US-Backed Death Squad Files Surface
As Obama Lands in Indonesia
By ALLAN NAIRN | CounterPunch | November 10, 2010
Secret documents have leaked from inside Kopassus, Indonesia’s red berets, which say that Indonesia’s US-backed security forces engage in “murder [and] abduction” and show that Kopassus targets churches in West Papua and defines civilian dissidents as the “enemy.”
The documents include a Kopassus enemies list headed by Papua’s top Baptist minister and describe a covert network of surveillance, infiltration and disruption of Papuan institutions
The disclosure comes as US President Barack Obama is touching down in Indonesia. His administration recently announced the restoration of US aid to Kopassus.
Kopassus is the most notorious unit of Indonesia’s armed forces, TNI, which along with POLRI, the national police, have killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands.
The leaked cache of secret Kopassus documents includes operational, intelligence and field reports as well as personnel records which list the names and details of Kopassus “agents.”
The documents are classified “SECRET” (“RAHASIA”) and include extensive background reports on Kopassus civilian targets — reports that are apparently of uneven accuracy.
The authenticity of the documents has been verified by Kopassus personnel who have seen them and by external evidence regarding the authors and the internal characteristics of the documents.
Some of the Kopassus documents will be released in the days to come, in part via my website.
Those being released with this article concern West Papua, where tens of thousands of civilians have been murdered and where Kopassus is most active. Jakarta has attempted to largely seal off Papua to visits by non-approved outsiders.
When the US restored Kopassus aid last July the rationale was fighting terrorism, but the documents show that Kopassus in fact systematically targets civilians.
A detailed 25-page secret report by a Kopassus task force in Kotaraja, Papua defines Kopassus’ number-one “enemy” as unarmed civilians. It calls them the “separatist political movement” “GSP/P, ” lists what they say are the top 15 leaders and discusses the “enemy order of battle.”
All of those listed are civilians, starting with the head of the Baptist Synod of Papua. The others include evangelical ministers, activists, traditional leaders, legislators, students and intellectuals as well as local establishment figures and the head of the Papua Muslim Youth organization.
The secret Kopassus study says that in their 400,000 – person area of operations the civilians they target as being political are “much more dangerous than” any armed opposition since the armed groups “hardly do anything” but the civilians — with popular support — have “reached the outside world” with their “obsession” with “merdeka” (independence/ freedom) and persist in “propagating the issue of severe human rights violations in Papua,” ie. “murders and abductions that are done by the security forces.”
The Kopassus document cited above is embedded below, followed by supplementary field reports. [The documents can be viewed here. Satgas Ban – 5 Kopassus Triwlapharian.]
Given that the Kopassus report states as settled fact that security forces do “murder, abduction,” those who they define as being the enemy can be presumed to be in some danger.
In its discussion of “State of the enemy” Kopassus identifies the enemy with two kinds of actions: “the holding of press conferences” where they “always criticize the government and the work being done by the security forces” and the holding of private meetings where they engage in the same kind of prohibited speech.
The Kopassus “enemies” list — the “leaders” of the “separatist political movement” includes fifteen civic leaders. In the order listed by Kopassus they are:
— Reverend Socrates Sofyan Yoman, chair of the Papua Baptist Synod
— Markus Haluk head of the Association of Indonesian Middle Mountains Students (AMPTI) and an outspoken critic of the security forces and the US mining giant Freeport McMoRan;
— Buchtar Tabuni, an activist who, after appearing on the Kopassus list, was sentenced to three years prison for speech and for waving Papuan flags and was beaten bloody by three soldiers, a guard, and a policeman because he had a cell phone;
— Aloysius Renwarin, a lawyer who heads a local human rights foundation;
— Dr. Willy Mandowen, Mediator of PDP, the Papua Presidium Council, a broad group including local business people, former politcal prisoners, women’s and youth organizations, and Papuan traditional leaders. His most prominent predecessor, Theys Eluay, had his throat slit by Kopassus in 2001;
— Yance Kayame, a committee chair in the Papuan provincial legislature;
— Lodewyk Betawi;
— Drs. Don Agustinus Lamaech Flassy of the Papua Presidium Council staff
— Drs. Agustinus Alue Alua, head of the MRP, the Papuan People’s Council, which formally represents Papuan traditional leaders and was convened and recognized by the Jakarta government;
— Thaha Al Hamid, Secretary General of the Papua Presidium Council;
— Sayid Fadal Al Hamid, head of the Papua Muslim Youth;
— Drs. Frans Kapisa, head of Papua National Student Solidarity;
— Leonard Jery Imbiri, public secretary of DAP, the Papuan Customary Council, which organizes an annual plenary of indigenous groups, has staged Papua’s largest peaceful demonstrations, and has seen its offices targeted for clandestine arson attacks;
— Reverend Dr. Beny Giay, minister of the Protestant evangelical KINGMI Tent of scripture church of Papua;
— Selfius Bobby, student at the Fajar Timur School of Philosophy and Theology.
Reached for comment, Reverend Socrates Sofyan Yoman of the Baptist Synod laughed when told he headed the Kopassus list. He said that churches were targeted by TNI/ Kopassus because “We can’t condone torture, kidnapping or killing.” He said that he has received anonymous death threats “all the time, everywhere,” but that as a church leader he must endure it . He said the real problem was for Papua’s poor who “live daily in pressure and fear.”
Markus Haluk said that he is constantly followed on foot and by motorcycle, has been the subject of apparent attempts to kill him, and receives so many sms text death threats that he has difficulty keeping current with the death-threat archive he tries to maintain for historical and safety purposes.
One threat, written months after his name appeared as a target in the Kopassus documents, promised to decapitate him and bury his head 200 meters deep, while another imagined his head as a succulent fruit to be devoured and swallowed by security forces.
But as a famous figure in Papua, Haluk enjoys, he thinks, a certain kind of protection since when security forces have actually arrested him it has at times touched off street uprisings.
Village Papuans, he said, enjoy no such advantage. For them, being targeted by Kopassus “can get you killed. If there’s a report against you, you can die.”
Contacted in prison, Buctar Tabuni, the number three enemy on the Kopassus list, told of getting a death threat with a rat cadaver, described living with round-the-clock surveillance, and said the threats to him repeatedly stated that “you will be killed unless you stop your human rights activities.”
Three days ago, writing from his prison cell, Buctar Tabuni called on President Obama to cut off aid to TNI and back a democratic vote on Papuan independence. He told me that Indonesia follows the US lead and that the US was complicit since, as he wrote Obama, US-trained “troops in cities and villages all over West Papua treat the people like terrorists that must be exterminated.”
Anti-terrorism was indeed Obama’s main argument for restoring US aid to Kopassus, but the documents make clear that Kopassus mainly targets unarmed civilians, not killers.
In fact, the main unit that wrote the secret documents, SATGAS BAN – 5 KOPASSUS, is ostensibly doing anti-terrorism, with the Kopassus Unit 81, Gultor.
Obama justified the Kopassus aid restoration to Congress by saying that the initial US training would be given not to Kopassus as a whole but only to its anti-terror forces. The White House and Pentagon suggested that these forces were less criminal than the rest of Kopassus and of TNI/POLRI, but the documents establish that they, like the rest, go after civilians like the Papuan reverends and activists.
