Honor Those Who Said No to Torture

If we don't prosecute and imprison the torturers and the ones who planned, justified and excused it, then at the very least let us honor those who refused to torture.

Jon Weiner at The Nation:

Hidden in the Senate torture report are stories of some heroes—people inside the CIA who from the beginning said torture was wrong, who tried to stop it, who refused to participate. There were also some outside the CIA, in the military and the FBI, who risked careers and reputations by resisting—and who sometimes paid a heavy price. They should be thanked and honored.

But President Obama hasn’t mentioned them. Instead, he praised the CIA officials who presided over the torture regime as “patriots.”

We should “celebrate the ones who stood up for what was right,” says David Luban of the Georgetown University law school, author of Torture, Power and Law. Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, author of the definitive book on Bush administration torture, The Dark Side, calls them “the real torture patriots.”

SNIP

The heroes in the torture report include Ali Soufan, former FBI agent and interrogator of terrorists who, according to Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, came closer than anyone to preventing the 9/11 attacks. Soufan has argued publicly against torture and in favor of “rapport-building” as the best technique to get information from suspects. The CIA heavily censored his memoir The Black Banners in what Wright called an effort “to punish a critic and to obscure history.” He was featured in a Frontline documentary made by Martin Smith and James Gilmore.

Another hero: Alberto Mora. As general counsel of the Navy in 2004, Jane Mayer reported, he tried to stop the torture program. He told his superiors at the Pentagon that the Bush torture policy violated the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition of torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He described the Bush program as “unlawful” and “dangerous,” and warned that the torturers could face criminal prosecution. He was featured in the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side by Alex Gibney (which won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2007).

Some of the heroes were ordinary soldiers, like Sgt. Joe Darby, who first revealed the Abu Ghraib abuses. As a result,” Luban points out, he “had to live under armed protection for six months.” Others were high officials, like Philip Zelikow, an adviser to Condoleezza Rice, who, Luban reports, wrote an “anti-torture memo” that the White House “attempted to destroy.”

And there was Ian Fishback, an army captain who reported that his own unit was abusing Iraqi prisoners. Eventually he wrote an open letter to Senator John McCain, asking, “Do we sacrifice our ideals in order to preserve security?” His answer: “I would rather die fighting than give up even the smallest part of the idea that is ‘America.’ ”

Finally we have the case of Guantaánamo prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who refused to prosecute a teenager who had been abused in US detention in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. For that decision, Jameel Jaffer and Larry Siems report, Vandeveld was “barred from the prosecutors’ office, confined to his residence and threatened with dismissal from the Army.”

SNIP

The ACLU has set up a web page with a petition to President Obama to “honor those who said no to torture.”

And make sure everyone knows that waterboarding was the least of it and the CIA wasn't alone.

Digby:

I think people don't realize how much anal rape was going on. It wasn't just those "high value" detainees and it didn't happen just a couple of times.

SNIP

Folks, they were raping these prisoners and they knew they were raping these prisoners. It wasn't just the CIA, it was the Pentagon too.

They Knew It Was Wrong When They Did It

Gee, if only some powerful country had already - maybe seven decades ago - established the principle that "I was just following orders" is not an acceptable excuse for torture.

Digby:

Nobody's family deserves to be targeted and the government should protect them from harm if they are. But I  do not buy the excuse that the people who did this were just doing what they were told and bear no responsibility.  They could have said no.  Nothing terrible would have happened to them if they had.  And if they had resisted this program would likely not have gone forward.

I sincerely don't wish that any of these people become victims of violence. But there needed to be a reckoning for this hideous, immoral policy and this is the inadequate, weaselly way we've come up with.  It would be nice if I believed it would shock the consciences of Americans so much that they would insist it never happen again but from the looks of it, that's not going to happen.  After tomorrow, the Republican Party (and some Democratic hawks who operate out of fear and intimidation) are going to be officially pro-torture.

We will be fighting about this for a long time to come unfortunately.  And these operatives who could have said no bear some responsibility for that as well.

QOTD

Digby:

If all these patriots were really concerned about national security they'd be for closing Guantanamo instead of holding on to a rapidly aging group of prisoners, turning them into martyrs, and pretending that it is keeping us safe. It's doing the opposite.

Gitmo Comes Home

Why reserve those tactics for innocent foreigners when they'll work just as well on innocent Americans?

