Obama extends his Islamophobia to include Sikhs as well
By Ali Abunimah | October 19, 2010
US President Barack Obama has ruled out a visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, sacred to Sikhs, because Obama does not want to wear the head-covering that is required as a sign of respect in case it makes him look like a Muslim. From The New York Times:
But the United States has ruled out a Golden Temple visit, according to an American official involved in planning. Temple officials said that American advance teams had gone to Amritsar, the holy city where the temple is located, to discuss a possible visit. But the plan appears to have foundered on the thorny question of how Mr. Obama would cover his head, as Sikh tradition requires, while visiting the temple.
“To come to golden temple he needs to cover his head,” said Dalmegh Singh, secretary of the committee that runs the temple. “That is our tradition. It is their problem to cover the head with a Christian hat or a Muslim cap.”
Gawker, which drew my attention to the report, also quotes the Indian Express newspaper on efforts to come up with a “compromise” that would allow Obama to wear a baseball cap – a piece of head gear that would presumably not offend American racists back home:
The White House team which visited India last month ruled out Obama wearing the traditional scarf on his head. Indian officials were informally told that Obama wearing a headscarf to visit the Golden Temple may convey an image of him appearing to be a Muslim. This is one misinterpretation Obama’s advisors did not want at any cost, given the political sensitivities over this issue in the US.
And then:
Obama’s aides finally came up with the idea of a “modified” baseball cap. It would have to be modified because the Golden Temple does not permit a baseball cap instead of a headscarf. In fact, the temple authorities have no problems with skull caps.
As Giani Gurbachan Singh, head priest of the Golden Temple, puts it: “We have no problems if he wears a skull cap, the kind that Muslims wear to the mosque – or any other cap that is modified to something similar. But we don’t allow baseball caps or Army hats.”
It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting to his hosts than this. But of course Obama had absolutely no qualms about wearing a religiously-mandated head-covering when he visited the Wailing Wall, holy to Jews, in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem as part of his pandering to US Zionists and other racists when he was running for president, as the photo above from his July 2008 visit to Israel and occupied Jerusalem shows (The Guardian).
This is only the latest in a long line of incidents of Obama pandering to Islamophobia rather than standing up to it. During that same election campaign visit to Israel and Jordan, Obama aides were instructed not to wear green clothing, as that is supposedly the color of Islam. Also during the campaign two Muslim women enthusiastically attending an Obama rally were required to move out of camera shot, so that the Post Racial candidate would not be pictured with them.
More recently, Obama has repeatedly failed to stand up to Islamophobic incitement ginned up about the planned lower Manhattan Islamic Center and has basically hung American Muslims out to dry.
If Obama had refused to wear a kippah – the Jewish ritual head-covering – when he went to Jerusalem, and instead insisted on wearing a baseball cap, he would have been declared not only disrespectful, but anti-Semitic as well. Of course the whole point of going to Jerusalem was for the photo-op in order to buttress his pro-Israel credentials.
But in the current atmosphere of routine, endemic and escalating anti-Muslim incitement Obama has no fear of offending and denigrating Muslims. He also feeds racism against, and misunderstanding of Sikhs, whom racists often mistake for Muslims. Indeed this happened most tragically when Balbir Singh Sodhi, a 52 year-old Sikh man in Mesa, Arizona was shot five times and killed on September 15, 2001 by Frank Roque in “revenge” for the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Sikhs, along with Muslims and so many others, are just the latest to be thrown under Obama’s election campaign bus
Afghan detainees claim US abuse
“Despite the government’s insistence that its detention rules meet the minimum requirements under international law, it appears that this facility is either ignoring those rules or interpreting them so loosely that they make detainees susceptible to mistreatment,” – Jonathan Horowitz, human rights expert and author of report.
By Andrew Wander | Al-Jazeera | October 15, 2010
Former US military prisoners in Afghanistan have said that they were abused in a secret prison on Bagram airbase as recently as this year, raising fears that detainee mistreatment has continued despite an overhaul of US detention operations in the country.
The abuse – which includes exposure to extreme temperatures, lack of adequate food and bedding, lack of natural light and interference with religious duties – is alleged to have occurred at a secret “screening” facility on the military base north of Kabul.
The existence of the site, known amongst Afghans as the “Tor Jail”, has never been admitted by US authorities, although it does acknowledge it runs a number of field sites in which prisoners are held immediately after being captured.
Prisoners are kept at the field sites before either being handed to Afghan authorities, released, or transferred to the main US detention facility at Parwan, on the edge of Bagram airbase.
International standards
The US task force responsible for running detentions in the Afghanistan insists that treatment in all its facilities meets international standards.
But a report released this week by the US-based Open Society Foundation, details the testimony of 18 detainees held at the Tor Prison who say they were mistreated there.
The testimony includes repeated claims that their cells were kept uncomfortably cold so they were unable to sleep, that they were given inedible food, and that bright lights were kept on in windowless cells 24 hours a day.
Such treatment would not only fall short of international standards for the treatment of prisoners, but also would run counter to US military’s own guidelines on the issue, which says prisoners should not be exposed to “excessive or inadequate heat, light, or ventilation”.
The differences between the secretive Tor Prison and the main Bagram site have raised questions about whether the smaller site is being run by a different military agency to other detention sites in the country, which come under the mandate of Joint Task Force 435 (JTF 435).
Jonathan Horowitz, the author of the report, told Al Jazeera that there appeared to be a link between the Tor Prison and US special forces activity in Afghanistan.
“JTF 435 does not run the facility,” he said. “The facility does seem to have tight links with forces operating under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Whether they are the only ones in charge, I don’t know.”
“It’s worth noting that at the Detention Facility in Parwan [the main Bagram prison], there are also interrogators and isolations cells,’ he said.
“One of the big differences between the two sites is transparency. I assume that those in Tor Jail think they benefit from its secretive nature and don’t want to give that up.”
Detention overhaul
The allegations have come to light as the US military oversees a much-publicised effort to improve its record on detainee treatment in Afghanistan. Improved prison facilities have been built, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been given better access to those held in US detention.
Eighteen prisoners who passed through the site were interviewed for the report. Half of them said that they had been taken to the prison in 2009 and 2010, after Barack Obama, the US president, had already ordered an overhaul of detention operations in Afghanistan.
The US military has denied that it runs secret prisons in Afghanistan, and said it does not mistreat the prisoners it holds there, insisting that conditions are compliant with both the Geneva Coventions and the military’s own guidelines.
Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon spokesperson, said the US department of defence (DoD) “takes all credible allegations of detainee mistreatment very seriously”.
“Furthermore, DoD conducts thorough and regular assessments of all of its detention facilities and operations to maintain oversight, accountability and to ensure humane treatment of detainees,” she said in an email to Al Jazeera.
The US military does run temporary detention and screening facilities in Afghanistan, “which are classified to preserve operational security,” she said. “However, both the ICRC and the respective host nations have knowledge of these facilities … [and] these facilities are consistent with international and US law.”
THE CIA, KKK, & USA
By Sherwood Ross | 2010-10-11
By assigning covert action roles to the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA), it is as if the White House and Congress had legitimized the Ku Klux Klan to operate globally. That’s because the CIA today resembles nothing so much as the “Invisible Empire” of the KKK that once spread terror across the South and Midwest. Fiery crosses aside, this is what the CIA is doing globally.
The CIA today is committing many of the same sort of gruesome crimes against foreigners that the KKK once inflicted on Americans of color. The principal difference is that the KKK consisted of self-appointed vigilantes who regarded themselves as both outside and above the law when they perpetrated their crimes. By contrast, the CIA acts as the agent of the American government, often at the highest levels, and at times at the direction of the White House. Its crimes typically are committed in contravention of the highest established international law such as the Charter of the United Nations as well as the U.S. Constitution. What’s more, the “Agency,” as it is known, derives its funding largely from an imperialist-minded Congress; additionally, it has no qualms about fattening its budget from drug money and other illegal sources. It is a mirror-image of the lawless entity the U.S. has become since achieving superpower status. And it is incredible that the White House grants license to this violent Agency to commit its crimes with no accountability. The Ku Klux Klan was founded shortly after the end of the U.S. Civil War. Klansman concealed their identities behind flowing white robes and white hoods as they terrorized the newly emancipated blacks to keep them from voting or to drive them from their property.
Allowing it to operate in secret literally gives the CIA the mythical Ring of Gyges. In Plato’s Republic, the owner of the ring had the power to become invisible at will. As Wikipedia puts it, Plato “discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.” The ancient Greeks made the argument, Wikipedia says, that “No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.” The CIA, like Hitler’s Gestapo and Stalin’s NKVD before it, has provided modern man the answer to this question. Its actions illuminate why all criminal entities, from rapists and bank robbers, to Ponzi scheme swindlers and murderers, cloak themselves in secrecy.
There are innumerable examples of how American presidents have authorized criminal acts without public discussion that the preponderant majority of Americans would find reprehensible. Example: it was President Lyndon Johnson who ordered the CIA to meddle in Chile’s election to help Eduardo Frei become president. If they had known, U.S. taxpayers might have objected to such a use of their hard-earned money to influence the outcome of another country’s elections. But the public is rarely let in on such illegal foreign policy decisions. Where the KKK after the Civil War terrorized blacks to keep them from voting, the CIA has worked to influence the outcome of elections all over the world through bribery and vote-buying, dirty tricks, and worse. According to investigative reporter William Blum in “Rogue State”(Common Courage Press), the CIA has perverted elections in Italy, Lebanon, Indonesia, The Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Laos, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Portugal, Australia, Jamaica, Panama, Nicaragua, Haiti, among other countries. If they had known, taxpayers might also object to the CIA’s numerous overthrows of foreign governments by force and violence—such as was done in Iran in 1953 by President Eisenhower and Chile in 1973 by President Nixon. Both overthrows precipitated bloodbaths that cost tens of thousands of innocent civilians their lives. Blum also lists the countries the CIA has attempted to overthrow or has actually overthrown. His list includes Greece, The Philippines, East Germany, Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Iraq, Viet Nam, Laos, Ecuador, The Congo, France, Cuba, Ghana, Chile, South Africa, Bolivia, Portugal, and Nicaragua, to cite a few. As I write, today, October 11th, 2010, Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina called on President Obama to revise U.S. (imperialist) policies toward Latin America. He questioned why the U.S. continues to plant its military bases across the region. That’s an excellent question. If the U.S. is a peace-loving nation, why does it need 800 bases the world over in addition to 1,000 on its own soil? Americans might recoil in disgust if they knew of the CIA’s numerous assassinations of the elected officials of other nations. Is it any wonder Americans so often ask the question, “Why do they hate us?” As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1961, “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defence of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.”
The CIA’s protective secrecy resembles nothing so much as the KKK, which proudly proclaimed itself “the Invisible Empire” and whose thugs killed citizens having the courage to identify hooded Klansmen to law enforcement officials. Today, it is our highest public officials that protect this criminal force, said to number about 25,000 employees. It is actually a Federal offense to reveal the identity of a CIA undercover agent—unless, of course, you happen to be I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and are employed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame to punish her husband Joseph Wilson for publishing a report that undercut the White House lie that Saddam Hussein had purchased “yellowcake” from Niger to fuel WMDs. Today, high public officials direct the CIA’s criminal policies and protect its agents’ identities the better to enable them to commit their crimes.
According to journalist Fred Cook in his book “Ku Klux Klan: America’s Recurring Nightmare”(Messner), “The Klan was inherently a vigilante organization. It could commit the most atrocious acts under the guise of high principle and perpetrators of those acts would be hidden behind white masks and protected by Klan secrecy… (The Klan) set itself up as judge, jury and executioner”—a policy adopted by the CIA today. CIA spies have conducted their criminal operations masquerading as officials of U.S. aid programs, business executives, or journalists. Example: The San Diego-based Copley News Service’s staff of foreign correspondents allegedly was created to provide cover to CIA spies, compromising legitimate American journalists trying to do their jobs. While the murders committed by the KKK likely ran into the many thousands, the CIA has killed on a far grander scale and managed to keep its role largely secret. As Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for the New York Times noted in his book “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (Anchor): “In Guatemala, 200,000 civilians had died during forty years of struggle following the agency’s (CIA) 1954 coup against an elected president.” Weiner adds, “the CIA’s officers in Guatemala still went to great lengths to conceal the nature of their close relations with the military and to suppress reports that Guatemalan officers on its payroll were murderers, torturers, and thieves.” When it comes to murder, the CIA makes the KKK look like Boy Scouts.
