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The Intersection

The AP tells a depressing-yet-somehow-familiar story:

The Iraqi prisoner had valuable intelligence, U.S. special forces believed, and they desperately wanted it. They demanded that expert American military trainers teach them the same types of abusive interrogation techniques that North Korea and Vietnamese forces once used against U.S. prisoners of war.

The trainers resisted, according to testimony prepared for a Senate hearing Thursday; the methods were intended to elicit confessions for propaganda use, rather than gather intelligence. They were overruled and ordered to demonstrate on the prisoner in September 2003, early in the war.

The interrogation went ahead before a lead trainer stepped in and stopped it. He and his team were sent home shortly thereafter.

(…)

“In far too many cases, we simply erred in pressing interrogation and interrogators beyond the edge of the envelope; as a result, interrogation was no longer an intelligence collection method; rather, it had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate,” Col. Steven Kleinman said in his prepared testimony.

He headed the small team of military trainers from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency sent to Iraq in September 2003 to help special forces get more information from stubborn and resistant detainees.

“When presented with the choice of getting smarter or getting tougher, we chose the latter,” Kleinman stated.

This is the worst-case intersection of amorality and incompetence.  The Bush administration didn’t care about legality, decency, or even effectiveness - only cruelty and power.

Will we ever wash away the stain?

(h/t dakine)

Add comment September 25th, 2008 at 11:39pm Posted by Eli

How Not To Get Arrested In Minneapolis

In case you haven’t heard about the massive, insane, and very illegal police state activities going on in preparation for the Republican National Convention, this is probably the only way to keep the cops or the Feds from raiding or arresting you:

(Cartoon - and hover-text - by xkcd)

Add comment September 1st, 2008 at 05:37pm Posted by Eli

The More Things Change…

Over three years ago, I was urging Democrats to lay some groundwork to ensure that Republicans couldn’t turn a terrorist attack or other disaster (this was several months before Katrina) into an undeserved political windfall:

Another thing that the Democrats must keep in mind is the very high probability that Republican policies will lead to a financial or terrorist-inflicted disaster. An electoral scandal and constitutional crisis is also a possibility: I believe there are limits to just how large a margin election “gaming” and fraud can cover up without leaving behind a gun too smoky for the media to ignore. What happens if that threshold is exceeded, at least to the point where the election outcome is severely in doubt? What mechanisms do we have for resolving such a situation?

In theory, Democrats should be able to capitalize on any of these negative outcomes, as they can all be laid clearly at the doorstep of the Republicans. In reality, they would be pilloried by the Republicans and the media for opportunistically “politicizing” a national tragedy.

Therefore, what I’m advocating is that the Democrats get out in front and periodically raise a big stink (and for the love of God, don’t capitulate!) about the various ways that the 100% Republican-controlled government has made us vulnerable…

(…)

[M]y point is that the Democrats need to be vocal about these issues in advance, so that everyone knows where they stand before the unthinkable occurs. It’s very easy to denounce terrorist attacks or stock market crashes after they happen, and both sides of the aisle will be doing exactly that. But the Democrats will be on the record as having warned of disaster, while the Republicans will be on record as steamrolling and shouting them down. This will give the Democrats standing and credibility to point the finger of blame after the fact.

(…)

Am I rooting for catastrophe? Of course not. I think it is highly probable, if not inevitable, but I desperately hope to be proven wrong.

What I am rooting for is that the Democrats will not let the Republicans get away with saying, “Well, these things happen, no-one could have seen it coming, we must all pull together now and do whatever we say,” as they did after 9/11. They must be held accountable for their willful refusal to protect America from harm.

Well, here we are three years later, and (as I predicted in that same post), the Democrats haven’t really gotten that message across, much to RJ Eskow’s dismay (and mine):

I’ve been privately warning Democrats for some time that Obama and the party need emergency preparedness plans. Major events between now and November could change the course of the election - especially a U.S. strike on Iran, or a terror attack against Americans at home or abroad.

We’re not seeing any signs of such plans. Not that we should -except that one outcome would be to explain now why Americans are much less safe as the result of GOP policies.

If it seems crass to weigh political considerations in the face of war or tragedy, remember that the future safety of civilians here and elsewhere will be greatly affected by this election. And they - the Republicans - are certainly thinking politically. When McCain’s chief political advisor, lobbyist Charlie Black, said yesterday that a terror attack “would be a big advantage for him, his biggest mistake was excessive honesty. That’s one of the few imaginable scenarios that could lead to a McCain victory in November.

(…)

So what should Obama and the Democrats be doing about these two possibilities? Some of their planning should be invisible - for the speeches that Obama might gave, the surrogates (military and otherwise) that would appear on Democrats’ behalf. But we should be seeing some groundwork being laid now, and we’re not.  So, what should be happening?

[Main bullet points only - check out Eskow's post for the meat behind them]

Guanatanamo and Abu Ghraib should be described as Bush-created “terrorist factories.”

Democrats should explain that torture is un-American, that it breeds terrorists — and that it doesn’t help catch bad guys.

If we surrender our freedoms, the terrorists win.

…Democrats owe it to themselves - and more importantly, to the nation - to start telling the real story immediately. There should be no equivocation and no calculation.

Their motto should be: Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and do what’s right in the meantime.

I still believe that something terrible is going to happen, that the Republicans’ criminal mismanagement of, well, everything, has made it inevitable.  Indeed, some pretty terrible things have already happened, like Katrina and the subprime meltdown.  But when the next terrible thing happens, if Democrats haven’t already shown (or, better yet, tried to fix) how the Republicans have left us vulnerable, they will be unable to fight off the Republicans’ this-is-why-you-need-a-strong-daddy narrative.

(h/t Elliott)

Add comment June 23rd, 2008 at 09:56pm Posted by Eli

A Whole Bushel Of Bad Apples

This is a lot like that report out of the Senate Intelligence Committee - you know, the one saying that BushCo. knowingly lied about the intelligence they had against Iraq before the invasion:

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

The reported evidence — some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today — also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.

