Torture – Antiwar.com Blog

Don’t Confirm Brennan, Torture AND Drone Assassinations Are Illegal

Senator Rand Paul is not the only one with serious questions about the nomination of John Brennan for CIA Director! Many people are rightly concerned that the CIA Nominee failed to provide a clear answer to Paul’s question: “Do you believe that the president has the authority to order lethal force, such as a drone strike, against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, and without a trial?”

This coming Wednesday, Feb. 27, the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on “Drones and the War On Terror: When Can the U.S. Target Alleged American Terrorists Overseas?” Unfortunately, besides being framed in a completely leading way, the only witnesses that will testify — all four — were drawn from the same Lawfare blog. Lawfare co-founder Benjamin Wittes (who doesn’t even possess a law degree himself) gloats about it. Have you ever heard of a congressional hearing that calls all of its “experts” from one certain pro-war agenda-driven blog?! (Note how the Lawfare blog byline, “Hard National Security Choices”, masks how these blogging lawyers tend to come up with the very easy answer that the law of force is the answer instead of the rule of law. Clearly the aim of this “Judiciary Hearing” should be questioned as it does not appear it is to fairly consider the range of views about the illegality of drone assassination without judicial process.)

Additionally, we here in Minnesota have initiated meetings and letters signed now by over 200 members of different peace groups asking our Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, given their important Judiciary Committee assignments, to use their influence to seek answers. We’ve asked several other serious questions about Brennan’s background with CIA torture black sites as well as his role in drone assassinations (in this latest full letter to Sen. Klobuchar.)

Finally, our Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) group sent a letter Senator Feinstein warning her about endorsing Brennan, who cooperated with former CIA Director George Tenet as he helped fix the Bush administration’s case for war on Iraq. It would be her next-to-worst mistake of her tenure on the Senate Intelligence Committee, we told her. The worst – we hope she now concedes – was voting to authorize the Iraq War. Read the letter in full here.

Let me also mention something else that seems to be going on in the “legal” debate that is now distracting people as it devolves into party partisanship. A number of law professors and legal commentators, from both the Right and the Left (even most recently Georgetown Law Professor David Cole who wrote: “Laying Down the Law–Why Obama’s targeted killing is better than Bush’s torture“) have turned what should be a much wider real debate based on facts and law into the narrow, more partisan-driven question of “What’s worse? (Bush’s) Torture or (Obama’s) Drone Bombing?”

Some like Cole, at least have the decency to preface their comments with “well they are both wrong, but…..” while Bellinger III and others of his Lawfare ilk post their challenges on the other side of the partisan “divide,” that in fact killing is worse than torture, using such common sense arguments that it’s better to be alive with your fingernails torn out than to be dead.

Isn’t this partisan “divide” as to whether to prefer torture or assassination as the lesser evil a bit like counting how many demons can dance on the head of a pin? It’s certainly confusing to those of us who think torture AND drone assassination are wrong, wrong, wrong. The unfortunate result, however–and perhaps the goal of the two party kabuki theater–is that the entire red herring “debate” distracts the partisans of both parties, making both Republicans and Democrats more complacent about both torture & drone assassination. This is how so many people come to ignore the right and wrong of it all and turn it into a mere political difference of opinion.

(Cross-posted from Huffington Post.)

All I Want for Christmas Is My Civil Liberties!

Sad, isn’t it, that just two days before Christmas, we have to stand out in the cold and worry about getting another big lump of coal from our politicians?! But unfortunately it’s expected that Obama will sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law right after the holiday. Since that’s the same day the big sales start, few Americans will probably be paying attention to the police state being officially ushered in.

On December 23, however, we were still able to protest the despicable NDAA in front of Obama’s Minnesota Campaign Headquarters. At the end of the rally led by members of “Occupy Minnesota” and the “Minnesota Committee to Stop FBI Repression”, everyone taped their signs to the front window of Obama’s campaign office, hoping he’d somehow get the message. Then we also made telephone calls to tell Obama’s volunteer receptionists to act as his better angels and plead for him to veto the NDAA.

But a veto would be quite the Christmas miracle. Obama’s expected signature will not only de-link the “war on terror” from its original justification, the 9-11 attacks of more than a decade ago, to ensure the “long war” does not end, but it will keep Guantanamo open indefinitely and turn the whole world into a battlefield, including our own backyards here in the U.S. where citizens will stand guilty until proven innocent.

(Signs at Obama’s Campaign Office in Minneapolis)

What’s the worst that could happen as a result of the congressional rubberstamp broadening the war and allowing indefinite military detention of American citizens as “enemy combatants”? Can it happen here? It’s interesting to see what Journalist Joshua Phillips learned from research for his new book: None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture, a harrowing description of the torture of prisoners in Iraq and the deep psychological scars it left on the members of one battalion who dispensed pain to their victims. When asked how this came about, the author says that almost all the soldiers he interviewed cite the main reason for the various torture abuses as the climate of “permissiveness” that began when they were told they did not need to follow the Geneva Conventions anymore. (It should be recalled that Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel lawyers Robert Delahunty and John Yoo had written their memo on Jan 9, 2002 stating that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to “non-state actors”, i.e. Al Qaeda, Taliban and other “terrorist” suspects. Bush consequently signed a directive the following month, implementing this OLC memo and the word went out that gave rise to the abusive conditions at Guantanamo and other military detention sites.)