Like the KKK, CIA terrorists operate above the law. KKK members committed thousands of lynchings yet rarely were its members punished for them. In 2009 at a speech at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, President Obama revealed he was not intent on punishing CIA agents for their crimes but would rather “look forward.” This seemingly charitable philosophy may be driven by the fact that Obama worked for Business International Corporation, a CIA front, at least in 1983 and perhaps longer, and allegedly is the son of a mother and father both of whom also worked for the CIA, as did Obama’s grandmother! I could find none of this in Obama’s biography when he ran for the presidency, when a gullible American public elected a CIA “mole” to the White House. Consider this, too: an agency President Truman feared would become “an American Gestapo” when he signed the enabling legislation into law in 1947 has become just that, and it casts a lengthy shadow over the White House. Ominously, it has in Barack Obama one of its own former employees sitting in the Oval Office—a man who, according to news reports, has vastly expanded the frequency of the CIA’s assassinations by drone aircraft in Pakistan and who illegally claims the “right” to assassinate any American citizen abroad as well. What’s more, from 1989 to 1993 George Bush Sr., the CIA’s own former Director, sat in the White House. Additionally, from 2001 to 2009, the CIA had that Director’s son, George W. Bush, in the Oval Office giving the CIA a blank check after the 9/11 massacre. Bush Jr., according to The New York Times, in the summer of 1974 worked for Alaska International Industries, which did contract work for the CIA. The Times noted that this job did not appear in his biography when he ran for the White House in 2000, terming it “The Missing Chapter in the Bush Bio.” Thus, two presidential candidates with CIA ties—Bush Jr. and Obama—both neglected to mention them. And in Bill Clinton, who presided from 1993 to 2001, the CIA had a go-along president who satisfied the Agency’s blood-lust when he authorized the first illegal “rendition,” a euphemism for what KKK thugs once knew as kidnapping and torture. Is there any question that the Agency has not played an influential, behind-the-scenes or even a direct role in the operations of the U.S. government at its highest level? It may indeed be a stretch to argue that the CIA is running the country but it is no stretch to say that year after year our presidents reflect the criminal philosophy of the Agency.
Other parallels with the KKK are striking. As Richmond Flowers, the Attorney General of Alabama stated in 1966, “I’ve found the Klan more than just another secret society… It resembles a shadow government, making its own laws, manipulating local politics, burrowing into some of our local law-enforcement agencies…When a pitiable misfit puts on his $15 sheet, society can no longer ignore him.” Yet the descendants of those misfits have moved up today where they feel comfortable as operatives in the shadow government run by the White House. One of the CIA’s illicit duties has been to serve as a conduit for funneling U.S. taxpayer dollars to corrupt dictators and strongmen bent on suppressing the popular will of their citizenry. As Noam Chomsky wrote in “Failed States”(Metropolitan/Owl), in Honduras, “military officers in charge of the battalion (3-16) were on the CIA payroll.” This elite unit, he says, “organized and trained by the United States and Argentine neo-Nazis,” was “the most barbaric of the Latin American killers that Washington had been supporting.”
Like the KKK, the CIA kidnaps many of its victims with no thought ever of legal procedure. It exhibits utter disdain for the rights of those individuals, the sovereignty of foreign nations, or respect for international law. At least hundreds of foreigners, mostly from the Middle East, have been the victims of “renditions” just as the KKK kidnapped and flogged and lynched blacks, labor leaders, Catholics, Jews, or wayward wives whom it felt to be morally lacking. In September, 1921, The New York World ran a series exposing the KKK. It pointed out that, among other things, the KKK was violating the Bill of Rights wholesale. This included the Fourth amendment against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the Fifth and the Sixth amendments, guaranteeing that no one may be held without a grand jury indictment or punished without a fair trial. And these rights today are similarly trampled by the CIA against American citizens, not just foreigners. Apparently, only foreign courts care to rein in the CIA. The 23 CIA agents that it took to render one “suspect” in Italy are wanted there by the magistrates. (The spooks, by the way, ran up some fabulous bills in luxury hotels on taxpayers’ dollars in that escapade.) Former President Jimmy Carter wrote in his book “Our Endangered Values”(Simon & Schuster), the CIA transferred some of those it kidnapped to countries that included Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Morocco, Jordan, and Uzbekistan where “the techniques of torture are almost indescribably terrible, including, as a U.S. ambassador to one of the recipient countries reported, ‘partial boiling of a hand or an arm,’ with at least two prisoners boiled to death.” The KKK’s methods of punishment were often as ugly: the brutal flogging of blacks in front of vicious crowds, followed by castration and burning their victims alive, and then lynching of the corpses. As for the CIA, “Why?” asks investigative reporter William Blum, “are these men rendered in the first place if not to be tortured? Does the United States not have any speakers in foreign languages to conduct interrogations?”
That the CIA is a terrorist organization was upheld in the famous “CIA On Trial” case in Northampton, Mass., in 1987, when a jury acquitted 14 protesters who tried to stop CIA recruitment on campus, according to Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois international law authority who defended the group. The defense charged the CIA was “an organized criminal conspiracy like the SS and the Gestapo.” Boyle said, “You would not let the SS or the Gestapo recruit on campus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, so you would not permit the CIA to recruit on campus either.”
Another shared characteristic of the KKK and CIA is greed, the desire to loot the hard-earned wealth of others. Often, Klansmen terrorized African-Americans who had amassed property to frighten them off their land. Law-abiding black citizens who had pulled themselves up by the proverbial bootstraps were cheated out of their homes and acreage by the night riders. Similarly, the CIA across Latin America has aligned itself with the well-to-do ruling class at every opportunity. It has cooperated with the elite to punish and murder labor leaders and clergy who espoused economic opportunity for the poor. The notion that allowing the poor to enrich themselves fairly will also create more wealth for an entire society generally, including the rich, has not permeated CIA thinking. I emphasize what historian Toynbee noted: “America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for.”
In sum, by adopting the terrorist philosophy of the KKK and elevating it to the operations of government at the highest level, the imperial Obama administration, like its predecessors, is showing the world the worst possible face of America. Foreigners do not see the goodness inherent in the American people—most of whom only want a good day’s pay for a good day’s work and to educate their children and live at peace with the world. Every adult American has a solemn obligation to demand that its government live up to international law, punish the CIA criminals in its midst, and become a respected citizen of the world. This will not come to pass until Congress abolishes the CIA, putting an end to its KKK-style terrorism which threatens Americans as well as humankind everywhere.
