Saturday, December 4, 2010

Time to clean house on torture - Guardian

Time to clean house on torture Letta Tayler guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 December 2010 09.00 GMT

As WikiLeaks reveals how the US has covered the CIA's dirty tracks, the Obama administration must hold officials to account

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/02/torture-cia-wikileaks

In the already sordid annals of US torture in the name of countering terrorism, November proved to be an unusually embarrassing month – not just for the Bush administration, which sanctioned the abuses, but also for the Obama administration, which has failed to hold its predecessors accountable.

First, former President George W Bush boasted in his new memoir and on talkshows how he had authorised waterboarding, a form of torture. Then, a US special prosecutor announced that he will not pursue criminal charges against CIA officers for intentional destruction of videotapes that reportedly show two terrorism suspects being waterboarded in one of its secret prisons in Thailand in 2002. Now, classified diplomatic cables newly released by WikiLeaks confirm that both the Obama and Bush administrations sought to quash criminal investigations in Europe into illegal counterterrorism activities such as kidnapping and torture by Bush-era officials.

In Spain, US diplomats in April 2009 joined with a pair of Republican members of the US Congress to urge a Spanish prosecutor, as well as officials with Spain's justice ministry and foreign affairs ministry, to drop a potentially landmark investigation against six top Bush administration officials, the cables show. The Spanish probe sought to indict former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and five other Bush administration officials for creating the legal framework to justify the use of torture and other coercive interrogation techniques. The case "would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship" between Spain and the US, the Americans warned, according to one cable. Immediately following those meetings, Spain's attorney general recommended dropping the investigation, which has foundered ever since.

In Germany, other classified cables show, a US diplomat in 2007 warned Berlin that issuing international arrest warrants for CIA agents involved in the abduction and mistreatment of an innocent German citizen "would have a negative impact" on US-German relations. In 2003, the CIA abducted Khaled el-Masri, an unemployed German car salesman who was vacationing in Macedonia, and allegedly beat him and secretly flew him to a prison in Afghanistan. There, he was again beaten, he said, and held for months in solitary confinement. The CIA thought el-Masri was a similarly named al-Qaida member.

Nearly two months after determining they were holding the wrong man, and five months after his abduction, US officials arranged to have el-Masri dumped on a remote road in Albania. A German prosecutor issued arrest warrants for the suspected CIA agents in 2007, but the country's justice ministry did not pursue them.

These cables made few headlines in the US. Nearly a decade after President Bush launched his "war on terror", acts such as a former chief executive's unrepentant admission of torture, the CIA's destruction of evidence with impunity, and diplomatic efforts to subvert justice no longer hold much shock value. The humiliating snapshots from Abu Ghraib are already part of the nation's collective memory. The public has read of fatal beatings of suspects in Afghanistan and questionable detainee deaths at Guantánamo. It has been inundated with the so-called "torture memos", in which President Bush's top justice department officials justified waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that had long been prohibited under US and international law.

But public weariness does not make the legal case against Bush administration officials less compelling. Indeed, every new piece of evidence underscores the need for the Obama administration to conduct a full-scale criminal investigation into senior-level responsibility for planning, authorising and ordering torture and other abuses committed in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. In the case of the CIA-linked abduction and ill-treatment of el-Masri, and the probe into the architects of President Bush's torture policy, Germany and Spain should do the same.

Despite his welcome ban on torture and secret prisons, President Obama has shown scant enthusiasm for prosecuting such crimes. John Durham – the same special prosecutor who declined to pursue charges for the destruction of the CIA tapes – is conducting a broader investigation into abusive interrogation methods. But the Obama administration has made clear that the scope is limited to "unauthorised" acts. That means it will not prosecute CIA agents who committed abuses authorised by Bush's top justice department lawyers, even if the abuses violated domestic and international law. It also means there is little hope that these former justice department officials will be investigated, let alone prosecuted, for concocting a legal rationale for these blatantly illegal acts, or that President Bush and other senior officials will be held accountable for criminal offences justified by this dubious legal advice.

While the Obama administration buries its head in the sand and pressures Europe to do the same, some European countries have, nevertheless, taken a few important steps towards accountability for abusive counterterrorism actions. In 2009, Italy convicted 23 Americans in absentia, most of them CIA agents, for kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003. (The Obama administration criticised the ruling.) In Spain, in addition to prosecutors seeking indictments against the six legal architects of President Bush's torture policy, they also asked a judge last spring to issue an arrest warrant for the 13 CIA agents implicated in the kidnapping and rendition of el-Masri. The agents allegedly entered Spain using false documents.

President Obama justifies his reluctance to investigate Bush administration officials by saying that the country needs to "look forward and not backwards". Yet, he admitted the fallacy of that attitude during an interview in March 2010 in a reference to Indonesia, a country with its own history of abuses. "We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed," President Obama said of the regime of former Indonesian President Suharto, a US ally. "We can't go forward without looking backwards."

If the US hopes to exert any moral authority over abusive regimes past and present, it is incumbent on President Obama to heed his own advice, rather than merely preach it to the rest of the world.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Lecture on American Torture

But I just wanted to let you know that a talk I gave to Burlington Friends Meeting on October 24, 2010 in VT made it's way on to community TV. This is a QUIT Update (QUIT - The Quaker Initiative to End Torture). There are no explicit horror stories here about torture, only the questions about our democracy since American torture continues. There's a half hour lecture and a half hour Q & A.

http://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/burlington-friends-meeting-discussion-john-calvi-quaker-initiative-end-torture

Please share this widely.

Thanks, John

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

QUIT 4 Conference a Great Success!

