Gitmo: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

This morning's New York Times reports that Spain will investigate whether a previous government permitted Spanish territory to be used in transporting prisoners to Gitmo. One thing is obvious. Yes, Spain permitted its territory to be used to transport prisoners.

According to The Times

Spain will investigate whether a previous government allowed Spanish territory to be used to transport captured terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Bay, the Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

The ministry said in a statement it had not been informed whether the government of Jose Maria Aznar, in power from 1996 to 2004, allowed CIA flights carrying captured foreigners to use Spanish air space or runways.

The newspaper El Pais said in a report Sunday that it had obtained a government document showing that a U.S. official asked the Foreign Ministry for such access in January 2002. El Pais published the document -- labeled MUY SECRETO, or top secret -- in its paper and Web site editions.

The request was communicated to Josep Pique, who was foreign minister, hours before a CIA flight landed at Moron air base in southwest Spain, the El Pais report said.

The story in El Pais is here (en Espanol), and the documents are here: part 1 (pdf) and part 2 (pdf). All are in Spanish.

The important part (my translation from the El Pais story, for which I apologize in advance):

The USA is going very soon to initiate flights to transfer Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to the Guantánamo, Cuba base", Aguirre de Cárcer wrote. "These flights will be carried out with long distance airplanes and, consequently, without stop overs," it continued. "Nevertheless, if for unanticipated reasons, like the necessity of a forced landing, the Government of the USA wants to obtain authorization from the Spanish Government to use some airport in our country". "The Government of the USA," he emphasized, "Assures that these stop overs would be for the time minimum essential to transfer to another airplane at the airport to continue the flight and that, to this end, the US would have prepared airplanes in reserve in the region to move immediately if necessary. At any moment, the USA would be responsible for the security of the transported people".

So this is how it's done. The US serves up at the last possible minute a fait accompli with some seriously misleading terms and voila! the flight can land in Spain. Among the seriously misleading parts are who the prisoners are, where they might be from, where they're going, and on and on, the entire litany of black holes, extraordinary renditions, illegal extraditions, kidnappings, torture. None of that is disclosed.

Is it any wonder that there is no trust of the present Administration across the world.

A first step to remedy some of this? Close Gitmo. Find out who's there. Try those that can be tried in federal courts. Release everybody else. Put a period at the end of this ugly chapter from our national story. Prosecute those who are responsible.

Omar Khadr: Growing Up In Gitmo

Omar Khadr at age 14 (in 2000)


Omar Khadr (born 9/19/86) is a Canadian who has been imprisoned in Guantanamo in connection with the alleged killing of a US soldier during a battle in Afghanistan in 2002. At the time of his capture by US forces, Khadr had been shot three times and was near death. Khadr was 15 at the time, a child soldier. He will be 22 in September. He has been detained in Gitmo for more than 6 years in essentially solitary confinement. Today some video of his interrogation was released in Canada.

The video is here via BBC. It is not of good quality, but the audio works. It is revolting.

Please join me in Gitmo.

The NY Times reports:

Video recordings released Tuesday showing interrogations of the only Canadian held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba provided an unprecedented glimpse inside the compound.

The mood of the detainee, Omar Khadr, just 16 years old at the time of the interrogations, in February 2003, swings between calm and indifference to rage and grief in the recordings, which were released by his lawyers.

The video footage,... snip... shows Mr. Khadr pleading with a Canadian intelligence agent for help and, at one point, shows him displaying chest and back wounds that had still not healed months after his capture in Afghanistan. ...snip...

They show Mr. Khadr, who is accused of killing a United States soldier in Afghanistan during a battle in July 2002, being questioned by an unidentified member of the Canadian intelligence agency.

In all, about seven hours of recordings were given to Mr. Khadr’s lawyers, but the lawyers released a selection of only about 10 minutes of video recording on Tuesday.

Khadr has said he was abused by American interrogators both at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. With regard to the videos released today, Khadr apparently thought that the Canadian agent had come to help him. Later, he realized that the agent was only there to extract information from him:

Much of the material released shows Mr. Khadr — who is wearing an orange uniform — sobbing and repeatedly saying, in a moan, “Help me, help me.”

In the interrogation, Mr. Khadr says he wants to return to Canada, but the agent suggests that the situation is so good in Cuba he might want to stay there himself.

“The weather’s nice,” the interrogator, whose face was electronically obscured, said. “No snow.” ...snip...