Reverend Giay said, when reached for comment that TNI, Kopassus and POLRI were making the case that “it’s OK to kill pastors and burn churches since the churches are separatist.”
Among Giay’s collection of anonymous sms death threats was a political missive demanding that “the reverend stop using the platform of the church to spread the ideology of free Papua.”
Giay said that “they need ideological and moral support from the Indonesian majority and the media” so they use Kopassus and others to attack the churches as constituting security threats.
He compared TNI/Kopassus actions in Papua now to those earlier in East Timor and the Malukus where “they created this conflict between Muslims and Christians” to expand their presence and get more money and power.
Reverend Giay said that “local pastors have been targeted. They kill them off and report them as separatists.”
The Kopassus documents boast that “in carrying out the operational mission of intelligence in the kotaraja area, we apportion work in order to cover all places and avenues of kotaraja society.”
The files show that Kopassus indeed penetrates most every part of
popular life. In addition to plainclothes Kopassus officers who go undercover in multiple roles, Kopassus fields a small army of non-TNI “agents” — real people with real lives and identities, who are bought, coerced or recruited into working covertly.
Kopassus Kotaraja area agents discussed in the secret personnel files include reporters for a local newspaper and for a national TV news channel, students, hotel staff, a court employee, a senior civil servant who works on art and culture, a 14 year old child, a broke, “emotional, drunken” farmer who needs money and “believes” that Kopassus will “take care of his safety,” a “hardworking” “emotionally stable” farmer who also is a need of funds, a worker who “likes to drink hard liquor,” is poor and “likes to believe things,” a motorcycle taxi driver, a cellphone kiosk clerk who watches people who buy SIM card numbers, and a driver for a car rental company who “frequently informs on whether there are elements from the Separatist Political Movement who hire rental cars and speak regarding independence/freedom (merdeka).”
In the file, though, the word “merdeka” is not spelled out. In accord with Kopassus practice, only an initial is written, in quotation marks: “‘M'”, the unwritable, unspeakable M-word.
The documents support the longtime word on the street: you rarely know who is Kopassus. So best watch what you say if you care for safety, especially if what you say is “freedom.”
Allan Nairn is a journalist living in Indonesia.
Would America look much different if Republican John McCain had beaten Democrat Barack Obama to become president?
By Cindy Sheehan | Al-Jazeera | 31 Oct 2010
If John McCain were president, we can never be exactly sure what would be happening, but I think we can make some educated speculations.
First of all, the “banksters” would be receiving their carte blanche bailouts and Ben Bernanke would have been re-appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Robert Gates would probably still be the secretary of defence and Sarah Palin would be offering late night comedians endless fodder for their monologues.
If John McCain happened to be the one infesting the Oval Office at this time, single-payer health care would surely be “off the table”. I am confident that a health care “reform” bill probably would have contained massive giveaways to the insurance and big pharmaceutical industries, with no “robust” public option.
We citizens would, I’m sure, have been forced to purchase insurance from the very same insurance companies that spread out a largess of nearly $170m lobbying dollars to Congress in 2009. If we are one of the “lucky ones” that happen to already have coverage, we would have been taxed for the benefit.
McCain and ‘justice’
Without a doubt, McCain’s Justice Department would be protecting war criminals – like John Yoo – of the preceding administration and the McCain Department of Justice (DOJ) would probably be vigorously defending the discriminatory practise of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for the military.
More than likely, under this nightmarish scenario, McCain’s Federal Bureau of Investigation would be committing home invasion break-ins (designated as “legal raids”) to intimidate activists.
McCain probably would have given himself the power to be judge and jury over any American citizen that didn’t approve of his foreign policy.
There is not even a shadow of doubt that McCain would be feigning strictness with Israel, while turning a blind eye to the continued expansions of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the completely immoral and destructive blockade of Gaza.
If the unthinkable occurred and McCain beat Obama in 2008, official unemployment would be hovering around 10 per cent (unofficial around 20 per cent). And one in every five homes would be in danger of being foreclosed upon. We might even be experiencing the widest income disparity between the rich and poor that we have seen since before the stock market crash of 1929!
McCain, being the “brave” military man, may have tripled troop deployments to Afghanistan and the needless deaths of US troops and Afghan civilians would probably have increased dramatically. I am sure that McCain would have given huge contracts to the US war machine for drones, mercenaries, airplanes and other military hardware.
Being a loyal Bushite, McCain would probably be conscientiously following the Status of Forces Agreement for the slow withdrawal from Iraq that was negotiated between the Bush government, and the puppet regime in Iraq.
At least we aren’t bombing Iran!
I get informed all the time, that even though “Obama isn’t so great”, at least he hasn’t invaded Iran yet, and McCain surely would have been bombing Iran by now.
Okay so rhetoric towards Iran would be heigtened, but whether McCain would have waged another military campaign during the current political climate would be an assumption too far.
Gosh, if McCain were president right now, the defense budget might be the largest – $741.2bn – since World War II. He might have even asked for billions upon billions of supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Horrors!
Of course, a McCain education budget would only be about 1/10th of the defense budget at $78bn. And, a McCain education plan would probably contain lots of rigorous testing if the states were to want more desperately needed funds.
If McCain were president, there would be an active “anti-war” movement. However – as during the Bush years – the “movement” wouldn’t be so much antiwar, but anti-war waged by the Republicans. The anti-Republican movement wants no systemic change, it just wants Democrats in office.
Blurring the political divide
However in almost every case, Democrat equals the status quo.
Of course, in all of my above scenarios, Obama and his regime have done all of those things that people were afraid that McCain would do, but there’s an extremely small outcry.
Here we are, once again, careening madly down the path to electoral ruin—where voting for the “lesser of two evils” has become a national pastime.
When the elite class gives the appearance of only two choices on the ballot, we end up voting “against” a candidate far more times than we vote “for” someone.
What’s wrong with us? We are lazy, we are fearful, the establishment beats us down, we are ignorant, and we are defeated. Voting at least gives us the latent feeling that we are doing something, when we are really doing very little.
We righteously march down to our polling place, like good soldiers for the status quo. We vote. We get our little stickers with an American flag that proudly proclaims: I VOTED. But when we vote for a member of the political duopoly, we are only voting for “Dee or Dum”.
The Democrats had their chance during the last four years, and instead of passing progressive legislation and ending the wars, they have pandered to the right, which has been emboldened by the power the Democrats gave it.
Now the Republicans are poised to take over at least the House of Representatives. And Democrats will begin to spew progressivism out of their lying mouths and abuse the energy of their newly-angry base to try to regain power – like the Republicans have done effectively for the past two years.
Will progressives ever learn that political pandering and fear-based voting never brings anything but defeat, or are we trapped in a vicious cycle of our own making?
