Gitmo hunger striker speaks out

By Mustang Bobby

This op-ed in The New York Times by a prisoner at Gitmo is going to get a lot of pixels:

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I've been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

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 prisoner, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, dictated his story over an "unclassified" phone line through a translator.

I am certain the orcosphere will attack the Times for giving the man the opportunity to speak; how dare they let a dangerous terrorist mock the First Amendment? Except if the man's story is to be believed, he was in the wrong place in the wrong time and no one has been able to prove he's guilty of anything more than that. But, hey, it's not like we lock up innocent people, right?

Read more »

Just wrong

By Carl 

It makes little sense to spread democracy around the globe if we are not going to practise democratic ideals:

The Daily Telegraph, along with other newspapers including The Washington Post, today exposes America's own analysis of almost ten years of controversial interrogations on the world’s most dangerous terrorists. This newspaper has been shown thousands of pages of top-secret files obtained by the WikiLeaks website. 

[...]The files detail the background to the capture of each of the 780 people who have passed through the Guantanamo facility in Cuba, their medical condition and the information they have provided during interrogations.

Only about 220 of the people detained are assessed by the Americans to be dangerous international terrorists. A further 380 people are lower-level foot-soldiers, either members of the Taliban or extremists who travelled to Afghanistan whose presence at the military facility is questionable.

At least a further 150 people are innocent Afghans or Pakistanis, including farmers, chefs and drivers who were rounded up or even sold to US forces and transferred across the world. In the top-secret documents, senior US commanders conclude that in dozens of cases there is "no reason recorded for transfer".

However, the documents do not detail the controversial techniques used to obtain information from detainees, such as water-boarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, which are now widely regarded as tantamount to torture. 

Now, let's see what the Framers had in mind with respect to "democracy":

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

Words you and I, if you're American, had to learn by heart. This doesn't mean that some men who are not American do not have the same rights and privileges as Americans. It says that the Creator made all men equal, that all men are entitled to life and that all men are entitled to their personal freedom. It also says that even a Teabagger ought to recognize these rights, that it doesn't require deep thought or evidentiary hearings. All men are entitled to these rights. Period.

The Framers were smart enough to elucidate these points and outline these rights in a supporting document to this Declaration, our Constitution.

Right up top in the first Ten Amendments, the Bill of Rights, the Framers delineated what is liberty. Liberty is the protection of the individual from the tyranny of the majority, that beautiful phrase of John Stuart Mill. That majority can take the form of mob or governance by mob rule.

It means that any man in the entire world should be free from the depredations of our exertion of American will and might over him. One can make the case that in war, these rules should be suspended, and perhaps there is a point to be made there but it seems to me that if you can't have a higher batting percentage than roughly .500 in the application of that suspension versus harming innocents, you have no business being in the business of war in the first place.

The willful negligence... and that's being overly polite... of the Bush and Obama administrations in the pursuit of the aims of their aggressions in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Libya will come back to haunt American citizens. How can it not? How can Americans expect to live a life of freedom in a world where freedom is a slogan and not a philosophy? How can we expect to continue to presume that what we own and what we enjoy cannot be taken from us at a moment's notice, not just by those who would do us harm, but also by those who wave the flag of "freedom" in our faces?

How can we in good conscience say we are bringing freedom to the world, but only to the part of the world that agrees with us? For if one man is not free, they I am not free. And if I am not free, then my fellow Americans are not free. 

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Cheney's terrorists

Guest post by Gen. Donald Edwards (Ret.)

General Edwards served in the U.S. Army for 37 years, including two tours with eight campaigns in Vietnam. He served as a congressional staffer from 1997-99. He is a resident of Maine and Ashburn, Virginia.

This piece first appeared at Progressive Fix, a project of the Progressive Policy Institute.

**********

Just last week, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair declared with certainty that there will be another terrorist attack aimed at the United States within the next six months. With the Obama administration pursuing record numbers of drone attacks and taking out top al Qaeda leaders, it's hard to understand how this could be the case. But the paradox becomes clearer if we take a quick trip back through time to examine the track record of one particular individual: Vice President Dick Cheney.

As a former military officer, it is immensely difficult to speak out against our former vice president. While he was in office, I believed that it was inappropriate to criticize Dick Cheney. But now that he is no longer in government, I am compelled to speak my mind about his disastrous national security policies.

