Alex Kane
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Guantanamo detainees are still starving themselves, and are still being force-fed. By the military’s latest count, 97 prisoners are on hunger strike, though lawyers say even more have joined the protest. And the convergence of the ongoing protest and the opening of the Bush presidential library has led to a strong New York Times editorial that’s important to highlight.
The editorial strongly denounces the “stain” that Guantanamo represents on the American human rights record. It unequivocally states that the legal mess of indefinite detention is a major legacy of the Bush administration. And the editorial also points out that the Obama administration has failed to close the prison. Here’s an excerpt:
There is another building, far from Dallas on land leased from Cuba, that symbolizes Mr. Bush’s legacy in a darker, truer way: the military penal complex at Guantánamo Bay where Mr. Bush imprisoned hundreds of men after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a vast majority guilty of no crime.
It became the embodiment of his dangerous expansion of executive power and the lawless detentions, secret prisons and torture that went along with them. It is now also a reminder of Mr. Obama’s failure to close the prison as he promised when he took office, and of the malicious interference by Congress in any effort to justly try and punish the Guantánamo inmates...
Whatever Mr. Bush says about how comfortable he is with his “tough” choices, the country must recognize the steep price being paid for what is essentially a political prison. Just as hunger strikes at the infamous Maze Prison in Northern Ireland indelibly stained Britain’s human rights record, so Guantánamo stains America’s.
The Times editorial is the most prominent media effort to shine the light on Guantanamo, a welcome intervention after the issue of indefinite detention had largely fallen off the map. There’s also another, less prominent though still important article to pay attention to concerning the prison camp.
Today, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf published a piece highlighting what is one of the most shocking aspects of Guantanamo: that the Bush administration knew many of the men imprisoned there were absolutely innocent. “Holding prisoners even after their innocence is known, as President Obama and the present Congress are doing even today, is a moral abomination,” writes Friedersdorf. The Atlantic writer linked to this important piece by Truthout investigative reporter Jason Leopold, who had first revealed that a former U.S. official said he was willing to testify to the Bush administration’s knowledge of prisoners’ innocence. Here’s a part of Leopold’s report:
In a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush's first term in office, said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.
"By late August 2002, I found that of the initial 742 detainees that had arrived at Guantánamo, the majority of them had never seen a US soldier in the process of their initial detention and their captivity had not been subjected to any meaningful review," Wilkerson's declaration says. "Secretary Powell was also trying to bring pressure to bear regarding a number of specific detentions because children as young as 12 and 13 and elderly as old as 92 or 93 had been shipped to Guantánamo. By that time, I also understood that the deliberate choice to send detainees to Guantánamo was an attempt to place them outside the jurisdiction of the US legal system."
For more on the Guantanamo hunger strike, check out my piece in AlterNet, "Beatings, Attempted Suicides and Deliberate Starvation: The Dystopic Hell of Guantanamo Bay."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is exploiting the Boston Marathon attacks as a way to defend the New York Police Department’s tactics to fight terrorism. But two progressive City Council members are having none of it.
Bloomberg crassly used a press conference yesterday to take a jab at opponents of the NYPD’s counter-terror tactics--tactics that include widespread surveillance of Muslim communities with no regard as to whether who they are spying on are guilty or innocent of a crime. “The moment that we let our guard down, the moment we get complacent, the moment we allow special interests to shape our security strategies, is the moment that the terrorists are waiting for,” the New York City mayor said. “As a country, we may not be able to thwart every attack. We saw that yesterday. But we must do everything we possibly can to try.”
It was a subtle way of defending the NYPD’s surveillance program. Even though he did not name the spying as one of the “security strategies,” it’s pretty clear he was talking about the NYPD program. It’s also pretty clear that the “special interests” he was referring to are opponents of the NYPD’s massive and probably unconstitutional surveillance program. That program, which was exposed by the Associated Press, is now being challenged in court. The NYPD itself has acknowledged that the widespread spying on Muslims has not produced any leads on potential terrorist plots, so it’s unclear where Bloomberg gets the idea that spying on Muslims is doing something to stop terrorism.