A Turning Point Quietly Reached
Israel does not want anything that could conceivably be called a genuine peace
By Jeremy Salt – Palestine Chronicle – October 31, 2010
This turning point has arrived quietly, no fanfare or advance warning signifying its importance. After 62 years there is nothing left to talk about with Israel. Finally, all possibilities have been eliminated. Past plans are scattered across the landscape like the whitened bones of dinosaurs, their only purpose to remind us and future generations of what might have been but never was. The last flimsy veil has been pulled away from a ‘peace process’ that was never a peace process in the first place but a different kind of war process. Netanyahu slaps Obama’s face time after time (and Obama does not react). Michael Oren tells the world Israel will decide its borders and noone else. Lieberman tells European Foreign Ministers to mind their own business. When you have solved your own problems come and talk to us, he says, and by the way, Israel is not going to be the Czechoslovakia of 2010, demonstrating that his knowledge of history is as twisted as his understanding of manners, ethics, law and morality. Only this week, Netanyahu paid a special visit to the ‘commandos’ who killed nine civilians on board the Mavi Marmara. They have already been decorated for their bravery but Netanyahu wanted to congratulate them in person. Livni made belligerent statements of her own. Why would Israel not want to settle this problem with a country which over the centuries was a haven for Jews and which was well placed to arbitrate between Israel and the Arab states? Why would it actually go out of its way to antagonise Turkey, and even to rub salt into the wound? The answer would seem to lie at the intersection between folly, stupidity and lunacy. Meir Kahane, whose followers celebrated his genocidal ideas in the streets of Umm al Fahm only the other day, would be dancing with delight at the way things are turning out.
Israel has rejected every opportunity that ever came its way to make peace with the Palestinians, and through them with the broader Arab world. The process did not begin in 1988 or even in 1973 but goes back to Nasser’s approaches in the 1960s. In the past two decades the Arab states have laid out a simple formula for peace – you keep 80 per cent of the land but you return the 20 per cent you took in 1967 and you take the refugee question seriously. The offer was almost insanely and irresponsibly generous, but it was still not enough for Israel. By ignoring or rejecting these open offers, by taking what it wants from the ‘peace process’ and dumping the rest, Israel has repeatedly turned its back on peace. For peace to be durable, viable, all those words used by American presidents and British Prime Ministers, something has to be on offer for both sides, but now nothing is on offer for the Palestinians. Israel is going to do what it wants, take what it wants, and to hell with international law and what anyone else thinks. These are the clear signals coming from the Netanyahu government, backed up on the ground by a feverish acceleration of settlement-building.
There is nowhere left for Mahmud Abbas, Husni Mubarak and the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan to hide behind, not a rock, a fig leaf or even a blade of grass. If we are not hearing much from any of them these days that is because there is nothing left to say. Obama has gone completely silent on the question of Middle East peace and, except for the occasional pro forma statement about getting the peace process back on track (i.e. giving a corpse mouth-to-mouth resuscitation), so has Hillary Clinton. Obviously, they are focused on the coming congressional elections but they have nothing useful to say either. Israel has driven everyone into a corner. The ‘peace process’ was based on the assumption that sooner or later Israel would come to the party, that when the point was reached where the ‘core issues’ could be discussed Israel would make the necessary ‘concessions’ (i.e. handing back stolen property). But it is not coming to the party. There is no party, except for the settlers and the fascists marching on Umm al Fahm calling ‘death to the terrorists’. They are having a wild old time. The champagne corks are popping everywhere.
Israel claims legitimacy and the ‘right’ to exist. Yet its first act was to drive out the indigenous people of Palestine so that they would have no rights at all, not just the right to vote but the most basic right of all, the right to live in the land where they were born. In other words, Israel is claiming rights which it completely denies to another people. Not only does it do this but it demands that its victims accept that the wrongs committed against them were in fact a ‘right’. This is totally absurd but if the full blown fascists in the Knesset have their way, even the commemoration of the nakba would be criminalised. That the government would actually allow the followers of the genocidal Meir Kahane to flaunt their repulsive doctrines in Umm al Fahm, right amongst the people they want killed or removed, is a measure of the depth of the racism in its ranks.
The life of a state is also based on the harmony of its relationships with those living alongside it and on its willingness to live within the remit of international law. On both of these counts Israel is a miserable failure. In the name of security and defending borders which it refuses to declare, it has spent the last six decades antagonising the Arabs. This has to be regarded as extremely strange behavior for a state which endlessly proclaims its desire to live at peace with its neighbors. In fact, Israel has no ‘neighbors’ in the cozy sense of that word. It has treaty arrangements with Egypt and Jordan, whose rulers do not represent the sentiments of their own people, let alone the feelings of the broader Arab world.
Israel does not want anything that could conceivably be called a genuine peace. For the sake of holding on to its ill-gotten gains, it is prepared to remain a garrison state forever. It is prepared to fight wars and to launch them to destroy anyone who stands in the way of the fulfillment of the Zionist dream/nightmare. Nothing is left for the Palestinians in this situation but to declare that, as the Oslo process succeeded or failed as a package, as it has now not so much failed as been killed off by Israel, all the agreements that were made along the way are null and void. Effectively, they, the Palestinians, and we, the rest of the world, because there is no way that the world can avoid becoming embroiled in the very large crisis that will inevitably arise as the apotheosis of all these smaller crises (small by comparison), we are back to 1948. Blocked from swinging in one direction, the pendulum between war and peace must now swing in the other.
– Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne.
US allots $100bn to nukes
Press TV – October 30, 2010
Iran has criticized the United States for allocating $100 billion to proliferation of its nuclear weapons, saying it contradicts Washington’s claim of supporting a nuke-free world.
Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Khazaei condemned the US nuclear double standard, saying Washington advocates a nuclear-free world on the one hand, while it continues to develop and modernize its nuclear arsenal on the other.
“The US plan to develop and modernize nuclear weapons … to which a budget of more than one hundred billion dollars is allocated, is in direct contradiction to White House slogans of a nuke-free world,” Khazaei told the UN General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee.
The Iranian envoy also referred to the US nuclear bombardment of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, saying the existence of thousands of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of nuclear countries continues to cast a “shadow of fear” over the world.
The UN General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee in a meeting in New York on Friday discussed a new nuclear disarmament treaty between the United States and Russia.
During the meeting, the member states of the Non- Aligned Movement (NAM), in a statement, criticized the new START pact, citing inadequate measures to counter nuclear threats.
The statement, which was proposed by Iran and read aloud at the meeting, called on the US and Russia to stick to their commitments regarding the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the destruction of all their nuclear weapons.
The US and Russia were also urged to adopt a transparent nuclear policy and to meet their international nuclear verification obligations in order to ensure global denuclearization.
The statement said that the reduction of nuclear weapons was no substitute for their destruction, as the only way to protect the world against a nuclear threat was complete denuclearization.
The NAM members states also voiced deep concern over NATO’s nuclear policies that seek to justify the use of nuclear weapons.
The US and Russia, both signatories to the NPT, are major possessors of nuclear weapons.
The two countries signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) on reduction and limitation of nuclear weapons in 1991.
It was renamed START I after negotiations began on the second START treaty, which became START II or the New START.
The START I treaty expired in December 2009. In April 2010, the New START was signed by the US and Russia.
Under the new treaty, each side within seven years would be barred from deploying more than 1,550 strategic warheads or 700 launchers but neither side would have to eliminate large numbers of weapons to meet the new limits.
Arms control advocates say the treaty does not go far enough in reducing the dangerous weapons on both sides.