The term I’ve personally used for this new culture of “permissiveness” is “the green light”. Unless you worked in the system, you might not recognize what the insidious “green light” is. I’ve tried to warn over and over that the green light will eventually go out and the people down the line who have gone along under its influence instead of resisting in accord with their previously ingrained sense of right and wrong are likely to pay a heavy price. Phillips’ book documents that soldiers are now taking their own lives years after having participated in the abuse occasioned by the culture of permissiveness under Bush.

Instead of extinguishing the green light, Obama’s signing of the NDAA could well signal an even worse one being turned on than occurred with Bush’s torture memos.

(Originally submitted to the Huffington Post.)

Michael Hayden: Torture’s PR Man

Former director of both the NSA and CIA Michael Hayden has been out of public “service” for over two years now. Sadly, though, his mouth hasn’t, and for quite the worse.

Hayden ran the NSA, and after 9/11 followed many Americans into the fever swamps of terror illogic, abandoning his once-held belief that the state should in some way be restricted from spying on its own citizens. The NSA under his direction started a domestic phone call database, helped Bush gut FISA, and helped establish the drone program that now stealthily murders its way across Afghanistan and countries we’re nominally not even at war with, like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. As director of the CIA from 2006 — imagine, he was already so bad on domestic spying at his point that the likes of Dianne Feinstein opposed him — he loved him some controlled near-drowning of alleged terrorists.

Hayden already has a trail of twisted wreckage and rotten bodies in his wake. Now he’s trying to turn America into a torture state as well.

In a recent op-ed in — where else? — The Wall Street Journal, Hayden uses loaded language to dismiss those skeptical of the government and its apologists’ claims that torture was the reason the US was able to find and kill Osama bin Laden. In “Birthers, Truthers and Interrogation Deniers” — yep, “deniers,” just like the Holocaust ones! — Hayden attempts to make the case that those of us who know there is more to fact-finding through interrogation than body-slamming and cold cells are self-deluding and dishonest. After all, he says, we’d have to dump the 9/11 Commission Report if we didn’t think good information came from “enhanced interrogation techniques”!

But that doesn’t follow. Nobody ever said, as Hayden claims, that zero true information is blurted out by a detainee in agony or terror. What torture opponents including actual interrogators have said is that most information is false and that it is much more productive to use other, less barbaric techniques to prise good info from a prisoner.

The director of two spy agencies shouldn’t be expected to do anything but create strawmen to blow down. His job has always been to confuse issues and defuse honest debate. Hayden’s goal here is to nudge the American culture into full acceptance of any brutality our overseers would like to employ to make their jobs easier. Since it really has been established that torture makes the job of intelligence harder, we must realize that’s not the actual job in question. The real goal is to have the population cowering and compliant.

Lest we get the bamboo shoots.

Twenty-Four Anti-Torture Activists Acquitted

Breaking: Twenty-Four Anti-Torture Activists Acquitted in Trial for Protest at the US Capitol Calling for Guantanamo’s Closure and the Investigation of Deaths at the Prison.

From WitnessTorture.org:

On Monday, June 14, twenty-four activists with Witness Against Torture were acquitted in Washington, D.C. Superior Court of charges of “unlawful entry with disorderly conduct.” The charges stemmed from demonstrations at the US Capitol on January 21,2010 – the date by which President Obama had promised the closure of the Guantanamo detention camp.

“With his decision, the judge validated the effort of the demonstrators to condemn the ongoing crime of indefinite detention at Guantanamo,” says Bill Quigley, legal adviser to the defendants and the Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

“Our acquittal is a victory for free speech and for the right of Americans to stand up for those falsely imprisoned and abused at Guantanamo,” says Ellen Graves, one of the defendants. “We tried to shine a light on the unconstitutional policies of the Bush and now the Obama administrations. That light shone brightly today.”

“We will use our freedom to continue to work for the day when Guantanamo is closed and those who designed and carried out torture policies are held to account,” says defendant Paul Thorson.

On January 21, activists dressed as Guantanamo prisoners were arrested on the steps of the Capitol holding banners reading “Broken Promises,Broken Laws, Broken Lives.” Inside the Capitol Rotunda, at the location where deceased presidents lie in state, fourteen activists were arrested performing a memorial service for three men who died at Guantanamo in 2006. Initially reported as suicides, the deaths may have been – as recent evidence suggests – the result of the men being tortured to death (see [the other] Scott Horton, “Murders at Guantanamo, March, 2010, Harper’s).

WitnessTorture.org

McChrystal, Copper Green, Torture and Assassination

Check out this great Esquire article about the torture occupation of Iraq and new Afghan boss McChrystal‘s role. How’d I miss this in ’06?

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in â€” they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.” …

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. “Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?” he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. “I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times.”

Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs. That put responsibility right in the heart of the Pentagon.

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report “is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning” or that it was “read by SecDef.”

Muriel Kane wonders whether McChrystal ran Cheney’s global assassination hit squads.

Hersh: “…letâ€™s say Yemen, letâ€™s say Peru, letâ€™s say Colombia, letâ€™s say Eritrea, letâ€™s say Madagascar, letâ€™s say Kenya, countries like that…”

Thanks to Douglas Valentine.

Democrats: Investigate Republicans

But why bring up lawbreaking by the Democrats who preceded them? We don’t want to criminalize policy differences do we?

The sooner we stop pretending there is a “rule of law” which binds the power of our government, the better off we’ll all be.