Two City Council members are now speaking up about Bloomberg’s comments. The progressive Brooklyn politicians Brad Lander and Jumaane Williams sent a letter to Bloomberg today. Both of them are sponsors of the Community Safety Act, a set of bills pending in the City Council that would bar discriminatory policing and institute an Inspector General that would provide oversight of the NYPD. Here’s an excerpt from their letter:
We find it distressing that you would politicize the memory of those killed in the tragedy in this way. To suggest that New Yorkers who stand both against terrorism and for civil liberties are “special interests” that “the terrorists are waiting for” is both inappropriate at this tragic moment and degrading to our public dialogue. We ask that you reconsider your comments...
We believe that we can and must keep New Yorkers safe without violating fundamental Constitutional rights. If we have a “special interest,” it is simply equal justice under the law. We are concerned that the NYPD’s Stop, Question and Frisk policy targets African-American and Latino young men, and LGBTQ residents, without reasonable suspicion, the vast majority of whom are guilty only of fitting a bias-based profile. We are concerned that the NYPD’s intelligence program profiles Muslim mosques and student associations for undercover surveillance, even in the absence of any specific leads.
Bloomberg is hardly the only politician exploiting the Boston Marathon attacks. The mayor now joins the likes of Republicans Louie Gohmert and Steve King, who both made anti-immigrant remarks in the aftermath of the Boston attack and implied Muslims had something to do with the bombs with no evidence to back their claims up.
Guantanamo Bay is back in the headlines again, largely thanks to a mass hunger strike that threatens the lives of 166 detainees languishing at the prison camp. Earlier today, activists in the U.S. tried to capitalize on the growing attention to Guantanamo and held a day of action to send a message to the Obama administration: shut the prison down.
The hunger strike has been ongoing since February, and was sparked by searches of the detainees’ cells and their Qu’rans. Detainees have also reported being abused by prison guards and punished for speaking out to their lawyers.
The day of action was organized by Witness Against Torture, the Center for Constitutional Rights and World Can’t Wait. Protests took place in cities ranging from Albany to New York to Chicago to San Francisco. The New Haven Independent covered the action in that city here; Fox News Radio has a report here as well.
“Right now, men detained at Guantánamo are engaged in a large-scale hunger strike that started in early February. Some are in critical condition,” reads a call for action put out on Facebook by the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The unfolding crisis at Guantánamo cannot be divorced from the fact that the vast majority of the 166 remaining prisoners have been imprisoned for more than 11 years without any charge or fair trial, and with no end to their detention in sight.”
Meanwhile, more disturbing news about intrusions on lawyer-prisoner conversations at Guantanamo has emerged, thanks to ProPublica. Cora Currier reports:
The long-troubled military trials at Guantanamo Bay were hit by revelations earlier this year that a secret censor had the ability to cut off courtroom proceedings, and that there were listening devices disguised as smoke detectors in attorney-client meeting rooms.
Now, another potential instance of compromised confidentiality at the military commissions has emerged: Defense attorneys say somebody has accessed their email and servers.
“Defense emails have ended up being provided to the prosecution, material has disappeared off the defense server, and sometimes reappeared, in different formats, or with different names,” said Rick Kammen, a lawyer for Abd Al Rahim Al Nashiri, who is accused of plotting the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole.
The lawyers say they don’t know exactly who is accessing their communications. And it’s not yet clear whether the emails were intentionally grabbed or were scooped up mistakenly due to technical or procedural errors.
Either way, the lawyers are concerned.
The ten-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq should be a reminder to the U.S. of the perils of militarized intervention. But that’s a lesson the U.S., and the Central Intelligence Agency, refuse to learn.
The CIA is reportedly ramping up its presence in Iraq, according to the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper reports that the primary reason the CIA is increasing its activity in the country is the civil war in Syria; there has already been spillover from the war in Syria into Iraq, and the CIA wants to stop more of it from happening.
The intelligence agency will provide support to Iraqi counter-terrorism units fighting an al Qaeda offshoot that is also fueling the insurgency in Syria--an insurgency that the U.S. backs, though the group reportedly affiliated with al Qaeda in Syria has been labeled a terrorist group by the State Department.
Here’s more on the CIA’s role via UPI (the Wall Street Journal article is behind a paywall):
The White House directed the CIA to support CTS [Counter-Terrorism Service] -- an elite anti-terrorism group that reports directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- in a series of secret decisions from 2011 to late 2012, the Journal said.
The CIA has since ramped up its work with the CTS, taking over a mission long run by the U.S. military, administration and defense officials told the newspaper.