The Pentagon’s move to spend billions to rejuvenate its nuclear warheads runs counter to the White House’s “nuclear free world” motto.
Pre-Election Bomb Plot a Political Boost for Obama
‘Terror Threat’ a Big Political Win for Obama, Dems
By Jason Ditz | Anti-war.com | October 29, 2010
Though the administration has declined to raise the terror alert level, the very public nature of the Yemen bomb plot is seen as giving President Obama and incumbent Congressional Democrats a much-needed political shot in the arm, conveniently enough just days before the midterm elections.
The plot gave an opportunity for President Obama to look “presidential,” experts say, as he gave a high profile speech vowing “any steps necessary” to see al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate destroyed.
The fact that by all accounts no explosives appear to have actually gotten to the United States also likely plays to the administration’s advantage, and indeed the advantage of all incumbents, who can claim that the “system worked” in this regard even as they promise major new foreign policy ventures in retaliation.
Though former Bush-era offical Gordon Johndroe insisted that these attacks can “cut either way” politically right before the election, the recent history in the US and abroad suggests that they have pretty much universally favored the incumbent, and while this particularly incident appears much larger, it does not appear to be any different in that regard.
Recent polls had showed Democrats taking big hits in the upcoming Midterm election, and President Obama’s campaigning doing very little to help. The consequences of a shift in the popular interest away from the economy and onto hawkish rhetoric about revenge attacks against al-Qaeda at the last minute could be significant, and might well mean that the massive losses the incumbents were facing will no longer apply.
What Are They Hiding? Obama Administration Defending Black Site Prison at Bagram Airbase
Dave Lindorff | This Can’t Be Happening | 10/26/2010
A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.
In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgement saying that the government may keep that information secret.
The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?
Says Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, “The military says that they can’t release the information because it would be a threat to national security, but they provided that information for the prisoners at Guantanamo.”
And of course, as our leaders informed us repeatedly, those captives at Guantanamo, who hailed from all over the globe, including Afghanistan, were allegedly “the worst of the worst”–at least until it turned out that many of them were wholly innocent of anything. Had been framed and turned in for a bounty, or were mere children when picked up, like Omar Khadr, the 24-year old Canadian man who just copped a guilty plea to avoid a sham tribunal before 7 officers and potential life imprisonment, after being captured at 15, tortured at Bagram, and held for nine years at Guantanamo (on a charge of killing an American soldier in battle).
The court ruling keeping the information about the thousands of prisoners held at Bagram secret may be a victory for the government, but it is hardly a victory for America’s image in the world, or for the troops battling in Afghanistan, who will be attacked all the harder by people induced to fight to the death to avoid capture and consignment to the hellhole in Bagram (now known as Parwan Prison), which has become Afghanistan’s Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo rolled into one.
One of the things that concerns the ACLU is that by not even making public the circumstances under which Bagram detainees were brought into the prison, it appears likely that the administration is hiding the reality that many “probably don’t deserve to be there,” says the ACLU’s Goodman. She explains, “There could be plenty of people sitting there who were just caught up in house sweeps in Kabul, for instance.”
As well, she says that by withholding information about citizenship and about the place of initial capture, the government may be hiding the fact that it is using Bagram as it used to use Guantanamo, as a so-called “black site” for “rendering,” or bringing, people captured all around the world.
Making matters worse is a string of continuing reports from people released from Bagram, including some which are very recent, that it is a site where torture is routinely applied to prisoners.
Significantly, a second part of the court’s ruling was that the CIA does not have to confirm or deny whether it too is holding captives at Bagram. This is a serious blow too to America’s reputation and to democratic values, since when President Obama, early in his presidency, signed an executive order outlawing torture by the military, he left some major loopholes. Most significantly, he applied that order only to persons captured during “armed conflict.” Since the US doesn’t consider captives in the loosely-defined “War on Terror” to be legitimate combatants, that means many of the people held at Bagram may be considered outside of the president’s ban. The order also says captives in counterterror operations do not have to be reported to the Red Cross.
Goodman says, “Despite concerns that Bagram has become the new Guantánamo, the public remains in the dark when it comes to basic facts about the facility and whom our military is holding in indefinite military detention there. The public has a right to know how long the U.S. has kept people locked up in military detention and under what circumstances. The lack of transparency about these key facts is even more disturbing considering the possibility that the U.S. will continue holding and interrogating prisoners at Bagram well into the future. Unfortunately, today’s ruling will allow the government to continue hiding this vital information.”
When the ugly sadistic goings on at Abu Ghraib were exposed, it caused massive damage to the US, and, according to government statements at the time, ended up helping recruit more future terrorists. It seems the Obama adminstration is heading down the same road now at Bagram, with the blessing of a Judge Jones.
JOHN ASHCROFT’S IMMUNITY AND THE U.S. LEGAL SYSTEM
By Dr. Lawrence Davidson | 26. Oct, 2010
The Situation
One of the cases the Supreme Court of the United States will take up in its 2011 session is Ashcroft vs. al-Kidd. John Ashcroft was the Attorney General under President George Bush Jr. In that capacity he appears to have knowingly violated the U.S. Constitution (as well as periodically forced his employees to listen to his horrendous singing voice). Abdullah al-Kidd is a Muslim American citizen who Ashcroft illegally ordered detained through the illicit use of a material witness warrant. Kidd was one of 70 detained in this manner. He was picked up at Dulles International Airport after the FBI lied to a judge in order to get the warrant for his seizure. Al-Kidd was subsequently held for long periods in a security cell where the lights never went out.
That John Ashcroft is the criminal and al-Kidd his victim is certain. That is how the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sees it. That court has refused to dismiss al-Kidd’s lawsuit against Ashcroft noting that the former Attorney General can be held personally responsible for action “repugnant to the Constitution.” That he knowingly and criminally acted to “arrest and detain American citizens for months on end, in sometimes primitive conditions, not because they have committed a crime, but merely because the government wants to investigate them for possible wrongdoing.” Ashcroft’s lawyers avoid the question of the illegality of his actions and simply say that he is immune from lawsuits for actions he took as Attorney General. On that basis they have asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the suit. The Justices have now decided to consider Ashcroft’s request.
Certainly John Ashcroft is not the first high U.S. official to reveal himself as an alleged criminal. Nor is it the first time that high government officials have acted in an unconstitutional manner. Right out of the starting gate , so to speak, the young United States created the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) through which the Federalist party sought, quite unconstitutionally, to jail its political opponents. Andrew Jackson spit in the eye of both the Supreme Court and the Constitution by evicting the Cherokee Indians (1838), James Polk should have been impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors for lying to the Congress in order to start the Mexican-American War (1846), Abraham Lincoln probably violated the Constitution by some of his police actions during the Civil War, the raids and deportations that took place as a result of the Red Scares of the 1920s were at least in part unconstitutional, then you have Watergate, Irangate and now multiple potential Bushgates. Few of the politicians who ordered these criminal actions, or those who carried out those orders, ever faced punishment.
