Progressive Viewpoints

Clip: The Dickishness Of The GOP

What we've observed these past two years is a political party that knows nothing but scorched earth tactics, cannot begin to see any merits in the other party's arguments, refuses to compromise one inch on anything, and has sought from the very beginning to do nothing but destroy the Obama presidency....

The two parties are evenly spread in this 50-50 country, but only one can brook no compromise in its accelerating rush to the far right. And that is what it seems we have to contemplate for the next two years - total paralysis in the face of urgent problems as part of a game of cynical partisan brinkmanship. They simply cannot bear that another party might actually have a role to play in government....

This is not conservatism, properly understood, a disposition that respects the institutions and traditions of government, that can give as well as take, that seeks the national interest before partisan concerns, and that respects both the other branches of government and seeks to work with them. These people are not conservatives in this core civilized sense; they are partisan vandals.

via andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com

Commentary on grant of habeas corpus to al Rahiah

Regarding the grant of habeas corpus to Fouad Mahmoud al Rahiah, held and tortured in Guantanamo for seven years, commentary from Andrew Sullivan:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.

Mercifully, America under Bush and Cheney was not a totalitarian regime.

It had an executive branch that embraced the ethic of tyranny in warfare, and a legislative branch so supine it was a toothless adjunct, but it retained a judiciary that began, too late, of course, to push back against the hermetically sealed war-and-torture cycle. The Founders were wise to add such a check. Without it, we would have no way out of the maze that Cheney pushed us in.

Last week we discovered, thanks to the judiciary, a clear example of this tyrannical impulse occurring under Bush and Cheney. We now know that torturing a human being to get proof that he deserved to be tortured was not just a theoretical fear of mine. It happened. If it happened once, it almost certainly happened more often. The temptations are just too great; and when you have clear evidence that Bush and Cheney knew some inmates to be innocent but tortured them anyway to manufacture evidence of their guilt, we know that there was nothing in the character of those two men to restrain the true nightmare scenario.

Grant of habeas corpus to Fouad Mahmoud al Rahiah, held and tortured in Guantanamo for 7 years

The court decision clearly shows that the US government detained and tortured this man into demonstrably false confessions for most of the seven years he's been held in Guantanamo.  The wheels of American justice may grind slowly, but we must remember that they sometimes are grinding people down in the process.

The Obama administration's continued pursuit of this case leaves one's mind reeling between whether it was unconscionable given the facts or whether it was brilliant strategy to ensure more clear legal rulings on these matters instead of just leaving this history of the Bush administration's torture and detention policies in legal limbo by simply releasing him.

Extract from the 65 page opinion, Civil. Action No. 02-828 (CKK) :

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

FOUAD MAHMOUD AL RABIAH, et al., Petitioners,

v.

UNITED STATES, et al., Respondents.

Civil. Action No. 02-828 (CKK)

CLASSIFIED MEMORANDUM OPINION (September 17, 2009)

UNCLASSIFIEDIIFOR PUBLIC RELEASE

Petitioner Fouad Mahmoud Al Rabiah ("AI Rabiah") has been detained by the United States Government at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba since 2002. The evidentiary record on which the Government seeks to justify his indefinite detention is surprisingly bare. The Government has withdrawn its reliance on most of the evidence and allegations that were once asserted against Al Rabiah, and now relies almost exclusively on Al Rabiah's "confessions" to certain conduct. Not only did Al Rabiah's interrogators repeatedly conclude that these same confessions were not believable - which Al Rabiah's counsel attributes to abuse and coercion, some of which is supported by the record - but it is also undisputed that AI Rabiah confessed to information that his interrogators obtained from either alleged eyewitnesses who are not credible and as to whom the Government has now largely withdrawn any reliance, or from sources that never even existed. Far from providing the Court with credible and reliable evidence as the basis for Al Rabiah's continued detention, the Government asks the Court to simply accept the same confessions that the Government's own interrogators did not credit, and to ignore the assessment [REDACTED]

Based on this record (or more accurately, in spite of it), the Government asserts that it has the authority to detain Al Rabiah pursuant to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Pub. L. No.1 07-40, § 2(a), 115 Stat. 224, 224 (2001) ("AUMF"), which authorizes the use of force against certain terrorist nations, organizations, and persons. Al Rabiah believes he is unlawfully detained and has filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