Digby:

Unbefuckinglievable:

Browder was a 16-year-old sophomore in high school walking home from a party in the Bronx when he was arrested on a tip that he robbed someone three weeks earlier. He was hauled off to Rikers Island, a prison known for punishing conditions and overuse of force, and was held because he couldn’t pay the $10,000 bail. Browder went to court on several occasions, but he was never scheduled for trial. After 33 months in jail, Browder said a judge offered freedom in exchange for a guilty plea, threatening that he could face 15 years in jail if convicted. He refused. Then one day, he was released with no explanation.

“They just dismissed the case and they think it’s all right. No apology, no nothing,” he told WABC-TV. Now at age 20 with his teen years behind him, Browder is first faced with finishing his GED and trying to make up for three years of his teen years lost.

Browder says he spent more than 400 days in solitary confinement, was deprived of meals, and was assaulted and beaten both by officers and fellow inmates. Browder attempted suicide at least six times. Last month he filed a lawsuit last month against the city and several agencies. The Bronx District Attorney’s office has declined to comment.

Huh? What is going on here? This young man has lived out a Kafkaesque nightmare right there in the middle of New York.

Browder’s story lays out a laundry list of some of the most prevalent problems with the criminal justice system. Browder was stopped in the Bronx, where the New York Police Department came under particular fire for its over-aggressive use of stops and unsubstantiated charges of “trespassing.” He was purportedly jailed based solely on one report to police, reinforcing race disparities in the criminal justice system. He was held in jail pursuant to bail policies that routinely punish the impoverished. And he was held in solitary confinement as a juvenile, even though the draconian punishment has particularly detrimental long-term effects on youths.

That's also known as torture.

It looks as though Gitmo has come home --- no trials, solitary confinement and physical abuse. It was always inevitable that it would happen. Once you say that universal principles of human rights as enshrined in our Constitution are only applicable to people the government believes are "worthy" of them, this is where you end up.

It's true that most of the victims of this kind of unconstitutional treatment are young black men without the money or connections to fight it.  But if they can successfully transfer Gitmo tactics from Cuba to the mainland, then they can certainly transfer them from minorities to the rest of us.

QOTD

Charlie Pierce:

With all due respect, screw the NSA surveillance scheme. You want to see what we've become in our fear and barely suppressed rage, look to Gitmo. We are currently inflicting this barbarism on 45 people who have not been charged with anything and who are protesting the fact that they are being locked away without having been charged with anything. There is one person who can stop this. And please, don't anyone say anything about the problems with the Republican Congress, or what the gobshites will say on Sunday, or anything else. When they can, presidents act. This one must.

Gitmo Stupidity

The torture-lovers are hiding under the bed, demanding that the Boston bombing suspect be gitmo-ized asap. Digby has some pertinent thoughts.

The one thing this suspect has going for him is that he's a legitimately naturalized citizen which, while it should have no bearing on anything (the constitution applies to everyone on American soil), which means that while they can throw him in prison indefinitely under section 1021, they cannot try him by military tribunal. They still need to be mindful of the normal rule of law, even if he's called an "enemy combatant" (a term that has no legal meaning --- the Obama administration doesn't use it) if they hope to have a trial and a resolution. So, we live in hope.

On the other hand, he does have a ferrin sounding name and he wan't born here --- and the national security psycho caucus obviously doesn't find the fact of his citizenship to be a hindrance, so who knows?

This is going to be a big test of the Obama administration. I'm fervently hoping they do the right thing here. Their early endorsement of an indefinite detention policy is worrisome, but I'm hopeful they wil understand that they simply must come down on the right side of this one for the sake of out constitutional foundation.

Someday, when historians study the long-gone American empire, they are going to identify the point at which the American Experiment when totally, irrevocably wrong: Guantanamo detention.

Kevin Drum:

Marcy Wheeler tweets:

I'd really love some pollster to figure how what % of Americans know how many Gitmo detainees have been cleared for release.

I believe the answer is about 40 percent—but, like Marcy, I doubt that many people know this. Her tweet was prompted by an op-ed (laste week) in the New York Times by Samil Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a Yemeni hunger striker at Guantanamo who is being force fed:

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial…The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense…I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

Yemen's previous administration prevented the release of many detainees by demanding enormous payments from the US before it would accept them. The current administration has changed course, and has requested that all Yemeni nationals be repatriated to Sana'a. But now it's the U.S. that refuses to deal.

SNIP

Some detainees are tougher to deal with than others. But those who have already been cleared for release, and which Yemen is willing to accept, should be the easiest. Moqbel might or might not fall into this category (his status is unclear), but there are at least a couple dozen Yemenis who do. Obama should let them go.

 Especially since it turns out that the bad guys in the warren terra is us.

But holding torturers accountable is a violation of the Constitution.

Winner of the Expose-Mitch-McConnell's-Stupidity Contest: The Duffel Blog!