The Position of the Obama Administration
What is interesting about the present case of Ashcroft vs. al-Kidd is that the Obama administration has decided to make illegality acceptable by institutionalizing the concept of immunity for highly placed men like Ashcroft. The administration will try to do this not through legislation, but through precedent– by defending Ashcroft’s claim to immunity before the Supreme Court. At first it seems strange that a professed liberal president such as Barack Obama would do this. But unfortunately, it is quite consistent with the illiberal stance he has maintained on the question of the constitutional responsibility of his predecessors in the Bush White House. From the beginning of his presidency, Obama decided to shield them from the consequences of their crimes. This position was initiated by the president’s “we should look forward” statement in January of 2009. In this statement he made it clear that he did not want to pursue those who had ordered or implemented (in this case) torture under the Bush administration. When popular pressure forced the president to allow his attorney general, Eric Holder, to open an investigation of the issue of torture it was arranged so the inquiry would have no teeth. Publically and up front we were told that no one would be prosecuted whatever the outcome of the probe. That is the last anyone has heard of Holder’s investigation of torture American style. The long and short of this is that the principle set down at Nuremberg, to wit following orders is no excuse for criminal behavior, will not be applied. Nor will giving the orders incur a penalty. The decision to defend Ashcroft’s claim of immunity is in solid accord with this position.
The logic of this position, and its likely consequences, warrants close examination. If we were to ask President Obama why he has decided to defend the immunity of alleged criminals who happen to be high government officials, and if he were to be perfectly candid in his reply, here is what he might say:
1. President Obama – It would be difficult for the president, or those who carry out his orders, to act freely and as needed if they had always to worry about litigation after the fact. This is particularly true in time of war and emergency.
My Reply – This assertion has been made by leaders of states from time immemorial. It is a variation on the raison d’etat argument that has historically allowed all manner of bad behavior under the guise of state interests. On the other hand, it is true that following the law can prove inconvenient under wartime or emergency conditions. Nonetheless, in the long run, lawlessness is much worse than inconvenience. It is to be noted that, in the American case, appointed and elected high officials (particularly attorney generals!) are sworn to uphold the law not to transgress it.
2. President Obama – While I have stopped the more egregious policies of the Bush administration, I am still responsible for the safety of all American citizens and, in our modern age, I have to be able to use all the methods, high tech and otherwise, to achieve this goal. Some of these methods might very well prove unconstitutional (warrantless wiretaps, for instance) and yet I must be free to use them because another 9/11 style attack must be prevented. And, if I am to use these methods, then I can not prosecute those who have done so before me. Otherwise I would be accused of being a hypocrite by my political foes.
My Reply – This argument juxtaposes unattainable 100% security against the traditional freedoms that makes America the country its founders intended. Do we want to sacrifice the latter for the illusion of the former? As James Madison once observed, “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” That is the slippery slope President Obama seems willing to take us down. It also prioritizes the president’s political interests over the Constitution. This latter point of view can be carried further.
3. President Obama – You have to understand, that if I do not do all that is possible, be it constitutional or otherwise, to protect the nation I put myself in mortal political danger. I open myself to the accusation by my political rivals that I am “soft” on security or terrorism. And, if something does happen, such as another terrorist attack, then I am politically dead.
My Reply – Well, yes, this is so. However, what is also true is that prioritizing politics above law always leads us in the direction of corruption, or worse. By defending Ashcroft isn’t President Obama saying it is all right to break the law if you are highly placed and so lacking in imagination that you can not figure out a legal way of dealing with an emergency? For let us be clear, there is no evidence that after 9/11 the unconstitutional route was the only possible route to defend the country. Were the legal options and their constitutional variants ever seriously itemized and discussed? The Obama administration, like the Bush operatives, have never publically addressed this question.
Likely Consequences
If the Obama Justice Department proceeds with its plans to defend Ashcroft’s immunity claim and if, as is likely, the Supreme Court upholds that claim, we will be left with a politically based two tier legal system. It will set free to break the law every highly placed federal official every time he or she can claim an emergency situation. Then, after the fact, they will cite the immunity precedent. In the meantime, the fact that high federal officials are sworn to uphold the laws of the land will be rendered worthless, just another bit of political hypocrisy.
So what is it that we want for America? Do we want a two tier legal system where presidents and their appointees can break the law with impunity? Do we want a legal system where it is accepted that citizens and residents can disappear into federal dungeons? Is it all right with us that our fellow citizens, following the orders of the president, will torture, detain, shackle and otherwise abuse others without any regard for law – and they too will be immune? Because, whether they realize it or not, that is what the Obama Justice Department is arguing for when it defends John Ashcroft.
DR. LAWRENCE DAVIDSON is professor of Middle East history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA, and the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University of Florida Press, 2001), Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003), and Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentuck Press, 2009).
Federal Court Rules Government Can Keep Secret Basic Facts About Bagram Prisoners
More Transparency Needed On Detention Practices At Massive U.S. Prison In Afghanistan, Says ACLU
ACLU | October 25, 2010
NEW YORK – The Defense Department can continue to withhold key information from the public about the hundreds of detainees imprisoned by the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, according to a federal court ruling today.
The ruling came in an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Defense Department and the CIA for records related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram (now known as Parwan). The Defense Department has released the names of the 645 prisoners who were detained there as of September 2009, but has kept secret other vital information including their citizenship, how long they have been held, in what country they were captured and the circumstances of their capture. The ACLU charged that the Defense Department is improperly withholding these basic facts about Bagram prisoners and their detention, and asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to order the Defense Department to turn over the information. In denying the ACLU’s motion, the court also ruled that the CIA did not act improperly when it refused to even confirm or deny whether the CIA had records about the rendition and interrogation of Bagram detainees.
The U.S. military has announced its intention to transfer control of Bagram prison to the Afghan government next year. However, media outlets have reported that the Obama administration intends to maintain control over a portion of the prison and to continue detaining some prisoners in U.S. custody there, including non-Afghan terrorism suspects captured outside of Afghanistan and prisoners considered “enduring security threats.”
The following can be attributed to Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project:
“Despite concerns that Bagram has become the new Guantánamo, the public remains in the dark when it comes to basic facts about the facility and whom our military is holding in indefinite military detention there. The public has a right to know how long the U.S. has kept people locked up in military detention and under what circumstances. The lack of transparency about these key facts is even more disturbing considering the possibility that the U.S. will continue holding and interrogating prisoners at Bagram well into the future. Unfortunately, today’s ruling will allow the government to continue hiding this vital information.”
More information about the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit, including today’s filings, is online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/bagram-foia
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666
Pelosi’s ‘progressive,’ antiwar challenger is also… pro-Israel
By Matthew Taylor | Mondoweiss | October 23, 2010
Here in San Francisco, progressives are furious with Nancy Pelosi for enabling the Bush war machine, Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan, and her utter disdain for (our crappy definition of) democracy, as she has refused to debate her libertarian Republican opponent John Dennis. Although his is clearly a Quixotic campaign, Dennis is running to Pelosi’s left (to some extent) and picking up support from across the political spectrum, including, quite shockingly, former Board of Supervisors President Matt Gonzalez.
