America’s Concentration Camps category archive

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

The Booman has a thought.

As a nation, we have allowed our nation to sin.

H/T Karen for the link.

Draining the swamp:

The 42-page draft report by the State Department’s Inspector General says the department faces “numerous challenges” in dealing with the security situation in Iraq, including the prospect that Blackwater may be barred from the country. The department would have turn to other security arrangements to replace Blackwater, officials said.

Suggestion: Let U. S. government soldiers and employees who are required to adhere to rules and are accountable to the people of the United States of America, rather than mercenaries beholden to whoever the hell signs their paychecks, handle security.

H/T Karen for the link.

Emphasis added:

A new Senate report says the physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was the direct result of Bush administration policies and should not be blamed on guards and interrogators.

(snippage)

The report says administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers but called that ”both unconscionable and false.”

Kinda like I was saying here.

Shamelessly stolen from Atrios.

It’s the Lynndie England case all over again; throw the grunts under the bus and promote the officers. Eugene Robinson:

The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards in the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it’s probably the exact opposite — a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility.

(snip)

The indictment, charging voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations, demonstrates that those who engage “in unprovoked attacks will be held accountable,” Assistant Attorney General Patrick Rowan claimed.

But it demonstrates nothing of the sort. As with the torture and humiliation of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, our government is deflecting all scrutiny from the corporate higher-ups who employed the guards — to say nothing of the policymakers whose decisions made the shootings possible, if not inevitable.

The Current Federal Administration has soiled the heritage and promise of the United States of America (emphasis added):

Darrel Vandeveld, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who left his post at the base in Cuba earlier this year on ethical grounds, told the BBC that it was impossible to guarantee fair trials there.

“I thought that the military commissions were part of a grand tradition in accordance with the highest of American values,” he said. “Now I see them as having defiled the U.S. Constitution and I see them as a stain on America.

“There should have been a procedure in place so that we could ensure due process and fair trials for these defendants. There was no such process.”

Balloon Juice:

A democratic nation should never make a decision like torture or, say, mass prosecutions for committing torture without weighing the decision publicly. Mass pardons, if they happen, will at least give us a supply of well-placed officials who cannot plead the fifth.

Truth.

No reconciliation.

Go here. Watch the show.

And wonder how our leaders could do this in our name.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Not.

(Follow the link. It’s worth five minutes of your time to see Your Tax Dollars at Work.)

The outrageousness continues:

A federal judge ordered yesterday that 17 Chinese Muslims held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison be released into the United States by Friday, agreeing with the detainees’ lawyers that the Constitution barred holding the men indefinitely without cause.

(snip)

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina issued the landmark ruling in the case of a small band of captives, known as Uighurs, who have been held at Guantanamo nearly seven years and are no longer considered enemy combatants by the U.S. government.

The United States is refusing to repatriate the Uighurs to China, since China considers Uighurs to be prima facie terrorists and rebels, and doesn’t want to admit them to the United States because, for some reason or other, they just might be bearing a grudge.

But today, an appeals court enjoined the order so that the government could “have more time to make arguments in the case.”

Note the argument was described, in the first link above, as using to keep these innocent persons incarcerated (emphasis added). It boils down to “King George the Wurst doesn’t want to.”

Justice Department lawyers had argued that only the president had the authority to allow the men into the country. They also said the judge was barred from ordering the entry of detainees if they had ties to terrorist groups.

Just because I haven’t quoted it in a while, here is the oath of office that King George swore:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Frankly, Pascal nailed it.

From Phillipe Sands in The Guardian:

. . . I learnt that the concerns of FBI personnel at Guantanamo were communicated directly to Mr Haynes’ office, in telephone conversations in November and December 2002 between Mr Bowman and, first, Mr Bob Dietz; second, Mr Dan Dell’Orto (who was then Mr Haynes’ deputy and is now his acting successor); and third, Mr Haynes himself. Mr Bowman told me it was “a very short conversation , he did not want to talk about it all, he just stiff-armed me”. My conclusion, taking into account my conversations with Mr Haynes, is that he was able to adopt that approach because by then – contrary to the impression he sought to create when he appeared before this committee – he had knowledge of the contents of the DOJ legal memos written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo on 1 August 2002.

On the basis of these conversations I believe that the administration has spun a false narrative. It claims that the impetus for the new interrogation techniques came from the bottom-up. That is not true: the abuse was a result of pressures driven from the highest levels of government. It claims the so-called Torture Memo of August 1, 2002 had no connection with policies adopted by the administration: that too is false, as the memo provided cover for Mr Haynes. It claims that in its actions it simply followed the law. To the contrary, the administration consciously sought legal advice to set aside international constraints on detainee interrogations, without apparently turning its mind to the consequences of its actions. In this regard, the position adopted by the Pentagon’s head of policy at the time, [Douglas] Feith, appears most striking.

As result, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions was violated, along with provisions of the 1984 Convention prohibiting torture. The spectre of war crimes was raised by US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 2006 judgment in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. That judgment corrected the illegality of President Bush’s determination that none of the detainees at Guantanamo had any rights under Geneva.

Torture was their pornography.

The McClatchy report lives up to its billing.

The cynical among us might argue that one of the reasons the Current Federal Administration has been so adamant about denying any rights to the folks at Gitmo is that doing so would provide even more confirmation of its failure to get anything right.

Harry Shearer today observed that he thought that, in the United States, persons had rights which the government had to observe; that rights were not something granted on a whim by the king (whoops, my word, not his government.

From McClatchy:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

You don’t think so?

See this and this.

Not to mention this.

And everything these people have done in the last seven and a half years.