Dear All,

Thank you for all your notes and for holding the QUIT conference in the
Light.  The conference was excellent!  All 4 presenters outdid themselves in
presenting current information from their fields.  Terry Kupers, author of
Prison Madness, gave us clear information about how the use of torture in
American prisons results in deformed people unable to live as whole humans.
Fr Roy Bourgeois explained the history of the School of the Americas and the
torture training for more than 60,000 Latin American military and police
that continues.  Scott Horton, lawyer and Harper's magazine writer of the No
Comment column, explained the legal context in which Obama not only
continues Bush policies but in some instances makes things worse regarding
torture.  And Hector Aristizabal, Columbian therapist and torture survivor,
showed us how movement and play can help us integrate all the information
and subsequent emotions after learning so much about torture.  California
has good and active groups working against torture and we heard of several
actions taken in recent years- everything from clown protests to
legislation.  Friends from Durham, North Carolina and Bosie, Idaho and
Eugene, Oregon along with mostly Californians attended, plus several
non-Quakers joined us.  Thanks again for your good care and support, John

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Thursday, September 2, 2010

4th QUIT Conference - last call

Dear Friend,

I know how you feel: who wants to think about the Quaker Conference on Torture & Accountability (9/24-26/2010) over Labor Day weekend?
Even if the conference has a superb set of speakers and brainstorming sessions.
Even if it will kickstart the work of ending this awful blot on our national conscience.
Even if it could change our future.
Yours. Mine. Our children’s.
I mean, it’s holiday time. The “last hurrah” of summer.
And don’t we all know it’s been a long, hot, climate change, hard times kind of summer?
Yes, we know.
So go ahead and kick back. Take a break. Get some sun, surf, or just chill from the heavy stuff.
We're with you.
It's all good. Don’t think about it.
Just do it: go to www.quit-torture-now.org and register online.
It only takes a few minutes.
Then forget about it, and have an outrageous holiday.
Don’t reflect on all the great programming until after you’re back.
Never mind about the chances to do planning and networking.
They’ll keep til you’re rested up.
We won’t even mention the great food and serene atmosphere of the Quaker Center at Ben Lomond.
(No, we won’t mention it; some might think it’s really a vacation.)
But it’s not. The conference will be serious work, on an issue that’s shaping our future.
All the more reason to register now: so you can quit being serious about it til you’re back in the regular routine. When you’re looking ahead to autumn, the full-steam-ahead school year and all that goes with them.
The conference will be there, on the list. A memorable part of it, in fact.
But we’re not going to dwell on that.
Because now it’s time to party.
Register. Then party.
See you there.

John Calvi

PS. It only takes a few minutes to register: www.quit-torture-now.org . Then go get those bags of ice.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Hector Aristizabal at QUIT 4 Sept 24-26 Quaker Center Ben Lomond CA

Dear All,

When The Quaker Initiative to End Torture – QUIT began its work in May of 2005, we began to look for teachers who could show us the various aspects of the torture industrial complex. One of the very first talented people we found was Hector Aristizabal. He taught at QUIT conferences in Ottawa and twice at Guilford. And now we are very happy have the blessing of his good work at QUIT 4 September 24-26 at Quaker Center in Ben Lomond, CA. Check out registration – www.quit-torture-now.org

Hector is a native from Medellin Colombia and currently lives in Pasadena CA. Hector’s commitment to the human rights work forced him to leave his country in 1989 due to death threats. Hector holds an MA degree in Psychology from the Antioquia University in Medellin, Colombia and a degree as a Marriage Family Therapist from Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena.

During the last 15 years Hector’s main work and interest has been on the use of Theater of The Oppressed techniques, traditional myths and story telling as a way to combine theater, drumming, and dance with psychotherapy in the creation of “modern rituals” as a way to address the healing needs of many of our communities. In his recent book Blessing next to the Wound Hector talks of his transformation from torture victim to healer.

Hope to see you there,

John Calvi
Founding convener QUIT

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Monday, August 16, 2010

QUIT 4th Conference 9/24-26/2010 Ben Lomond, CA

Dear Friend,

Several questions are bothering me today. Do they bother you too? Does it bother you that Jay Bybee sits as a federal judge after defying US and international law to make torture legal? If so, coming to the 2010 QUIT Conference on Torture & Accountability is a way of putting your feelings into action. (QUIT: The Quaker Initiative to end Torture.)

And what about John Yoo? Is it okay for him to green-light waterboarding and then go blithely back to teaching “law” at a distinguished California law school? If you think this is a disgrace, the Conference (September 24-26 at Quaker Center) is the place to put words into concrete effort.

Then there's Jeppesen Dataplan: when scores -- more likely hundreds – of “torture taxis” took off from an airfield in North Carolina, those flights were planned and coordinated in San Jose, from Jeppesen's faceless offices. The ACLU has sued Jeppesen. But more is needed.

The QUIT Torture Conference is the time to gather and find ways to broaden the challenge. Modern American torture: it's not just a few men in black masks beating blindfolded Muslims in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib. It's a far-flung, complicated network, well represented on the West Coast. How well represented? It goes beyond Yoo, Bybee and Jeppesen. When investigators tracked down a CIA front company for torture planes, the trail led to a Reno office building, and a prominent Nevada Republican politician's lobby firm. And there's more we could include, but space is limited.

Unfortunately, the network is still largely in place, even after the change of administration in Washington. The new “ban” on torture came with significant loopholes. Guantanamo is not yet closed. Efforts to hold the torturers and their masters accountable have hit a stone wall. But many are chipping way at that wall.

At the QUIT conference, we'll hear from some of the most effective anti-torture and accountability activists:

* Scott Horton, who broke the story of the secret “prison-within-a-prison” at Guantanamo, and the prisoners who were murdered there.

* Father Roy Bourgeois, who has spearheaded the campaign to close the School of the Americas, and its torture academy.

* Dr. Terry Kupers, who has helped expose the extent of torture in prisons across the US.

And we'll have time for brainstorming to turn their information and inspiration into plans for action. The work to end torture is a long-term struggle. The 2010 QUIT Conference is one important step on that long journey.

Yet one more thing is bothering me: as I'm writing this, registrations for the QUIT conference are below our expectations. If torture is a concern for you, and you've been thinking about attending, we need to hear from you. Or if someone you know is considering it, please pass this note on to them. Torture won't end unless we make that happen.