“Some have suggested that detainee abuses committed by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and at Guantanamo were the result of a ‘few bad apples’ acting on their own. It would be a lot easier to accept if that were true,” Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in a statement for delivery at a committee hearing this morning. “Senior officials in the United States government sought out information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

(…)

[M]emos and e-mails obtained by investigators reveal that in July 2002, Haynes and other Pentagon officials were soliciting ideas for harsh interrogations from military experts in survival training, according to two congressional officials familiar with the committee’s investigation. By late July, a list was compiled that included many of the techniques that would later be formally approved for use at Guantanamo Bay, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and the hooding of detainees during questioning. The techniques were later used at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq.

(…)

The Guantanamo Bay visit and the effort to compile interrogation tactics appear to show that Pentagon officials were moving toward a formal policy on interrogation before military commanders at the detention camp requested special measures, the officials said. However, top military officers objected to the proposals in a series of memos in November 2002, much earlier than previously reported, congressional investigators said. In early 2003, Rumsfeld formally authorized the techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay.

(…)

“It is increasingly clear that the decision to abandon the rule of law and order torture and abuse was made at the very top,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office. “We look forward to the full investigative report from the Armed Services Committee and call on Congress to hold accountable any and all public officials involved in ordering illegal torture.”

A group of 56 Congressional Democrats last week asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate whether any Bush administration officials may have broken laws in approving the use of harsh interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists.

As with the Senate Intelligence report, this pretty much just confirms and documents what we already knew, and what the Bush administration has been consistently lying about.  In this case, it’s the fact that torture is official BushCo. policy, and they’ve been lying about it all along.

Can’t wait to hear John “I Hate Torture But Voted For It Anyway” McCain’s reaction to this.

Add comment June 17th, 2008 at 06:59am Posted by Eli

The Power Of Names

Helen Thomas is the latest to lament America’s loss of moral standing now that our president has admitted to authorizing something that looks an awful lot like torture.  But in BushCo’s mind, as long as they never call their enhanced interrogation techniques “torture”… then they aren’t.

No matter that most Americans, the Army’s code of conduct, and pretty much the entire civilized world, considers waterboarding torture - as long as the administration (not to mention John McCain) says it isn’t, it’s perfectly okay.  It’d be interesting to see how well that defense stood up at The Hague, but I don’t guess we’ll ever get a chance to find out.

3 comments May 2nd, 2008 at 08:00am Posted by Eli

Media And Democrats Sleeping Through Wakeup Call

What BooMan said:

Asked whether he was aware that his National Security Council Principals Committee discussed and approved torturing human beings that we’re being held at the U.S. government’s mercy, our President responded:

“Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people.” Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

To be more specific about what Bush knew about and approved:

As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA. (…)

These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.

No one with any credibility on human rights thinks that waterboarding is legal under U.S. or international law. And waterboarding is not the only violation of law committed by our government and approved by the president. A look at the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture clearly demonstrates that our country is guilty of numerous violations.

Unfortunately, those with credibility on human rights are not the ones controlling our national narrative.  Instead it’s the shallow corporate-owned Heathers of the media and the cowardly (if not outright complicit) Democrats in Congress.

As recently as March, the president vetoed a bill banning torture. And the international press is covering the news that torture was authorized at the highest levels, even if our domestic press is more concerned with meaningless back and forth arguments in the Democratic primary.

The reputation of our nation has been seriously damaged, and ignoring the damage will only exacerbate the problem. Unfortunately, neither the media nor the Congress appear capable of coming to terms with what was done in our name and doing anything about it. The ACLU is calling for a Special Prosecutor, but it is very unlikely that the Bush administration will willingly authorize someone to investigate them for serious felonies that they have already confessed. Any talk of impeachment must account for the seriously depressing prospect that the Republican Party will act collectively as official apologists for torture and thereby, by failing to convict, establish the unhealthy precedent that the most serious violations of human rights are not worthy of removal from office. Compounding the problem is that a failure to attempt to impeach will establish the same precedent.

It is hard to believe that just ten years ago this nation impeached a president for lying about his sex life in a civil deposition in a case that was eventually tossed for lack of merit. Ten years ago the media could not grant enough coverage to the crimes of the president, but now even confessed felonies are covered over in favor of silly campaign coverage.

(…) We, as a nation, need to do something about this. It is a most difficult thing to come to terms with. There is a strong impulse to set this aside and write it off as an overreaction to the national trauma of 9/11. We see the same instinct in how so many want to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications carriers that were ‘only doing their patriotic duty’ when they allowed the government to violate our 4th Amendment rights and spy on us without judicial warrants. In this case, government officials were ‘only trying to keep us safe’. That’s their defense, but it is not an adequate defense. And it does nothing to justify Bush’s recent veto of a bill banning torture.

Bush and Cheney will be leaving office in nine months, and the easiest thing to do is to just run out the clock. But that isn’t the right thing to do. And it will not absolve us of our responsibility to punish injustice and vindicate our nation’s commitment to human rights and the rule of law. Just look at how the world views us. Are we to let this stand?

And, yet, what can we do? With Clinton and Obama distracted by the primaries and the domestic press in the bag and with Republican complicity and administration obstruction, there seems to be no leadership and no path to a solution.

That leaves the responsibility on citizen activists…people like you and me. If the media won’t cover it, we will. And we will hope that shame compels the media to recognize our shame and agony, and our commitment to our country and its reputation in the world.

Even with a closely fought primary going on, this should be the story of the year, if not the story of the century: The President Of The United States has admitted to approving war crimes.  Impeachment is the very least that Congress should do; criminal prosecution seems far more appropriate (although perhaps not legally feasible for Dubya until he leaves office).

I doubt that Congress will do anything more than hold ineffectual hearings that get stonewalled, so does anyone (i.e., torture victims or their families) have standing to prosecute the evildoers, including Dubya in 2009? That will probably be the only possible way to obtain justice, and for this country to finally begin redeeming itself.

Add comment April 14th, 2008 at 07:20am Posted by Eli

Principals Without Principles

Does this really surprise anyone?

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of “combined” interrogation techniques — using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time — on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

As the national security adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.

Contacted by ABC News today, spokesmen for Tenet, Rumsfeld and Powell declined to comment about the interrogation program or their private discussions in Principals Meetings. Powell said through an assistant there were “hundreds of [Principals] meetings” on a wide variety of topics and that he was “not at liberty to discuss private meetings.”

Hey, you hear that flushing sound, Colin?  That’s the last remaining scraps of your reputation.  Remember when everyone thought you were a statesmanlike man of integrity?  Pretty awesome, wasn’t it?  And now you’re just another of Dubya’s war criminals.