Sherwood Ross can be contacted by email at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
“Reset” and missile defence
Valentin Zorin | The Voice of Russia | October 9, 2010
There was cause for much optimism when President Obama made the first steps towards a ‘reset’ in US-Russian relations by renouncing plans by his predecessor, George Bush, to deploy American missiles in close proximity to the Russian borders on the territory of Poland and the Czech Republic.
And it cleared the way for settling other important problems in bilateral relations. Preparations for signing a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty got off the ground at last, and the no-easy talks on the treaty eventually resulted in an agreement which was signed by Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in Prague in May this year.
But as it became clear shortly afterward, the issue is far from simple. At the end of September Bucharest said it was getting ready to sign an agreement on the deployment of an American military base on the territory of Romania. A similar base was to be deployed on the territory of Bulgaria. As it happens, Romania will have the bases instead of Poland, and Bulgaria instead of the Czech Republic. But a change of location makes no difference as far as the end result is concerned. Given the situation, the American moves cause as much concern as before.
As he commented on them, Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said: “Russia and the US have discussed the issue of missile defense at length and agreed that there would be no anti-missiles in Poland or the Czech Republic. And all of a sudden, we learn that the missiles are being moved to other European countries. So where is the ‘reset’?”
Among other questions which are brought up in connection with the missile defense program is how long the United States is going to drag its feet over ratifying the new START Treaty. Signed in May, the treaty was supposed to be ratified by the Senate by the middle of September. Now, as the first ten days of October are coming to a close, the opponents to the treaty are preventing the ratification from going ahead by linking it to missile defense. Senator Richard Lugar said a few days ago that the treaty should be supplemented with a special resolution stating that it imposes no restrictions on American plans to develop a missile defense system.
Mighty circles in the US have been doggedly pursuing a missile defense program ever since it was launched by President Ronald Reagan 25 years ago. And the intensity with which they are doing so stays unabated, despite substantial failures and losses. One the latest failures, which cost the US 120 million dollars, was reported recently, when an interceptor missile launched from an air base in Vandenberg, California, failed to hit a hypothetical target and exploded in mid-air.
Professor Richard Garwin, one of the founders of America’s hydrogen bomb, indicated as he spoke in the Senate recently that the American missile defense system in its current shape was useless.
Auditors from a Washington-based audit agency came to an equally disappointing conclusion. They had to admit that missile defense experts had failed to achieve the results they were paid for and that a system they had built was totally ineffective.
The sums allocated for the missile defense program were huge beyond description. Experts estimate that one trillion dollars has been spent on it by now and it will require billions more if continued.
This explains why the masterminds of American missile defense have been so persevering in pursuing it regardless of common sense. Billions of dollars earmarked for missile defense have not been invested into space research as it was promised but landed in the bank accounts of those who have turned it into a gold mine. These people have a lot of weight in present-day Washington. Whether the US policy makers will fall hostage to these mighty groups remains to be seen.
US Fails to Condemn Israel Raid on Gaza Flotilla Despite UN Findings
By Marjorie Cohn | The Jurist | October 13, 2010
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of ships in International waters. The vessels were carrying humanitarian supplies to the people in the Gaza Strip, who suffer under a punishing blockade by Israel. The stated aims of the flotilla were to draw international attention to the situation in Gaza and the effect of the blockade; to break the blockade; and to deliver humanitarian assistance and supplies to Gaza.During the attack, Israeli soldiers killed 9 people, seriously wounded more than 50, and detained 750. They also confiscated or destroyed equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The United Nations Human Rights Council sent an independent fact finding mission to investigate violations of international law resulting from the Israeli attacks on the flotilla. The Mission, with Judge Karl T. Hudson-Philips, Q.C., retired Judge of the International Criminal Court presiding, interviewed 112 witnesses and examined forensic and other evidence, assisted by experts in forensic pathology, military issues, and firearms. Israel refused to cooperate with the independent investigation.
In a 56-page draft report [PDF], released on September 21, the Mission concluded that the Israeli military “demonstrated levels of totally unnecessary and incredible violence. It betrayed an unacceptable level of brutality. Such conduct,” the report added, “cannot be justified or condoned on security or any others grounds. It constituted grave violations of human rights law and international humanitarian law.”
The Mission made the following findings:
Passengers on the vessels and their luggage were subjected to “security checks similar to those found in airports before boarding, including body searches,” to ensure that they were not carrying weapons. “At no stage was a request made by the Israeli Navy for the cargo to be inspected.”
The Israelis fired live ammunition from an Israeli helicopter onto the top deck of the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, before soldiers boarded the vessel by descending from the aircraft. Although some of the passengers used chairs, sticks, a box of plates and other objects to resist the soldiers, there was “no evidence to suggest that any of the passengers used firearms or that any firearms were taken on board the ship.”
During the operation to secure control of the top deck, the Israeli forces landed soldiers from three helicopters in a 15-minute period. The use of live ammunition resulted in fatal injuries to four passengers and injuries to at least 19 others, 14 with gunshot wounds.
Israeli soldiers continued shooting at passengers who were already wounded, with live ammunition, soft baton charges and plastic bullets. “There was considerable live fire from Israeli soldiers on the top deck and a number of passengers were injured or killed whilst trying to take refuge inside the door or assisting others to do so.”
Furkan Dogan, a 19-year old with dual Turkish and U.S. citizenship, was one of the people killed by the Israeli forces. He was hit with live fire while filming with a small video camera on the top deck. He received five bullet wounds. “All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound, which was delivered at point blank range while he was lying on the ground on his back.”
Many people were forced to kneel on the outer deck in harsh conditions for many hours and people were subjected to physical mistreatment and verbal abuse, unnecessarily tight handcuffing, and the denial of access to toilets and food.
Israeli authorities confiscated, withheld, and in some cases destroyed the private property of many hundreds of passengers on board the vessels.
There is a “severe humanitarian situation in Gaza, the destruction of the economy and the prevention of reconstruction.” Israel’s blockade was “inflicting disproportionate damage upon the civilian population” in Gaza, and is therefore illegal. Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective punishment of civilians under occupation. One of the principal motives behind Israel’s imposition of the blockade was “a desire to punish the people of the Gaza Strip for having elected Hamas” in the 2005 election. There is “no doubt that Israel’s actions and policies amount to collective punishment.” In this conclusion, the Mission explicitly supported the findings of Richard Falk, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, as well as those of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The firing of rockets and other munitions of war into Israeli territory from Gaza “constitutes serious violations of international and international humanitarian law. But action in response which constitutes collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza is not lawful in the present or in any circumstances.”