It's no wonder Mitchie-poo got tripped up on a simple and obvious military/veteran issue, given that he escaped from basic training during the Vietnam War so fast he doesn't even qualify as a veteran.

Spencer Ackerman:

The best parody contains elements of truth. Which might explain how the military’s answer to The Onion suckered the Senate’s Republican leader.

Meet The Duffel Blog, if you haven’t already. A must-read for national-security nerds — and anyone who enjoys humor, really — it provides pitch-perfect military parody online, such as this piece about Syria hosting Iraq War reenactors (bylined by “G-Had”) or this one about a Google Street View Prius getting blown up in Kandahar. The Duffel Blog, as dutiful readers know, is America’s oldest online source for fake military news, founded in 1797 in a moment of farsightedness. It often gives more real talk than most legit journalistic institutions, but there is no way you can confuse it with the real news.

Unless you are a senior member of the United States Senate.

On November 14, 2012, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote to Elizabeth King, the Pentagon’s congressional liaison, with a an unusually credulous query. “I am writing on behalf of a constituent who has contacted me regarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners receiving Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits,” McConnell wrote in a letter acquired by Danger Room. “I would appreciate your review and response to my constituent’s concerns.”


Um, Guantanamo detainees getting GI Bill benefits? Yes, that’s from the Duffel Blog, as McConnell’s constituent clearly states, complete with the reference URL. Said constituent even notes that he or she can’t find any information about the alleged government payouts to suspected insurgents and terrorists.

The Defense Department does a lot of inexplicable things at Guantanamo Bay — there’s a resume-building workshop for detainees, for real — but paying detainees GI Bill benefits is not one of them. “The very idea that the U.S. government would extend GI Bill benefits to enemy detainees is a patent absurdity,” says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon’s spokesman on all matters Guantanamo. 

Bow to the genius of the Duffel Blog.  But here's my question: is the constituent who wrote to McConnell as dumb as he is, or was this a setup by a Duffel Blog fan who saw an opportunity to expose McConnell's ignorant jingoism? 

And here's an idea for the Judd campaign: a daily "Fact About the Military or Veterans That Mitch McConnell Doesn't Know."

The Never-Ending Tragedy of Gitmo

I'm starting to worry a lot about the PTSD that must be plaguing the Marines stationed at Guantanamo Bay. If they never deploy to a combat zone or fire a shot in anger, they are active participants in a blatant regime of repeated torture. Which has now lead to its ninth death.

Center for Constitutional Rights at Firedoglake: 

(On September 10), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the following statement in response to the news that a ninth man has died in detention at Guantánamo.

With great sadness, the Center for Constitutional Rights condemns the fact that yet another detained man – the fourth on President Obama’s watch – has died at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, most likely without charge and certainly without trial. Neither the name of the man nor the details of his death have yet been released by the Department of Defense.  Whatever the cause turns out to be, it is clear that the United States government is ultimately responsible for his death.

Military investigations into several of the deaths at the base remain under a cloud of suspicion; and the Center’s clients, families of two men who died there in 2006, never got their day in court or the chance to know the truth about what happened to their sons.  The Center for Constitutional Rights calls on the government to preserve the evidence in this case, conduct a full and impartial investigation, and treat the body and the family with all proper respect, none of which, regrettably, has consistently occurred in the past.

More than half the men remaining at Guantánamo have been cleared for transfer but remain imprisoned, trapped by politics.  Whether because of despair, suicide or natural causes, as Guantánamo enters its 11th year of operation – 11 years of indefinite detention without trial or prospect of release – death has become an inevitable consequence of President Obama’s failure to close the prison.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has led the legal battle over Guantánamo for the last 10 years – representing clients in two Supreme Court cases and organizing and coordinating hundreds of pro bono lawyers across the country, ensuring that nearly all the men detained at Guantánamo have had the option of legal representation. Among other Guantánamo cases, the Center represents the families of men who died at Guantánamo, and men who have been released and are seeking justice in international courts. In addition, CCR has been working through diplomatic channels to resettle men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Visit www.ccrjustice.org. Follow @theCCR.