U.S. Special Operations Forces previously worked with CTS against al-Qaida in Iraq. But the U.S. military role has dwindled since U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011.
It’s important to note that the CIA is working with a unit that has been accused of committing human rights abuses. According to Human Rights Watch, the Iraqi CTS helps to control a secret detention facility in Baghdad that reports to the Iraqi prime minister. The CTS also helps control another prison where detainees were routinely tortured, according to the human rights group.
March 19th marks the 10th anniversary of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, which resulted in immense destruction inflicted on Iraqi society and countless deaths. And today, The Guardian reveals more details that show just how deep into the moral abyss the U.S. traveled to when it comes to the Iraq War.
The British newspaper, along with BBC Arabic, has published an eye-opening investigation that comes after a 15-month project. The most important takeaway is that the U.S. government aided and abetted sectarian torture squads that unleashed havoc on Sunni Iraqis. The responsibility for this torture reaches all the way to the now-disgraced General David Petraeus, who had responsibility for training Iraqi security forces.
The investigation reveals that the Pentagon appointed a veteran of U.S. “dirty wars” in Latin America to oversee sectarian units that carried out systematic torture against those suspected of being insurgents in the fight against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
That man was Colonel James Steele. Another man, Colonel James Coffman, worked alongside Steele. Coffman reported directly to Petraeus.
The Guardian notes that their investigation was sparked by the actions of Bradley Manning, the Army whistleblower who recently admitted to giving classified material to WikiLeaks. Manning, facing years in prison, leaked thousands of thousands of documents in an effort to spark a debate on U.S. foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those documents included revelations about how “US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished,” as The Guardian put it back in 2010 when they published on the “Iraq War logs.”
Here’s some of the most important parts of today’s Guardian expose on sectarian torture squads:
Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus's "eyes and ears out on the ground" in Iraq.
"They worked hand in hand," said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. "I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there ... the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture."
Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. "Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee," claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.
"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."
There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place, and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees...
The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.
The Guardian concludes by noting that arming and training this paramilitary Shia force helped to fuel the brutal Iraqi civil war. Some of the members of the sectarian paramilitary force came from the Badr brigades--forces that ironically were trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. While the neoconservatives in the Bush administration who helped pushed the Iraq War wanted to reduce the power of Iran, they in fact helped to empower the Islamic Republic, which has forged close ties with the Iraqi government.
Read The Guardian's profile of Col. James Steele here. Watch the video investigation of the Iraqi torture units here.
Tensions are flaring between Israel and the Palestinians, sparked by hunger-strikers in Israeli jails, the death of a Palestinian prisoner allegedly due to torture and protests in response to those events in the West Bank. The tensions have also spread to the Gaza Strip--but if you read the New York Times, you would misunderstand what happened in Gaza recently.
Yesterday, Israel said that a rocket from a militant Palestinian faction flew into the city of Ashkelon. A “subgroup” of the Palestinian faction Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade took responsibility, the New York Times’ Jodi Rudoren reported. The problem with Rudoren’s initial report on the event was that it claimed that the rocket broke the ceasefire between Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza that was reached at the end of intense fighting in November 2012. In reality, Israel has systematically violated the ceasefire by shooting at farmers and fishermen in Gaza and conducting military incursions into the Strip.
Before the story was corrected later in the day (Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center chronicles the original story here), Rudoren wrote:
For the first time in more than three months, at least one rocket fired from the Gaza Strip landed in southern Israel early on Tuesday morning, according to Israeli authorities, breaking a ceasefire that had been in place after eight days of intense violence between Israel and Gaza last fall.
But as Ben White noted in Al Jazeera English, “since late November, Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have averaged over one a day, everyday. These include shootings by troops positioned along the border fence, attacks on fishermen working off the Gaza coast, and incursions by the Israeli army.”
So Rudoren was dead wrong, though this is hardly the first time the New York Times has pushed the Israeli narrative when it comes to events in Palestine.
But there's an upshot: the story has now been changed and is much more accurate. The version that appeared in the print edition of the Times reads:
The rocket, which came down on a road outside the city of Ashkelon and caused no injuries, was the first from Gaza to hit Israel in the three months since a cease-fire agreement ended eight days of cross-border violence. Israel has violated the cease-fire several times by firing on fishermen and farmers approaching newly relaxed security perimeters, but the agreement has otherwise held.