Israel has continuously occupied Gaza despite its unilateral withdrawal of military forces in 2005. Since then, “abject poverty” among refugees has tripled. Israel determines the conditions of life within Gaza. Israel controls the border crossings and the territorial sea adjacent to Gaza, and it has declared a virtual blockade and limits to the fishing zone, thereby regulating economic activity in that zone. Israel maintains complete control of the airspace above Gaza through continuous surveillance, and it makes military incursions and from time to time hits targets within the Gaza Strip. Moreover, Israel regulates the local monetary market of Gaza based on the Israeli currency and controls taxes and customs duties.
The flotilla presented “no imminent threat but the interception was motivated by concerns about the possible propaganda victory that might be claimed by the organizers of the flotilla.” There was no reasonable suspicion that the flotilla posed any military risk, and as a result “no case could be made to intercept the vessels in the exercise of belligerent rights or [UN Charter] Article 51 self-defence.”
Not only was the Israeli interception of the flotilla unlawful, “the use of force by the Israeli forces in seizing control of the Mavi Marmara and other vessels was also prima facie unlawful since there was no legal basis for the Israeli forces to conduct an assault and interception in international waters.”
Much of the force used by the Israeli soldiers on board the Mavi Marmara and from the helicopters was “unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers.” At least six of the killings, including that of Dogan, can be characterized as “extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions,” which amounted to violations of the right to life and to physical integrity under articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
During the period of detention on board the Mavi Marmara, the passengers were subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment, which “did not respect the inherent dignity of persons who have been deprived of their liberty.”
The Israeli military’s treatment of the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara and in certain instances on board the Challenger 1 amounted to torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment, in violation of articles 7 and 10 of the ICCPR. The willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment and willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health violated article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Other violations included the arbitrary or illegal arrests or detentions, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR and the parading of detainees at the quayside carrying “the hallmarks of a ‘triumph'” which amounted to a “humiliating spectacle” in violation of article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention.
Serious incidents of physical violence perpetrated by the Israeli military and/or police officers at the Ben Gurion International Airport “clearly constituted grave violations” of the right to security of the person and to human dignity, in violation of article 9 of the ICCPR. In some instances, the treatment amounted to torture.
The confiscation of a large amount of video and photographic footage recorded on electronic and other media by passengers “represents a deliberate attempt by the Israeli authorities to suppress or destroy evidence and other information.”
The ICCPR guarantees the victims judicial remedies and reparations proportionate to the gravity of the violations. Torture victims should be afforded medical and psychological care, and article 9 provides for a specific right to compensation.
“The perpetrators of the more serious crimes being masked cannot be identified without the assistance of the Israeli authorities,” the Mission concluded, and urged the Israeli government to assist in their identification. Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the UN Human Rights Council a biased commission because it issued the Goldstone Report [PDF] , a 575-page document under the direction of noted Zionist Richard Goldstone, which found Israel guilty of international law violations in its December 2008 – January 2009 war on Gaza. During that war, 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.
Israel conducted its own investigation of the flotilla attack, known as the Turkel Commission. It refused to take testimony from any of the victims on the vessels.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also commissioned an investigation, which undertook no primary witness investigation, largely relying on evidence from Israeli officers.
There is no evidence that the United States played any direct role in the attack on the flotilla. However, U.S.-made and U.S.-financed Apache and Blackhawk helicopters, which Israel often employs, were likely used in the assault. Any use of those weapons would violate the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibits any recipient of U.S. arms exports from using U.S. weapons except for security within its own borders or for self-defense.
Israel could not maintain its illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories without the support of the United States. Three weeks after Israel’s deadly attack on the flotilla, 329 out of 435 members of the House of Representatives and 87 out of 100 senators wrote letters to President Barack Obama supporting what they called Israel’s right to “self-defense.”
Obama has failed to condemn Israel’s actions on May 31, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence of its illegality. If Iran had attacked a humanitarian flotilla in international waters and killed 9 people, there would be certain retaliation from Washington.
Until our government stands up to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States, the Palestinian people, and our own humanity, will continue to be held hostage.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Human Rights Network. See www.marjoriecohn.com.
Obama: Israel’s Lawyer
By Maggie Lorraine | Resisting Occupation | October 12, 2010
Just yesterday, Prime Minister Netanyahu demanded that the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as a Jewish state in exchange for Israeli compliance with international law. Shortly after, State Department spokesman Philip Crowley illuminated the United State’s official position on the proposal, explaining, “We recognize the special nature of the Israeli State. It is a state for the Jewish people.” While President Obama’s views on the institutionalization of Israel’s ethnic character are of no surprise, such an outright endorsement of Netanyahu’s insult to the PA stands in stark contrast with the vision of the United States as impartial mediator the American public has been spoon-fed over the past few months.
If the admission of offering military, financial and political concessions in exchange for a partial extension of the so-called settlement “freeze” hadn’t done enough to destroy the Obama Administration’s credibility in the peace process, this was surely the final blow. How could any casual observer continue to believe Obama had the interests of both parties at heart while simultaneously lauding Netanyahu’s inanity as even remotely legitimate?
Israel’s settlement construction is illegal under international law. The United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Security Council and International Court of Justice all concur: Settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem must immediately halt and reverse, along with construction of the partition wall. Just as chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said, Israel’s Jewish character has no bearing the illegal status of Israel’s settlements. Netanyahu’s condition is a wanton distraction.
The proposal also has nothing to do with Israel’s right to exist as a nation. Far from being existentially threatened, Israel has enjoyed full recognition of its sovereignty by Fatah and the PA for the past 17 years. The issue lies in Israel’s insistence that its statehood be defined on ethno-religious terms. Yet somehow the implications of this definition is utterly lost on Obama. Electronic Intifada founder Ali Abunimah illustrates the point well in two of his recent tweets:
Would Obama align himself with the moral argument underpinning either of these assertions? One would hope not. Then why is it somehow permissible to endorse the same position when it comes to Israel? And how can his administration support linking the PA’s acceptance of such assertions to Israel’s admittedly partial and temporary compliance with standards of international law?
What’s more, who could defend Obama as a worthy proponent of peace while he cheers Netanyahu on in his quest to force Abbas into selling out Israel’s Arabs, further codifying their second-class status, while at the same time attempting to settle the question of Palestinian refugees’ Right of Return prima facie?