According to a former CIA official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas.

“It kept coming up. CIA wanted us to sign off on each one every time,” said one high-ranking official who asked not to be identified. “They’d say, ‘We’ve got so and so. This is the plan.’”

Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Ashcroft sounds a lot more concerned with optics than ethics.  Powell had a little more of a big-picture concern, but didn’t do squat about it:

Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns — shared by Powell — that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA: “This is your baby. Go do it.”

So Condi is incompetent and evil!  Maybe she would make a perfect running mate for McTrainwreck.  And did Colin Powell always completely lack balls, or did he hand them over to Dubya when he assumed the Secretary Of State position?  Wasn’t this the point (or one of the points) where a Principled Man Of Conscience  says, “I cannot be party to this,” and resigns?  As opposed to, “Gee, I sure wish you guys wouldn’t do that, but okay.”  Heroic.

3 comments April 10th, 2008 at 07:08am Posted by Eli

The Vindictive States Of America

I wish I could say I was shocked…

The case of the “Liberty City Seven” stymied jurors. After a three-month trial late last year, they deadlocked on nearly all of the charges regarding the purported plot by several men to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago.

The one thing jurors could agree upon, however, was that one of the men, Lyglenson Lemorin, 33, was not guilty.

(…)

Yet more than two months after his acquittal on charges of supporting terrorism, Lemorin remains incarcerated, and U.S. immigration officials are moving to deport him to Haiti, which he left more than 20 years ago. Officials are asking an administrative judge to order his deportation based on the same charges that the jury dismissed.

The government’s effort to punish Lemorin despite the acquittal is drawing fire from his attorneys and some legal observers as an attempt to seek retribution in a high-profile case that prosecutors lost after a fair trial.

Even the jury foreman — who said he had been willing to convict some of Lemorin’s co-defendants — said the move to deport Lemorin seems unfair.

“It’s kind of outrageous that the guy was cleared after we spent three months at trial, and now they’re continuing to go after him,” said Jeff Agron, 46, an educator. “They’re getting a second bite at the apple. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

Caught in the middle is Lemorin, a father of two, a Haitian immigrant who came here as a child and is a permanent legal resident of the United States.

“It’s not just double jeopardy — it’s sour grapes,” said Lemorin’s criminal defense attorney, Joel DeFabio. “It’s a mind set at the Department of Justice: ‘We don’t lose — and if we can get you another way, we will.’ ”

Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Lemorin “will get due process.”

Legally, there is nothing to bar the government from pursuing immigration sanctions against Lemorin, experts said, though such action is rare after an acquittal. The immigration charges are a civil matter, and a judge will apply a less strict standard of evidence to the charges that were brought at the criminal trial.

Apparently, it is possible to be guilty even after proven innocent under the Bush legal regime. And vice versa.

(h/t dakine)

Add comment March 2nd, 2008 at 02:13pm Posted by Eli

Principles

The WaPo continues its descent into evil and insanity with this charming editorial:

THE HALLS of Congress are too often filled with cowardice and groupthink. So it is reassuring when not one but two lawmakers show the moral fortitude to defy party politics to take a stand on principle.

Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) showed such courage Friday when they announced their support for attorney-general nominee Michael B. Mukasey. Both are members of the Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to vote Tuesday on Mr. Mukasey’s nomination. It is likely that their support salvaged Mr. Mukasey’s nomination, imperiled because he would not state outright that the interrogation method known as waterboarding, or simulated drowning, is illegal. While we, like Mr. Schumer, Ms. Feinstein and others, would have wished for such an answer, supplying it would have put Mr. Mukasey in conflict with Justice Department memos that likely allow the technique — memos that those who may have carried out or authorized waterboarding relied on for legal protection.

Yes, you heard that right: Caving yet again to the Bush administration and approving an AG nominee who thinks waterboarding is a-ok is a courageous, principled moral stand. Hooray for Charles & Di! They’re not craven, go-along-to-get-along wankers like that Russ Feingold character:

I will vote against the nomination of Judge Mukasey to be the next Attorney General. This was a difficult decision, as Judge Mukasey has many impressive qualities. He is intelligent and experienced and appears to understand the need to depoliticize the Department of Justice and restore its credibility and reputation.

At this point in our history, however, the country also needs an Attorney General who will tell the President that he cannot ignore the laws passed by Congress. Unfortunately, Judge Mukasey was unwilling to reject the extreme and dangerous theories of executive power that this administration has put forward.

The nation’s top law enforcement officer must be able to stand up to a chief executive who thinks he is above the law. The rule of law is too important to our country’s history and to its future to compromise on that bedrock principle.

What a wuss! See how he allows himself to get stampeded by something as trivial as the rule of law! He’s trapped in the same groupthink as the other 15-20 senators who will end up voting against Mukasey.

(h/t whig for the Feingold statement)

1 comment November 5th, 2007 at 06:58am Posted by Eli

Welfare Cheats

For all the Republican outrage about welfare cheats, they never seem to mind when corporations rip the government off…

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

(Which begs the question, just how Iraqi-owned was it?)

…Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

(…)

“If you [blow the whistle], you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, `Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

“The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ‘Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’

“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”

Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

(…)

Then there is Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company - with which he was briefly associated - bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.

He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.

It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.

But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.

Um, WTF. The judge is a Reagan appointee, in case you were wondering.

“It’s a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system,” said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to help the government, and the government didn’t seem to care.”

One way to blow the whistle is to file a “qui tam” lawsuit (taken from the Latin phrase “he who sues for the king, as well as for himself”) under the federal False Claims Act.

Signed by Abraham Lincoln in response to military contractors selling defective products to the Union Army, the act allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf.

The government has the option to sign on, with all plaintiffs receiving a percentage of monetary damages, which are tripled in these suits.

It can be a straightforward and effective way to recoup federal funds lost to fraud. In the past, the Justice Department has joined several such cases and won. They included instances of Medicare and Medicaid overbilling, and padded invoices from domestic contractors.

But the government has not joined a single quit tam suit alleging Iraq reconstruction abuse, estimated in the tens of millions. At least a dozen have been filed since 2004.

They. Don’t. Care. BushCo. doesn’t mind that these companies are ripping them off, because these companies are BushCo’s friends and allies. I’m pretty sure that the ripoffs are an unwritten appendix to the contracts, an understanding that the contractors can take whatever they want, and the government will cover for them.