In the days and years following September 11, 2001, Vice President Cheney stood out as the chief architect of a calamitous approach to U.S. foreign policy that resulted in a weakened United States and the recruitment of a new generation of terrorists dedicated to anti-American jihad. The Bush-Cheney contribution to terrorist recruitment is clear from the numbers: In 2000, there were 423 international terrorist attacks. The Iraq War heralded a sharp spike in terrorist attacks, which continued with a 607 percent average yearly increase. Eight years later, there were 11,770 international terrorist attacks, as the terrorists birthed by the Bush-Cheney policies grew up.

Unlike Dick Cheney, who glorifies conflict but has never put his own body on the line, I am a retired military officer. I know firsthand the long list of security threats that our country faces. And I know that Cheney's reckless strategy, out of touch with today's threats, made that list longer. The first rule of grand strategy – from Sun Tzu to General Petraeus – is to choose your own battlefield. On September 12, 2001, the United States was in a position to frame the security threats of the new century as the world united against violent, radical extremists. Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, was eager to frame his battle as the West versus Islam. The Bush administration walked onto al Qaeda's battlefield and began fighting Osama bin Laden's war.

As even former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld realized, winning the fight against al Qaeda requires killing more terrorists than we create. Instead, Cheney served as a prime recruiter for our enemies. Al Qaeda featured Guantanamo Bay in its recruiting videos, citing its evasion of the Geneva Conventions as "evidence" of American's lack of moral standing and antipathy toward Islam.

Defeating al Qaeda turns on human intelligence, which requires careful infiltration, relationship-building, cultural research, and triangulation of information. But conservatives based their intelligence-gathering tactics on Hollywood movies: bust a knee cap hard enough, and the truth will pour out like blood. In reality, interrogators rarely know whether they have the right knee cap – and even if they do, actual intelligence agents know that busting it is likely to yield a string of lies, misinformation, and false leads. Instead of generating information and creating leads, Cheney's strategy led to an Arab generation growing up on images of Abu Ghraib.

Finally, quashing al Qaeda requires focusing on the countries where the movement had built relationships and infrastructure. For over a decade, al Qaeda's senior leadership had lived in and erected training camps along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Meanwhile, bin Laden's roots lie in Yemen, and he repeatedly recruited the radically loyal tribes originating in that country for his riskiest missions. Yet the past administration ignored Yemen and starved Afghanistan for troops in order to launch a war in Iraq, where there were no terrorists. Terrorist attacks spiked following the invasion of Iraq, and have continued to grow since.

For a generation of young Arabs now in the prime terrorist age range of 18-25, September 11 was their first political memory. The Bush-Cheney strategy handed al Qaeda the colors they needed to paint a false picture of "America versus Islam." It produced hundreds of terrorists who learned that they could be heroes by fighting the West – the West that tortured and indefinitely detained Arab brethren and killed women and children.

And to think we had an opportunity, in the wake of 9/11, to bring about a smarter, more hopeful strategy. America was unified and ready to sacrifice on September 12. If our leaders had called on the best and brightest to learn Arabic or join the CIA, we would now have a flood of fresh intelligence experts. If they had asked us to declare our independence from oil – demanding that auto companies innovate and asking environmentalists to accept a resurgence of nuclear power – we would have stopped funding the bullets that are now going into terrorist guns.

We have not heard the last from Cheney's terrorists. We cannot waste another day. We must act immediately to build the covert networks we need to fight terrorists. We must prioritize shutting down Guantanamo – a gift that keeps on giving for al Qaeda – and not make it a political football. And we must understand that, as we did during the fight against the Soviet Union, claiming the higher ground in the debate is strategically important. Cheney sold America's greatest weapon – our moral authority and our freedoms – on the cheap. Let's win it back, before more of Cheney's terrorists strike again.

Craziest Republican of the Day: James Inhofe

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He's one of the craziest each and every day, but some days he stands out above even his own awesomely lofty standards. Take, for example, what he said about Gitmo the other day at a town hall in Grove, Oklahoma:

There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons.

No torture at Gitmo? Ever? (Does Cheney know? I mean, he was behind the Bush Torture Regime. Would he not be disappointed that no one was tortured?)

TP: "As the Center for Constitutional Rights has documented, there have been countless cases of detainees being abused and tortured at the prison camp. Detainees have been beaten, deprived of sleep for weeks, sexually harrassed, and shackled to the floor for days at a time."

Yet Inhofe, who also thinks that global warming is a hoax, genuinely seems to believe his own nonsense. That makes him not just an ideological extremist but seriously crazy.