Peace, John Calvi, Convener

PS. By the way, you don't have to be a Quaker to attend the QUIT Conference. All who want to end this practice are welcome and urged to attend. Online registration is easy, here: http://www.quit-torture-now.org/

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301 Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Saturday, August 7, 2010

One More Thing Needed - 4th QUIT Conference Sept 24-26 Quaker Center, Ben Lomond, CA

The 4th Quaker Initiative to End Torture Conference is all ready to go! The site is in the beautiful Redwood Forests of Ben Lomond, CA. We’ve leased the entire of Quaker Center, an intimate conference center known for good food and comfort in a quiet, natural setting.

We’ve 3 renowned experts on American torture as our speakers. Scott Horton is a human rights attorney and author of Harper’s Magzine No Comment column- http://harpers.org/subjects/NoComment - his overview of torture’s legal scene is a must read and makes him one of the most in-demand speakers. Fr. Roy Bourgeois is the founder of School of the America’s Watch. For 2 decades he’s collected information about America’s instruction of torture and formed the largest annual protest in American history. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year by the American Friends Service Committee. Dr. Terry Kupers is the author of Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It. He’s expertise on torture and abuse in American prisons is known to Congress and courtrooms across the country.

This will be the best QUIT conference yet. Everything is set to go September 24-26. Except one thing- registration is lagging. If you’ve been intending to register- now is the time. If you go on-line right now – www.quit-torture-now.org - and register, QUIT can be sure to go ahead. We would love to share all we’ve organized for the past year. It’s going to be a great gathering of dedicated people doing good and important work.

Thanks, John Calvi – founding convener QUIT

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Sunday, August 1, 2010

It Takes Just a Little More Than A Minute

Dear Friend,

Our efforts in QUIT (The Quaker Initiative to end Torture) have been blessed with many minutes of support. One of the most recent came from Dallas Meeting, which said, in part:
“Dallas Friends Meeting reaffirms its support of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture, its educational programs, and its commitment to bringing an end to torture.
“We realize that the end of torture will not come about soon and may be the work of many lifetimes, but we have no doubt that acts of torture are counter to the spirit of love and light that Friends have given witness to for almost 400 years.
“We are holding the Fourth QUIT Conference, its attendees and program leaders, in the light as they continue this vital work.”

At QUIT we're grateful for that expression of support. We hope other Friends will follow its counsel and join together at the QUIT Conference at Quaker Center in California, Sept. 24-26 2010.

The conference is important to further what Baltimore Yearly Meeting added to this chorus, when it urged Friends “to find ways take up such a witness, by public education and organized effort.” The QUIT conference will provide both.

Besides compelling speakers such as Scott Horton andRoy Bourgeois, the conference will include opportunities to plan and strengthen the long work for accountability among Friends and others, especially on the West Coast.

More details of the conference schedule are available here: http://www.quit-torture-now.org/horton.htm

Online registration takes only a few minutes at:
http://www.quit-torture-now.org/quit4_registration.htm

“Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.” Hebrews 13:3 NRSV
“Recognizing that of God in every person, we condemn the use of torture for any purpose by any person, group, or government. Torture by any means is immoral. It debases the humanity of the tortured, the torturer, and those who have knowledge of it. . . .
“The acceptance of torture is making our society an international pariah. We appeal to Friends and others everywhere to take up this concern and follow it through. Let us bear down into the work of bringing this immoral practice into the Light. Let us do all we can to bring about the day when torture is banished from our country and from our planet.”

Help put these wonderful minutes into action. Please Join us at the Fourth Quaker Conference on Torture, Sept. 24-26.

Peace,
John Calvi
Founding convener of QUIT

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Monday, July 26, 2010

4th QUIT Conference Sept. 24-26 2010 Quaker Center Ben Lomond CA

Dear Friend,

Did you read about Jay Bybee's recent "admissions" regarding US torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other prisons?

At the Quaker Conference on Torture, Sept. 24-26 at Quaker Center in Ben Lomond CA, seeking accountability for the actions of officials like Bybee will be part of the agenda. We hope you'll join us there, and support this work.

Bybee is currently a judge on the US Court of Appeals in San Francisco. He holds this powerful post depite being one of the main authors of the notorious "torture memo," which formed the supposed legal basis for the US torture program. Bybee drafted his memo in 2002 for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. It was later withdrawn and repudiated by the same agency.

At first glance, Bybee's recent admissions to a Congressional committee might seem startling and even incriminating: he acknowledged that detainees--most of whom were later released without charge--were tortured. And torture is (or at least once was) a crime under US law.

Read more closely, all Bybee really said was that some torturers went too far in carrying out their orders.

Went too far? How? Torture victims died, for one thing; and for another, word of the abuse leaked out, producing a rising chorus of calls for holding accountable those who built and ran this system --including Jay Bybee.

Bybee regretted the negative publicity his own role has received -- but he said "I am going to stand by the memo." "We took a muscular view of presidential authority," Bybee said. "I wasn't running a debating society, and I wasn't running a law school." Instead, he was establishing torture as a policy of the US government. Unfortunately, that basic policy still stands, and Jay Bybee still sits on one of the highest courts in the land.

A government that can torture with impunity has laid the foundation of tyranny. The Quaker Torture Conference is part of the work of overturning this torture policy, dismantling the torture network, and bringing redress to torture victims and justice to perpetrators.

This effort ranks with the epic struggle against slavery in its importance. Please join us, Sept. 24-26. You can register online now at: http://www.quit-torture-now.org

And please pass this message on to others.
John Calvi QUIT Convener

John Calvi
calvij@sover.net
802/387-4789
PO Box 301
Putney VT 05346 USA
www.johncalvi.com
http://johncalvi.blogspot.com
www.quit-torture-now.org

Monday, July 12, 2010

4th QUIT Conference - Torture & Accountability Sept 24-26 QUAKER CENTER Ben Lomond, CA

Dear Friend,

We wish we didn’t need a Quaker Conference on Torture in 2010. But we do. And we hope you, or someone from your meeting community, will join us there.