Do read the whole thing - there’s some especially scary stuff about how the American embassy set Vance and Ertel up.

Mike Stark also points out via e-mail that the War Profiteering Prevention Act has been stuck in committee since January, even though “[t]he two bills are similar and the cost estimates are identical.” I guess no-one cares.

(h/t Jane)

3 comments August 25th, 2007 at 04:10pm Posted by Eli

Help Pat Leahy Restore Habeas Corpus

Go here.

Do it. Now.

Add comment June 26th, 2007 at 06:55am Posted by Eli

This, I Can Believe

I typically assume that every word coming out of the Bush White House is a lie, and I have been right more often than not. But I think I have to make an exception this time:

The White House yesterday denied a report that President Bush will imminently move to close the Guantanamo Bay terror prison in Cuba.

The Associated Press reported that the White House had summoned security chiefs to a meeting today to make a plan, but officials involved in Gitmo matters told the Daily News they were unaware of the gathering.

A National Security Council spokesman said Bush wants to close Camp Delta, but not before military tribunals convene and most detainees are repatriated to their home countries.

“No decisions on the future of Guantanamo Bay are imminent and there will not be a White House meeting [today],” NSC spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

It’s like a little kid saying he’ll give up candy when the world runs out of chocolate…

1 comment June 22nd, 2007 at 11:15am Posted by Eli

Lawlessness

Sidney Blumenthal has a great Salon piece about the complete collapse of the Bush Administration’s constitutional legitimacy.

But the sad fact is, it doesn’t seem to faze anyone. It’s certainly not slowing Dubya down, and I sure haven’t seen it as a narrative in the media, or even very much from the Democratic establishment. Disappointing, but not surprising.

Add comment June 21st, 2007 at 11:21am Posted by Eli

What Have We Become?

Perhaps the most telling line from WaPo’s chilling story about torturers interrogators:

Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

Umm… yeah. When you’re trying to use the Nazis as role models, you have lost your way.

Read the whole thing. I can’t really feel sorry for him, but the American interrogator really is a complete mess. The story also profiles former British and Israeli interrogators, and they’re not exactly normal. Unless you’re a total xenophobe or sociopath, it’s hard to imagine that not having an extreme effect on your psyche.

Good thing the military is loosening its standards to let in more sociopaths, eh?

12 comments June 4th, 2007 at 06:02pm Posted by Eli

Bastard Of The Day

I’m beginning to realize that “Wanker” is just not strong enough…

Last week, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee held a hearing on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, whereby hundreds of “terror suspects who had never been indicted for any crimes” have been abducted and flown to either secret agency prisons or to foreign countries such as Egypt or Syria where they are tortured.

Throughout the hearing, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) aggressively defended the U.S. rendition program and attacked the witnesses, three members of the European parliament, who testified that rendition actually hinders prosecutions of terrorists.

Rohrabacher told the witnesses that Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann would still be alive if they were in charge. He said the witnesses were free to doubt the motives of U.S. rendition since “I know there’s a lot of people who hate America.”

At one point, Rohrabacher argued that imprisoning and torturing one innocent person was a fair price to pay for locking up 50 terrorists who would “go out and plant a bomb…and kill 20,000 people.” When members of the audience groaned, Rohrabacher said, “Well, I hope it’s your families, I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences.”

Of course, if they’re Christians, they won’t mind…

5 comments April 25th, 2007 at 06:55am Posted by Eli

Shorter Bush Administration

“Hey everybody! Remember that one time we actually caught a terrorist mastermind? Only we can protect you from the Scarybadmen!”

UPDATE: ellroon’s comment is, of course, completely correct. This is a pathetic attempt to distract from the latest cloud of scandals. It’s an amazingly inept and transparent one, though: a guy everyone already assumed was guillty years ago confessed?

Big freakin’ deal. It’s barely newsworthy, but they want everyone to think we captured him all over again. I guess “Saddam’s Funniest Prison Videos” is next.

5 comments March 15th, 2007 at 11:15am Posted by Eli

Oh, The Injustice!

Today’s NYT lead editorial makes an interesting point:

It was another reminder of how precious the American judicial system is, at a time when it is under serious attack from the same administration Mr. Libby served. That administration is systematically denying the right of counsel, the right to evidence and even the right to be tried to scores of prisoners who may have committed no crimes at all.

How many of the right-wing attack monkeys who lament this terrible railroading of an innocent man feel the same quivering outrage about all the prisoners at Gitmo who are presumed guilty with no opportunity to assert their innocence?

2 comments March 7th, 2007 at 12:08pm Posted by Eli

Couldn’t Shiv The Habit

Might be time for prisons to start stocking up on nicotine patches…

Two inmates housed in a smoke-free prison traded a hostage for cigarettes after a six-hour standoff.

Billy Grubb, 32, and Bradley Johnson, 25, attacked the guard Monday night, said Howard Carlton, warden of the Northeast Correctional Complex.

”As the night progressed they started saying, ‘Look, we’ll give up if you let us have some tobacco. If you do that, we’ll go back to our cell,”’ Carlton said. ”They got them some cigarettes, they smoked them and went back to their cell and locked themselves back in.”

I think the moral of this story is pretty obvious: Never take a job as a guard in a smoke-free prison.

4 comments February 28th, 2007 at 04:40pm Posted by Eli

Quotes Of The Day

From an excellent Vanity Fair piece about an Abu Ghraib detainee and the post-sadist guard who befriended him:

Ben Thompson, the guard:

I believe that there is always an opportunity to connect with other people, to look another person in the eye and to see them for who they really are. I think we should never allow a situation, no matter how complicated it is, to mask our ability to sympathize or to prevent us from feeling the suffering of other people.

Yunis Abbas, the prisoner:

He was a very honest soldier, because he told me, always, “You and all those guys inside the camp, I know you are not guilty.” And he [would] always help me out, help the prisoners, [bring us] food or blankets or T-shirts or socks. He always wanted to help, because he loved Iraqi people. He told me, “We need peace. Me and you, we are brothers.”

We need more like this. A lot more. (Speaking of which, their story is told in the soon-to-be-released The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair.)