Gonzalez is a progressive icon who nearly became the first Green Party Mayor of a major American city in 2003, when he picked up 47% of the vote. He was also Nader’s VP running mate in 2008. Gonzalez’s passionate endorsement of Dennis, in an open letter to Pelosi:
Even your most ardent supporters are at a loss to defend your escalation of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan after you became Speaker (despite your promises to end the war), and for your support for the Patriot Act, its subsequent reauthorization, and for your support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among other things…
Although you may want to dismiss your congressional opponent John Dennis because he is a Republican, I assure you that he is a serious candidate with views worthy of consideration. In addition to being firmly anti-war and committed to defending civil liberties, Dennis is pro-gay rights, opposed the Wall Street bailouts and has joined in the populist call challenging the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve…
As with virtually every politician in America, it turns out John Dennis’ progressivism has a limit. I’ll give you a hint: it starts with an “I” ends with an “L” and has “obliviousness to racist ethnic cleansing and illegal colonization” in the middle.
Check out Dennis’ comments on Israel at 4:40 of this video. The upshot: he wants to not only continue to dole out six billion in military funding to Israel every year, he insists that Israel should be able to build unlimited settlements/colonies, and the U.S. has absolutely no right to criticize what Israel does with the U.S. guns.
John Dennis, where’s the limit? What would Israel have to do with U.S. guns for you to say, “too far”? Outright genocide?
I love Matt Gonzalez – worked on his campaign, in fact – but Gonzalez totally blew it on this one. Gonzalez should run against Pelosi instead of handing out endorsements to pro-Israel sycophants like candy. Gonzalez might actually win.
The Democratic-Likud Party
October 22, 2010 by Alex Kane
Ynetnews.com today publishes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “list of millionaires,” a group of people Netanyahu identified as potential donors to him ahead of the 2007 primary elections in Israel.
What’s important about the list of donors that Netanyahu identified is what it says about the Israel lobby and the Democratic Party in the United States. It goes a long way in explaining why hard-right Zionist views can be found among Democratic politicians.
There is little to no difference between how Democrats and Republicans in the United States act towards Israel; criticizing Israel is a “third rail” in American politics, and some of the donors included on this list show why.
It makes sense why this is the case with the Republican Party, as the ideology of neoconservatism and military interventionism is a core part of the party, and matches up nicely with Likud’s way of looking at the world and, in particular, the Palestinians. But with the slightly more rational and liberal Democratic Party, which captured the House and Senate in 2006 in part because of growing opposition to the Iraq War, it makes less sense.
That is, until you look at some of the donors who Netanyahu reasonably thought may give him money and notice that at least a couple are heavy contributors to the Democratic Party.
Among the potential donors listed are Haim Saban and Mortimer Zuckerman.
Saban is a wealthy ”entertainment mogul” whose “greatest concern is to protect Israel” and who is “one of the largest individual donors to the Democratic Party,” according to a May 2010 profile of him in the New Yorker. The profile notes that “in 2002, he contributed seven million dollars toward the cost of a new building for the Democratic National Committee—one of the largest known donations ever made to an American political party.” But his political views match up with the Israeli right-wing, a decidedly illiberal set of viewpoints.
From Marwan Bishara’s blog on Al Jazeera, here’s Saban in his own words, taken from a 2006 interview with Ha’aretz:
On his worries for Israel:
“… Israel does not worry me. Israel’s neighbours worry me … History proved that Sharon was right and I was wrong. In matters relating to security, that moved me to the right. Very far to the right.”
On Iran:
“The Iranians are serious. They mean business. Ahmadinejad is not a madman.
“When I see Ahmadinejad, I see Hitler. They speak the same language. His motivation is also clear: the return of the Mahdi is a supreme goal. And for a religious person of deep self-persuasion, that supreme goal is worth the liquidation of five-and-a-half million Jews. We cannot allow ourselves that.
“Nuclear weapons in the hands of a religious leadership that is convinced that the annihilation of Israel will bring about the emergence of a new Muslim caliphate? Israel cannot allow that. This is no game. It’s truly an existential danger.”
On the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran:
“Is there a higher price than two nuclear bombs on Israel? So they will fire missiles, all right then. Iran is not Lebanon, where you pinpoint specific targets: this bridge here, that building, half of that courtyard over there. In Iran you go in and wipe out their infrastructure completely. Plunge them into darkness. Cut off their water.”
“Would I prefer a defence minister who is capable of looking at a map and saying, ‘Half a division here, two divisions there, send the commandos from the north and let the navy hit from the south’? Yes, I would prefer that. Because to negotiate with management on behalf of the unions is a skill, but it’s a different skill from planning a war. In our situation, for all time, at least in our lifetime, we need a defence minister who has a thorough understanding of these subjects.”
Zuckerman is a media mogul who owns the New York Daily News and is the editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, and is a major contributor to the Democratic Party, according to the Center for Reponsive Politics’ Open Secrets website. He is a former head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and espouses hawkish views when it comes to the Palestinians. For instance, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Zuckerman calls Jerusalem ”its capital” and refers to the illegal settlement of Ramat Shlomo in East Jerusalem as a “Jewish suburb.”
The Democratic Party is beholden to people like Zuckerman and Saban, who were listed as potential donors to a right-wing Israeli political party whose official platform states that Likud “rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
No wonder Likudnik views get play within the supposedly liberal party in American politics.
A new stage in the war on dissent
Socialist Worker | October 19, 2010
Michael Ratner is the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a leading organization in opposing the dismantling of civil liberties under the Bush, and now Obama, administrations.
He spoke with Nicole Colson about the recent raids on the homes and offices of antiwar and socialist activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and North Carolina–and why the Obama administration, despite claims to the contrary, has been disastrous when it comes to promises to protect our civil liberties.
NC: RECENTLY, ANTIWAR and socialist activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and North Carolina have had their homes and offices raided, and were given grand jury subpoenas. What is your take on these raids? What’s your sense of what the government is after?
THE RAIDS have all the earmarks of a fishing expedition–both the search warrants as well as grand jury subpoenas. They all claimed to be investigating “material support to terrorism,” in particular around both the Middle East and the country of Colombia. It appears to be a fishing expedition because the materials that were authorized to be seized and the subjects about which questions were to be asked were quite broad.
The search warrants were like wholesale seizure warrants. The FBI goes into five or six houses in Minneapolis, two houses in Chicago, some houses in North Carolina and Michigan as well, and seize everything. They take people’s cell phones, they take all the computers out, they take every document out. This broad language in the search warrants purports to allow the FBI to take everything in those offices.
And then the subpoenas, which require people to testify in front of the grand jury, they also are very open ended. Asking for everything people know about certain organizations, phone numbers, associates, friends, etc. So you would think if it was a narrowly tailored prosecution in which they thought there might be real criminal conduct, the focus would be much narrower.
So while it appears from the warrants they might have some suspicion about something (but who even knows if that suspicion is valid), they certainly don’t have very much, because they are going very, very broadly.
It’s something like looking for a needle in a haystack, in which they destroy many lives and chill people’s rights–and there may not even be a needle. And because of that, they are clearly encroaching on the First Amendment rights of people who are doing antiwar organizing and working to change U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East and in South America.