At one point, [Khadr] lifts his shirt to show the agent the wounds on his back and stomach that were still not healed.

The agent, however, is unmoved. “I’m not a doctor, but I think you’re getting good medical care,” he responded.

Later, a sobbing Mr. Khadr said: “You don’t care about me.”

That's quite an understatement.

Many details sure to provoke outrage and shock about what has happened to Khadr are here in a Wiki, which notes his factual innocence of the killing, a Rolling Stone feature story, and Lisa Lockwood's excellent essay yesterday.

The capture, detention, yes, torture, and long term, solitary confinement of a child soldier, Omar Khadr, is the face the United States has put on display for all the world to see. This is the face of the Global War On Terror. This was an utterly mortifying display of barbarism before the video was released. And now, a small part of a very long detention can be viewed across the world in all of its inhumanity and obvious brutality. If there were any justice at all, Omar Khadr would be released.

According to the Times:

Amnesty International and several Canadian groups have been pressuring the Canadian government to ask the United States to return Mr. Khadr to Canada from Guantánamo Bay. Last week, however, Prime Minister Stephen Harper again rejected those calls.

Nathan Whitling, one of Mr. Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, said that he hoped the airing of the videos, which were prominently featured on the morning new programs of Canadian television networks, would change the government’s mind.

“The only way to get him released is through a political process,” Mr. Whitling said from his office in Edmonton, Alberta. “So we are pleading in the court of public opinion.”

I'm disgusted by Khadr's further confinement at Gitmo and want it to be viewed and weighed across the world in the court of public opinion.

Maybe that's where we can be of help to Omar Khadr. Maybe by spreading the word and writing and sending emails we can do something to galvanize public opinion about this case and ultimately free Omar Khadr.

Torture, Lies And Videotape At Gitmo

Still Guantanamo

Every day it just gets worse. Today (h/t to Smintheus at dKos), Prof Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall University Law School (with assistance from many others) released a report (pdf format) on interrogations at Gitmo. It's a shocker. Among other things it says that there have been 24,000 "interrogations" at Gitmo and that all of them have been videotaped.

The short of it (from the report's executive summary):

*More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002.

*Every interrogation conducted at Guantánamo was videotaped.

*The Central Intelligence Agency is just one of many entities that interrogated detainees at Guantánamo.

*The agencies or bureaus that interrogated at Guantánamo include: the Central Intelligence Agency and its Counterterrorism Center; the Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI; Defense Intelligence Analysis (DIA); Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT); Army Criminal Investigative Division (ACID); the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI); and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Private contractors also interrogated detainees.

*Each of these entities has identical motives to destroy taped investigations as has the Central Intelligence Agency. As one former senior Central Intelligence Agency official put it: “It’s a qualitatively different thing—seeing it versus reading about it.”
One Government document, for instance, reports detainee treatment so violent as to “shake the camera in the interrogation room” and “cause severe internal injury.” Another describes an interrogator positioning herself between a detainee and the camera, in order to block her actions from view.

*The Government kept meticulous logs of information related to interrogations. Thus, it is ascertainable which videotapes documenting interrogations still exist, and which videotapes have been destroyed.

There's a whole lot more in the report. The report is a remarkable piece of work, and Denbeaux and his team deserve a great deal of credit for important work well done.

Now that it has been the disclosed that every "interrogation" has been videotaped-- something that the Bush administration has not previously admitted-- one would hope that those in Congress who are in charge of oversight might want to view the video tapes. They might want to see what techniques are actually being used in Gitmo. They might want to decide with their own eyes and ears whether what is going on in Gitmo is or is not torture, is or is not legal, is or is not something they feel is appropriate. They might want to see the videos and decide whether they've been told the truth about Gitmo, or if what they've been told is a pack of lies. Bottom line, whatever is on the video is going to be different from reading about the events in classified documents.

At the very least those who are responsible for oversight should immediately demand that they be provided with copies of all of these videotapes. They have the staff and resources to cull these videotapes and to find out precisely what has been going on. And they should do that. This is what they were elected to do. And it's different from sitting in briefings about the "interrogations" and nodding their heads. (Yes, I'm talking to you, Nancy.)

And what if, as before, it turns out that the videotapes have been-- quel surprise!-- destroyed? Maybe Arlan Spector and others can rouse them selves and make as big a deal out of these Guantanamo videotapes as they have about the NE Patriots videos.

Might this be something to dial up "our" Congress people about?