In connection with its inquiry into whether Al Rabiah is lawfully detained, the Court has considered the factual evidence in the record, the extensive legal briefings submitted by the parties, and the arguments presented during a four-day Merits Hearing held on August 26-28, 2009, and August 31, 2009, during which the parties proffered evidence based on the written record and did not present any live testimony.  Based on the foregoing, the Court concludes that Al Rabiah's uncorroborated confessions are not credible or reliable, and that the Government has failed to provide the Court with sufficiently credible and reliable evidence to meet its burden of persuasion. If there exists a basis for Al Rabiah's indefinite detention, it most certainly has not been presented to this Court. Al Rabiah's petition for habeas corpus is GRANTED.

The American Way Of Torture

The key point:

If this is not torture, then torture does not exist. And if this is America, and there is no accountability for these war crimes, then core American values have ceased to exist as well.

The American Way Of Torture | The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan:

... The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. Some more details:

An HVD may be walled one time to make a point or twenty to thirty times when an  interrogator requires a more significant response to a question. In an interrogation designed  to be intense, an HVD may be walled multiple times in one session...

Current OMS guidance on cramped confinement limits confinement in the large box to 8 hours at a time for no more than 18 hours a day and confinement in the small box to two hours...

Interrogators will often use one technique to support another. As an example, interrogators would tell an HVD in a stress position that he [HVD] is going back to the walling wall for walling if he fails to hold the stress position until told otherwise by the HVD. This places additional stress on the HVD who will typically try to hold the stress position for as long as possible to avoid the walling wall.

John McCain will remember these techniques and variants of them from his time in the Hanoi Hilton. If this is not torture, then torture does not exist. And if this is America, and there is no accountability for these war crimes, then core American values have ceased to exist as well.

The noose of "plausible legality"

The Nixon era falsely tried to create "plausible deniability", the Bush era falsely tried to create "plausible legality".

Re: They Tortured With Good Will  | By Andrew Sullivan:

Condi Rice tries to walk back her statement that if Bush authorized something, it was not illegal. She says instead - in a cosy conversation with Leon Wieseltier - that the president ordered that interrogation go to the limits of the legal. My own sense, from a few off-the-record conversations as well, is that president Bush simply said: do what you have to do, but make sure it's legal. Cheney ran with that. Bush meant it as cover. He needed legal cover to torture in a systematic way. And, because this was the Bush administration, they did what the great leader asked. Even though it was, in fact, impossible. And was impossible. And so America became a torturing country. And Rice sat by and let it happen. Andnow wants to be in polite society.

I do not believe in being polite to war criminals. I believe in prosecuting them.

Re: Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On

A strong plea for America to be America:

Re: Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On:

There is no way the American experiment can continue while legal and historical precedent gives the president the inherent authority to torture. It is the undoing of the core idea of the founding - protection against arbitrary, lawless, cruel and despotic rule. And the impact on the entire world of America allowing this to stand would be profound. The world looks here for moral leadership. Those who endure real political oppression, imprisonment, torture and abuse at the hands of despots look to America for leadership, for guidance, for hope. If America - America - discovers that its own president has illegally tortured and decides that it simply won't do anything about it, that it doesn't matter, that it's too polarizing to restore the rule of law ... then what hope do those people have? To whom will they look when they fight far more pervasive tyranny, buttressed by the same absolute power to coerce the truth and break the human soul?

Re: Major defeat for Bush/Obama position on secrecy

The wheels of justice grind slowly, but they are moving.

Major defeat for Bush/Obama position on secrecy - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

Today, in a 26-page ruling (.pdf), the appellate court resoundingly rejected the Bush/Obama position, holding that the "state secrets" privilege -- except in extremely rare circumstances not applicable here -- does not entitle the Government to demand dismissal of an entire lawsuit based on the assertion that the "subject matter" of the lawsuit is a state secret.  Instead, the privilege only allows the Government to make specific claims of secrecy with regard to specific documents and other facts -- exactly how the privilege was virtually always used before the Bush and Obama DOJs sought to expand it into a vast weapon of immunity from all lawsuits challenging the legality of any executive branch program relating to national security.

In rejecting this radical secrecy theory, the court emphasized how the Bush/Obama doctrine, if accepted, would essentially place the President above and beyond the rule of law...

