Hey everyone, the government got a big legal break! Torture? A-OK! Rendition? Not a problem! Kidnap all you want… as long as you keep it a big secret:
The prospect of any legal accountability for the government’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program dimmed dramatically this week. On Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the so-called “state secrets” privilege protects the government and its contractors from a lawsuit brought by five men who say they were kidnapped, flown to foreign countries, and tortured on the behalf of the American government. Even the ACLU, which supported the men in their suit, acknowledged that the decision “all but shuts the door on accountability for the illegal program.”
Of course, it’s obvious that some information must remain under wraps. Nobody is suggesting that our national security should be put at risk. However, there are ways for the government to remain accountable and still keep “state secrets”.
Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.
If you’d like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.
Then read Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. You’ll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I’m all over the CIA deception issues, too.
In a cover story today titled “The Making of a Terrorist-Coddling, War-Mongering, Wall Street-Loving, Socialist, Godless, Muslim President – who isn’t actually any of these things,” Alter goes myth-by-myth to correct the record and critique those who perpetuate it.
Our maddening times demand that the truth be forthrightly stated at the outset, and not just that the president has nothing in common with the führer beyond the possession of a dog. The outlandish stories about Barack Hussein Obama are simply false: he wasn’t born outside the United States (the tabloid “proof” has been debunked as a crude forgery); he has never been a Muslim (he was raised by an atheist and became a practicing Christian in his 20s); his policies are not “socialist” (he explicitly rejected advice to nationalize the banks and wants the government out of General Motors and Chrysler as quickly as possible); he is not a “warmonger” (he promised in 2008 to withdraw from Iraq and escalate in Afghanistan and has done so); he is neither a coddler of terrorists (he has already ordered the killing of more “high value” Qaeda targets in 18 months than his predecessor did in eight years), nor a coddler of Wall Street (his financial-reform package, while watered down, was the most vigorous since the New Deal), nor an enemy of American business (he and the Chamber of Commerce favor tax credits for small business that were stymied by the GOP to deprive him of a victory). And that’s just the short list of lies.
This is called truth. This is called dispelling the rumors, setting the record straight, slapping down the lies, shutting down the memes.
Oh wait. Too late.
Well, at least he tried. Thank you, Jonathan Alter.
More here, re: blaming ClusterFox and the Rushpublic leadership.
It concludes that foreign perceptions of the US as an “Exporter of Terrorism” together with US double standards in international law, may lead to noncooperation in renditions (including the arrest of CIA officers) and the decision to not share terrorism related intelligence with the United States.
BRDC, a joint venture between engineering and construction company Burns and Roe Services Corp. and construction company dck worldwide LLC, said Thursday it received a $64.5 million contract from the U.S. Navy to renovate a family housing and fitness center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
If 146 new housing units, spiffing up the fitness center, building youth soccer and softball fields, and resurfacing four tennis courts is closing down Guantanamo Bay, then I must have missed something.
Talk about your fixer-upper.
H/t: Tymlee, JasonLeopold tosfm
UPDATE: Per sharp commenter Michael Chase, the Navy and Marine base, not the detention center, will benefit. Thank you Michael!
Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.
If you’d like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.
Then read Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. You’ll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I’m all over the CIA deception issues, too.
The Center is supported by the Jewish Mayor, local Community Council, Jewish elected Officials representing that District, and opposed by Red State politicians who trashed the heroic Ground Zero First Responders, in Congress 2 weeks ago.
This neighborhood is not hallowed. The people who live and work here are not obsessed with 9/11. The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric.
At this point the only argument against this project is fear, specifically fear of Muslims, and that’s a bigoted, cowardly and completely indefensible position.
Despite the shorthand the news dee jays use, despite the TV chyrons, despite the emphasis on using buzzwords for political purposes or out of sheer laziness, it is not a mosque. It’s a community center with a pool, a gym, YMCA-style classes, and a prayer room. Scary, huh?
The group aims to improve relations between Islam and the West by hosting leadership conferences for young American Muslims, organizing programs on Arab-Jewish relations, and empowering Muslim women. [...]
