must be treated in accordance with international standards, an interpretation that would prohibit prisoners from being subjected to harsh treatment in interrogations, several U.S. officials said.

At Abu Ghraib, well we all know about Abu Ghraib.



And dubya's lecturing the world about human rights?

Powell on Gitmo

From the AP:

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said today he favors immediately closing the Guantanamo Bay military prison and moving its detainees to U.S. facilities.

The prison, which now holds about 380 suspected terrorists, has tarnished the world's perception of the United States, Powell said.

"If it was up to me, I would close Guantanamo. Not tomorrow, but this afternoon. I'd close it," he said.

He also votes in favor of the justice system (pre-Bush):

"And I would not let any of those people go," he said. "I would simply move them to the United States and put them into our federal legal system. The concern was, well then they'll have access to lawyers, then they'll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn't that what our system is all about?"

Well, yea.

Think Progress has the transcript here.  He has some other choice words on international diplomacy.  Like this:

And so I think it is short-sighted not to talk to Syria and Iran and everybody else in the region, and not just for the purpose of making a demand on them, and “I’ll only talk to you if you meet the demand I want to talk to you about.” That’s not the way to have a dialogue in my judgment.

And he sums up things very nicely:

[E]very morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. So essentially we have shaken the belief that the world had in America’s justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open and creating things like the military commission. We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.

Too bad it's a few years too late.