There are many problems, but one of the problems here is that the search warrants and subpoenas are so that broad, they cut directly into all kinds of First Amendment activities. So the people in Minneapolis, who were among the main organizers of some of the Republican National Convention demonstrations in 2008, then become the targets of the FBI or the Joint Terrorism Task Force–and their First Amendment activities, and their right to organize and oppose the government are therefore chilled or even prevented all together.
A broad, wholesale attack like this on the antiwar movement and on activists is bad for the people who were directly attacked, and it also tells all of us that the activities we undertake are subject to government surveillance and much more in this case–the actual seizure of the documents and grand jury subpoenas.
So it’s quite serious. It makes you very suspicious because it’s so broad. It was so coordinated, it was across the country, and they don’t really have that much, if anything.
A second problem is the ostensible reason for the search. The various warrants and subpoenas cite the law concerning material support for terrorism. And of course, that’s the material support statute.
A case arguing the unconstitutionality of that statute was recently argued by the Center for Constitutional Rights in the Supreme Court [Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project]. We lost. The Supreme Court, for the first time since 9/11, said advocacy or speech on behalf of an organization on the attorney general’s terrorist list is covered by the criminal statute–the material support of terrorism statute–if that speech is coordinated with, or you work with or have contact with, people in the alleged terrorist organization.
So once an organization is put on the terrorist list, if I only write an op-ed, and if I gather the information from the designated organization or have any contact with anybody there, even if it’s just asking for information, that might be interpreted as “coordination” with them, or some kind of material support for that organization. And there is no due process given before an organization is put on the list. It’s almost impossible to challenge. Oftentimes, placement on the terrorist list is a political decision.
So first you have the Supreme Court decision in June 2010, and then you have these raids a couple of months afterward. It makes you very suspicious that the current government is pushing the boundaries of the material support statute and reading it very broadly.
Organizations are going to be put in fear of any kind of opposition to U.S. foreign policy if there is a claim by the government that there is contact with organizations that are designated terrorists. Domestic American organizations that oppose U.S. foreign policy may well be chilled in their work.
COULD YOU say a little bit more about the way that the material support provision has been used since 9/11? There have been a number of really high-profile cases–particularly of Islamic charities, for example–where no violence was ever alleged to have occurred as a result of the so-called “material support,” so a lot of us on the left have seen this as a broader attempt to whip up support for the “war on terror.”
ONE OF the main uses of the material support statute, I think is to demonize organizations that the U.S. government doesn’t like. Had they had such a statue during the period of the African National Congress (ANC) opposition to the apartheid government in South Africa, they would have labeled that–and that’s how they thought of it in the U.S., under Reagan and before–as a terrorist organization. Any contacts with the ANC of any Americans opposed to apartheid would have been considered criminal.
There are two aspects to this. One is that the government can label, without any kind of hearing or way to challenge it, a foreign organization as a terrorist organization. The other is that any American contact with that organization or support for that organization is prohibited.
This is true even if that support is, as I said, by writings that are at all coordinated; by giving blankets to their hospital; by, according to the case we lost in Supreme Court, wanting to teach the [Kurdistan Workers Party] or the Tamil Tigers about the Geneva Conventions. Wanting to teach people peaceful means of resolving disputes, or wanting to get them to the negotiating table–when Jimmy Carter negotiates questions in the Middle East and he has contacts with Hamas or Hezbollah–those all are now prohibited.
So this statute is the favorite of prosecutors to go after people, because the smallest kind of contact with a designated terrorist organization can be considered material support. It’s an easy way to intimidate, wipe out and jail opponents of U.S. foreign policy, and an easy way to demonize organizations that many would call liberation organizations in other countries.
The provision has been used often. It is a favorite among prosecutors because you have to prove so little. So the Holy Land Foundation, which was the biggest Muslim charity in the United States, was accused of giving money to Hamas, but so indirectly that it’s hard to believe any of the facts in the case–it was giving it to groups that I think even the UN was giving to in Gaza. But somehow, they were supposed to believe or know that those groups were connected to Hamas, which has been put on the U.S. terrorist list.
The statute is used very broadly to say, “Muslims in this country and all their charities, what they’re doing is supporting terrorism.” When in fact, the vast majority of those charities–I obviously don’t know every one, but from what I know–gave aid to organizations they didn’t think were terrorist for starters, or on the list, and, secondly, they were giving humanitarian aid or doing things like teaching the Geneva Conventions.
I WANTED to go back to this recent Supreme Court case, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, that was argued for the Obama administration by former Solicitor General Elena Kagan–who is now, of course, sitting on the Supreme Court. What do you think that case signals about the court’s view of free speech issues and its efforts to broaden this statute?
THEY WERE pushing to broaden out this statute, of course. I was at the argument, and the solicitor general did make very broad arguments–broader than the case required for saying that certain kinds of what she called “material aid” should be criminally punished under the statute, or could be.
So, for example, let’s say an organization was designated as a terrorist organization, and it comes to you and says, “We were improperly designated, we want to try to challenge it.” I couldn’t do that, as a lawyer representing them. Elena Kagan said in the Supreme Court that such representation would be “materially aiding” a terrorist organizations.
So she took a very broad position in the court. The solicitor general does have some ability to say, “I’m not taking a position that’s broader than the case,” but she didn’t do that. The Supreme Court didn’t decide every question on this, but you’d be taking a real chance if you went and represented a designated terrorist organization that was on the list. So it doesn’t bode particularly well that Elena Kagan argued in that case that she was willing to go for a very broad reading of the statute.
The other issue had to do with the plaintiff we represented, the Humanitarian Law Project, which wanted to teach the Geneva Conventions or explain to a designated terrorist group how to use the UN as a peaceful means of achieving their goals. Kagan argued that such teaching was “conduct,” and not “speech”–and therefore wasn’t protected by the First Amendment.
We argued that it was speech, and the court did agree that it was speech. So even on that issue, the government was willing to say that teaching the Geneva Conventions was speech.
But then they said this was one of the rare cases where we’re going to outlaw speech, which is what they did.
I THINK a lot of people felt some real hope that with Barack Obama’s election, civil liberties would be safer, given his promise to close Guantánamo, and to try detainees in civilian courts. But he’s really fallen far short of almost all of these promises, hasn’t he?
I WOULD say it’s a disaster. It’s a continuation of the Bush policies, and in some cases, the deepening of those policies. So Guantánamo is still open. We still have arbitrary detention, or detention without trial, and we have a number of people at Guantánamo who will never go to trial.
In a recent case that came up in federal court, the court barred testimony that might have been the result of torture. The Obama administration tried to use it. But the government still uses military commissions to try people, and those commissions can still use evidence derived from torture.
The Obama administration still uses the “state secrets” defense to get cases dismissed. They just did it again in a case of ours, in which we’re suing Obama to stop the assassination by drone or otherwise of Imam (Anwar) al-Awlaki in Yemen. The government asserted the “state secrets” defense to that case. We don’t know what the court will decide.
But they have been pretty deferential to the Obama administration on the question of state secrets. We have not won a case. So on every issue–Guantánamo, preventive detention, state secrets, use of torture evidence, military commissions–there’s been an identical practice to that of the Bush administration. Some people would argue they’re surrounded with a few more procedural protections, or laws, but it’s the same policy.
