Month: March 2014

Imagine you commit a heinous crime. Then imagine that, once facing charges in court, you’re allowed to withhold incriminating evidence brought forth by the prosecutors, keeping the jury in the dark about the details of your lawbreaking. Further, imagine you commit more crimes while on trial and imagine the judge enables and covers up these additional offenses.

Who would call this a fair trial? Clearly, it’s nothing but a mockery of the rule of law.

But that’s essentially how the Senate investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era torture program has proceeded and the chaos seemed to have hit its zenith with Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s testimony on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday. She accused the CIA of violating formal agreements with the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating its torture program, and of violating “the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the C.I.A. from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.”

The story she told is appalling, but it is also convoluted. Below is a short-list of things that stuck out to me.

• Since 2006, the CIA has continually misled the Senate committee about the extent and severity of the torture and interrogation program in an attempt to hide from public view torture methods employed that were “far different and far more harsh” than what had already been reported in the newspapers.
• In response to the Senate committee’s demands to access classified material documenting CIA torture and interrogation, the CIA insisted that investigators only be allowed to view the documents in a secure facility on secure computers chosen by the CIA. The CIA later hacked into the committee’s independent computer network to spy on the investigators’ activities.
• In sifting through millions of documents the CIA was compelled to provide on this supposedly secure network, Committee investigators came across an internal CIA review conducted in Obama’s first term while Leon Panetta was CIA director. This internal review concluded, among other things, that crimes had indeed been committed and that the torture did not produce valuable intelligence. These conclusions were consistent with those in the still-classified 6,300 page Senate report, but contradicted the CIA’s official public appraisal of the Senate report, which was that it was factually incorrect and contained fundamental judgement errors. This public position on the report, revealed to be spurious by the Panetta review, has been the basis for its continued classified status.
• At some point in the Senate committee’s investigation of these documents, the CIA quietly removed about 1,000 pages of documents from the collection that had been previously provided. When the staff noticed this, they demanded to know why this was done. The CIA initially alleged that the computer technicians must have done it on their own, then they claimed the White House ordered it done. When the Committee asked the White House about it, they denied giving such an order.
• The CIA had apparently intended to hide the Panetta review from Senate investigators, but perhaps inadvertently included it in the “document-dump” provided to the committee staff. Upon realizing the Panetta review was revealed to Senate investigators, the CIA started to spy on the committee staff and the CIA’s general counsel – who played an important part in the torture program and who is “mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our study” – told the Department of Justice that Senate staff had committed a crime by reading the Panetta review. Feinstein said she believes this was an attempt both to protect himself and to “intimidate” the Senate committee.

Throughout all of this, President Obama has been almost completely silent – at least publicly. Behind the scenes, it seems clear he has colluded with the CIA in its implacable campaign to obstruct justice and keep crimes of the highest order from being revealed to the public. This collusion goes back a long way, in fact back to Obama’s first days as president in which he refused to initiate an investigation of his own into the torture and interrogation program, swearing off any pursuit of accountability for Bush-era crimes with the ludicrous missive “looking forward not backward.”

President Obama, for his part, is going even beyond the CIA’s flagrant attempt to cover up its crimes. According to McClatchy, “The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program.”

Notably, these 9,000 documents “are separate” from any of the 6.2 million documents provided to the Senate committee investigators by the CIA in those supposedly secure facilities. These are documents that are apparently regarded as even more revealing and incriminating than the millions the CIA has already been compelled to provide, raising questions about just how extreme the content of them are. When you add this to Obama’s refusal to declassify the Senate’s 6,300 page report, it is simply disgraceful.

“These documents certainly raise the specter that the White House has been involved in stonewalling the investigation,” Elizabeth Goitein of the NYU Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice told McClatchy.

John Brennan, the current CIA director and close confidant of President Obama, has denied the testimony from Feinstein unequivocally. He said, “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that.” My personal opinion when I view the video of his denial is that he is shamelessly lying, and rather obviously so. You’d think the CIA director would be able to do it better.

Anything less than the full and complete disclosure of all the relevant documents is unacceptable.

Something sinister is brewing around and below al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, and it has the hallmark of a familiar Israeli campaign to strip the Mosque of its Muslim Arab identity. This time around, however, the stakes are much higher.

The status of al-Aqsa mosque is unparalleled within the context of Muslim heritage in Palestine itself. It is also the third holiest Muslim shrine anywhere. But equally as important, it is a symbol of faith, resistance and defiance. Its story of struggle and perseverance goes hand in hand with the very modern Palestinian struggle for rights, freedom and identity. Praying at al-Aqsa at times seems like an impossible feat. Many Palestinians lost life or limbs simply trying to gain access to the mosque.

In a statement released on March 7, the Palestinian Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs said Israeli forces carried out 30 attacks against Al-Aqsa Mosque and other holy sites during the month of February alone. Most of the attacks targeted Al-Aqsa itself. While the recurring violations at Al-Aqsa were led by Jewish settlers, according to the statement, they have done so under the watchful eye, protection and support of the Israeli police and army.