Guantanamo Bay By the Numbers

Eli Clifton at Think Progress:

The 10-year anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, offers few opportunities for celebration. The prison has been described as “arguably the most expensive prison on earth” and human rights activists have voiced concerns about detainees’ lack of access to the U.S. court system and a steady stream of reports of abuse and torture. The 10-year history of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp can best be evaluated through the human and economic costs imposed on both the U.S. taxpayers and detainees. Here are some relevant numbers:

10 years since the first 20 detainees arrived at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray

1 year, 11 months, 21 days since President Barack Obama’s deadline to close Gitmo

779 detainees incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay since 2002

600 detainees have been released

242 detainees at Gitmo when Obama took office

171 detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay

89 detainees still held after being cleared for release

92 percent of prisoners were never al Qaeda fighters according to the U.S. government

86 percent of detainees were turned over after payment of a bounty

13 years old, the age of the youngest detainee

89 years old, the age of the oldest detainee

8 detainee deaths since 2002

6 detainee deaths by suicide

3 alleged detainee homicides from “dry boarding”

$139 million per year to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison open

$800,000 per year to house each detainee

6 detainees convicted by military commissions

6 detainees currently charged by military commission prosecutor

0 detainees released in the past year

Click here for links to the numbers.

Congress Making Guantanamo Violations Worse

Funny how electing a constitutional law professor as president has led to the rule of law at Guantanamo getting worse.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

As the Obama administration’s ability to attack Libya without congressional authorization reminds us, Congress has largely abdicated its constitutional role to legislate on military affairs. The good news is that this year’s National Defense Authorization Act is an exception. The bad news is that the legislation would restrict the president’s ability to transfer prisoners being arbitrarily held at Gitmo. Even worse, these restrictions involve Kafkaesque requirements to prove the impossible while also holding detainees effectively responsible for the actions of unrelated individuals. Jamie Mayerfeld lays out the problems in detail:

Imagine yourself under arrest and locked up. Having committed no crime, would you be confident that your innocence would set you free? What if the government imprisons you not for something you did but for something you might do? Could you prove that you pose no future threat?

Such a scenario seems outlandish, yet it is precisely the logic behind legislation that Congress is getting ready to enact regarding Guantánamo detainees. The bill passed the House of Representatives and will soon come to a vote in the Senate.
Individuals never shown to be dangerous, much less convicted of a crime, must remain in U.S. detention unless our government certifies that they cannot cause harm in the future.

[...]

Former detainees include Murat Kurnaz of Germany, whose imprisonment was justified on the grounds that his friend had carried out a suicide bombing in Istanbul.
Leaving aside the oddity of detaining Kurnaz for something his friend did, it turned out that his friend never took part in the bombing, but was alive and well in Germany. Although internal Pentagon documents dating from 2002 cleared Kurnaz of any link to al-Qaida or terrorist activity, he was kept in detention and tortured for the next four years.

Such stories remind us why we must honor the presumption of innocence. Congress would reverse this principle, forbidding the release of any prisoner unless his harmlessness, not just now but in the future, is publicly certified.

But that is not all. The legislation also bars a prisoner from being transferred to his home country or a third country if another detainee previously sent to the same country went on to commit a terrorist act — another instance of guilt by association.

For reasons Ben Wittes explains, the Obama administration’s feckless, passive-aggressive response hasn’t helped matters either. But it’s telling that when Congress finally decides to take the initiative, it is to restrict human rights rather than to protect them.

Liberals know strong democracies don't have to undermine the constitution and rule of law to deal with threats whether foreign or domestic.

"Guantanamo in the Heartland"

The secrecy and insanity of both detention at Guantanamo and the federal prison system made it inevitable that the two would merge in an attempt to justify the inexcusable.

From The Nation:

It was only days later that Jenny heard from a friend that Daniel was in transit, his destination Marion, Illinois. She quickly researched Marion and learned that it housed both a minimum- and a medium-security facility. Daniel, however, was classified as a low-security prisoner, a designation between minimum and medium. Even though he had a perfect record at Sandstone and had been recommended for a transfer to a prison closer to home, Jenny still didn’t think it was likely that Daniel would be stepped down to minimum security. But it made no sense that he would be moved up to medium security.

By May 16 the inmate locator on the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) website showed Daniel in a variety of places, including a federal correctional facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. After speaking with several people at the BOP, Sandstone and Terre Haute to no avail, Jenny e-mailed friends, “This is seriously like pulling fucking teeth.”

Finally on June 12, one month after their missed call, Daniel telephoned Jenny. He was still in transit and had only a few moments to speak. He was definitely going to Marion, where he heard he would be housed in something called a Communications Management Unit (CMU). He had no idea why he was being transferred. He simply had been told he was moving, given thirty minutes to pack and thrown into “the hole” until he was moved. All he knew was that the CMUs were supposedly run out of Washington and placed severe restrictions on phone calls, mail and visits. He was anxious about his new placement and asked Jenny to find out all she could about Marion.