It’s still hard for many to admit, but the United states government built an extensive “Torture Industrial Complex” as part of the “War On Terror.”
Torture is illegal, a crime under existing U.S. And international laws. There was hope it would end when a new administration came into office in early 2009.

Unfortunately, the actual progress has been very limited: Guantanamo remains open. Secret prisons are still operating in Afghanistan and, likely, elsewhere. The official ban on torture techniques is limited in its applicability.

And perhaps worst of all, none of those who designed or carried out the U.S. torture program has been held accountable. Nor have any of the thousands of victims later released as innocent received compensation, or even an apology.

We think accountability today is the best way to prevent torture in the future. Other countries, including Canada and England, have begun accountability investigations. But the U.S. government is still refusing to follow suit.

It will take persistent and determined effort to root out the “Torture Industrial Complex.” The 2010 Quaker Conference on Torture is one more step toward the goal.

Won’t you take the step, and join us?

Peace,

John Calvi, Convener
QUIT: The Quaker Initiative to End Torture
Quaker Conference on Torture & Accountability
September 24-26, 2010 - Quaker Center-California
Register online NOW at: www.quit-torture-now.org

Friday, June 11, 2010

Registration for 4th QUIT Conference is OPEN!

Registration is OPEN for the QUIT Conference on Accountability at our website-

www.quit-torture-now.org

A few reminders-

Dates- September 24-26 2010

Site- Quaker Center, Ben Lomond, California – near Santa Cruz
(this is not a Quaker Center program, we’ve leased the whole campus)

Please register soon – there are only 50 beds on campus & room for only 50 commuters.

Main Speakers – Scott Horton & Fr. Roy Bourgeois will both speak on Saturday 9/25.

If you are flying in, please use San Jose airport, which is closer – we are hoping to provide transportation from there as we area able. We will not be providing rides from San Francisco airport, which is 2 hours from Ben Lomond.

Please visit the website, fill out the registration form, and send a check.

This is the 4th conference of the Quaker Initiative to End Torture. Much more info at website.

Thanks, John Calvi
Founding Convener- QUIT
calvij@sover.net

Sunday, June 6, 2010

George W Bush, Torture President - Scott Horton

http://harpers.org/subjects/NoComment

Scott Horton

June 4, 9:35 AM

George W. Bush, Torture President

Last week we learned from an interview with former Argentine president Néstor Kirchner that former president George W. Bush touted war as a cure to a nation’s economic ills. Bush has not contested that account. Moreover, yesterday he clarified his role in the torture of prisoners at CIA black sites. For two years, Republicans have argued against any inquiry into the torture practices of the Bush-Cheney administration, but apparently all it takes to get Bush to discuss the issue is a fat speaking fee. In a keynote address before the Economic Club of Grand Rapids, he spoke glibly about waterboarding:
Sure, we waterboarded Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, former President George W. Bush reportedly said on Tuesday. And he would “do it again to save lives.”

A group of thirteen retired admirals and generals meeting in Philadelphia to discuss national security issues, speaking through former CENTCOM commander General Joseph Hoar, responded:
Waterboarding is torture. John McCain has said it’s torture. We have prosecuted foreign and American military personnel for waterboarding. We even prosecuted a sheriff in Texas for waterboarding. Waterboarding is torture and torture is a crime. It cannot be demonstrated that any use of it by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life. To the contrary, the misguided belief that torture saves lives has cost America dearly. It is shocking that former President George W. Bush said he would use waterboarding ‘again to save lives.’ When he authorized it the first time he sent America down the wrong road, battering our alliances, damaging counterinsurgency efforts, and increasing threats to our soldiers.

Bush’s statement amounts to an admission of his role in a serious crime. He can speak and act without concern because the Obama White House has announced its intention not to enforce American domestic law, under which this conduct was a felony, and not to comply with the unequivocal treaty commitments of the Convention Against Torture, under which the United States is unconditionally obligated to undertake a criminal investigation. In this way, the sins of one regime have been assumed by its successor.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Silencing Lawyers - Scott Horton, No Comment - Harpers

http://harpers.org/subjects/NoComment

No Comment
By Scott Horton

May 26, 10:23 AM

Silencing the Lawyers

A total of 779 prisoners have been held in Guantánamo in connection with the war on terror. Five hundred seventy-nine were released, most by the Bush Administration, a quiet recognition of errors made in the decisions to detain them. A large number of those still detained are contesting their imprisonment through habeas corpus—under which the government must make a minimal showing that it has a reasonable basis for holding the prisoner. In roughly three-quarters of these cases so far (36 out of 50 decided), which are being heard before largely Republican-appointed, conservative federal judges in Washington, the court has found that the United States has no reason to hold the prisoner. That’s not surprising. In fact, we now know that 80 percent or more of the Guantánamo prisoners were captured not by American forces on or near a battlefield but rather by Afghan warlords and Pakistani security forces eager to collect reward money the United States was offering. So Ahmed the taxi driver and Mohammed the shepherd were whisked off to Gitmo.

What happened to the 600–800 Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders for whom the prison was originally conceived? We now have a pretty good idea. In the late fall of 2001, military operations in Afghanistan were successful, and Taliban and Al Qaeda leadership figures had fled to two last redoubts—the city of Kunduz in the northeast, and the Tora Bora region along the Pakistani frontier. But for reasons known only to him, Vice President Dick Cheney ordered a halt to the bombardment of Kunduz and opened an air corridor to allow the Pakistani military to airlift the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders out of Kunduz. The maneuver was ridiculed by one U.S. military official present at the time as “Operation Evil Airlift.” The United States quickly moved to fill Gitmo with nobodies. With that fact now becoming painfully apparent, you’d think that Congress would be calling for an investigation into how original plans for Gitmo were botched—specifically how the Al Qaeda and Taliban figures for whom it was built evaded capture in the face of one of the most powerful military forces ever fielded in Afghanistan. That could well be one of the most significant “lessons learned” of the war.