Frankly, I can’t think of anything we could do at this point that could give the Iraqis fond feelings towards the United States. Except possibly in the Kurdish areas, everyone in Iraq has been tortured, raped, wounded, killed, afraid for their life, humiliated, or just plain fucked over… or knows someone who has. Maybe not always directly at the hands of Americans, but everyone understands that we are responsible. Iraq may someday have a truly democratic government, and it may someday have a pro-American government, but it will never, ever have a truly democratic pro-American government.

(Thanks to baconpowder for the tip!)

1 comment February 22nd, 2007 at 09:13pm Posted by Eli

But Who Will Be Watching?

It’s a shame this is only being shown on a premium cable channel:

“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” a new HBO documentary produced and directed by Rory Kennedy, daringly approaches a scandal that hardly anyone wants to see reexamined — least of all, one can safely assume, the Bush administration and the Pentagon.

The reason is not just that what happened at Abu Ghraib is, to understate in the extreme, unpleasant. The documentary says it’s also because this breakdown was not so much nervous as inevitable — and not so spontaneous, having been sanctioned by the top brass, including former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

(…)

The photos [Kennedy] shows from Abu Ghraib are very explicit and, unlike the versions shown in newspapers and on television in 2004 when the story broke, uncensored.

We see naked prisoners in humiliating situations — a man tied at the end of a leash, like a dog; a group of naked prisoners arranged in a lopsided human pyramid; men positioned in ways to suggest homosexual acts. Kennedy was right to show these pictures, but she should have been less genteel in what she showed of the 9/11 attacks. America violated the rules on interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and for that, there is no excuse. But one must take into account the fury felt in the aftermath of 9/11 over monstrosities that also violated every covenant of “civilized” warfare.

This is irrelevant bollocks, and it would have created a false equivalence between genuine terrorists and largely innocent victims who had nothing to do with 9/11. It would reinforce one of the unspoken reasons for the torture; namely collective punishment against the Arab/Muslim world for being home to the terrorists.

This discrepancy doesn’t really lessen the film’s power. And in interviews with some of the men and women who perpetrated the torture, or who posed cheerfully (almost like tourists at Niagara Falls) with the victims, we see them looking anything but furious or consumed with wrath. Instead, they smile in the photos and, in the interview segments, they speak with a kind of numb, casual regret — but nothing like wrenching shame or sorrow.

Like I said, the 9/11 argument is bollocks. The torturers weren’t blinded with rage, they just got off on inflicting pain and humiliation; on having absolute power over their victims.

Kennedy suggests the torture was not an outbreak of lunacy but the direct result of policies handed down by Rumsfeld that were designed to circumvent the Geneva Conventions (which specify that prisoners of war be “treated humanely”) and U.N. conventions against torture, to which the United States is, at least technically, a signatory. That was done by, among other things, refusing to classify the up to 6,000 inmates of Abu Ghraib as prisoners of war; Rumsfeld instead calls them “unlawful combatants” at a news conference. Then the term “torture” was redefined so narrowly in government memos that it would be almost impossible to commit it.

When the scandal broke, the administration sent out “conscious disinformation,” one former official recalls, including the trivializing assertion that what happened at Abu Ghraib was just ” ‘Animal House’ on the night shift.”…

It could easily be argued that it was the torturers and not the tortured who suffered the most as a result of what happened at Abu Ghraib….

Umm… NO.

The wider moral of the film is simpler and nonpolitical and painfully, poignantly evident: When you treat people as less than human, you become less than human yourself.

Okay, I can buy that. Just don’t try to tell me that the torturers suffered more than their victims.

I’m glad this is getting more attention, and that Kennedy is making the case that Abu Ghraib was the result of deliberate high-level decisions rather than a few “bad apples.” Unfortunately, it’s about two and a half years too late.

4 comments February 22nd, 2007 at 12:39pm Posted by Eli

What I’ve Been Sayin’

Here’s me, 14 months ago:

Bush’s claim that he had to take extraordinary measures to fight terror is at odds with his resolute unwillingness to take ordinary measures against terror.

And a couple of days before that, talking about “the discrepancy between the level of anti-terrorism commitment the Administration pretends to have, vs. the level of commitment they’ve actually demonstrated thus far”:

Bush claims that the War On Terror is so important that he has to break the law in order to wage it effectively. But if that’s true, why hasn’t he put his foot down that Homeland Security funds be allocated on the basis of need, and not used for air-conditioned garbage trucks or police dog body armor? Why doesn’t he buck the nuclear and chemical industries to force them to improve their plant security? Why has he ignored all the recommendations of the 9/11 Committee?

As with torture, it looks as though Bush and the Republicans are only interested in “anti-terror” methods if they are illegal. For me, it begs the question: Is preventing terror attacks the end which justifies the means of violating individual rights, or are those violations an end unto themselves?

Glenn Greenwald yesterday:

One of the most notable aspects of the rhetoric used by Bush followers — particularly their shrill insistence that the Global Epic War of Civilizations/World War III/World War IV (or, as Gaffney called it in his column, The “War for the Free World [that] began on September 11, 2001″) — is how obvious they make it that they do not actually believe their own rhetoric.

They oppose any real sacrifice that would enable us to “fight the war” much more effectively (such as a draft or increased taxes), oppose virtually every counter-terrorism measure that does not involve either fun new wars or fewer limits on presidential power (such as the boring proposals for more rigorous port inspections, which these advocates of the $8 billion-per-month Iraq war have the audacity to oppose on grounds of cost), and worst of all, their constant prioritizing of relatively petty concerns over their vaunted “terrorism war” (such as Orrin Hatch’s recent demand that Alberto Gonzales devote more FBI and other law enforcement resources to combating the Evils of Online Pornography rather than, say, hunting down all the lurking Al Qaeda cells about to unleash radiological bombs in our children’s school houses).

They only get excited about their Grand Global War of Civilizations Which is More Important Than Any War Ever when it can be used to justify starting wars, blowing things up, increased surveillance on Americans, and breaking laws. Everything else — genuine measures to combat terrorism — bores them, and true counter-terrorism measures always are subordinated to their other priorities, whether it be tax cuts or the Drug War. The hallmark of an inauthentic belief is a refusal to sacrifice for it. When it comes to their Glorious War, the Bush administration and its followers ooze nothing but a refusal to sacrifice.

Great minds, and all that. I wonder how many more months it’ll take for the Democratic party to pick up on this. They don’t read my blog, but hopefully they read Greenwald’s.