But Jenny couldn’t find much. There was nothing on the BOP website about CMUs or a special unit at Marion. She did find a few scattered articles, all about a Terre Haute CMU, described as a secret experimental unit for second-tier terrorism inmates who were almost all Arab and Muslim Americans.

There was, in fact, little to be found; the Bush administration had quietly opened the CMUs in Terre Haute and Marion in December 2006 and March 2008, respectively, circumventing the usual process federal agencies normally follow that subjects them to public scrutiny and transparency. The first whisper of what the government was planning reached public ears in April 2006, when the BOP—in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA)—published its proposed rule for “Limited Communication for Terrorist Inmates.” Under the APA, federal agencies like the BOP must publish notice of any new regulations and solicit public comments in order to operate legally. After a period of review, the agency publishes the finalized rule.

In the 2006 rule, the BOP proposed restricting the communications of inmates with a “link to terrorist-related activity” to one six-page letter per week, one fifteen-minute call per month and one one-hour visit per month, limited to immediate family members. The rule left it to the discretion of the warden whether visits would be contact or noncontact. (As a point of comparison, the BOP generally allows most prisoners 300 minutes of calls per month and places few caps on the number or duration of visits prisoners may receive. Even at the only federal Supermax, inmates are allowed thirty-five hours of visits a month.)

Several civil rights groups, led by the ACLU, submitted comments criticizing the proposed rule as flawed and potentially unconstitutional. The rule also appeared to be unnecessary, as the law already allowed monitoring and restricting inmates’ communications to detect and prevent criminal activity. After the period for comments closed in June 2006, observers waited for the BOP to publish its finalized rule.

Then in February 2007 came a stunning revelation: the BOP had not only abandoned the rule-making process; it had apparently bypassed it altogether by opening a prison unit in December 2006 in which all the inmates were subject to communications restrictions almost exactly like those described in the proposed rule. This secret unit came to light when supporters of an Iraqi-born American physician, Rafil Dhafir, made public a letter he had written describing his harrowing transfer to a new prison unit in Terre Haute. He called it “a nationwide operation to put Muslims/Arabs in one place so that we can be closely monitored regarding our communications.”

(In 2005 Dhafir had been sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for violating sanctions against Iraq by sending money to a charity he had founded there, as well as for fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and a variety of other nonviolent crimes. He had no terrorism convictions or charges.)

In his letter Dhafir reported that at the time there were sixteen men in the CMU, fourteen of whom were Muslims and all but one of those were Arab. They had been told by prison officials that the unit was an experiment. Written material they received informed them that they would be entitled to one fifteen-minute call a week, that their communications had to be in English only and that their visits would all be noncontact; it made no mention of “terrorism.” According to Dhafir, the inmates were particularly devastated at the prospect of not being able to hug or kiss their families and of having so little time to talk with them. For those who didn’t speak English, there was particular panic.

Legal advocates were shocked by the discovery—and by the BOP’s impunity. According to William Luneburg, former chair of the American Bar Association’s administrative law practice section and a professor of administrative law, the BOP action was “grossly irregular” and arguably illegal. “It is not a normal thing for agencies legally bound by the APA to propose some new program, to start through the public rule-making process and then basically not complete it, and then to decide to go ahead and do it on their own.” Or as David Shapiro of the ACLU’s Prison Project says, “Essentially these CMUs are being operated in the absence of any rules or policies that authorize them.”

The media, however, paid scant attention to the CMUs, save for a few articles, the most notable by Dan Eggen in the Washington Post, which Jenny found during her frantic Internet search for information. All the articles noted that the CMUs were almost entirely filled with Muslim and Arab prisoners.

Then in March 2008, the BOP established by memo a second CMU, at Marion. Two months later, Daniel McGowan, who is neither Muslim nor Arab, was moved there. In June 2008, Andy Stepanian, another non-Arab, non-Muslim low-security inmate, was sent to Marion for the last six months of his three-year sentence for conspiring to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act of 1992. The only notice he received after his transfer said that he “has known connections to Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), groups considered to be domestic terrorist organizations.” “Enhanced review and control of inmate communications,” it claimed, “is required to assure the safe functioning of the correctional facility, surrounding community and American public.”

According to Stepanian, prison staff referred to non-Arab and non-Muslim inmates as “balancers.” One white guard comforted Stepanian, who had received biweekly visits from his fiancée at his previous prison, saying, “You’re nothing like these Muslims. You’re just here for balance. You’re going to go home soon.”

Read the whole thing.

Unconditional Surrender

Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.

Let's just swear in President Bachmann right now.