Instead, influential Republicans in Congress are crying out for an investigation of the lawyers. Florida Republican Jeff Miller has secured a provision in the current defense appropriations act (PDF) requiring that the Defense Department’s inspector general “conduct an investigation of the conduct and practices of lawyers” who represent clients at Guantánamo if there is some reason to believe that they “interfered with the operations” at Gitmo or “violated any applicable policy of the Department.” Of course, as Steven Vladeck has explained, in the thinking of the Bush era, prisoners were to be held at Gitmo without access to attorneys or the ability to make legal arguments, so everything that the defense counsel did amounted to “interference with the operations”–starting with securing a series of Supreme Court decisions holding that those operations were illegal.
Miller explained the need for this provision in a blog post for the Heritage Foundation. As he makes clear, his purpose is entirely retaliatory:

Last year the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) established the John Adams Project to “support military counsel at Guantanamo Bay.” The mission behind this treacherous enterprise was to identify intelligence officers involved in interrogating Guantanamo Bay detainees and then provide that information to military defense attorneys representing the detainees so that they could attempt to call intelligence personnel to testify. Unfortunately, it appears that their efforts may have been successful, when last year photographs of intelligence personnel were found in the cells of detainees. News reports indicate that American citizens hired private investigators to surreptitiously photograph intelligence personnel and provide them to enemies of this nation. If true, the disgraceful actions by the individuals involved in the John Adams Project have created a severe security risk for our intelligence community and, ultimately, the American people. Any attempt to identify and expose to potential harm our Nation’s fine intelligence and military officers who serve as our first line of defense is deceitful, shameful, and illegal.

Let’s decode Miller’s histrionics here. It’s about torture. One of the key issues in many of the habeas cases, as well as in the forthcoming military commissions proceedings, is whether statements elicited from prisoners should be excluded because they were secured through the use of coercion—in the most serious cases, through the use of torture. In fact, the prior convening authority, Dick Cheney protégée Susan J. Crawford, concluded that at least one such statement was secured by torture, judges in several of the habeas cases have concluded that impermissible coercion was used, and in one of the military commission proceedings—involving child soldier Omar Khadr—one of his own interrogators testified, against his own interests and considerable government pressure, that he believes that Khadr was tortured. In order to make their case, the defense counsel need to establish if there were written or audiovisual records made of the interrogation sessions. They also have to identify all the potential witnesses and attempt to find out what the witnesses said or didn’t say. They are having a difficult time in this process because the government is not cooperating with them. Moreover, clear evidence–like the videotapes of interrogation sessions–keeps mysteriously disappearing.

Of course, the government can control whether the supposed statements are an issue. It can decide not to rely on them. It also has the power to insist that certain kinds of evidence are classified and can only he heard by the court under restricted circumstances. But the government does not have the right to use the statements against the prisoners and then block any inquiry into how they were secured and who was involved in the process, because that would turn the proceedings into a travesty. Secret evidence of that very sort was regularly used in the Tudor- and Stuart-era Court of Star Chamber, and the Founding Fathers appropriately forbade it—largely because the evidence was usually dishonest and unreliable. The prohibition on secret evidence was made absolute in the seventeenth century. It is “a fundamental common law principle,” as the Court of Appeal ruled just a few weeks ago in rejecting an effort to deny defendants access to evidence of torture in the hands of government interrogators.

The defense counsel working at Guantánamo have been subjected to a barrage of officially sponsored indignities. They have been tarred with ethnic slurs and accusations of homosexuality, accused of undermining national security, subjected to continual petty harassment. They have also had their livelihoods threatened through appeals to their paying clients. These events have been reported as separate incidents in the press, but this conduct results from a carefully orchestrated Bush Administration policy that goes under the rubric of “lawfare.” With the Bush Administration out of power, these efforts have been taken up by former Vice President Dick Cheney, his daughter, and a collection of Republican hacks. There’s nothing remotely “disgraceful” about the efforts of defense counsel to identify witnesses and collect evidence, and to prove torture if indeed torture was used. That’s the essence of justice. Congressman Miller is afraid that the truth of what happened to these prisoners will be fully exposed and that they may be proven innocent. He therefore instinctively wants to silence the lawyers who are putting the lie to his claims. But overcoming the legacy of Guantánamo has to start with learning the truth about what happened there. That may indeed be a painful experience for Miller and his colleagues, but their efforts to interfere with justice will only make the process longer and more painful.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

QUIT Conference Sept 24-26 Quaker Center Ben Lomond, CA

Dear Friend,
Will you please post the enclosed flyer, and share the information below with Friends, through your Meeting newsletter or online community email list? Thank thee!
The QUIT Conference Planning Committee
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Mark Your Calendars Now:
The Third National Quaker Conference on Torture & Accountability:
September 24-26, 2010
Quaker Center, Ben Lomond CA: http://www.quakercenter.org/

Two internationally known anti-torture activists will headline the third Quaker Conference on Torture. Human rights attorney and investigator Scott Horton will be the keynote speaker. Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, will also bring his unique perspective on the work.

Scott Horton has been one of the most tenacious investigators and reporters on issues of torture and accountability. Earlier this year, he broke the stunning story about three Guantanamo prisoners, whose deaths there were previously reported as suicides. Horton's investigations showed they more likely died during torture by US secret units. They were killed at a previously unknown “black site” outside the Guantanamo complex. Scott continues his reporting at a hard-hitting blog, “No Comment” here: http://www.harpers.org/subjects/NoComment

Roy Bourgeois, a decorated Vietnam veteran and former missionary to Bolivia, founded SOA Watch in 1990, and has been active in the effort to abolish the “School of Assassins” ever since. He has also been active in the struggle for women's ordination in the Catholic church.

Friend John Calvi, coordinator of QUIT, The Quaker Initiative to End Torture, has been working on the concern for torture and accountability for several years.