What to do, what to do... about Guantanamo?

By Carol Gee

Closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility will be one of the most difficult challenges of the Obama administration. His own staff has been divided on how to do it. FBI Director Robert Mueller worries about detainees in U.S. prisons. Michele Flournoy, number three at the Pentagon, maintains that the U.S. must set the right example before our allies will accept detainees for repatriation. Rendition has been another matter, entirely, in the past when the Bush administration implemented the practice of rendering U.S. prisoners overseas to other countries where they were interrogated under torture.

How other law abiding countries handle suspected violent extremists offers a contrasting picture of how it is managed by the United States. The legal fallout over this has sent cases to court (in particular the Jeppesen/ACLU case). The Obama DOJ has asked a federal appeals court to block the case, claiming "state secrets" necessitate throwing out the case, taking up the claim of the previous administration. On June 22, federal judge Richard Leon ordered Abd al Rahim Abdul Rassak, a Syrian held by the U.S. for years, released because he was a victim of torture by al-Qaida. He "emphatically rejected the government's claims against Rassak. . . adding that U.S. officials are taking a position that defies common sense."

How will the U.S. continue to handle violent extremists? Earlier this month Glenn Greenwald analyzed the current practices of many countries, contrasting them with the administration's probable call for indefinite detention by the U.S. He concluded that, "numerous other countries are, with their actions, adhering to the values and principles which we, with words, righteously claim to embody." Now the White House has drafted an executive order reasserting presidential authority to incarcerate suspects indefinitely, bypassing Congress, according to The Washington Post's Peter Finn and ProPublica's Dafna Linzer. To quote the lead:

Such an order would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that bypassing Congress could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, White House officials are growing increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may prove impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the facility by the president's January 2010 deadline.

Is Bush precedent Obama precedent? Zachary Roth at TPM Muckraker had this chilling conclusion to the news of the draft memo: "If the last eight years have taught us anything, it's that executive abuses, left to continue unchecked for many years, have a tendency to congeal into precedent." It need not be that way. The Constitution has been a powerful bulwark with plenty of capacity to sustain the rule of law, particularly with a president whose specialty has been Constitutional law.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Blame the Senate Democrats

By Creature

Closing Gitmo should be a no brainer. With today's Gallup poll showing Americans are not too keen on it closing, it is not. I blame Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats. I know the GOP, led by Cheney, were out in force against the closing, but it wasn't until the Democrats caved that the conversation changed. Suddenly it was bi-partisan to oppose the closing. Suddenly the GOP's rallying cry changed to "look 90 Senators agree."

I understand the Democrats voted against funding, not the closing itself, but they should have known the optics of the whole thing would stink and that the GOP would welcome the wedge. It's time to reeducate the people. Maybe this time the Senate Democrats will play along.

Petraeus backs Obama on Gitmo and torture

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As HuffPo's Sam Stein reports, Gen. David Petraeus, that darling of the warmongering right (at least when he was devising and leading the Iraq Surge), has come out in support of Obama's positions on Gitmo and torture.

Interviewed on Radio Free Europe this past weekend, Petraeus noted that he has "long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention." He also stated that he approved closing Gitmo "in a responsible manner."

As Stein points out, this is a significant boost for Obama. Along with Colin Powell, who also spoke in defence of Obama on Sunday, Petraeus is another high-profile military leader (and Republican) who disagrees with Cheney, and with the many on the right who agree with Cheney, on two key national security issues.

Will the right-wing smear machine now unleash its fury on Petraeus? Will it seek to take down one of its heroes?

Bedwetters to the end

By Creature



It would be nice if the GOP had something to offer other than fear.

Harry Reid's new low

By Creature

It's hard to imagine being more disappointed in Harry Reid than I am today. It's one thing for Democrats to block funding for the closing of Guantanamo until a more complete plan on how the funds will be used is laid out. There's some logic there and, after all, it is the Senate's job to watch the purse strings (though you wouldn't have known it during the Bush years). It's a whole other thing for Harry Reid to come out and defend the blocking of funds by buying into the GOP fear mongering that closing Guantanamo will lead to a terrorist moving into your spare bedroom. Come on, Harry, not only are not leading, you are crawling behind an opposition party who's ideas have been completely discredited in the last two elections.