Right after we wave bye-bye to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health care for anyone not a millionaire, public schools, minimum wage, clean water, safe food, police and fire protection .... and any last semblance of civilization here in New Gilead.

Genuflect to our new corporate overlords. Their minions, the republicans, have won.

No, I'm not exaggerating. Even never-say-die Obama apologist Steve Benen calls him a coward:

Holder told reporters this afternoon that his original decision was still the right one, but blamed Congress for "tying our hands."

He happens to be right. Even today, Holder wants to do the right thing, and so does President Obama. And yet, Gitmo is open today, and KSM will be subjected to a military commission in the near future, not because of an administration that backed down in the face of far-right whining, but because congressional Republicans orchestrated a massive, choreographed freak-out, and scared the bejesus out of congressional Democrats. Together, they limited the White House's options to, in effect, not having any choice at all.

There's plenty of room for criticism of the administration, but those slamming Obama for "breaking his word" on this are blaming the wrong end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

No, I'm not blaming him for breaking his word. I'm blaming him for being a coward - for letting the most pathetic bunch of retarded, narcissistic bullies in the history of the world push him around.

Steve M. says they're worse than cowards:

Not cowardice exactly -- more like false bravado. A big percentage of the country wants to flatter itself by imagining that these guys have superpowers, and the military or the Bush administration or Cheeto-chomping right-wing bloggers are somehow holding these supervillains at bay using superhuman powers of their own. These folks aren't pants-wetters, they're worse: they're people who want to persuade you they're tough by exaggerating the risks they, and they alone, are fending off. (They certainly give no credit to the actual current commander in chief, or anyone in his administration.)

****

And I'd just like to remind you of what Peggy Noonan wrote less than a month ago:

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations....

America wanted -- needed -- to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom.

Noonan's a right-wing apparatchik, but she's old-school, so she doesn't always remember what ideas have been disappeared by the right's culture commissars. She still thinks it's the early Bush era, when it was unthinkable that we wouldn't force bin Laden to do a perp walk into a courtroom in Manhattan, assuming we caught him alive. And, as Noonan's slip-up reminds us, that would have been perfectly fine.

Yes, these are the shitting-themselves morons to whom Barack Obama has unconditionally surrendered.

Quote of the Day

From emptywheel at Firedoglake:

Because nothing says “laying the foundation” of a Presidential campaign and “inspiring new” supporters like caving to fearmongering.

Happy 154th Louis Brandeis - No Cake for You, Obama Administration

At the "Spaghetti Junction" confluence of Interstates 64, 65 and 71 along the Ohio River at Louisville, several large brick buildings sport huge portraits of famous Louisvillians on the side: Mohammed Ali, Paul Hornung, Tori Murden-McClure ... and Justice Louis Brandeis.

Peterr at Firedoglake:

From 1916 to 1939, Louis Brandeis sat on the United States Supreme Court, and was one of the most powerful voices for freedom of speech and the right to privacy ever to sit on the Court. Today would have been his 154th birthday, and I have no doubts that he would be appalled at some of what is being done by the Department of Justice today, in the name of the United States of America. Indeed, Brandeis seems to have anticipated the confluence of torture, warrantless wiretapping, and a federal government that seeks to defend its conduct merely by shouting “it’s necessary!”

SNIP

In a powerful and prescient dissent, Brandeis wrote:

SNIP

Moreover, “in the application of a constitution, our contemplation cannot be only of what has, been but of what may be.” The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may someday be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.

Justice Holmes concurred with Brandeis, adding a few brief comments of his own:

Therefore we must consider the two objects of desire, both of which we cannot have, and make up our minds which to choose. It is desirable that criminals should be detected, and, to that end, that all available evidence should be used. It also is desirable that the Government should not itself foster and pay for other crime, when they are the means by which the evidence is to be obtained. . . . We have to choose, and, for my part, I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the Government should play an ignoble part.

It took 39 years, but Brandeis and Holmes were vindicated in their dissents when Katz v. United States overturned Olmstead in a 7-1 ruling.

Wiretapping and torture, all in the same dissent.

That can’t be a good combination for Attorney General Eric Holder to contemplate. He’s dealing with these same issues today, in a series of cases working their way forward, like al-Haramain, the GITMO habeas corpus cases, and others.

It's a continuing wonder to me that Justice Brandeis does not rise up out of his grave to strike corporate shill John Roberts dead.

Charles Swift for Supreme Court Justice

(Thanks to Blue Girl for reminding me about the Constitution-saving service performed by the JAG lawyers who defended Guantanamo detainees.)