Accountability today is the way to prevent torture in the future. The road to accountability will be long and difficult. This 2010 Quaker conference (which is open to other interested persons as well) will be one strong step down that long path. Watch for more details soon about the program. Fees will be kept as modest as possible, and registration will be limited. More information at the QUIT website: www.quit-torture-now.org

********************************************************************************************************

Patience & Determination: Tools for Ending Torture & Seeking Accountability. 54 pages. $3.00 plus $2 shipping.
This new study booklet from Quaker House and QUIT is for those working to end torture and hold torturers accountable, or seeking encouragement in the effort.

It was produced because, despite an initial flurry of reform, the new administration in Washington has left in place many of the interrogation policies and programs of its predecessors. It has also turned aside efforts to hold accountable those who planned and carried out illegal torture policies and programs.

In short, opposition to a real examination and uprooting of the "Torture Industrial Complex" in the United States is strong and deeply entrenched. There is still much work to do.

This emerging reality has deeply dismayed those who hoped that 2009 would bring a clear break with the history of US torture, and accountability for those responsible as a way of preventing its return. But it has also underlined the need for pressing forward with accountability work.

Such work is difficult and stressful, and requires, in the words of pioneering Swiss torture investigator Dick Marty, "patience and determination"; hence the title.

While torture is a worldwide problem, this booklet is addressed mainly to readers in the United States, where torture became a particularly salient issue in the years since 2002. Patience & Determination includes nine concise selections. All are suitable for private reflection or reading aloud in small group discussion. The booklet is a Quaker initiative, but should be "user-friendly" for other groups.

Keeping up with the developments on torture and accountability in 2009 and now 2010 has been like a roller-coaster ride: full of rapid ups and downs and unexpected twists and turns, with more to come.

Order copies from: Quaker House, 223 Hillside Avenue, Fayetteville NC 28301.
Quantity pricing: 5 copies or more to one address, $2.50 each, plus $1 per copy shipping.

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Obama's Secret Prisons - Gopal

Obama’s Secret Prisons
Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the “Black Jail,” and the Dogs of War in Afghanistan
By Anand Gopal

[The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism .]

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.

Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.

This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

One Dark Night in November

It was the 19th of November 2009, at 3:15 am. A loud blast awoke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni city, a town of ancient provenance in the country’s south. A team of U.S. soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for the Minister of Agriculture. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of whom were sleeping in the family’s one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran towards the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot, but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted towards his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives remaining in the room, but they -- both children -- refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, U.S. forces released Rahman’s cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

“We’ve called his phone, but it doesn’t answer,” says his cousin Qarar, the spokesman for the agriculture minister. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor, and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar’s family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were “enemy militants [that] demonstrated hostile intent.”

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. “Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government,” Qarar says. “Rahman couldn’t even leave the city because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him.”

Beyond the question of Rahman’s guilt or innocence, however, it’s how he was taken that has left such a residue of hate and anger among his family. “Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?” Qarar asks. “They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn’t they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply.”

“I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners,” he adds. “But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don’t care if I get fired for saying it, but that’s the truth.”

The Dogs of War

Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one among a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogation.

In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.

Of the 24 former detainees interviewed for this story, 17 claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials, and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, a body tasked with investigating abuse claims, corroborate 12 of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, U.S. forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby U.S. base. “They interrogated me the whole night,” he recalls, “but I had nothing to tell them.” Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom U.S. forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut, and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point, they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. “They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed.” They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow 12 bottles worth of water. “Two people held my mouth open and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious. It was as if someone had inflated me.” he says. After he was roused from his torpor, he vomited the water uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days; sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, and other times blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually, he was sent on to Bagram where the torture ceased. Four months later, he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from U.S. authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

An investigation of Sher Khan’s case by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and an independent doctor found that he had wounds consistent with the abusive treatment he alleges. U.S. forces have declined to comment on the specifics of his case, but a spokesman said that some soldiers involved in detentions in this part of the country had been given unspecified “administrative punishments.” He added that “all detainees are treated humanely,” except for isolated cases.

The Disappeared

Some of those taken to the Field Detention Sites never make it to Bagram, but instead are simply released after authorities deem them to be innocuous. Even then, some allege abuse. Such was the case with Hajji Ehsanullah, snatched one winter night in 2008 from his home in the southern province of Zabul. He was taken to a detention site in Khost Province, some 200 miles away. He returned home 13 days later, his skin scarred by dog bites and with memory difficulties that, according to his doctor, resulted from a blow to the head. U.S. forces had dropped him off at a gas station in Khost after three days of interrogation. It took him ten more days to find his way home.

Others taken to these sites never end up in Bagram for an entirely different reason. In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, where rumors grow more abundantly than the most bountiful crop, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally, a body turns up. Such was the case at a detention site on an American military base in Helmand province, where in 2003 a U.S. military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in U.S. custody (later made available through the Freedom of Information Act): “Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle). Manner of death is homicide.”

In the dust-swept province of Khost one day this past December, U.S. forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, according to nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses. Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained -- plastic cuffs binding their hands -- were found more than a mile from the largest U.S. base in the area. A U.S. military spokesman denies any involvement in the deaths and declines to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders, however, steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in U.S. custody. American authorities released four other villagers in subsequent days. The fate of the three remaining captives is unknown.

The matter might be cleared up if the U.S. military were less secretive about its detention process. But secrecy has been the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations are aware of them. There may, however, be others whose existences on the scores of military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed. One example, according to former detainees, is the detention facility at Rish Khor, an Afghan army base that sits atop a mountain overlooking the capital, Kabul.

One night last year, U.S. forces raided Zaiwalat, a tiny village that fits snugly into the mountains of Wardak Province, a few dozen miles west of Kabul, and netted nine locals. They brought the captives to Rish Khor and interrogated them for three days. “They kept us in a container,” recalls Rehmatullah Muhammad, one of the nine. “It was made of steel. We were handcuffed for three days continuously. We barely slept those days.” The plain-clothed interrogators accused Rehmatullah and the others of giving food and shelter to the Taliban. The suspects were then sent on to Bagram and released after four months. (A number of former detainees said they were interrogated by plainclothed officials, but they did not know if these officials belonged to the military, the CIA, or private contractors.)