9 comments February 16th, 2007 at 11:23am Posted by Eli

Fifthiness

Well, this brings the percentage of the Bill Of Rights that the Republicans are in favor of all the way up to 20%, although if too many Democrats start buying guns, look for some “enemy of the state” exclusions to get carved out…

General [Geoffrey "Gitmoize Me"] Miller has denied recommending the use of guard dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogations in Iraq. He also recently said he would not testify in the courts-martial of Sergeants Cardona and Smith, invoking his right to avoid self-incrimination. As someone who voluntarily spoke at length about my actions in Iraq to investigators, without a lawyer present, I can’t have a favorable opinion of General Miller. By doing the military equivalent of “taking the Fifth,” he’s decided to protect himself, apparently happy to let two dog handlers take the fall - a stunning betrayal of his subordinates and Army values.

Read the whole piece, which is a chilling insider’s look at the torture and deliberate graying-out of moral and legal values at Abu Ghraib. But I thought this paragraph was particularly striking, since to me it sounds an awful lot like an admission of guilt at a very senior command level (this would be especially interesting if the new release of Abu Ghraib photos were getting any traction, which they sadly are not). But I guess as long as you don’t actually get charged with anything, it doesn’t count. Bygones!

UPDATE: The incomparable and out-of-nowhere Glenn Greenwald explains all about the Republicans’ deep and lasting commitment to personal responsibility.

(greenwald tip thinks to Atrios)

2 comments February 28th, 2006 at 11:27am Posted by Eli

Must… Control… Fist… Of… Death…

This is one of those occasions where mere words cannot contain my disgust with these people:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice chastised Europe leaders today, saying that before they complain about secret jails for terror suspects in European nations, they should realize that interrogations of these suspects have produced information that helped “save European lives.”

In her remarks, the Bush Administration’s official response to the reports of a network of secret detention centers, Ms. Rice repeatedly emphasized that the United States does not countenance the torture of terrorism suspects, at the hands of either American or foreign captors.

(Oh, I’m sure that makes the Europeans feel much better)

Noting that half-a-dozen international investigations are underway, Ms. Rice did not explicitly confirm the existence of the detentions center. But that was implicit in her remarks.

“We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible,” she said. “But there have been many cases where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option.”

“In those cases,” she added, “the local government can make the sovereign choice to cooperate in the transfer of a suspect to a third country, which is known as a rendition.

“Sometimes, these efforts are misunderstood,” she said.

(snip)

Ms. Rice insisted that the United States had done nothing wrong.

Many of the imprisoned suspects “are effectively stateless,” she maintained, “owing allegiance only to the extremist cause of transnational terrorism. Many are extremely dangerous.”

She made an effort to frame the debate as one over the effectiveness of terror enforcement and not over the propriety of holding suspects indefinitely in secret prisons.

“We consider the captured members of Al Qaeda and its allies to be unlawful combatants who may be held, in accordance with the law of war, to keep them from killing innocents,” she said. “We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible.”

Um, what law of war would that be? The law the President and his merry men and, well, whatever you are make up as you go along don’t actually have any international standing, you know.

The European nations must decide, she added, whether they “wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries.”

Were they given that choice up front (or were they bullied into it)? Or are they only know getting to make that decision after the fact, now that you’ve been busted?

This crap might still play with American audiences, but I don’t think it’s fooling the Europeans for a second. Of course, the Europeans don’t vote in our elections, so they’re probably not the target audience anyway.

1 comment December 5th, 2005 at 09:38am Posted by Eli

Guilty Even After Proven Innocent

Very disturbing column in today’s Washington Post, written by P. Sabin Willett, a defense lawyer for some of the Gitmo detainees:

As the Senate prepared to vote Thursday to abolish the writ of habeas corpus, Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jon Kyl were railing about lawyers like me. Filing lawsuits on behalf of the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Terrorists! Kyl must have said the word 30 times.

As I listened, I wished the senators could meet my client Adel.

Adel is innocent. I don’t mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And these facts would still be a secret but for one thing: habeas corpus.

Only habeas corpus got Adel a chance to tell a federal judge what had happened. Only habeas corpus revealed that it wasn’t just Adel who was innocent — it was Abu Bakker and Ahmet and Ayoub and Zakerjain and Sadiq — all Guantanamo “terrorists” whom the military has found innocent.

(snip)

In a wiser past, we tried Nazi war criminals in the sunlight. Summing up for the prosecution at Nuremberg, Robert Jackson said that “the future will never have to ask, with misgiving: ‘What could the Nazis have said in their favor?’ History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say…. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength.”

(snip)

The secretary of defense chained Adel, took him to Cuba, imprisoned him and sends teams of lawyers to fight any effort to get his case heard. Now the Senate has voted to lock down his only hope, the courts, and to throw away the key forever. Before they do this, I have a last request on his behalf. I make it to the 49 senators who voted for this amendment.

The technical detail here is that Adel is an Uighur, a member of China’s repressed Muslim minority, and therefore might not be safe in his home country. But the DoD has been saying this for over two years now, while claiming to be searching for a safe haven for him. This would be a lot more believable if they weren’t trying to cover up his status and suppress his attempts to gain release. It sounds like an excuse to keep an inconvenient and embarrassing person under wraps; not sincere concern for his well-being.

In other words, not only are we holding people prisoner indefinitely who have not been convicted of terrorism, we are also indefinitely holding people who have been acquitted of terrorism. The Republican gremlins (and some of their allegedly Democratic friends) are nibbling away at the Constitution while America sleeps. Will there be anything left when we wake up?

2 comments November 14th, 2005 at 03:43pm Posted by Eli

Tell Me Again What Durbin Apologized For?

Interesting Op-Ed piece in the NYT today:

Fearful of future terrorist attacks and frustrated by the slow progress of intelligence-gathering from prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon officials turned to the closest thing on their organizational charts to a school for torture. That was a classified program at Fort Bragg, N.C., known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. Based on studies of North Korean and Vietnamese efforts to break American prisoners, SERE was intended to train American soldiers to resist the abuse they might face in enemy custody.

The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the United States Southern Command, Gen. James T. Hill, said a team from Guantanamo went “up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques” for “high-profile, high-value” detainees. General Hill had sent this list - which included prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault and the exploitation of detainees’ phobias - to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who approved most of the tactics in December 2002.