Q: Is it just a mosque?
A: The developers have planned a 13-story, $100 million Islamic community center, complete with a pool, gym and 500-seat auditorium, of which the mosque would be a part.
It’s a former Burlington Coat Factory store.
SoHo Properties, a private real estate development company and partner in the Islamic center project, bought the building in 2009 for $4.85 million. Muslim prayer services have been held each week there since then.
The owner of SoHo said:
“We pledge to all New Yorkers and all Americans that we’ll work under all applicable laws and regulations. By no means will we accept support from persons with anti-American views or agendas.”
It is not a mosque. It is not anti-American. And despite George Pataki’s protests to the contrary just now on MSNBC, these are not the same people who attacked us on September 11, 2001.
This is not about buzz words or politicizing 9/11 in an election year. It is a constitutional issue. And whether it is painful or not, we cannot forgo the laws of the land because of emotions, as I opined in this post from yesterday.
Oh, and there’s this via my Twitter pal cbn2, regarding the SCOTUS unanimous legal precedent. Here’s an excerpt from this site:
Facts of the Case:
The Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye leased land in Hialeah, Florida and planned to establish a church, school, and cultural center there. They would bring their practice of Santeria, which included the ritual sacrifice of animals, into the area. Animal sacrifice is practiced at birth, marriage, and death rites. It is also used for curing the sick and other annual ceremonies. As a response to this, the city of Hialeah passed several ordinances prohibiting animal sacrifice. The Church claimed that this violated their First Amendment rights to freely exercise their religion.
Decision:
The Court unanimously invalidated the city ordinances that outlawed animal sacrifices.
The conservatives have now jammed another wedge issue down our throats and it is monopolizing the so-called news media.
There are moments when large groups in a society become seized with mass hysteria, which is akin to sociological psychosis. Since the election of Barack Obama, we have seen this phenomena growing like a cancer across a segment of white working class America. The science fiction theories presented as fact and pure logic-defying nonsense have spread like a cancer among the FOX Fraudcasting, Tea Party and a large segment of the Republican Party.
The latest bizarre theory advanced by the likes of Texas Republican Congressman Louis Gohmert is an extension of the latest GOP obsession with the 14th Amendment. Simply put, the most recent psychotic fear spreading like wildfire among the radical right is that terrorist mothers are coming to the U.S. to have babies. [...]
[W]hile Gohmert is emphatically arguing about the danger of terrorist babies, he’s supporting the right of alleged terrorists to buy guns. [...]
Do you know that the Mexican drug cartels buy their firearms in the United States because they are so easy to obtain due to the NRA stranglehold on Congress?
How much terror does the NRA enable in terms of gun deaths in the United States and the arming of terrorists and narco assassination squads? Quite a bit. [...]
[W]hite males egged on by the right wing media have been shooting police and government officials; these are the real terrorists in our midst, no doubt heroes to Rep. Gohmert.
When it comes to so-called “terrorist babies,” Rep. Gohmert should put a diaper over his mouth and eat his meals in a high chair cause he’s acting like an infant.
Time to vent a little, this time about the rise in very public, very unrestrained emotions that are infringing upon– and therefore reducing the opportunity to have– reasoned, rational discourse. The most recent example of this is the so-called “mosque at Ground Zero”, which in fact is a multi-functional Islamic Community Center with prayer room.
Please indulge the stream of consciousness nature of this post. There is so much to deal with, so much fervor, so much churning around inside me, it’s just kind of streaming out. Here goes.
Note to America: We are a nation of laws, not a nation of emotions. But, according to the punditiots on the Tee Vee Machine and talk radio, feelings of outrage and pain trump the Constitution. Unfortunately, this not only destructive to the tenor of what passes for debate these days, it is also chipping away at the very foundation, democracy, and well-being of this country.
Some Americans are hurt, angry, scared about those who are “different” than they are, whether it’s Mexican immigrants, an African American president, anyone who doesn’t look like them, sound like them, dress like them, have names like them, or worship the way they do. Many voices we hear are those of politicians scrounging for votes, and by scrounging I mean digging through the rubble in political gutters.