Most alarming about these attacks is their political context, which indicates that a great degree of coordination is underway between politicians, security forces and Jewish settlers.

In anticipation of a Palestinian backlash, on March 04, an Israeli court sentenced Islamic leader Sheikh Rade Saleh to eight months in prison for ‘incitement’. The Sheikh is the most outspoken Palestinian leader regarding the danger facing Al-Aqsa. Why silence Sheik Saleh now when the attacks against al-Aqsa are at an all times high?

It was on February 25, 1994, that US-born Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein stormed into the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and opened fire. The aim was to kill as many Arabs as he could.

Continue reading “Al-Aqsa vs. Israel: The Lurking Danger Beneath”

The key to being taken seriously in Washington is to condemn other countries for their failures, crimes, and shortcomings and to praise the United States of America. One should never entertain the notion that the U.S. should be condemned for human rights abuses on the world stage.

At least, that’s what the rhetoric leads you to believe. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) frequently refers to the United States as “the greatest nation the world has ever known,” before he unleashes a diatribe on the threats to freedom and individual rights under authoritarian regimes like China, Russia, or Venezuela. That’s pretty standard.

Human Rights Watch differs with that worldview. In a press release today, it notes that the U.S. is scheduled to appear this week before the United Nations Human Rights Committee “for a periodic review of its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a core international human rights treaty that the US ratified in 1992.”

The surveillance system revealed to the world by Edward Snowden, Human Rights Watch argues, “violate[s] fundamental civil and political rights.”

“The mass communications surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden demonstrates a shocking disregard by the US for the privacy rights of both those inside the country and those abroad,” said Andrea Prasow, senior national security counsel and advocate at Human Rights Watch. “The US review is the perfect time for the Human Rights Committee to make clear that mass communications surveillance, whether against a country’s own citizens or another country’s, violates basic rights.”

But it’s not just on surveillance where the U.S. fails to comply with international standards. A short list from Human Rights Watch is as follows:

1. The US has failed to fully repudiate abusive counterterrorism policies developed after September 11, 2001. In particular, this includes indefinite detention at Guantanamo and the drone war.
2. The US fails to protect children by treating many as adults in the criminal justice system.
3. The US supports arbitrary and excessive sentencing and detention policies that do not take into account a person’s individual circumstances.
4. The US ignores the consequences of discriminatory state and federal laws, policies, and practices. This refers specifically to the “profound racial disparities” found in the execution of the drug war.

“The US holds itself out as a leader on civil and political rights, but its record is rife with failings and contradictions,” Prasow says. “The US still has a long way to go before its practice meets its rhetoric.”

Somebody tell Marco Rubio.

Imad Abdullah Hassan, a Yemeni detainee in Guantanamo that has spent 12 years in a cage without ever being charged with a crime, is suing President Obama. He says the forced feeding he has been subjected to in order to disrupt his hunger strike amounts to torture.

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf lists some of the allegations in the lawsuit:

• At Gitmo, they began to use tubes that were too big for Hassan’s nostrils.
• Rather than leaving them in place, they would insert and remove them twice a day.
• Prisoners were force-fed in what Hassan called “the Torture Chair.” Hands, legs, waist, shoulders and head were strapped down tightly. The men were also force-fed constipation drugs, causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding.” They’d be strapped down amid the shit and blood for up to two hours at a time–though quicker wasn’t always better.
• That’s because Gitmo staff started force-feeding much more liquid into the prisoners. Sometimes they sped up the process, leaving the amount of liquid constant. “If Mr. Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, what he terms ‘the atrocity’ would start all over again.” Severe gastric pain was common.
• “Early on in this new and more abusive phase… authorities took Mr. Hassan and two others to another block so that others would see what was being done to them. This was obviously done as a deterrent to scare others into not hunger striking.”

One time after being subjected to this treatment, Friederdorf writes, Hassan “lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.” He now suffers from “severe gastric pain, damage to both his nostrils, sinus problems, and bouts of pancreatitis, sometimes brought on by the use of a high-fat nutritional supplement.”

Of course, the Obama administration denies force feeding amounts to torture, despite this harrowing account of what it’s like. Human rights officials from the United Nations have declared, however, that force feeding amounts to torture, saying “it is unjustifiable to engage in forced feeding of individuals contrary to their informed and voluntary refusal of such a measure.”

It’s worth noting that Hassan, like some 86 other Gitmo detainees, has been cleared for release by a judge who found there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned. No matter: Obama continues to deny him his freedom and to criminally abuse him.

Read the sworn statement of Hassan’s attorney here.

Edward Snowden spoke today via video feed to an audience at this year’s South by Southwest. Here is the full discussion:

When news hit last week that China’s defense spending will increase by 12.2 percent this year to $132 billion, pundits and politicians told us to be scared. I’m not:

Via Ian Bremmer in Politico.

Note that this is using a conservative estimate of U.S. military and national security spending. There is much in the black budget that would add to the gap.