Some within the Pentagon warned that these tactics constituted torture, but a top adviser to Secretary Rumsfeld justified them by pointing to their use in SERE training, a senior Pentagon official told us last month.

(snip)

SERE methods are classified, but the program’s principles are known. It sought to recreate the brutal conditions American prisoners of war experienced in Korea and Vietnam, where Communist interrogators forced false confessions from some detainees, and broke the spirits of many more, through Pavlovian and other conditioning. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, painful body positions and punitive control over life’s most intimate functions produced overwhelming stress in these prisoners. Stress led in turn to despair, uncontrollable anxiety and a collapse of self-esteem. Sometimes hallucinations and delusions ensued. Prisoners who had been through this treatment became pliable and craved companionship, easing the way for captors to obtain the “confessions” they sought.

…At Guantanamo, SERE-trained mental health professionals [worked] with guards and medical personnel to uncover resistant prisoners’ vulnerabilities. “We know if you’ve been despondent; we know if you’ve been homesick,” General Hill said. “That is given to interrogators and that helps the interrogators’ make their plans.”

(snip)

A full account of how our leaders reacted to terrorism by re-engineering Red Army methods must await an independent inquiry. But the SERE model’s embrace by the Pentagon’s civilian leaders is further evidence that abuse tantamount to torture was national policy, not merely the product of rogue freelancers. After the shock of 9/11 - when Americans desperately wanted mastery over a world that suddenly seemed terrifying - this policy had visceral appeal. But it’s the task of command authority to connect means and ends rationally. The Bush administration has too frequently failed to do this. And so it is urgent that Congress step in to tie our detainee policy to our national interest.

So when Dick Durbin compared our treatment of detainees to that of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union and was subsequently vilified to the point of tearful apology for it, it was not hyperbole - it was quite literally true. We have become the enemy.

Also note that this utterly obliterates the “few bad apples” defense that the military and the administration shamefully and successfully deployed when the Abu Ghraib torture photos first surfaced. There are some other interesting nuggets as well, such as an observation that the primary goal of the Communist torturers SERE emulated was false confessions, not actionable intelligence.

1 comment November 14th, 2005 at 11:40am Posted by Eli

Oh. Nevermind.

Sorry, got excited there for a second when I saw the NYT headline, “G.O.P. Leaders Seek Inquiry on Leaks of Government Secrets,” but it was just about the revelation about the secret overseas torture prisons.

Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Senate majority leader, and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois wrote in a letter to intelligence committee chairmen that leaking such information “could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences” for the security of the United States.

The letter, to Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, and his House counterpart, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, both Republicans, complained that the leaking of classified information by government employees appeared to have increased, “establishing a dangerous trend that, if not addressed swiftly and firmly, likely will worsen.”

I don’t see what they’re getting so worked up about. This leak business just looks like good old-fashioned hardball politics to me. Besides, everyone already knew about the secret torture prisons anyway.

And need I mention that the administration has already established a clear precedent on just exactly how to address security leaks “swiftly and firmly”?

1 comment November 8th, 2005 at 04:22pm Posted by Eli

Torture Song Trilogy

Okay, so. BushCo is still fighting the release of additional Abu Ghraib images tooth & nail. They have apparently abandoned the truly laughable “It would humiliate the torture victims” rationale (I think that ship has already sailed, eh?), and have moved on to how “al-Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill.” Phila has an excellent post covering the moral bankruptcy of this strategy, but I want to talk a little bit about the stakes here, and why it’s so important to the administration to suppress any more Abu Ghraib pictures.

Why should this be a big deal? After all, we’ve already seen pictures from Abu Ghraib, and everyone was suitably outraged. Even if the new pictures are worse, does it really make that big of a difference? Well, consider: Americans generally have short attention spans, and need the immediacy that images provide. Verbal descriptions of Abu Ghraib (and later, Gitmo) had absolutely zero effect. And now that everyone’s seen the pictures, they’re old news, and the scandal is essentially forgotten.

So why is this important now? Because when the first wave of Abu Ghraib pictures was released, the administration successfully palmed responsibility off on “a few bad apples,” and most people were satisfied with that. But since then, revelations have come out about very similar tactics being employed at Guantanamo Bay, and still more damning, the fact that the torture and humiliation started at Abu Ghraib shortly after the general in charge of Gitmo transferred to Iraq. Right now, those linkages are dormant, because all they do is link a non-story (no photos of Gitmo) to an ex-story (old news!). But release additional photos from Abu Ghraib, and some people will start asking the same how-could-this-happen questions again. And this time, the old excuses will be a lot harder to sustain.

Conversely, if the administration succeeds in suppressing the additional Abu Ghraib photos, the coverup of their culpability will be successful. No-one will dig into the connections between Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, the connections that demonstrate that torture was systemic, pervasive, and instituted from a very very high level. We need those pictures to come out, and we need someone to start asking the right questions. A congressional investigation and/or special prosecutor would be appropriate but unlikely. Let’s hope the media is on the job this time, or that the bad apples have some intrepid, fearless, and publicity-seeking legal representation.

4 comments August 15th, 2005 at 12:17am Posted by Eli

Trans-Oceanic Bad Apples

I, for one, am completely shocked and amazed…

Interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, forced a stubborn detainee to wear women’s underwear on his head, confronted him with snarling military working dogs and attached a leash to his chains, according to a newly released military investigation that shows the tactics were employed there months before military police used them on detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

(snip)

The report’s findings are the strongest indication yet that the abusive practices seen in photographs at Abu Ghraib were not the invention of a small group of thrill-seeking military police officers. The report shows that they were used on Qahtani several months before the United States invaded Iraq.

The investigation also supports the idea that soldiers believed that placing hoods on detainees, forcing them to appear nude in front of women and sexually humiliating them were approved interrogation techniques for use on detainees.

(snip)

[Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay] traveled to Iraq in September 2003 to assist in Abu Ghraib’s startup, and he later sent in “Tiger Teams” of Guantanamo Bay interrogators and analysts as advisers and trainers. Within weeks of his departure from Abu Ghraib, military working dogs were being used in interrogations, and naked detainees were humiliated and abused by military police soldiers working the night shift.