Guantanamo, Iraq, and Iran -- a digest

By Carol Gee

Attorney General Eric Holder is indicating that he is reluctant to examine detainee treatment under the Bush administration. This followed the publication of information about a 2007 International Red Cross report containing detainee interviews that claimed torture. Holder did say that he would be bound by "wherever the law and the facts take" the DOJ, noting once again that they do not want to criminalize policy differences. The DOJ has recently had discussions with European officials about taking some of the detainees. The AG reported that they are looking who and what method might be used to try other detainees, suspected of crimes. This comes from CQ Politics of 3/18.

The Obama administration's new definition of terrorists looks a lot like the old one, says Christopher Weaver, writing for ProPublica on 3/17. The administration is no longer using the phrase "war on terror" and now, "enemy combatant." In a detainee habeas corpus case, the DOJ did not substantially change the claim to hold suspected terrorists, as it is tied to the 2001 Congressional resolution known as the AUMF. New rules will still have to be adopted. To quote the article's conclusion:

The filing is littered with ambiguous phrases like "private armed groups" and a "novel type of armed conflict" instead of "enemy combatants" and the "war on terror." The scrapping of martial lingo backs away from the Bush-era argument that asserts the commander in chief's right to lead the military independently from Congress. However, in a press release the Justice Department explained that the latest definition still relies on the international laws of war as they apply to a 2001 congressional resolution that authorized the president to use military force.

"They're recognizing a right to detain," Madeline Morris, a Duke law professor who helped prepare a major brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of several detainees. "They're recognizing that that right is not governed by existing [laws of war]," in these cases, and that new rules will need to be articulated.

What they're not doing, so far, is showing their hand, our experts agree. "In every way, it's better than the old definition," said Mariner, the Human Rights Watch expert. "It's just not substantially different."

Several Republican senators are attempting to derail the nomination of Christopher Hill as the new Ambassador to Iraq, according to CQ Politics (3/17/09). Led by Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), five senators sent a letter to President Obama urging the withdrawal of Hill's name from consideration. Brownback has also threatened to but a hold on the nomination. The others are Jon Kyle, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, James Inhofe, and Christopher Bond.

Just exactly how to engage with Iran was the subject of a very interesting analysis by Adam Graham-Silverman of CQ Politics on 3/16. The headline points to a "just right approach." Dennis Ross is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's special adviser on the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia. In addition to Ross, Richard Haas, Senator Kerry, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, and Zbignew Brzezinski also weighed in with opinions. It is a good read. To quote further:

The administration’s review of U.S. policy toward Iran could be completed this week and will have to provide answers to some pressing questions, from what concessions and pressure the United States can bring to the table to what kind of Iranian nuclear program it can accept

In conclusion, here are a couple of excerpted paragraphs regarding the Middle East from my most recent CQ Behind the Lines newsletter by David C. Morrison:

Courts and rights: . . . another Post piece has the ACLU calling for an independent prosecutor to investigate CIA torture allegations. . . Old terror case files are being dusted off as the Obama administration considers prosecuting high-profile Guantanamo Bay detainees in civilian courts, focusing on pre-9/11 crimes, AP reports. . .

Over there: . . . “What failed in Iraq, fails in Afghanistan,” Strategy Page flatly concludes — as The Long War Journal sees two Taliban leaders denying recent reports that their leader is in peace negotiations with the Afghan government. The White House is considering expanding strikes inside Pakistan against Taliban power centers beyond the tribal areas currently targeted, The New York Times reveals.

See also Behind the Links for further info on this subject.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Justice at Gitmo: An eyewitness account of the military commissions process

By Mike McNerney

Mike McNerney, a former U.S. Air Force officer, is a fellow with the Truman National Security Project. He recently visited the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. The following is a shorter version of an article originally published at Jurist.

Last month, the National Institute of Military Justice (NIMJ) gave me the opportunity to observe the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. As a veteran and a law student, they felt that I would be able to provide a unique perspective on the events. I joined the military in response to 9/11, so sitting in the same room as the self-professed terrorists who attacked our nation was a very emotional experience.

Watching the proceedings is intense, not so much for the law but for the courtroom dynamics. The military places visitors in an ante room separated from the main courtroom by double-pane soundproof glass. You can see the proceedings in real time but sound is delayed by 40 seconds in case the detainees say anything classified. The detainees themselves are free to converse with each other and often pass notes during the hearing. They obviously cooperate on strategy, stay up on current events, and make comments directed purely at the assembled media. They also refuse to cooperate with their counsel or medical personnel and make constant requests for irrelevant paperwork. This seems to be an attempt to undermine the proceedings of the military commissions and stands in stark contrast to the cooperation some have shown in their federal habeas corpus proceedings.