The Palestine Center’s Munayyer positively noted this change. “This is a far better representation of reality than what appeared earlier,” he wrote. “Of course it would have been best had the Times reported on the Israeli violations when they occurred, as they did with this single rocket, but nonetheless the updated version of this article is far improved.” Still, it says something that Rudoren's initial instinct was to blame the breaking of the ceasefire on Palestinians.
It’s an article of faith on the activist left that if George W. Bush--instead of Barack Obama--had been running an out-of-control drone war bombing civilians in Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, massive protests would fill the streets. When I recently spoke with CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin, who has been a one-woman force against the unaccountable and covert drone war pursued by Obama, she said: “It’s been very hard during the four years of the Obama administration to get people to pay attention to this and be outraged enough to do something. During the Bush years this would have been easy, and we would have had thousands and thousands of people out on the streets, but now its been very difficult and tedious.”
Now, there’s data to prove Benjamin’s contention. Salon’s Joan Walsh takes a look at the research of Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler, and reveals that, yes, liberals are hypocrites on the drone war. It seems that many Democrats and liberals put party over policy--so much so that they would express opposition to a drone war if someone else without the last name Obama was running it.
Here’s Walsh on Tesler’s findings:
In a YouGov poll of 1,000 voters last August, Tesler found significantly more support for targeted killing of suspected terrorists among white “racial liberals” (i.e., those liberal on issues of race) and African-Americans when they were told that Obama supported such a policy than when they were not told it was the president’s policy. Only 27 percent of white racial liberals in a control group supported the targeted killing policy, but that jumped to 48 percent among such voters who were told Obama had conducted such targeted killings (which Tesler refers to as the “Obama cue”)...
The U.S. is moving into uncharted political, military and moral territory with the use of drones, as well as expanded claims of presidential powers on targeted killings, on what seems to be a global battlefield in a time of endless war. Some of the very people who might be expected to raise objections to such moves are instead accepting them because they are made by Obama, and they like and trust him.That’s common sense, on one level, but in a country that’s supposed to be governed by laws above men, it’s disturbing – and certainly worth talking about.
Obama’s remarkable life story, and remarkable rise to the presidency, has made some liberals silent on an issue fundamental to how our democracy is operating and how our foreign policy is being conducted. The fact is that liberals’ acquiescence to the drone war has consequences. Civilians are being killed by American drones, but there’s no effective pushback on Obama because the Democrats who voted for him trust him on this issue (and many other issues). And conservatives aren’t coming out swinging against the drone war either--and if they did, they would be rightly called hypocrites.
All of which means that, without effective liberal pushback, the secret and global drone war will continue to be waged without very much dissent. And if a Republican president ever takes the drone war policy to even more extreme heights, these liberals’ cries will be rightly derided as hypocritical. It’s a dangerous worldview to blindly accept what your leader is doing only because you trust him. If Obama started torturing people, would liberals also be silent? The answer, unfortunately, is probably yes.
President Barack Obama’s remarks on Afghanistan last night during his State of the Union address garnered headlines that read, “Obama Promises to End of War in Afghanistan,” as ABC News put it. But much like other Obama foreign policy pronouncements, there’s more than meets the eye on his plan for Afghanistan.
“Tonight, I can announce that, over the next year, another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan. This drawdown will continue,” Obama said. “And by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over. Beyond 2014, America's commitment to a unified and sovereign Afghanistan will endure, but the nature of our commitment will change. We're negotiating an agreement with the Afghan government that focuses on two missions: training and equipping Afghan forces so that the country does not again slip into chaos and counterterrorism efforts that allow us to pursue the remnants of Al Qaeda and their affiliates.”
“Counterterrorism efforts” can mean a lot of different things, and Obama did not flesh out the details of what he meant. If he did, it would have undermined his claim that “our war in Afghanistan will be over.”
A day before Obama’s State of the Union, the Washington Post gave a much more detailed picture of what the Pentagon is pushing for beyond the year 2014:
The Pentagon is pushing a plan that would keep about 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan once the NATO military mission there ends in 2014 but significantly shrink the contingent over the following two years, according to senior U.S. government officials and military officers...