Who could have seen this coming? Of course, Abu Ghraib is all water under the board, and hardly anyone remembers it, must less is angered or ashamed by it, and as long as there are no pictures out of Gitmo, and assuming the second wave of Abu Ghraib photos stays under wraps, this isn’t going to make a ripple, especially in the heavy surf of Rovegate and the upcoming Supreme Court nomination battle(s). Actually, this might be another good reason not to nominate Gonzales - the White House probably doesn’t want torture coming up as a discussion topic if they can possibly help it.

2 comments July 14th, 2005 at 05:41pm Posted by Eli

Human Rights Are On The March!

Jaysus. How is this not news? Bad enough that we’re torturing detainees, but torturing children??? What the HELL has happened to America?

…before the transfer of sovereignty from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi interim government a year ago, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported registering 107 detainees under 18 during visits to six prisons controlled by coalition troops. Some detainees were as young as 8.

Since that time, Human Rights Watch reports that the number has risen. The figures from Afghanistan are still more alarming: the journalist Seymour Hersh wrote last month in the British newspaper The Guardian that a memo addressed to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld shortly after the 2001 invasion reported “800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody.”

Juvenile detainees in American facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Base have been subject to the same mistreatment as adults. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Pentagon itself have gathered substantial testimony of torture of children, bolstered by accounts from soldiers who witnessed or participated in the abuse.

(snip)

A Pentagon investigation last year by Maj. Gen. George Fay reported that in January 2004, a leashed but unmuzzled military guard dog was allowed into a cell holding two children. The intention was for the dog to ” ‘go nuts on the kids,’ barking and scaring them.” The children were screaming and the smaller one tried to hide behind the larger, the report said, as a soldier allowed the dog to get within about one foot of them. A girl named Juda Hafez Ahmad told Amnesty International that when she was held in Abu Ghraib she “saw one of the guards allow his dog to bite a 14-year-old boy on the leg.”

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, told Maj. General Fay about visiting a weeping 11-year-old detainee in the prison’s notorious Cellblock 1B, which housed prisoners designated high risk. “He told me he was almost 12,” General Karpinski recalled, and that “he really wanted to see his mother, could he please call his mother.”

Children like this 11 year old held at Abu Ghraib have been denied the right to see their parents, a lawyer, or anyone else. They were not told why they were detained, let alone for how long. A Pentagon spokesman told Mr. Hersh that juveniles received some special care, but added, “Age is not a determining factor in detention.” The United States has found, the spokesman said, that “age does not necessarily diminish threat potential.”

Well, I hope all you Republicans and torture apologists are pleased with yourselves. Bravo. Well done. Keep focusing on that legacy, President Bush.

3 comments June 29th, 2005 at 10:19am Posted by Eli

Lord, I Was Born A Rambling Ma-aann…

In which I veer wildly across topic lanes without signalling.

Okay, I’m still completely mystified by this whole “moral values” thing. Just reading a couple of days’ worth of NYT, I see a Frank Rich piece documenting multiple baldfaced lies and a significant whiff of corruption around the head of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, fallout from an article about extraordinary rendition (about half the letter-writers are outraged that the NYT would dare to expose the CIA’s top-secret kidnapping aeroplane like that), and letters expressing horror at the complicity of American psychiatrists in the torture at Gitmo, in violation of every applicable tenet of medical ethics. And somewhat less recently, we apparently have the administration admitting to torture, or at least abuse, at Gitmo (thanks to smalfish for the link!).

I continue to be amazed at how this is all apparently okay. Head of the CPB is a nakedly partisan pathological liar? No problem. Kidnapping people and covertly flying them to countries that will torture them for us? Shrug. Psychiatrists wiping their asses with the Hippocratic Oath at the Gitmo Torture Factory? Hey, shit happens.

All of which indirectly goes back to filkertom’s question and driftglass’s recurring theme about how Republicans and so-called conservatives can be okay with all the evil done in their name. To expand on my comments on his post a little bit more, I think the Republicans can be very roughly broken down into two groups:

The first group, the genuinely evil group, are the people who really don’t care about right or wrong, just so long as the government advances their agenda, be it accumulating and retaining wealth or indulging their hatred of The Other, be they brown, black, female, gay, or simply not-fundie. These are the rich/corporate and religious leadership of the Republican party, embodied by Grover Norquist and James Dobson, respectively. They also have an abundant army of selfish executives, wannabe entrepreneurs, racists, and fundamentalists at their disposal.

The second group, which I certainly hope is the larger, are the mostly decent people who get all their news from the TV, and simply don’t realize what is being done in their name. They uncritically absorb all the talking points the first group feeds them, and genuinely believe that invading Iraq will ultimately lead to democracy and drain the terrorist swamp, that the poor just need to stop being coddled so they have to stop loafing and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, and that AIDS could be eliminated if people would just stop sleeping around so much. And any mistreatment of prisoners is either the actions of a few bad apples, or is simply not so bad (two types of fruit!). If you tune out dissenting voices and don’t examine it too critically, it’s a fairly benevolent and compelling narrative that allows these Republicans to believe that they’re still on the side of righteousness and America and apple pie.

Obviously, there’s no way to persuade the first group - they know the score, and they like it. The question is, how do we persuade the second group, especially when they desperately want to go on believing that their team is the good guys? How do we convince them without making them stick their fingers in their ears, yelling “La la la la la, I’m not listening!” Yes, we can peel some of them off on a one-to-one basis, but is that enough to consign the Republicans to the wilderness where they belong? Is there any way to start reaching them wholesale?

The media has gotten a little bit better, but when it comes to subjects like the DSM, they’re reluctant to cover and eager to drop, and even then only because of the liberal blogosphere going positively big brass ballistic about it. And as long as the Republicans control the media, they control reality. The blogosphere’s nice, but it’s not exactly widespread, and there are enough right-wing blogs that it’s not necessarily a given that replacing the media with the blogosphere would be a clear-cut liberal victory. AAR and Pacifica are good too, but again, not nearly pervasive enough, especially when compared to their right-wing radio counterparts.

So yeah, filk’s questions are good ones, but I just don’t know how we’re going to get them out there where the right people will read them, or how to get them to really think about them rather than dismissing them as liberal propaganda. I’m open to suggestions, but I’m not sure “pray for Soros to launch an insanely popular liberal news network” is sufficiently realistic.

2 comments June 27th, 2005 at 07:58pm Posted by Eli