My experience at Guantanamo Bay ended when President Obama requested a continuance in all proceedings on the day of his inauguration. His administration now has 120 days to figure out what next steps, if any, it wants to take regarding the military commissions. President Obama should take this opportunity to create a policy that values national security but also balances justice, expediency, and sound legal structure. A more secure and stable system would better protect our citizens and improve our standing in the world. That way we can achieve justice for all Americans without sacrificing our values.

John Yoo, torture cheerleader

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think it's hilarious that one of the Bush Administration's leading proponents of torture -- in fact, the very guy, a DoJ official, who wrote the infamous memos that authorized the use of torture -- has come out against Obama's decision to close Gitmo and end the use of torture. That's right, John Yoo, in an op-ed yesterday in the WSJ, argues that "these actions... will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks."

Really? The U.S. has to torture people to wage the war on terror? How utterly ridiculous -- and yet just more of the same from the people who waged such a flawed war, in the process trampling the Constitution and destroying America's moral credibility and standing around the world. What Yoo clearly wants is for America to be a nation that tortures. And it isn't just him. As Think Progress notes, he "makes it perfectly clear that Bush himself directly and explicitly ordered torture, including the waterboarding of at least three detainees." Yoo wrote the memos, but the decision to torture was made at the highest level.

It's a new day, though, and it is Obama, not Bush, who is making decisions at the highest level. And while a goon like Yoo can lament all he wants in the right-wing pages of the WSJ or in the right-wing corridors of the AEI that all you need is torture and more torture, America is already, just over a week into the Obama presidency, moving past the damage and degradation of the Bush years. At a time of renewal, of a return to America's core principles and of working again towards the realization of her most noble ideals, Yoo's cheerleading is exposed all the more for the barbarism that it is.

**********

For more on Yoo's pro-torture cheerleading, see Larisa Alexandrovna, Stephen Webster at The Raw Story, and Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.

See also my posts on the un-American constitutionalism of John Yoo, John Yoo's dangerous idiocy, and the crimes of Yoo.

Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

Headline of the Day (Obama contra Bush edition)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's gotta be this one, right?

Obama Starts Reversing Bush Policies

And what a start it has been:

President Obama moved swiftly yesterday to begin rolling back eight years of his predecessor's policies, ordering tough new ethics rules and preparing to issue an order closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been at the center of the debate over the treatment of U.S. prisoners in the battle against terrorism.

Acting to address several promises he made during his campaign, Obama met with top generals about speeding the withdrawal from Iraq and gathered his senior economic advisers as he continued to push for a massive spending bill to create jobs.

He also signed a series of executive orders and directives intended to slow the revolving door between government service and lobbying, and ordered his administration to share information more freely with the public.

Today, he will issue another order calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year, an immediate case-by-case review of the 245 detainees remaining there, and the application of new rules governing the treatment and interrogation of prisoners, including compliance with international treaties that the Bush administration deemed inapplicable to suspects in terrorism cases.

Any questions? Any more doubts as to Obama's commitment to genuine reform and to a progressive agenda of change? (Like Maha, I've had more than enough of the doubting.)

The beginning of the end of Gitmo?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

WaPo:

In one of its first actions, the Obama administration instructed military prosecutors late Tuesday to seek a 120-day suspension of legal proceedings involving detainees at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- a clear break with the approach of the outgoing Bush administration.

The instruction came in a motion filed with a military court in the case of five defendants accused of organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The motion called for "a continuance of the proceedings" until May 20 so that "the newly inaugurated president and his administration [can] review the military commissions process, generally, and the cases currently pending before military commissions, specifically."

The same motion was filed in another case scheduled to resume Wednesday, involving a Canadian detainee, and will be filed in all other pending matters.

Such a request may not be automatically granted by military judges, and not all defense attorneys may agree to such a suspension. But the move is a first step toward closing a detention facility and system of military trials that became a worldwide symbol of the Bush administration's war on terrorism and its unyielding attitude toward foreign and domestic critics.