You want to know what really makes a potential Supreme Court nominee tick? What he or she will do when presented with an impossible situation? Whether he or she will put the Constitution, the Rule of Law and the good of the nation above personal, political and pecuniary considerations? Read this 2007 Vanity Fair profile of Navy Commander Charles Swift, who beat the Forces of Darkness at - and within - the Supreme Court in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that restored the primacy of the 800-year-old Great Writ of habeas corpus.

Assigned to defend a Guantánamo detainee, jag lawyer Charles Swift joined up with legal scholar Neal Katyal and sued the president and secretary of defense over the new military-tribunal system. With their 2006 Supreme Court victory overridden by the Republican Congress, and Swift's navy career at an end, they are fighting on.

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is "exporting Guantánamo"? That it is the "Guantánamo method"? —Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift to the author, January 2007.

SNIP

October 15, 2006. The day I meet Charlie Swift, he attempts to sum up the legal morass of Guantánamo. "Justice," he says, "is based on a simple idea: it can happen to you." The line comes out minutes after he arrives at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Maryland, and the intensity of his delivery causes the teenagers making out at the next table to look up. It's a Sunday afternoon, shortly after the announcement that Swift is leaving the navy. A few days earlier, on October 11, The New York Times ran a harsh editorial commenting on the subject:

In 2003, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen accused of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda—for the sole purpose of getting him to plead guilty before one of the military commissions that President Bush created for the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task, Commander Swift concluded that the commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client.… The Navy gave no reason for denying Commander Swift's promotion. But there is no denying the chilling message it sends to remaining military lawyers about the potential consequences of taking their job, and justice, seriously.

The Times editorial made it seem as if a navy hero had been slapped down for trying to put a stop to the practices at Guantánamo. On the telephone, Swift was irritated about that. "There is nothing clear-cut about this," he insisted. "It is not black-and-white."

SNIP

The victory, however, was short-lived. On October 17, President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, creating a new system of interrogating and prosecuting terrorism suspects and denying the 430 prisoners at Guantánamo and others around the world the right to file writs of habeas corpus. "The constitutional issue could not be more stark," Swift declared. "What they are doing is unprecedented."

SNIP

March 28, 2006. At three A.M. the night before they were to argue in front of the Supreme Court, Swift was on the courthouse steps in jeans. For days, protesters had been massing in the capital, and students had lined up on the steps for the night, hoping to be let into the trial the next day. A group of high-school students from Wisconsin began to talk with Swift. "Did Mr. Hamdan do it?" one of them asked him.

Swift recalls, "I told them, 'The question tomorrow is not: Did Mr. Hamdan do it? It is: Who are we? What kind of people are we? That is why it is so important that you are here today, because someday you will be able to tell your children who we are as a nation.… And something else: only in this country can a military officer take a disagreement with presidential power to court as a way of settling. Everywhere else they call that a coup.'"

And that's what I call a genuine American patriot who is uniquely qualified to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Security and Values

The Real Thing, from the One in Charge, courtesy Firedoglake.

Part One



Part Two



Part Three



TPM has the essential highlights.

Full transcript here.

Eeek! The Guantanamos Are Coming!

Jon Stewart completely demolishes the fainting-virgin panic over closing Guantanamo.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Detainee Released by Bush Then Attacked U.S. Embassy

You read that right. A terrorist released from Guantanamo two years ago at the order of then-president George W. Bush later bombed an American embassy.

The emergence of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

As Steven Benen notes:

I get the idea behind reports like these -- Guantanamo has housed some dangerous folks, and if we let them go, they'll do dangerous things. Therefore, we better not let them go, and Obama should rethink all of his recent announcements.

Except, the evidence doesn't match the conclusion. Obama isn't saying that he wants to just open the Gitmo doors, he saying he wants to review the pending cases and present evidence against the bad guys as part of a legal process. Ali al-Shihri returning to al Qaeda isn't evidence of a flawed Obama process, it's evidence of a flawed Bush process. Why did Bush let a dangerous guy this guy go? Did Bush's team not consider, I don't know, bringing charges against him before setting him free?

The same is true with the incessant media fascination with the 61 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who've since become alleged terrorists. First, the confirmed number is 18, not 61. Second, even that number isn't considered entirely reliable.

And third, again, the argument about how this relates to Obama is flawed. As Atrios noted, it wasn't Obama's policy that led to their release. The administration created this nightmare at Guantanamo, which was supposedly necessary for U.S. national security. What do we have to show for the former president's efforts? A series of bad guys who went free, and many more bad guys we'll struggle to prosecute because the Bush administration broke the law and tortured them.

As John Cole noted, "The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things."

Glenn Greenwald takes the argument further.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem.