To summarize, if the PA were to accept such a deal, Israel would have achieved the following:
- Further military, financial and political support from the United States;
- Formal permission from the PA to continue subjugating Israeli Arabs;
- And nullification of the Right of Return for Palestinian Refugees of the Nakba
The PA would achieve the following:
- A temporary “freeze”of settlement construction on what is to become a Palestinian state if talks succeed, one that would presumably not include freezing construction in East Jerusalem (in contravention of international law), nor the construction of current projects including the thousands that began just a few weeks ago, nor suspending the confiscation of Palestinian property to make room for further construction, just as the last “freeze”did not include these things
The United State’s endorsement of such an insulting proposal makes clear Obama’s complete disregard for Palestinian interests, and his commitment to repeating the mistakes of his predecessors. The authors of The Israel Lobby explain, “As Aaron David Miller, an adviser to six different secretaries of state on Middle East and Arab-Israeli affairs and another key player in the Clinton administration’s peace effort, put it during a 2005 postmortem on the failed negotiations: ‘Far too often, we functioned…as Israel’s lawyer'” (Mearsheimer and Walt 48). How exactly has Obama done anything to improve upon this characterization?
Terror Alerts vs Elections
October 8, 2010
Accusations today over the timings of terror alerts and elections.
The Bush administration used to raise threat levels around campaign time, apparently. Is Obama doing the same with European terror alerts to create a rally-round-the-president effect?
I wondered if there was a correlation between terrorism and elections we could actually see.
See the dynamic graph on Googe Insights
(It tracks the intensity of keywords over time- an interesting barometer of the group mind).
Note: Here I’ve chosen two relevant keywords that have similar intensity. In Insights, if you chose a keyword that’s too intense it dwarves the other and hides the pattern. Example.)
Any correlation?
A History of Repression
Cointelpro 101
By RON JACOBS | October 7, 2010
In recent weeks, articles have appeared in various media outlets detailing recent surveillance activities of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. According to these reports. much of this surveillance was focused on antiwar and peace groups. Then, on September 24, 2010 several homes and offices in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago and North Carolina were raided by the FBI. Subpoenas to appear at a grand jury investigation were issued to several activists. The reason provided for the raids was that some individuals were suspected of providing “material support to terrorists.” These raids and recent revelations have been met with protest and, in some quarters, shock-as if the United States government were somehow above such police state intimidation and practices.
On October 10, 2010 at the Mission Cultural Center of Latino Studies in San Francisco, the Freedom Archives will premier its latest documentary. Titled Cointelpro 101, this hour-long film makes it quite clear that the US government is certainly not above such practices and that, furthermore, it has a long history of them. For those who don’t know, Cointelpro was the abbreviated name for the intelligence and counterinsurgency operation waged against a multitude of organizations and individuals deemed threats to national security during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s by the FBI and other US law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Short for counterintelligence, Cointelpro involved the use of a multitude of methods up to and including murder in its crusade to neutralize any and all left opposition to the status quo in the United States. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Weather Underground Organization, any one considered an enemy of the US national security state because of their opposition to the US war in Vietnam or their support for the self-determination of people of color in the United States was a potential target of the Cointelpro program.
Cointelpro 101 opens with the April 1971 break-in by antiwar activists at the federal offices in Media, Pennsylvania. The activists were searching for Selective service files to destroy when they came upon files labeled Cointelpro. After a quick perusal of the file’s contents, they removed as many as they could find from the office, made copies and released them to the press. The program was unknown to the broader public at the time and the files proved a revelation to the country. Many politicians were offended and, after the 1972 discovery of the Plumbers unit run by G. Gordon Liddy under the direction of the Nixon White House and the subsequent months of Congressional hearings around Watergate, Senator Frank Church called for hearings to investigate the Cointelpro program.
As the history related in the film makes clear, Cointelpro’s stretch was broad. Beginning in the 1950s with a focus on the Puerto Rican independence movement and continuing through the 1960s and into the 1970s when much of its focus had shifted to the black liberation, Chicano liberation and American Indian movement, the program racked up a number of assassinations, false imprisonments and ruined lives. No government official was ever punished for actions taken under the program’s auspices. The film details this history through the artful use of still photos and moving images of the period covered. Films of police attacks and protests; still photos of revolutionary leaders and police murders graphically remind the viewer of Washington’s willingness to do whatever it takes to maintain its control. Organizers who began their political activity during the time of Cointelpro discuss the effect the program had on them and the organizations and individuals they worked with. Indeed, several of the interviewees were themselves targets and spent years in prison (some that were false, as in the case of Geronimo ji-Jaga Pratt) or on the run. One of the interviewees, Wesley Swearingen, is a former FBI agent who was involved in Cointelpro operations in Los Angeles and elsewhere and later published a book exposing his knowledge. His recollections reveal the nature of the war the FBI was fighting.
Former Black Panther member Kathleen Cleaver states toward the end of the film that Cointelpro represented the efforts of a political police force making the decision as to what is allowed politically and what is not. Anything outside the parameters set by this force was fair game. Nothing that was done by government officials or private groups and individuals acting on the government’s behalf was perceived as wrong or illegal. As Attorney Bob Boyle makes clear in his final statement in the film, Cointelpro is alive and well. The only difference now is that most of what was illegal for the government to do during Cointelpro’s official existence is now legal. The PATRIOT Act and other laws associated with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security have insured this. The September 24, 2010 raids mentioned above are but the most recent proof of it.
Cointelpro 101 is a well made and appealing primer on the history of the US police state. Produced, written and directed by individuals who have themselves been the target of tactics documented in the film, it has an authenticity and immediacy that pulls the viewer in. Although too short to cover the history in as full detail as some may desire, the film’s intelligence and conscientious presentation of the historical narrative makes it a film that the student, the citizen and the activist can all appreciate.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso.
Obama uses Weekly Address to lobby for Israeli firm BrightSource
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BrightSource founder Arnold Goldman
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US Court Denies Justice to Dead Men at Guantánamo
By Andy Worthington | 3.10.10
On Wednesday, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Ellen Huvelle turned down (PDF) a second attempt by the families of Yasser al-Zahrani, a Saudi, and Salah al-Salami, a Yemeni (two of the three men who died in mysterious circumstances in Guantánamo on June 9, 2006, along with Mani al-Utaybi, another Saudi) to hold US officials accountable for the circumstances in which their family members were held and in which they died.