The proposals under consideration call for reducing the U.S. presence by early 2016 to between 3,500 and 6,000 troops. One option under serious discussion envisages further reducing troop levels to under 1,000 by early 2017, with most of the personnel operating from the giant U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
While those details signal that there will be a significant paring down of the military occupation of the country, it’s nowhere near close to an “end to the war.” It appears that the Obama administration plans to keep a U.S. troop presence, coupled with a large embassy in Kabul, in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. The details of how many troops are being haggled over with the Pentagon, but news reports make it clear that there will still be some U.S. troops in Afghanistan for a while after 2014.
And considering that the American public is firmly in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan, it makes sense that Obama would fudge the details in his speech. But it’s not the job of media outlets like ABC News to help him along in that.
NBC News’ scoop on the Obama administration’s memo that summarizes their legal reasoning as to why they can kill American citizens has unleashed a torrent of stories about the U.S. drone program. One of those stories was the Washington Post’s “revelation” that exposed “the existence of a previously secret drone base in Saudi Arabia.” But there’s a few important things to know about that “secret”: it was, in fact, reported on by other outlets in 2011, and the Washington Post knew about the drone base for more than a year but held onto that information at the request of the Obama administration. Other news outlets like the New York Times also appear to have not published that information at the Obama administration's request.
The Washington Post also reported that “the only strike intentionally targeting a U.S. citizen, a 2011 attack that killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki, was carried out in part by CIA drones flown from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.” So the “secret” drone base that others reported on, based in the repressive state of Saudi Arabia, was used to kill an American citizen. One wonders whether that’s the base that also flew the drone that killed 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, another American citizen.
But let’s get back to the problems with the WaPo story. In 2011, as reporter Ryan Deveraux noted on Twitter, the British newspaper The Times revealed that “sources in the Gulf say that the agency is now massed along Yemen’s borders, launching daily missions with unmanned Predator aircraft from bases in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates.” Fox News also reported on the base.
What’s this say about the Post, and other news outlets that also knew about the not-so-secret base but held off on publishing it at the request of the Obama administration? It’s a window into our obsequious corporate press, apparently more concerned about access to the Obama administration than reporting important news. How many other pieces about the drone program does our corporate media know? The Post has come under a lot of justified criticism. Here’s Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Peter Hart on the matter:
Their rationale for withholding this information was simple: The government didn't want them to. And from what the Post is telling us today, they weren't the only ones...
So there was an "informal arrangement among several news organizations" not to report important news because the government felt that it could make things difficult for them...
it's possible that Saudi Arabia will stop allowing the CIA to use its territory to conduct a secret drone war against a third country now that the secret is out. But the possibility that news might affect the world is not a reason to stop doing journalism. Indeed, it's the best reason to do journalism.
The battle over the nomination of Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary is coming to a close tomorrow, as the Senate hearings on his confirmation begin. And in recent weeks, as those hearings grew closer, the right-wing showed just how delusional it can be.
The latest example: neoconservative Kenneth Timmerman writing today in the Washington Times that “the Iranian rulers love Chuck Hagel.” Timmerman also writes that he is “Tehran’s best friend in Washington.” That line is part and parcel of the larger smear campaign waged ever since Hagel’s name was floated. Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol have accused Hagel of being "pro-appeasement of Iran.”
Timmerman’s column offers no evidence for his assertions, as is to be expected. But it’s a useful window into how the right is trying to torpedo Hagel’s nomination.
The reason why Hagel is being smeared as an “appeaser” of Iran is because he has voiced mild skepticism over how U.S. policy towards the country has been conducted. In the past, he has been skeptical of unilateral U.S. sanctions on the country and has cautioned against hastily rushing into a military attack. But he has also backtracked on many of his heterodox positions. The backtracking is the price Hagel had to pay to get nominated in the face of vociferous opposition from neoconservatives like Timmerman.
And even if Hagel hadn’t backtracked, the line that he is a “friend” of Iran is out of left field. Hagel supports international sanctions against Iran and has also left open the possibility that a military attack might be needed. Those are not positions Tehran’s “best friend” would take.
Other neoconservative have gone even further than Timmerman and Kristol. For instance, Frank Gaffney, peddler of Islamophobia and a former Reagan official, suggested that Hagel could be an “Iranian agent.”
Perhaps once Hagel is confirmed, we can ignore these silly smears. And that’s the main reason I’m looking forward to the end of the battle over Hagel.