Contradictions About Torture

The Original Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy

This is really fascinating. And short. Whoever is playing Edgar Bergen has apparently temporarily lost control of his sockpuppet Charlie McCarthy. The story is that the voices of Bushco apparently don't agree today on the legality of waterboarding torture.

The New York Times blog pulls it all together:

Steven G. Bradbury, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, seemed set to shake up one of the fiercest debates in Washington today by offering a clear and concise statement about the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

‘’There has been no determination by the Justice Department that the use of waterboarding, under any circumstances, would be lawful under current law,'’ he says in prepared remarks for a House hearing today that were obtained in advance by The Associated Press.

The administration’s current interrogation rules are “narrower than before” waterboarding was used five years ago by the C.I.A., he said. Earlier this week, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said that “in order for it to become part of the program, its legality would have to be passed on.”

Sounds like Bradbury, who hasn't been confirmed, says that waterboarding is not legal under current law. Hmmm.

But then there's this:

About two weeks ago, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey wrote a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee saying that the technique was not clearly illegal, as The New York Times reported:

“But with respect, I believe it is not an easy question,” he said. “There are some circumstances where current law would appear clearly to prohibit the use of waterboarding. Other circumstances would present a far closer question.”

The letter did not define any of the circumstances.

"Not clearly illegal" means "sorta legal?" Or illegal but not totally? incompletely illegal?

And that's not all:

Last week, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the legality of waterboarding was “not certain … under current statute,” a view he attributed to himself and lawyers at the C.I.A. and the Justice Department.

When legality is "not certain" it means maybe it's legal, maybe it's illegal, I don't know?

What is next? Retractions all around? Retractions called "clarifications" all around? A more "nuanced" response from some/all of the talking heads? A gag order from Edger Bergen? Stay tuned.

To Avoid Judicial Review, Executions At Guantanamo

Guantanamo Detainee

Yesterday the US announced that 6 Gitmo detainees would face the death penalty after bogus "trials" with unfair and untested procedures. I wrote an essay explaining why this was an outrage and a disgrace. Today, to my shock and surprise, I discovered an even greater outrage: that the US plans to conduct executions of these detainees at Gitmo so that the detainees will be denied any judicial review in the US Courts. If yesterday's news was dreadful, today's is even more cynical and and even greater disgrace.

AP reports:

If six suspected terrorists are sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay for the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. Army regulations that were quietly amended two years ago open the possibility of execution by lethal injection at the military base in Cuba, experts said Tuesday.

Any executions would probably add to international outrage over Guantanamo, since capital punishment is banned in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union.

Conducting the executions on U.S. soil could open the way for the detainees' lawyers to go to U.S. courts to fight the death sentences. But the updated regulations make it possible for the executions to be carried out at Guantanamo.

And so the US intends to kill detainees after a "trial" before a Military Commission and not a court without permitting the possibility of review by US civilian courts. The US fears that bringing prisoners to the US might make habeas corpus available to them. How does Bushco solve this troubling problem of detainees seeking habeas corpus relief? By thumbing its nose at civilian courts, by building an execution chamber in Guantanamo, and by continuing to argue that Guantanamo is not subject to the habeas corpus jurisdiction of the US Courts.

How was the groundwork for this so stealthily accomplished?

Up until recently, experts on military law said, it was understood that military regulations required executions to be carried out by lethal injection at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

But in January 2006, the Army changed its procedures for military executions, allowing "other locations" to be used. The new regulations say that only the president can approve an execution and that the secretary of the Army will authorize the location.

"Military executions will be by lethal injection," the regulations say.

The US plan is quite simple. And it's this: do not allow the civilian United States Courts to inquire into the legality of the detainees' detention, or whether their guilt has been proved, or whether the "lethal injection" protocol is valid, or whether they are "enemy combatants," or whether they have been proved guilty, or anything else. Avoid all that potentially embarrassing judicial review. Just don't let detainees get to the US no matter what. Make sure they are killed in Guantanamo, that they never leave Guantanamo alive.

No death chamber is known to exist at Guantanamo, but Scott Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer and who is now a Duke University professor, said the military may decide to build one there. The 2006 Army regulations also call for a viewing room to the death chamber, where at least two news media representatives would be witnesses.

And so, even though the US just spent $12,000,000 on a courtroom in Guantanamo for "war crimes trials", and a death chamber has still not been built, the plan is in place to insulate the exterminations of detainees from meaningful, civilian court review.