Judge Huvelle’s ruling came in spite of additional evidence submitted by the families (PDF), drawing on the accounts of four US soldiers who were present in Guantánamo at the time of the deaths, and who have presented a number of compelling reasons why the official story of the men’s triple suicide (as endorsed by a Naval Criminal Investigative Service report in 2008) is a cover-up. Those accounts, reported by Scott Horton, were published by Harper’s Magazine in January this year, and I covered it here, and also in an update in June, although it has largely been ignored in the mainstream US media.
The case, Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld, was initially filed in January 2009, and primarily involved the families of the dead men seeking to claim damages through the precedent of a case known as Bivens, decided by the Supreme Court in 1971, in which, for the first time, damages claims for constitutional violations committed by federal agents were allowed. The families claimed relief under the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause (preventing individuals from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law”) and the Eighth Amendment (which prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments”), as well as submitting a claim, under the Alien Tort Claims Act, “alleging torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and violations of the Geneva Conventions.”
Despite the families’ claims, the case was dismissed by the District Court on February 16, 2010, for two particular reasons. One involved a handful of legal precedents — including Rasul v. Myers, a case brought in 2006 by four former Guantánamo detainees from the UK, which was finally turned down by the Supreme Court in December 2009. In the hope of making tortuous legal reasoning comprehensible to the lay reader, these rulings essentially provide precedents for preventing the courts from providing a Bivens remedy and entitle the defendants to “qualified immunity against plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.”
Rather more readily comprehensible, and deeply shocking, is a clause in the Military Commissions Act, passed by Congress in the fall of 2006 and unchanged in the legislation revived under President Obama in 2009, which, as well as creating — or bringing back to life — the much-criticized Military Commission trial system for Guantánamo prisoners that was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006, also granted blanket immunity to anyone involved in any activities relating to the detention and treatment of prisoners held in the “War on Terror.”
As Judge Huvelle explained in her opinion:
Specifically, the Court found that the section of the MCA removing from the courts ‘jurisdiction to hear or consider any other action against the United States or its agents relating to any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement’ of an alien detained and determined to be an enemy combatant by the United States is still valid law.
With these precedents, there was, to be blunt, little hope that Judge Huvelle would grant the complaint filed by the families of Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami, even though the families had made an emotional appeal, pointing out:
The fact that Defendants fought to keep secret virtually all information concerning the cause and circumstances of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami’s deaths from their families, the public and the courts until compelled by FOIA litigation in 2008, and that details of an elaborate, high-level cover-up of likely homicide at a “black site” at Guantánamo are only now emerging nearly four years after the fact, should disturb the Court and caution it against permitting unspecified national security concerns to trump all other factors in this case without question.
Perhaps more to the point, the families of al-Zahrani and al-Salami attempted to persuade Judge Huvelle that “Courts have allowed Bivens claims by detainees in the post-9/11 context to proceed … despite the presence of national security factors,” citing, amongst other cases, Ertel v. Rumsfeld, an ongoing case in Chicago “permitting US citizens detained by the United States in Iraq [former contractors Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel] to bring Bivens claims against Donald Rumsfeld for authorizing their detention and abuse,” and Padilla v. Yoo, another ongoing case (in California), in which Jose Padilla, a US citizen detained as an “enemy combatant” in the United States as part of the “war on terror,” was permitted “to bring a Bivens suit against John Yoo [the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s notorious “torture memos”] for authorizing his detention and torture.”
The families also urged the court to “scrutinize bald assertions of national security and secrecy because the government’s account of the risks has in many cases been overblown,” adding, “As an apt case in point, after years of dire warnings to justify the indefinite detention of Guantánamo detainees and forestall court review, the government has by now released the majority of detainees without incident, including approving dozens of detainees for transfer on the eve of habeas review.” For reference, the families drew again on the case of Jose Padilla, citing Padilla v. Hanft, and “observing that the government had ‘steadfastly maintain[ed] that it was imperative in the interest of national security’ to hold Padilla in military custody for three and a half years, yet abruptly changing course on the doorstep of Supreme Court review, seeking to move him into criminal custody, at a ‘substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.’” They also cited the case of Yasser Hamdi, a US citizen held briefly in Guantánamo, who was also held as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland. In Hamdi’s case, the Bush administration argued that “military necessity required Hamdi’s indefinite detention, yet [the authorities] releas[ed] him to Saudi Arabia seven months later.”
Despite all these arguments, Judge Huvelle was clear in her ruling that, although the allegations were of a “highly disturbing nature,” that alone “cannot be a sufficient basis in law” for the case to be heard. She also explained that the legal precedents established that “matters relating to the conditions of detention in Guantánamo remain the purview of Congress alone — not the courts — due to national security concerns,” as AFP explained.
“The question before the court,” she said, “is not whether homicide ‘exceeds the bounds of permissible official conduct in the treatment of detainees in US custody and demands accountability’ or whether the families of Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami deserve a remedy. Rather, the question is ‘who should decide whether such a remedy should be provided.’”
Following the ruling, Yasser al-Zahrani’s father Talal, spoke for everyone disturbed by the revelations of Joe Hickman and his colleagues, when he stated, “The courts should be investigating my son’s death and holding those responsible accountable. President Obama should be defending human rights and the democratic values the US preaches to the world, rather than going to court to defend the lies and gruesome crimes of the Bush administration.”
Pardiss Kebriaei of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the lawsuit with William Goodman of Goodman & Hurwitz, P.C. and the International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Washington College of Law, added, “The very secrecy of Guantánamo is what allowed the government to torture and illegally imprison innocent men there for years, as we now know from leaked government memos, whistleblowers, and repeated wins in court in detainees’ habeas cases. Yet the court’s decision today allows secrecy to continue to shroud the truth about these deaths, in the face of compelling evidence of a four-year cover-up of murder.”
With this ruling, it is uncertain how the families of Yasser al-Zahrani and Salah al-Salami can continue their quest for truth and justice, as it appears certain that Congress has no desire to investigate the circumstances of the men’s deaths. Sadly, only one major media outlet, AFP, covered the latest ruling, demonstrating how the story of the men’s deaths is viewed as such a toxic issue by most of the mainstream media that it is being ignored. If you care about what appears to be a particular vile cover-up by parts of the US administration, please do all you can to help to keep this story alive.
Below, I publish the sections of the families’ complaint, submitted as part of the “Motion for Reconsideration,” filed on May 3, 2010, that Judge Huvelle turned down last week, which spell out the deeply distressing story exposed by Harper’s Magazine in January this year.