SNIP

Both pre- and post-9/11, there are numerous other individuals who have been convicted in U.S. civilian courts of various acts relating to terrorism inspired by Islamic radicalism, including many alleged to be high-level Terrorists, who are now serving sentences inside the U.S., in U.S. prisons. Moreover, terrorists accused of being members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups have been successfully tried in the regular courts of other countries -- including Britain and Spain -- and currently sit in those countries' regular prisons, without a whiff of a problem.

If it were really the goal of Terrorists to attack American prisons where their members are incarcerated and if they were actually capable of doing that, they already have a long list of "targets" and have had such a list for two decades. If U.S. civilian courts were inadequate forums for obtaining convictions of Terrorism suspects, then the above-listed individuals would not be imprisoned -- most of them for life -- while the Guantanamo military commission system still has nothing to show for it other than a series of humiliating setbacks for the Government. As is true for virtually every fear-mongering claim made over the last eight years to frighten Americans into believing that they must vest the Government with vast and un-American powers lest they be slaughtered by the Terrorists, none of these claims is remotely rational and all of them are empirically disproven.

SNIP

The crime for which Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted and for which he's currently serving a life sentence in Colorado is the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, of which Rahman was the alleged "mastermind." That terrorist attack took place just seven weeks after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, but after that attack -- to use the Beltway parlance -- Clinton kept us safe, for the rest of his presidency. No more foreign Terrorist attacks on the Homeland. It wasn't until Clinton left the Oval Office and George Bush became President were Islamic Terrorists able to strike the Homeland again.

Therefore, using the reasoning of Bush followers everywhere, this means that Clinton's counter-terrorism policies -- i.e.: trying accused Terrorists in civilian courts and incarcerating them in U.S. prisons -- have been proven to be extremely effective in keeping us safe (since, as any beginning student of Logic will tell you: if A precedes B, then it means that A caused B -- as in: A = "waterboarding, torture and GITMO," and B = "no Terrorist attack on U.S. soil from 2002-2008"). Using that same "logic": A = "trying Terrorists in civilian courts and imprisoning them in the U.S.," and B = "no foreign Terrorist attacks in the U.S. from February, 1993 through the end of the Clinton presidency

Smirky/Darth, their accomplices and their apologists are desperate to prevent people from discovering just how much danger their Excellent Iraq Adventure placed the nation in, and uncovering the full extent of their crimes.

It's now obvious that every argument - every argument - made in defense of the bush maladministration is at best deluded and more likely a pack of lies.

Don't let them get away with it.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

Dishonoring 9/11 Victims at Guantanamo

President Obama's order to suspend the ludicrous "military commissions" at Guantanamo came just after a heart-wrenching scene that illuminates just what torture George W. Bush has inflicted - not on detainees, but on the families and loves ones of those who died on 9/11.

Following Monday's hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

"Today we were in the presence of true evil," said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. "Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going."

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

"My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11," he said. "When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, 'Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.'"

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, "No, right here, at Guantánamo," then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

One of the most horrific acts committed by George W. Bush is the cruel trick he played on the loved ones of 9-11 victims.

In their names, he justified a "war on terror" that has accomplished nothing but increase global terror and make this nation far more vulnerable to terrorist acts.

In their names, he bungled the search for bin Laden, allowing the actual 9/11 criminal to escape and remain free for more than seven years.

In their names, he launched an illegal war against one of bin Laden's greatest enemies, thus giving great aid and comfort to the person who killed their loved ones.

In their names, he authorized torture that made it impossible to try and convict bin Laden's captured confederates.

In their names, he did nothing to assuage their loss, but instead everything to ensure that no one actually responsible would ever pay for the crime of 9/11.

If you must write to Obama on behalf of the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, then write to demand he prosecute the people in the recent maladministration who have spent the last seven years desecrating their memories.

Cross-posted at BlueGrassRoots.

They Don't Just Disappear

Let's hope this is just the first of many stories about the tortured innocents released far too late from Gitmo.

After Mr. Iqbal was picked up in Jakarta and interrogated for two days, American officials generally concluded that he was a braggart, a “wannabe,” and should be released, one of the senior American officials in Jakarta said. “He was a talker,” the senior American official said. “He wanted to believe he was more important than he was.”

There was no evidence that he had ever met Osama bin Laden, or had been to Afghanistan, the two senior American officials said. But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Iqbal was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation, said one of the senior American officials.

SNIP

In Lahore, Mr. Iqbal wants to return to teaching the Koran. “It’s easy for the United States to say no charges were found,” he said. “But who is responsible for the seven years of my life?”

Read the whole thing.