In an irony, Bushco is trying today to quell arguments about killing the detainees:

The Bush administration has instructed U.S. diplomats abroad to defend its decision to seek the death penalty for the six men by recalling the executions of Nazi war criminals after World War II.

A four-page cable sent to U.S. embassies and obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press says that execution as punishment for extreme violations of the laws of war is internationally accepted.

The cable points to the 1945-46 Nuremberg war crimes trials in Germany. Twelve of Adolf Hitler's senior aides were sentenced to death at the trials, though not all were executed in the end.

The irony? The Nuremberg trials were entirely public. The Military Commissions remain hidden behind the wire at Guantanamo and their goal is to prevent public review of their conclusions.

What a disgrace.

Show Trials: 6 Gitmo Detainees Face Death

A Gitmo Detainee

Let the Gitmo show "trials" begin. Let the Bushites promote fear of "terrorism" in behalf of McCain. Let those who have been waterboarded be convicted on statements they made under torture. Let the US show the entire world that it's mired in its barbarianism and that it will kill to advance a partisan political agenda. Let yet another national disgrace unfold.

Killing to advance a partisan political agenda isn't exactly new. Two of the most glaring examples: Ricky Ray Rector and Karla Faye Tucker. And now the eventual killing of 6 Gitmo detainees-- even if they are convicted executions will not be possible for years-- is planned. Notice when this announcement was made. It's been 6+ years since the incident, and the detainees have been in custody for more than 5 years. But the election season is upon us, and the Republican front runner believes that terrorism is his most powerful issue. Is this the earliest moment when the announcement could have been made that the death penalty would be sought? Of course not. But what better political time to announce this.

Today's New York Times tells part of the story:

Six Guantánamo detainees who are accused of central roles in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, will be shown all the evidence against them and will be afforded the same rights as American soldiers accused of crimes, the Pentagon said Monday as it announced the charges against them.

Military prosecutors will seek the death penalty for the six Guantánamo detainees on charges including conspiracy and murder “in violation of the law of war,” attacking civilians and civilian targets, terrorism and support of terrorism, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann of the Air Force, legal adviser to the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions, said at a Pentagon news briefing.

General Hartmann said it would be up to the trial judge how to handle evidence obtained through controversial interrogation techniques like “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. Critics have said the harsh techniques, which are believed to have been used on several of the defendants, amount to torture.

As expected, the six include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

The Military Commission system has not yet had a single "trial." The one case in which there was a disposition, David Hicks, involved a guilty plea. So nobody knows whether the commission system works or how it works in practice and none of the procedures has been tested in an actual "trial." And, of course, the decision to seek the death penalty was announced before any of the charges were translated and served on the accused. So the additional complications of having a death penalty trial, let alone the 6 announced at this moment, haven't been worked out. Today's dramatic announcement means that a previously untested, unused procedure will now be invoked for the first time to decide if the six live or die.

This should spark a worldwide firestorm of criticism:

The decision to seek the death penalty will no doubt increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial. The death penalty is an issue that has caused friction for decades between the United States and many of its allies who consider capital punishment barbaric.

“The system hasn’t been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date,” said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Forget that the commission hasn't been used yet. Not once. In today's announcement, to no one's surprise, General Hartmann emphasized the procedural safeguards the accused would supposedly have:

General Hartmann said he could not predict when actual trials would begin, but that pretrial procedures would take several months at least. He said the accused will enjoy the same rights that members of the American military enjoy, and that the proceedings will be “as completely open as possible,” notwithstanding the occasional need to protect classified information.

In no sense will the proceedings be secret, the general said. “Every piece of evidence, every stitch of evidence, every whiff of evidence” will be available to the defendants, General Hartmann said.

Some officials briefed on the case have said the prosecutors view their task in seeking convictions for the Sept. 11 attacks as a historic challenge. A special group of military and Justice Department lawyers has been working on the case for several years.

Evidently a speedy trial isn't one of the rights the detainees have. Nor is the freedom from torture. Nor is the suppression of statements extracted under torture or evidence derived from the fruits of torture. And it remains to be seen exactly what kind of cross examination and confrontation rights the detainees have. And what kind of rights the detainees have to call witnesses in their own behalf. And what kind of non-secret, public "trial" they will receive behind the wire in Guantanamo. General Hartmann's statements aside, there's more to due process than receiving the evidence against the accused. A whole lot more.

Put simply, today's announcement should be widely condemned for its barbarity. And for its obvious political motivations. This a complete disgrace.