Make sure to read Greenwald: "This is a very good and important step," albeit "only a first step and a temporary one at that. Subsequent actions that the Obama administration is clearly considering could severely undermine both the symbolic and substantive value of this act... Still, this order clearly signals that Obama -- even for one day -- did not want his name anywhere near the grotesque mockery of justice known as the "Guantanamo military commissions," tribunals that were created when his own political party, in the weeks before the 2006 mid-term elections, helped to enact the Military Commissions Act..."

The resurrection of America's image and standing around the world, not to mention of its commitment to its own ideals, has begun.

"We do not torture."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So said President Bush in 2005 (when asked about reports of secret CIA prisons).

And yet, in truth, the U.S. does torture.

So says Susan Crawford, the convening authority of the Guantanamo military commissions, a Gates appointee and Bush administration official:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

*****

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent... You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said.

Qahtani's "interrogation took place over 50 days from November 2002 to January 2003." Which means that Bush, who was ultimately responsible, whether he knew it or not, lied.

The various enablers and supporters of torture, both inside and outside the administration, have defended and continue to defend the use of techniques such as waterboarding, claiming that they do not amount to torture, but it has been clear for a long time, as we know that waterboarding was used on detainees, that the Bush Administration, from Bush and Cheney on down, sanctioned what is widely considered to be torture.

And now we have formal confirmation from no less an authority than the high-ranking administration official who is responsible for overseeing the military commissions and reviewing the treatment of detainees at Gitmo.

(Find more reaction at Memeorandum.)

Overturning Dubya: Obama to reverse Bush national security policies

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Following up on my Bush-Obama-Gitmo post from last night, it looks like Obama will indeed reverse many of Bush's more egregious moves:

President-elect Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to reverse executive orders regarding torture of terror suspects, the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and other controversial security policies, sources close to his transition said, in dramatic gestures aimed at reversing President Bush’s accumulation of executive power.

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) said he's been informed that President Obama will support his proposed legislation to make public some opinions from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which issued some of the Bush Administration's most sweeping claims of executive power. Obama also has promised to limit President Bush's practice of using "signing statements" to amend legislation.

"Every day we get indications that they're serious about reversing the abuses of the Constitution," Feingold, a harsh Bush critic, told Politico. Feingold said he thinks Obama is likely to issue executive orders rapidly reversing Bush policies, and others have indicated that those will likely cover the interrogation and detention of terror suspects, and keeping the records of past presidents secret.

For America, then, the start of a long road back to respectability and a renewed moral standing in the world, a start coming in just a matter of days, and not a moment too soon.

Juxtaposition: Bush, Obama, Gitmo, and the so-called War on Terror

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Bush held his final press conference today and was, according to the easygoing NYT, "by turns impassioned and defiant, reflective and light-hearted." Surely, though, few people were paying attention to this last gasp of a failure of a president, so eager are so many to see him go, with Obama the de facto president ahead of his inauguration, set to undo so much of the failure of his predecessor.

But Bush was indeed defiant, or rather self-defensive. He may have "confessed a litany of mistakes," and he may have "cautioned Republicans to be inclusive," a caution they will surely ignore, but he stuck to his egotistical guns when it came to "the decision [he has] made to protect the homeland," that is to his so-called War on Terror:

All these debates will matter not if there is another attack on the homeland. The question won't be, you know, 'Were you critical of this plan or not?' The question will be, 'Why didn't you do something?'

Like what, invade yet another country or torture yet more evildoers, suspected or otherwise? For Bush, you see, hasn't learned a thing, it would seem. To him, which seems to be all that matters, he did right the defend America the way he did, no questions allowed. I agree that another attack akin to, or worse than, 9/11 would be, to put it mildly, an overwhelming development, but how is it that these debates don't matter? Debates over the Iraq War, over torture, over electronic surveillance, over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. Is anything and everything permissible for the sake of the protection of the Homeland?

Sorry, soon-to-be ex-president, but the debates do matter and, thankfully, there are people who obviously care far more than you do about America who are asking the right questions and probing into the depths of darkness that defined your presidency.

Thankfully, too, there is your successor. He will likely balk at doing what ought to be done, namely, prosecuting the evildoers in your administration, but at the very least, the very least, he will close Gitmo, one of the symbols, and still an active one, of your wretchedness, hopefully sooner rather than later, and America and the world will be better for it, one of the first steps towards resurrecting America's moral standing and credibility.

Bush may be defiant, and he may always be so, but he has done so much harm as president, and yet he doesn't seem to have much of a clue as to any of it, so divorced is he from his own reality, from the reality of his making, from the reality outside his bubble, from the consequences of his actions. There hasn't been another huge attack on the Homeland, even if there have been attacks elsewhere, but America is now weaker and the world is now more dangerous because of him.