The Constitution is in their way. That’s why they hate it. Because they think they should always get their way.

Because, well, because . . . they just should! Okay!

This might help answer the question in the title.

The Guardian:

On Thursday, the US Supreme Court did what no politician has yet been able to do – it effectively closed Guantanamo. The prison camp still exists, of course, but after Thursday’s landmark Supreme Court ruling, the camp’s raison d’etre has evaporated. The Bush administration self-consciously chose to house its detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base because it thought the location would afford it a “law-free zone.” But now the Supreme Court has ruled that the pre-eminent law of the United States, the Constitution itself, extends to the detainees at Guantanamo. As a result, there is no longer any advantage to keeping the detainees there. In this respect, then, the decision is likely to hasten the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Whether it will bring justice remains to be seen, but it has taken a very big first step, by insisting that the law must apply.

In one sense, the decision in Boumediene v Bush is a limited one. It does not order the release of a single prisoner – indeed, no prisoner has been released by court order in the six years that men have been held at Guantanamo. Nor does it address the scope of the President’s authority to hold individuals as “enemy combatants,” what procedural protections they are owed, or how they should be treated. It simply opens the courthouse door. Six years after Guantanamo opened, detainees will finally get their day in court.

But in every other sense, Thursday’s decision was groundbreaking. For the first time in its history, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a federal law enacted by Congress and signed by the President on an issue of military policy in a time of armed conflict. The Supreme Court has historically deferred to the President during times of conflict, especially when the President has acted with Congressional assent. For the first time, the court extended constitutional protections to noncitizens held outside US territory during wartime. And for only the third time in its history, the court declared unconstitutional a federal law restricting its own jurisdiction. (The court has typically sought to avoid such confrontations, because in some measure political control of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction is seen as conferring democratic legitimacy on an unelected institution).

McClatchy has been putting together the pieces. (Remember McClatchy: When they were still Knight-Ridder, they got the Iraq War story right.)

This should be good.

From their front page today (there is no separate link for this block of text and it will probably move off the front page at some point):

For more than six years, the United States has held hundreds of men at Guantanamo — “the worst of the worst,” in the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But the truth was different. McClatchy tracked down 66 men released from Guantanamo in the most systematic survey to date of prisoners held there. Many had no connection to terrorism, but their experience turned them against America.

You can see the promotional video here (I didn’t see an “embed” code).

Noz has some thoughts on the decision and on strict constrution of the Constitution of the United States of America:

a real strict constructionist would have no trouble finding the suspension (of habeas corpus except in cases of rebellion or invasion–ed.) to be unconstitutional. the constitution is crystal clear on this point. and yet justice scalia, usually held up as the paradigm case of a strict constructionist, issued an overheated dissent, devoting an entire section to his fevered imaginations about the disastrous consequences of the majority’s decision. if that isn’t “results oriented jurisprudence” what is?

He’s ready to lock us ’em up and throw away the McKey.

Glenn Greenwald:

On Wednesday, I documented John McCain’s complete reversal of views — in the last six months alone — on FISA, warrantless eavesdropping and executive power. McCain’s diametrically opposite views were contained in a questionnaire McCain completed for The Boston Globe last December (wherein he rejected many of the Bush/Cheney theories of presidential omnipotence and warrantless eavesdropping) and then a statement McCain issued this week to National Review (wherein he embraced those same theories in order to persuade the Right that he approves of and would continue Bush’s lawless surveillance policies).

(snip)

There are two critical conclusions highlighted by this episode: (1) whether McCain embraces the Bush/Cheney/Yoo theories of the omnipotent executive is, far and away, one of the most vital questions of the campaign, since the vast bulk of the radicalism and accompanying controversies of the last eight years — from spying to detention to torture to extreme government secrecy — arise out of those theories; despite that fact, those issues have been missing almost entirely from the media’s coverage of the campaign — until now; and (2) despite how central these issues have been, McCain is simply incapable of forming a coherent position on what he thinks about any of this, dramatically changing his answers almost from one day to the next depending on who is asking. This behavior, culminating in his embrace this week of the Bush/Cheney/Yoo theories, severely undermines the two attributes the media relentlessly uses to depict him — his “moderate” ideology and his straight-talking, principled independence.

The Guardian:

Yesterday’s disclosure – reported on the front page of the Guardian, based on the latest Reprieve report – involves the Bush administration’s fleet of “prison hulks”. The scheme is not so different from two centuries ago, when Charles Dickens opened Great Expectations on a hulk in the Thames. Then, as now, we transported prisoners around the world to little-known places. The US has injected a modern variation to the practice: even 200 years ago, there was a general insistence that prisoners be charged with and convicted of a crime before they could be condemned to the lower decks of an aging naval ship.

In one sense, the use of ships is wholly predictable, following the Guantánamo pattern: the Bush administration planned its secret prisons to be law-free zones, totally controlled by the US, far away from prying media eyes or annoying lawyers’ writs. What better place, some White House strategist no doubt suggested, than a boat in the middle of the ocean?

What Digby said.

From a commenter quoted in the post:

So one of the ships where this prisoner abuse is being perpetrated is named the USS Bataan? Does anyone else spot the irony there? The reason the name Bataan is remembered at all, even among non-WWII-history-buffs, is because of the notorious abuse of US and Filipino POWs there at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army. And, why yes, funny you should ask, we did prosecute people for that in Tokyo after the war. I’m sure any such irony was completely lost on the Bushies.

I should keep reminding myself not to be surprised by the capability of the Current Federal Administration to do evil.

What digby said.

A Kangaroo in the bush, even. But not The Bush himself, who knows not shame.

As Digby said.