And when it’s coming from a Democrat, it should be a particular lesson to people–that on these national security issues, there’s very, very little difference between the two administrations, Democratic or Republican. It’s also particularly bad, because if one had hopes that the Democrats were going to shift on these issues, it just demonstrates how deeply imbedded the erosion of civil liberties has become in the U.S. and the willingness to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of “national security” or “stopping terrorism.”
You would have trouble distinguishing the policies of Bush from Obama. Even on the issue of rendition, when you take a person from one country to another illegally, Obama has continued this. He claimed that he wouldn’t render people to countries where they would be tortured, but we haven’t seen that yet–the first person who was picked up to be rendered had the heck beaten out of them on the plane over here.
So even on rendition, they’re similar. One difference, you could say, is that there isn’t the open and notorious torture of people that there was under Bush–at least not that we know of.
I say that cautiously, because there are still some secret prisons out there–a section of Bagram that no one’s allowed into–so we don’t know everything that’s going on around the issue of torture. And there’s certainly been no accountability for the torture regime of the Bush administration. Many of those same people are still in the current administration.
I WAS reading a recent Rolling Stone interview with Obama, and he said that people need to vote for the Democrats in November if we want the kind of country that respects civil rights and civil liberties. It just seemed totally disconnected from the reality of what’s happened in the last two years under his administration.
IN EVERY case we’ve gone to court on regarding accountability, the Obama administration has stopped us.
We represent two people who allegedly committed suicide in Guantánamo. We have evidence now that they were murdered, and the Obama administration opposed our suit, and we lost. In another case, we went to court claiming that our Guantánamo lawyers at the Center were wiretapped without warrants. We just lost that case in the Supreme Court. They denied review. Again, the Obama administration opposed us.
The ACLU went to court to try and get at the rendition issue against a subsidiary of Boeing, which was involved in some of the flights. Again, the Obama administration opposed it.
I can name 20 cases where they’ve come into court, and they’ve made sure that there will not be exposure, much less liability, of the torture regime, and violations of fundamental Constitutional rights that occurred under Bush. And many of these violations are still occurring today. You don’t have an outcry about Guantánamo now, yet we have 40 some people there facing indefinite permanent detention without trial.
GIVEN WHAT you’re saying about these recent raids being about demonizing organizations the government doesn’t like, what kind of advice would you give to activists in this kind of climate?
I CERTAINLY think it’s not a time to cut back on actions, that’s for sure. If there is a need for action, it is now–whether it’s on the wars or civil liberties or immigration or otherwise. Otherwise, you’ll be basically conceding this territory to the government. So I don’t think one should pull back on major activity.
I do think one has to assume, in whatever you do, that most of what you do is wiretapped or surveilled, and there’s no doubt that the FBI guidelines are very broad on that. You have to assume that there’s an informant of some sort in a group, and that therefore what you say is going to be heard–whether by the government through surveillance or by someone in the group. And because of the breadth of the statute, you have to be extremely careful about your dealing with organizations on the [foreign terrorist] list.
When I say that, I mean your activities independent of those “terrorist” organizations are okay. So you shouldn’t pull back from that. So, for example, I can write an op-ed article tomorrow supporting the FARC in Colombia, but what I can’t do is have contact with the FARC in terms of saying that I need some help or something like that. Now, where it gets into real journalism is a harder issue.
I think organizations have to be extremely careful dealing with groups on the various terrorist lists that our government keeps. But you can do independent activities. Tomorrow, I can write an article saying “Hezbollah should be the legitimate rulers of Lebanon.” But I can’t contact Hezbollah and say, “Well I’m going to write this article, what do you think about this?” As soon as I do that, I cross a line.
I think organizations have to be extremely careful about contacts, if any, with designated terrorist organizations, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Not the way this government is acting right now and not with these decisions.
IN TERMS of the response to the FBI raids, I know there were several demonstrations in cities in the days following the raids, and when the first grand jury appearance was scheduled, even though all the activists refused to testify, people came out for that as well. Do you think that kind of public pressure is important?
I THINK those have been very helpful. I was really excited to see that there were 27 cities that had demonstrations around the raids and the grand jury appearances. And the fact that everybody decided to take the Fifth Amendment and not testify I think surprised the government. The government didn’t come back immediately and give certain people immunity, or maybe it realized they overreached a bit, and that it was a fishing expedition.
I think the demonstrations made a difference in that. That’s not saying that something more won’t happen, because you know they don’t do these things and then just walk away. But I think demonstrations did help, and protests really limit the scope that the government can act on in these kinds of raids. I think they are absolutely a crucial part of opposition.
I think that if there weren’t those protests, for all I know the government would have enforced those subpoenas right away and dragged those people right in to the grand jury. But now, maybe they’re rethinking it. They may still do it selectively–I don’t have any idea–but I certainly believe that making this into the civil liberties fight that it really is, is crucial.
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Book Review
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
… Groupthink was extensively studied by Yale psychologist Irving L. Janis and described in his 1982 book Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.
Janis was curious about how teams of highly intelligent and motivated people—the “best and the brightest” as David Halberstam called them in his 1972 book of the same name—could have come up with political policy disasters like the Vietnam War, Watergate, Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs. Similarly, in 2008 and 2009, we saw the best and brightest in the world’s financial sphere crash thanks to some incredibly stupid decisions, such as allowing sub-prime mortgages to people on the verge of bankruptcy.
In other words, Janis studied why and how groups of highly intelligent professional bureaucrats and, yes, even scientists, screw up, sometimes disastrously and almost always unnecessarily. The reason, Janis believed, was “groupthink.” He quotes Nietzsche’s observation that “madness is the exception in individuals but the rule in groups,” and notes that groupthink occurs when “subtle constraints … prevent a [group] member from fully exercising his critical powers and from openly expressing doubts when most others in the group appear to have reached a consensus.”[2]
Janis found that even if the group leader expresses an openness to new ideas, group members value consensus more than critical thinking; groups are thus led astray by excessive “concurrence-seeking behavior.”[3] Therefore, Janis wrote, groupthink is “a model of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”[4]
The groupthink syndrome
The result is what Janis calls “the groupthink syndrome.” This consists of three main categories of symptoms:
1. Overestimate of the group’s power and morality, including “an unquestioned belief in the group’s inherent morality, inclining the members to ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their actions.” [emphasis added]
2. Closed-mindedness, including a refusal to consider alternative explanations and stereotyped negative views of those who aren’t part of the group’s consensus. The group takes on a “win-lose fighting stance” toward alternative views.[5]
3. Pressure toward uniformity, including “a shared illusion of unanimity concerning judgments conforming to the majority view”; “direct pressure on any member who expresses strong arguments against any of the group’s stereotypes”; and “the emergence of self-appointed mind-guards … who protect the group from adverse information that might shatter their shared complacency about the effectiveness and morality of their decisions.”[6]
It’s obvious that alarmist climate science—as explicitly and extensively revealed in the Climatic Research Unit’s “Climategate” emails—shares all of these defects of groupthink, including a huge emphasis on maintaining consensus, a sense that because they are saving the world, alarmist climate scientists are beyond the normal moral constraints of scientific honesty (“overestimation of the group’s power and morality”), and vilification of those (“deniers”) who don’t share the consensus. … Read full article
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