Afghan human rights campaigners worry that U.S. forces may be using secret detention sites like Rish Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The U.S. military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.

The Black Jail

Much less secret is the final stop for most captives: the Bagram Internment Facility. These days ominously dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo,” Bagram nonetheless offers the best conditions for captives during the entire detention process.

Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that would eventually bring them to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the years since, however, it has become the main destination for those caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there. By 2009, the inmate population had swelled to more than 700. Housed in a windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried cage-like cells bathed continuously in white light. Guards walk along a platform that runs across the mesh-tops of the pens, an easy position from which to supervise the prisoners below.

Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison marked Bagram’s early years. Abdullah Mujahed, for example, was apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in 2003. Mujahed was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising against the Taliban in their waning days, but U.S. forces accused him of having ties to the insurgency. “In Bagram, we were handcuffed, blindfolded, and had our feet chained for days,” he recalls. “They didn’t allow us to sleep at all for 13 days and nights.” A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off. Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound of shackles dragging across the floor.

Then, one day, a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft, but refused to tell him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to shout, “This is Guantanamo! You are in Guantanamo!” He would learn there that he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in 2006). The U.S. eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.

Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music 24 hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked, and forced to assume what interrogators term “stress positions.” The nadir came in late 2002 when interrogators beat two inmates to death.

The U.S. Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base that the Red Cross still does not have access to. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the “Black Jail.”

One day two years ago, U.S. forces came to get Noor Muhammad, outside of the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers -- including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day, villagers found the handcuffed corpse of Muhammad’s father, apparently dead from a gunshot.

The soldiers took Muhammad to the Black Jail. “It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights. We didn’t know when it was night and when it was day.” He was held in a concrete, windowless room, in complete solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck, and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, “I am a doctor. It’s my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government.”

Eventually, Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. “I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban,” he says. “I’m happy my father is dead, so he doesn’t have to experience this hell.”

Afraid of the Dark

Unlike the Black Jail, U.S. officials have, in the last two years, moved to reform the main prison at Bagram. Torture there has stopped, and American prison officials now boast that the typical inmate gains 15 pounds while in custody. Sometime in the early months of this year, officials plan to open a dazzling new prison -- that will eventually replace Bagram -- with huge, airy cells, the latest medical equipment, and rooms for vocational training. The Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year, although the rest of the detention process will remain in U.S. hands.

But human rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process still remain. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantanamo cannot be stripped of their right to habeas corpus, but stopped short of making the same argument for Bagram. (U.S. officials say that Bagram is in the midst of a war zone and therefore U.S. domestic civil rights legislation does not apply.) Unlike Guantanamo, inmates there do not have access to a lawyer. Most say they have no idea why they have been detained. Inmates do now appear before a review panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. “I was only allowed to answer yes or no and not explain anything at my hearing,” says Rehmatullah Muhammad.

Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram’s conditions begs the question: Can the U.S. fight a cleaner war? This is what Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal promised this summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared house raids, and a more transparent detention process.

The American troops that operate under NATO command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now officially hold detainees for only 96 hours before transferring them to the Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these restrictions -- and have ways of circumventing them. “Sometimes we detain people, then, when the 96 hours are up, we transfer them to the Afghans,” says one U.S. Marine, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another 96 hours. This keeps going until we get what we want.”

A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the U.S. Special Operations Forces -- the Navy SEALS, Green Berets, and others -- which are not under NATO command and so are not bound by the stricter rules of engagement. These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the search for “high-value suspects.” U.S. military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change, however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny: Special Operations Forces and small field prisons.

The shift signals a deeper reality of war, American soldiers say: you can’t fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you could fight them without bullets. Through the eyes of a U.S. soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own a Kalashnikov. “You can’t trust anyone,” says Rodrigo Arias, a Marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. “I’ve nearly been killed in ambushes but the villagers don’t tell us anything. But they usually know something.”

An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. “Sometimes you’ve got to bust down doors. Sometimes you’ve got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person it makes all the difference.”

For Arias, it’s a matter of survival. “I want to go home in one piece. If that means rounding people up, then round them up.” To question this, he says, is to question whether the war itself is worth fighting. “That’s not my job. The people in Washington can figure that out.”

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. “We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability,” says former detainee Rehmatullah. “But now most people in my village want them to leave.” A year after Rehmatullah was released, his nephew was taken. Two months later, some other villagers were grabbed.

It has become a predictable pattern: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through the village, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards that cover the area. The Americans then return at night to pick up suspects. In the last two years, 16 people have been taken and 10 killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.

The people of this village therefore have begun to fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are now nights when Rehmatullah’s children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them, but admits he needs solace himself. “I know I should be too old for it,” he says, “but this war has made me afraid of the dark.”

Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com . He is currently working on a book about the Afghan war. This piece appears in print in the latest issue of the Nation magazine. To catch him in an audio interview with TomDispatch’s Timothy MacBain discussing how he got this story, click here .

Copyright 2010 Anand Gopal

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Justice Dept Clears Yoo, Bybee torture memo authors

http://www.truthout.org/obamas-doj-clears-torture-memo-authors-john-yoo-jay-bybee-professional-misconduct56531