Re: Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On

A strong plea for America to be America:

Re: Mr Broder Wants Us To Move On:

There is no way the American experiment can continue while legal and historical precedent gives the president the inherent authority to torture. It is the undoing of the core idea of the founding - protection against arbitrary, lawless, cruel and despotic rule. And the impact on the entire world of America allowing this to stand would be profound. The world looks here for moral leadership. Those who endure real political oppression, imprisonment, torture and abuse at the hands of despots look to America for leadership, for guidance, for hope. If America - America - discovers that its own president has illegally tortured and decides that it simply won't do anything about it, that it doesn't matter, that it's too polarizing to restore the rule of law ... then what hope do those people have? To whom will they look when they fight far more pervasive tyranny, buttressed by the same absolute power to coerce the truth and break the human soul?

Whistle-blower law for congress?

Do we need a whistle-blower law for congress?

In the last few days, following the torture memos release, we have had Senate reports released that provide further insight in the depth of illegality surrounding the decision and implementation of torture by the US.  Some Senators have called for the impeachment of Bybee, one of the memo authors.  And some had voted against Bybee's nomination to be a federal judge.  And they had seen some of those memos in the past as part of the classified intelligence briefings.  And presumably voted against Bybee because of them, but couldn't say so because they were classified materials.

One of the troubling elements in all this is some Senators and Representatives have known about these for quite some time.  Believed them to be unconstitutional, illegal, and in violation of treaties, but could not do anything about them.  To reveal them would be to disclose highly (if improperly) classified materials and subject themselves to legal action.  They would not be able to defend themselves because the materials are classified and the US would assert State Secrets and prevent their disclosure.  And you'd have a lone Senator fighting the entire administration and Department of Justice as well as the harpies of the right-wing in the Senate.

In this situation, our representatives seem to have no real choice for justice except to out-wait events, which is what they did, but which doesn't bring the events to an end, other circumstances did.  The election of Obams.  But if McCain had been elected president, the memos would still be hidden and classified.  And we'd still not know how bad it was.

Re: Scarborough falsely compared harsh interrogations to military training programs

This is a key point that is too often overlooked: there is a world of difference between SERE voluntary sampling of some torture techniques by you and your peers, where you know it can and will stop soon, and being held indefinitely with no contact, no one knowing where you are or if you are anymore, with no end way to stop it.  Think about the 183 waterboardings in a month: that is six times a day every day.  And this is after they claimed he confessed the first time after 90 seconds.

The legal memos essentially acknowledge the whole regimen is designed to increase the amount, frequency and types of pain inflicted over time.  You have no control.  No out.  No one can ever come to save you.  They get worse and worse over time.  It seems to go on forever.  And for no reason.  This breaks down your personality.

The other bizarre elements of the legal justifications are (1) the unwillingness to define mental pain or mental suffering as anything other than the experience of physical pain and (2) the definition of "suffering", as distinct from pain except for "connotation of a protracted period" of physical pain.

(1) Mental: The entire point of Jose Padilla's incarceration, and it appears for many of the others, was to break down his personality.  To produce a helplessness so complete that they ceased to be who they were; to remove choice.  That doesn't happen without severe mental pain and suffering.  It is not something you choose.  It is forced on you.

(2) Suffering: While suffering has a connotation of duration, it isn't the main element, in fact, it would be silly to have our phrase "long-suffering" if that was the real sense because that would be redundant.  The real issue in the definition of suffering is that you have to endure it -- you have to put up with it,  you have no choice, you are forced to experience it. 

And that is essentially what the legal memos describe. Not how to avoid causing mental suffering in detainees but in fact how to create excruciating mental suffering through an ever increasing intensity and variety of painful experiences with no hope of you or anyone else stopping it, for years on end if not to the end of your life, even if they leave carefully leave no lasting physical scars.

Torture is terrorism of the individual.

Scarborough falsely compared  harsh interrogations to military training programs:

During the April 22 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough asserted that, with the exception of waterboarding, interrogation techniques, such as "sleep deprivation and working on phobias," used against detainees, are no different from those used in U.S. military training programs. However, as Media Matters for America has noted, officials familiar with both the techniques used in harsh interrogations and those used in military training programs have said that such a comparison is false; those who undergo certain interrogation techniques in such training programs are aware that there are safeguards, and know they can stop the training immediately if necessary.