And we will soon, at long last, be rid of him.

End of the year national security wrap-up

By Carol Gee

A mixture of celebration and irony -- Sunday posts from me at this blog sometimes focus on celebrating the Constitution and the rule of law in the United States of America. And sometimes we have reason to decry the manner in which the rule of law has been ignored by those in power over us. "Restore the Constitution!" has been a rallying cry for far too many of these recent years of living under a lawless president. Civil liberties remain at risk, Guantanamo remains a shameful place to detain our enemies (and some who are not)**, national security remains insecurely practiced, and our Intelligence community remains fragmented and far too militarized.

As the New Year - 2009 - approaches, there are a number of realities to celebrate. A civil liberties advocate, Tom Head at About.com, reports that President-elect Obama's initial cabinet picks are solid civil libertarians, for the most part. Also, the ACLU's Anthony Romero's Dec. 18 newsletter reported that:

You and the ACLU just dealt another blow to the Patriot Act. This week, a federal appeals court upheld our earlier victory, ruling that the dangerous National Security Letter provision of the Act is unconstitutional.

Irony characterizes many other recent "Sunday" items. For example, an important Vanity Fair feature by David Rose on Dec. 16, is titled "Tortured Reasoning." Rose reveals that "Intelligence experts who analyzed Al-Qaeda detainee's statements about 'links' with Saddam Hussein were never told that he had been tortured." And in another example, like Glen Greenwald at Salon.com, we lament the manner in which breaches of the law are reported by the mainstream media. And I also found it ironic that the Director of National Intelligence felt it necessary to reveal that a Russian journalist was profiled from "open source" material, intelligence sources to which any of us has access, according to Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News. The story about what will happen to reams of private information required from Obama administration job applicants is also an ironic unintended consequence of our new Constitutional law professor President's transition process. Politico's Eamon Javers asks about "Facebook pages in National Archives?" To quote what an applicant might wonder after hitting the send button:

And then you think: Just who’s going to be reading this? And when similar information from all of the Obama applicants has been gathered, creating one of the largest treasure troves of personal secrets of powerful people in the world, exactly who will own that database?

Don’t ask the Obama team, it’s not saying.

A spokesman for the presidential transition declined to reveal the number of people who’ll have access to the disclosure information, where it will be kept and what will be done with it at the end of the transition. “I can’t comment at all on that,” said Obama spokesman Reid Cherlin.

Civil libertarians remain disturbed or cautiously optimistic about what the next administration's national security initiatives will bring. For whatever reason, it seems significant that President-elect Obama has yet to name his new head of the Central Intelligence Agency or his Director of National Intelligence. There could be many reasons for this dalliance, but one that occurs to me is that our president-to-be wants to get several weeks of daily national intelligence briefings under his belt in order to really "get the lay of the land of spooks, spying and secrecy." Many of us would be very dismayed if there were any appointments of Bush administration operatives, most of whom have dirty hands, in my humble opinion. We shall see; 22 more days of that motley crew!

**Reference from CQ Behind the Lines (sign up for this excellent free newsletter here), by David C. Morrison, on 11/26/08:

Courts and rights: Solving a potential early dilemma for Obama, the U.S. military has repatriated Osama bin Laden’s ex-driver from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen to serve out his brief remaining sentence, The Miami Herald mentions — even as The Toronto Globe and Mail has an Egyptian “who was once bin Laden’s farmer” seeking reincarceration in a Canadian prison because he can no longer handle the 24-hour surveillance. Slate rehearses Obama’s Yemeni detainee problem — while AP has an appeals bench expressing skepticism about a judge’s order releasing 17 Uighur detainees into the United States A federal judge ruled Monday that ethnicity could not serve as justification for the four-hour detention of two Egyptian-born men questioned after a 2004 cross-country flight, The New York Law Journal relates. An appeals court, meanwhile, finds that surveillance of U.S. citizens can be lawfully conducted in foreign countries, The New York Times tells — and Reuters sees another appeals bench upholding the convictions of three sentenced to life in prison for the 1998 U.S. African embassy bombings.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)