Others are misinformed voters or those who respond viscerally via hand-me-down fear. Still others have been traumatized and have legitimate– as opposed to manufactured or politicized– concerns based on their emotional proximity to tragic events.
However, in the case of the Cordoba Community Center some can’t seem to, or want to, process the simple fact that a few extremists do not represent an entire religion. Using their logic, they’d favor blocking the building of a church because they loathe Tim McVeigh… or, as my pal David Lane snarked, “I forgot that on 9/11 an entire religion attacked our country.”
Luckovich expressed something similar in a political cartoon here that sums it up in one panel:
“No YMCAs near Ground Zero!”… “On 9/11, America was attacked by men!”
What has happened to objectivity, to rationale? Of course it is difficult to step back from any harrowing experience and be neutral or detached from all feelings. Feelings have validity, actions beget reactions. But no matter how acute the agony, no matter how terrorized we might be, it is mandatory that we adhere to our principles and laws, the very principles and laws this country was founded upon, instead of bungee jumping off a reactionary cliff.
Why are Canadian or Irish or German or Swedish immigrants not being targeted in the same the way Mexicans are?
President Obama has gone out of his way to smooth things over with the Islamic world. No, that’s not “surrendering”, it’s differentiating between those who are peaceful and those who twist a religion to justify murdering Americans.
“The president’s made a historic speech in favor of religious freedom. He and Mayor Bloomberg have set the standard for other political leaders to preserve America’s open society,” said council President Salam Al-Marayati. “The president landed a major blow against Al Qaeda’s false narrative that America is at war with Islam.”
Good point.
Let’s remember that Constitutional thing called freedom of religion. Apparently, a bunch of loud mouthed conservative zealots don’t. Feeling unimaginable pain and suffering over those who died in the 9/11 attack is more than understandable, but ignoring who the killers were, lumping all Muslims in with a minority who are murderous extremists, is unacceptable.
When any mass murderer, or even serial killer, does the unspeakable, we as a nation should never, ever automatically assume everyone who shares their religious beliefs, or who looks like them, also shares their mental illness or zealotry.
When even Fox makes the occasional concession, it’s time for the most ardent conservatives to take a breath and reassess their positions (h/t: Cody_K):
I’m sure I’ve left out a lot or could have said some of this more artfully, but it just kind of came out. I’m just one more person with an opinion or two on the subject. Please feel free to correct or add in Comments.
A courtroom sketch of Abdullah Khadr at his extradition hearing on Wednesday, April 7, 2010.
I’m getting a late start today, but happy to start out with some positive news. After 4 1/2 years in prison, Omar Khadr’s 28-year-old brother Abdullah Khadr was released by a Toronto judge:
His lawyers argued their client’s incriminating statements were the result of torture during detention in Pakistan.
Omar is about to stand trial at Gitmo.
Torture doesn’t work. Those who are tortured will say just about anything to stop the pain and suffering, nullifying the validity of anything they might “admit” after having been, say, waterboarded or chilled nearly to death while being stress-positioned naked as they are doused with ice cold water.
Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.
If you’d like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.
Then read Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. You’ll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I’m all over the CIA deception issues, too.
[I]t’s hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.
How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates? [...]
The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. [...] Rep. Louie Gohmert (R- Texas) speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot. [...]
One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee [...] argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims. [...]
In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur’s — or should we say provocateur’s — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.
“A self-interested mass media with an economic stake…” Bingo. The news has been commercialized, politicized, and pulverized into something unrecognizable. To repeat, an uninformed electorate leads to the degradation of democracy.
We are constantly subjected to extreme, often irrational, hot air, giving credibility to the assertions of punditiots as if their viewpoints are valid and reasonable. The hysteria is force fed to viewers who either become desensitized or compliant, accepting unsubstantiated blather as fact.
The more often endorsements of secession, segregation, nullification, and fear mongering are given legitimacy, tacit or overt, the more likely it is that they will eventually become acceptable.