Excerpts from the “Motion of Reconsideration in Light of Newly Discovered Evidence,” Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld, Submitted May 3, 2010
In early 2009, as Plaintiffs’ Amended Complaint was pending before this Court, a former soldier by the name of Joe Hickman approached the law school of Seton Hall University, which had produced several reports dealing with the deaths and whose work Hickman had followed. Hickman was a decorated Army officer who had served a distinguished tour of duty at Guantánamo from March 2006 to March 2007 and had been on duty as sergeant of the guard the night Al-Zahrani and Al-Salami died. Hickman said he had decided to come forward with his story because what he had seen “was “haunting me” and he thought that “with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward.” While he did not want to speak to the press, he felt that “silence was just wrong.”
On January 18, 2010, Hickman’s account and interviews from three other soldiers under his supervision — Specialist Tony Davila, Army Specialist Christopher Penvose, and Army Specialist David Caroll — were reported by Harper’s Magazine. The article, which serves as the source for this motion and Plaintiffs incorporate in full herein, was the first time Plaintiffs and their counsel became aware of the soldiers’ accounts.
Those accounts are dramatically at odds with the official version of events on June 9-10, 2006. The soldiers describe a cover-up initiated by the authorities within hours of the deaths and say they were affirmatively told not to speak out. Despite having first-hand observations of camp activity that night, they were never approached or interviewed for the NCIS investigation. While the official account of the deaths concluded that Al-Zahrani, Al-Salami and the third deceased, Mani Al-Utaybi, had hanged themselves in their cells, the soldiers’ accounts strongly suggest that the men were transported from their cells to an undisclosed, unofficial “black site” nicknamed “Camp No” that was outside the perimeter of the main prison camp, and died there or from events that transpired there.
Specifically, according to the soldiers’ reported accounts:
• Between approximately 6-8 p.m. on June 9, Hickman observed the van used to transport detainees drive up to the camp where the deceased were held three separate times in short succession. Each time, guards escorted a detainee from the camp to the van and drove away in the direction of Camp No. By the third time he saw the van approach the deceased’s camp, Hickman decided to drive ahead of the vehicle in the direction of Camp No to confirm where it was going. From his vantage point shortly thereafter, he saw the van approach and turn toward Camp No, eliminating any question in his mind about its destination.
• Camp No is an unnamed and officially unacknowledged facility located outside the perimeter of the area enclosing the prison complex at Guantánamo. Guards nicknamed the facility “Camp No” because anyone who asked if it existed would be told, “No, it doesn’t.” Hickman was never briefed about the site, despite frequently being put in charge of security for the entire prison. He reported once hearing a “series of screams” coming from the facility.
• At approximately 11:30 p.m., from his position in a watch tower, Hickman watched the van he had seen transporting the detainees to Camp No return to the camp. This time, the van backed up to the entrance of the medical clinic, as if to unload something.
• At approximately 11:45 p.m., nearly an hour before the NCIS claims the first dead body was discovered in the cells, Army Specialist Christopher Penvose was approached by a senior navy officer who appeared to be extremely agitated and instructed Penvose to go the prison chow hall, identify a specific officer who would be dining there, and relay a specific code word. Penvose did as he was instructed. The petty officer leapt up from her seat and immediately ran out of the chow hall.
• At approximately 12:15 a.m. on June 10, Hickman and Penvose reported that the camp was suddenly flooded with lights and the scene of a frenzy of activity. Hickman headed to the medical clinic, which appeared to be the center of activity, and was told by a medical corpsman there that three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic, that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised.
• According to Specialist Tony Davila, guards he talked to also said the men had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.
• While the NCIS report’s narrative is that the deceased were found dead in their cells and transported from there to the medical clinic, Penvose, who was on guard duty in a watch tower at the time the deceased would have been transported to the clinic, had an unobstructed view of the walkway between the camp and the clinic, which was the path by which any detainee would be delivered to the clinic. Penvose reported that he saw no detainees being moved from the camp to the clinic.
• Army Specialist David Caroll, who was also on guard duty in another watch tower at the time the NCIS report says the deceased would have been transported to the clinic, also had an unobstructed view of the alleyway that connected the men’s specific cell block to the clinic. He similarly reported that he had seen no detainees transferred from the cell block to the clinic that night.
• By dawn, the news had circulated through the prison that three detainees had committed suicide by swallowing rags.
• On the morning of June 10, Defendant Mike Bumgarner, Commander of the Joint Detention Group at Guantánamo at the time, called a meeting of the guards during which he announced that three detainees had committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death. Defendant Bumgarner said that the media would instead report that the detainees had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. He said that it was important that the guards make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report, and reminded them that their phone and email communications were being monitored. This account of the meeting was corroborated by various guards in independent interviews conducted by Harper’s.
• On the evening of June 10, Defendant Harry Harris, Commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantánamo and Defendant Bumgarner’s superior at the time, read this statement to reporters: “An alert, professional guard noticed something out of the ordinary in the cell of one of the detainees. … When it was apparent that the detainee had hung himself, the guard force and medical teams reacted quickly to attempt to save the detainee’s life. The detainee was unresponsive and not breathing. [The] guard force began to check on the health and welfare of other detainees. Two detainees in their cells had also hung themselves.”
• In a press interview at the time, Defendant Bumgarner, contrary to his own admonition to the guards, let slip that each deceased detainee “had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”
• As soon as Defendant Bumgarner’s interview was published, Defendant Harris called him for a meeting and told him that the article “could get me relieved.” The same day, an investigation was launched to determine whether classified information had been leaked from Guantánamo. Defendant Bumgarner was subsequently suspended.
• Hickman and Davila later learned that Defendant Bumgarner’s home was raided by the FBI over a concern that he had taken classified materials and was planning to send them to the media or use them for writing a book.
• The only apparent discrepancy between Defendant Bumgarner’s interview and the official Pentagon narrative was on one point: that the deaths had involved cloth being stuffed into the detainees’ mouths.
• For several months after Hickman first came forward, he and his attorneys attempted to pursue an investigation through the Department of Justice. Their first meeting was on February 2, 2009, where they related a detailed account of Hickman’s observations and later handed over a list of corroborating witnesses with contact information. The Justice Department ultimately closed its investigation on November 2, 2009, concluding without explanation that “the gist of Sergeant Hickman’s information could not be confirmed” and his conclusions “appeared” to be unsupported.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK)
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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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