SATURDAY 30 JANUARY 2010
Justice Department Clears Torture Memo Authors John Yoo, Jay Bybee of Misconduct
Friday 29 January 2010


by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

Department of Justice watchdog report clearsJohn Yoo of misconduct. (Photo: JohnYoo; Edited: JaredRodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
A long-awaited Department of Justice watchdog report that probed whether John Yoo and his former boss Jay Bybee violated professional standards when they provided the Bush White House with legal advice on torture has cleared both men of misconduct, according to Newsweek, citing unnamed sources who have seen the document.
An earlier version of the report, prepared by the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) and completed in December 2008, actually concluded that Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion that authorized CIA officers to use brutal methods when interrogating suspected terrorist detainees.
But as I reported last April, those previous conclusions were watered down after OPR received responses on the report's conclusions from Yoo and Bybee, who both worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC):
Legal sources familiar with the internal debate about the draft report say OPR is in the process of "watering"- down the criticism of legal opinions by [OLC] lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee in 2002 and 2003 and by [OLC acting head Steven Bradbury], who in 2005 reinstated some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions after they had been withdrawn by Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith when he headed the OLC in 2003 and 2004.
David Margolis, the 34-year career prosecutor at the DOJ charged with reviewing the final version of the report, was responsible for "softening" OPR's earlier finding of professional misconduct and instead determined that Yoo and Bybee "showed poor judgment" when they drafted an August 1, 2002 legal opinion authorizing the CIA to employ methods such as waterboarding against detainees during interrogations, according to Newsweek.
That means neither Yoo nor Bybee will be referred to state bar associations where they could have faced disciplinary action since poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct, according to OPR's post-investigation procedures. For Bybee, such a referral could have also led to an impeachment inquiry before Congress.
Yoo and Bybee, however, are still under scrutiny. Legal advocacy groups have filed complaints against them, and others who worked on the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation" program, with state bar associations in hopes that their law licenses will be revoked.
When the report is released and if its conclusions match Newsweek's story, particularly the key finding that Yoo and Bybee did not violate professional standards and won't face disciplinary action, the Obama administration will face a swift backlash from those who say the president and his appointees have gone above and beyond to cover-up war crimes committed by the Bush administration.
Newsweek noted that the OPR report is "sharply critical" of the "legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding" and other methods of torture CIA interrogators used against detainees after 9/11 and that only, a critical conclusion that raises questions about the Obama Justice Department's reasons for not holding Yoo and Bybee accountable.
Moreover, the report, which is still under a declassification review "will provide many new details about how waterboarding was adopted and the role that top White House officials played in the process, say two sources who have read the report but asked for anonymity to describe a sensitive document," Newsweek reported.
Two of the most controversial sections of the 2002 memo—including one contending that the president, as commander in chief, can override a federal law banning torture—were not in the original draft of the memo, say the sources. But when Michael Chertoff, then-chief of Justice’s criminal division, refused the CIA’s request for a blanket pledge not to prosecute its officers for torture, Yoo met at the White House with David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief counsel, and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales. After that, Yoo inserted a section about the commander in chief’s wartime powers and another saying that agency officers accused of torturing Qaeda suspects could claim they were acting in “self-defense” to prevent future terror attacks, the sources say. Both legal claims have long since been rejected by Justice officials as overly broad and unsupported by legal precedent.
The OPR probe was launched in mid-2004 after a meeting in which Jack Goldsmith, then head of the OLC, got into a tense debate with White House lawyers, including Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel David Addington.
That back-and-forth over the OLC’s judgments regarding President Bush’s powers rest at the heart of the Bush administration’s defense of its “enhanced interrogation” techniques that have been widely denounced as torture, such as waterboarding which subjects a person to the panicked gag reflex of drowning and which was used on at least three “high-value” detainees.
Bush officials insist that they were acting under the guidance of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises Presidents on the scope of their constitutional powers. For the OPR report to conclude that Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury violated their professional duties as lawyers and, in effect, gave Bush pre-cooked legal opinions to do what he already wanted to do would have shattered that line of defense.
Goldsmith ended up withdrawing some of the Yoo-Bybee opinions because he felt they were “legally flawed” and “sloppily written.”
He resigned shortly thereafter and was subsequently replaced on an acting basis by Bradbury, who restored some of the controversial Yoo-Bybee opinions in May 2005, again granting George W. Bush broad powers to inflict painful interrogations on detainees.
Last March, the Justice Department revealed that the OPR report underwent revisions after the initial draft was rejected by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, both of who insisted that Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury be given an opportunity to respond to its conclusions.
“Attorney General Mukasey, Deputy Attorney General Filip and OLC provided comments [after the first draft was completed in December], and OPR revised the draft report to the extent it deemed appropriate based on those comments,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Faith Burton in a March 25, 2009 letter to Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Burton also said at the time that the final OPR would likely undergo more revisions based on responses from the former OLC lawyers. Several months later, Durbin and Whitehouse received a letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich who disclosed the post investigation process.
Weich’s letter noted that if the appeals filed by Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury resulted in a rejection of OPR’s findings by the "career official" reviewing the document then no such referral would occur.
"Department policy usually requires referral of OPR's misconduct findings to the subject's state bar disciplinary authority, but if the appeal resulted in a rejection of OPR's misconduct findings, then no referral was made," said Weich’s May 4, 2008 letter to Durbin and Whitehouse. "This process afforded former employees roughly the same opportunity to contest OPR's findings that current employees were afforded through the disciplinary process."
Weich added that the initial draft of the report was also shared with the CIA for a "classification review," and the agency, having reviewed the findings, "requested an opportunity to provide substantive comment on the report."
Durbin and Whitehouse, in a statement last May, said they "will be interested in the scope of the ‘substantive comment' the CIA is providing, and the reasons why an outside agency would have such comment on an internal disciplinary matter."
As Truthout previously reported, Attorney General Eric Holder testified before Congress last year that the OPR report was expected be released by end of November. In interviews over the past month, two senior aides to Democratic lawmakers claimed the report was being held up in lieu of the passage of a health care bill.
But Tracy Schmaler, a DOJ spokeswoman, disputed the allegations.
"That is absolutely untrue," Schmaler said. "One thing has nothing to do with another."
Schmaler said the review "process is ongoing and we hope to have [the report] complete and released soon."
Two DOJ officials familiar with details of the report said a delay in releasing it in the time frame Holder had promised was due, in part, to the fact that Margolis was hospitalized in December for pneumonia.
In his testimony last November, Holder said the report had not been released sooner due to "the amount of time we gave to the lawyers who represented the people who are the subject of the report an opportunity to respond. And then [OPR] had to react to those responses."