The U.S. government routinely uses the term “War on Terror” to describe its military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But how do we really define this “War on Terror”? After all, terrorism dates back to at least the 14th century, and individuals, groups and even nations have employed it ever since.
It’s hard to argue that the deployment of a bigger gun or faster tank can actually alter the outcome of either the war in Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone defeat terrorism. The U.S. armed forces have undeniably defeated the organized militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the question now is whether the military can obliterate the ideas and policies that drive the growing use of terrorism.
The fact is, terrorism originates from dark and damp alleys of apathy, poverty, disenfranchisement and misunderstanding. It is a tactic that can support any set of ideals, especially for groups that lack sufficient power to rebel openly. As a result, terrorism in its many forms likely will never be defeated.
More to the point, we certainly cannot expect to defeat terrorism when the “War on Terror” itself creates indifference and fosters misunderstanding among our own citizens. In America, we now accept secrecy in this “War on Terror” as common, acceptable and subject only to the amount of scrutiny that shadowy operatives in the government deem appropriate for disclosure.
In America, the “War on Terror” has become a subjective “us” versus “them” battle that serves to advance stereotypes based upon who we believe we are as Americans and who, or what, we perceive “them” to be. In a real sense, significant effort has gone toward convincing Americans with little worldly experience that a billion Muslim “them” think a certain way and hate us for our free and democratic way of life.
The “War on Terror” should be about taking the moral high ground and protecting law-abiding people of all races, ethnicity and religious faiths. But in the past eight years, it has wrongly been used to sell the idea that the arbitrary “them” are sub-human because they are not like “us.” Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib are perfect examples of what happens as a result. These military prisons are already touchstones for the “War on Terror” in history books and nothing we do will ever change that. But, certainly we can do more than continue the mistakes of current and past presidential administrations.
While prosecuting cases in Iraqi courts, I personally witnessed the consequences of misguided U.S. policies.The defendants I was prosecuting were much more likely to be unemployed Iraqis trying to make money, rather than extremists driven by religion or philosophy. Often, when it came to offering justifications for opposing U.S. forces, defendants would cite Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay or the United States’ invasion of Iraq. Very few cited historic or religious animosity as the basis for their actions.
As the number of Guantanamo detainees falls below 180 from a one-time high of 775, what will the released men say about their time at Guantanamo Bay and their opinions of the United States? Bear in mind that, for many, Guantanamo was their only American experience.How would their perceptions differ had we afforded these men the same rights we provide every American accused of a crime, no matter how malicious? At a minimum, we would have maintained the high standards of humanity upon which we, as Americans, used to pride ourselves. And we would have maintained the respect we have since lost, even from our closest allies. Instead, at a time when we should have set a shining example through exemplary adherence to the rule of law and respect for human rights, we employed arbitrary long-term detention, “harsh” interrogation techniques and a complete abandonment of due process.
My client, a Kuwaiti named Fayiz al-Kandari, has been confined in a cage at Guantanamo Bay for more than eight years. While we cannot make up for the time Fayiz has lost, we as a country can offer him justice by granting him an opportunity to hear the charges against him, present real evidence, roll back the curtain of secrecy and defend himself in an established court of law.
The only way to win the “War on Terror” is to rise above it and reclaim our leadership role by recognizing international law and not creating policy based on fear. Until we as a nation once again hold ourselves to the standards we demand of others, we will continue to lose friends and create enemies.
Our nation has survived dark times in the past and we can do so again – not by hiding our mistakes, but by publicly rejecting them and changing course. In the present instance, a fair and public trial in a real court for every detainee at Guantanamo Bay is essential. We must put an end to the approach of placing human beings in legal black holes and allowing fear to dictate a policy that contradicts what we have defined as our American way of life.
The views expressed in this article do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the United States government. Lt. Col. Wingard is a military lawyer who represents Fayiz al-Kandari and has served for 26 years in the military. When not on active duty, he is a public defender in the city of Pittsburgh.
Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.
If you’d like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.
Then read Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. You’ll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I’m all over the CIA deception issues, too.
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