Bloggers on torture -- an index

By Carol Gee

What led to today's post on torture? I was going through one of my favorite's folder at my terrific feed aggregator, Bloglines, and realized that I had saved many on torture. Andrew Sullivan's posts, the ones on torture he had written long ago, brought tears come to my eyes as I read the titles. For whatever reason I could not discard them as outdated. This is still raw unfinished business for many of us. Andrew Sullivan writes for The Atlantic.com. Here is his "Daily Dish" on the subject of torture:

1. "We Do Not Torture" Update - 6/6/08
2. Talking Torture - 5/22/08
3. The Vice-President For Torture - 5/17/08
4. Self-Waterboarding: An Experiment - 12/23/07
5. The Freedom To Torture - 12/14/07

This great surfing tool, Bloglines, has a number of handy features, including the (save as unread) feature that led to this post. It also offers very easy subscription to what seems like an unlimited number of different feed sources, folders for various categories of feeds, a story clipper, a blog, and a capacity to search for posts or stories. For example, the words "torture detainees" is a search term that today produced 25,200 posts on the subject.

Like anything else, Bloglines has limitations. Any feed's folder will only hold 200 new entry headlines. When I want to read the full story I just click on the headline. After I have scanned that set of feed headlines, they all go away except those where I have checked the "save" box. So the feeds "fill up" with old stories unless I get back to them and un-check those in which I am no longer interested. I checked several other favorites folders and found that more torture posts had been saved. There were only a couple of recent ones by the writers to whom I regularly turn. The first one today was from Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com on torture:

1. Porn producer invokes the Bush/Yoo defense -- unsuccessfully - 10/5/08
2. Supreme Court restores habeas corpus, strikes down key part of Military Commissions Act - 6/12/08
3. CNN, the Pentagon's "military analyst program" and Gitmo - 5/9/08
4. John McCain and Bush's torture powers - 4/27/08

Juan Cole at Informed Comment, as well as Dandelion Salad, carried the other new story about Condoleezza Rice. Professor Cole is one of the most knowledgeable writers on the Middle East and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also a regular writer on the subject of torture:

1. Rice and torture - 10/01/08
2. The Great Torture Scandal - 6/18/08
3. Bush Team Pushed Torture behind Myers' Back - 4/21/08
   

Dandelion Salad's stories on torture I saved were quite numerous, perhaps because the site has a lot of contributors interested in national security, etc. The writers are also good about naming names:

1. Top White House Offiicials Discussed and Approved Torture, Rice Admits - 10/2/08
2. Held Hostage For Six Years In Gitmo, Sami El Haj Tells His Story - 8/2/08
3. Confirmation of Detainee Murders (Wilkerson; Nadler) - 6/19/08
4. John Yoo, Totalitarian by Paul Craig Rogerts - 6/19/08
5. Maj. Gen. Taquba Accuses Bush Admin of War Crimes - 6/19/08
6. Bush Admin Post-Constitutional Order: "It was real 'Manchurian Candidate' stuff" - 6/19/08
7. American Psychological Association Supports Bush Regime "Interrogations" - 5/28/08
8. CIA Documents on Torture: Treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas - 5/27/08

Think Progress' posts on torture were concentrated in April of this year, when the issue was making a lot of news. I recommend TP as a regular stop for any news junkie:

1. Feith:"We Took an Extremely Strong Pro-Geneva Convention Position In the Pentagon" - 4/24/08
2. Thomas Breaks Press's 14 day Silence on Bush's Torture Approval, Chided Colleagues: 'Where is Everybody?' - 4/23/08
3. Ashcroft Compares Waterboarding to Being 'Interviewed by Jon Stewart' - 4/22/08
4. Addington, Gonzales Witnessed Gitmo Interrogations in 2002; Approved of 'Whatever Need to be Done' - 4/21/08
5. NYT’s Lichtblau: Bush Torture Program And CIA Tape Destruction 'Could Lead To Criminal Action' - 4/17/08
6. McCain Takes Bold Stance On Torture: ‘We Cannot Ever Torture Any American' - 4/14/08

My regular contributor (this link is on the subject of torture) is "betmo"*:

1. From the Dissident Voice (May 2008) "FBI compiled war crimes dossier on prisoner abuse and torture"

To conclude, my favorites' folders are now more lean because the posts are now indexed under "torture," one of our nation's many items of unfinished business. The Bush administration, I am sure, is happy that the issue is no longer front and center as it was earlier in the year. The purpose of this post is to make sure that it does not go away, not so long as it still fills me with so much anger and sadness for our country.

(Cross-posted at South by Southwest.)