Amnesty International: US Leads Global Attack On Human Rights
By Jeremy Lovell
Reuters

May 25th, 2005

London - Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most responsibility, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the picture is bleak. Governments are increasingly rolling back the rule of law, taking their cue from the U.S.-led war on terror, it said.

“The USA as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide,” Secretary General Irene Khan said in the foreword to Amnesty International’s 2005 annual report.

“When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity,” she said.

London-based Amnesty cited the pictures last year of abuse of detainees at Iraq’s U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison, which it said were never adequately investigated, and the detention without trial of “enemy combatants” at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

“The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law,” Khan said.

She also noted Washington’s attempts to circumvent its own ban on the use of torture.

“The U.S. government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Convention and to ‘re-define’ torture,” she said, citing the secret detention of suspects and the practice of handing some over to countries where torture was not outlawed.

U.S. President George W. Bush often said his country was founded on and dedicated to the cause of human dignity — but there was a gulf between rhetoric and reality, Amnesty found.

“During his first term in office, the USA proved to be far from the global human rights champion it proclaimed itself to be,” the report said, citing Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Blurred Distinction

But the United States was by no means the sole or even the worst offender as murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children spread to the four corners of the globe, Amnesty said.

“The human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from being the only negative repercussions of the response to the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Since that day, the framework of international human rights standards has been attacked and undermined by both governments and armed groups,” Amnesty said.

The increasingly blurred distinction between the war on terror and the war on drugs prompted governments across Latin America to use troops to tackle crimes traditionally handled by police, the report said.

In Asia too, the war on terror was blamed for increasing state repression, adding to the woes of societies already worn down by poverty, discrimination against minorities, a string of low-intensity conflicts and politicisation of aid, it added.

Africa too remained riven by regional wars and political repression, and the abject failure of the international community to take concerted action to end the slaughter in Sudan’s vast Darfur region was a cause of shame.

Khan also condemned the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for failing to stand up for those supposedly in its care.

“The U.N. Commission of Human Rights has become a forum for horse-trading on human rights,” she said. “Last year the Commission dropped Iraq from scrutiny, could not agree on action on Chechnya, Nepal or Zimbabwe and was silent on Guantanamo Bay.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Amnesty Calls For Investigation of Bush, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Gonzales
Corporate Crime Reporter
May 25, 2005

Amnesty International today called on foreign governments to “uphold their obligations under international law” and investigate at least one dozen current and former U.S. officials - including President George Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and former CIA Director George Tenet - all implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

“While the U.S. government has failed to conduct a genuinely independent and comprehensive investigation, the officials implicated in these crimes are nonetheless subject to investigation and possible arrest by other nations while traveling abroad,” the human rights group said.

Those implicated include “government lawyers who advocated or approved setting aside critical protections against torture or recommended interrogation methods that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as well as military officers who implemented those decisions.”

While the U.S. bears primary responsibility for investigating these acts, Amnesty International said that it found that more than 125 countries have laws permitting investigation of serious crimes committed outside their borders.

“Tolerance for torture and ill-treatment, signaled by a failure to investigate and prosecute those responsible, is the most effective encouragement for it to spread and grow,” said William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Like a virus, the techniques used by the United States will multiply and spread unless those who plotted their use are held accountable.

Read the complete report here…
http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/torture052505.htm

US Recruits a Rough Ally to Be a Jailer
By Don Van Natta Jr.
The New York Times

May 1st, 2005

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors. The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were “beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly, “Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights.”
Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in fighting global terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan’s treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terrorism suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States’ criticism.

Uzbekistan’s role as a surrogate jailer for the United States was confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent was in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States’ reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes - a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 - landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by The New York Times.

Although the precise purpose of those flights is not known, over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the CIA used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in American custody to countries around the world for questioning, according to interviews with former and current intelligence officials and flight logs showing the movements of the planes. On the day the planes landed in Tashkent, the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic, the logs show.

The logs show at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.

Details of the CIA’s prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan, and in some cases have alleged they were beaten and tortured while being held.

The program was created in the mid-1980’s as a way for the CIA to transfer crime suspects arrested abroad to their home countries. After Sept. 11, the CIA used it to send prisoners suspected of being senior leaders of Al Qaeda to a half-dozen countries for detention. American intelligence officials estimate that the United States has transferred 100 to 150 suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he would not discuss whether the United States had sent prisoners to Uzbekistan or anywhere else. But he said: “The United States does not engage in or condone torture. It does not send people anywhere to be tortured. And it does not knowingly receive information derived from torture.”

Ilkhom Zakirov, a spokesman for the Uzbekistan Foreign Ministry in Tashkent, also declined to comment on whether Uzbekistan accepted terror suspects from the United States. He declined to address the accusations from human rights groups. But human rights activists say that because Uzbekistan’s record is well known, it raises questions about why the CIA would send suspects there.

“If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used - it’s common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases,” said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is working inside Uzbekistan. “Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant.”

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said he learned during his posting to Tashkent that the CIA used Uzbekistan as a place to hold foreign terrorism suspects. During 2003 and early 2004, Mr. Murray said in an interview, “CIA flights flew to Tashkent often, usually twice a week.”

In July 2004, Mr. Murray wrote a confidential memo to the British Foreign Office accusing the CIA of violating the United Nations’ Prohibition Against Torture. He urged his colleagues to stop using intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan from terrorism suspects because it had been elicited through torture and other coercive means. Mr. Murray said he knew about the practice through his own investigation and interviews with scores of people who claimed to have been brutally treated inside Uzbekistan’s jails.

“We should cease all cooperation with the Uzbek security services - they are beyond the pale,” Mr. Murray wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Times.

Mr. Murray, who has previously spoken publicly about prisoner transfers to Uzbekistan, said his superiors in London were furious with his questions, and he was told that the intelligence gleaned in Uzbekistan could still be used by British officials, even if it was elicited by torture, as long as the mistreatment was not at the hands of British interrogators. “I was astonished,” Mr. Murray said in an interview. “It was as if the goal posts had moved. Their perspective had changed since Sept. 11.”

A Foreign Office spokesman declined to address Mr. Murray’s allegations. Last year, Mr. Murray resigned from the Foreign Office, which had investigated accusations that he mismanaged the embassy in Tashkent. An inquiry into those allegations was closed without any disciplinary action being taken against him.

The relationship between Washington and Tashkent was formalized at a March 2002 Oval Office meeting between President Bush and President Karimov. Muhammad Salih, the leader of Uzbekistan’s pro-democracy Erk Democratic Party, who is living in exile in Germany, said the relationship had strengthened Mr. Karimov’s hand.

“It’s been a great opportunity for Karimov,” Mr. Salih said. “But President Bush has to also think about human rights and democracy. If he wants to have a collaboration on antiterror matters, he should not close his eyes on other things that Uzbekistan is doing, like torture.”

At a news conference last month, President Bush was asked what Uzbekistan could do in interrogating a suspect that the United States could not.

“We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country,” Mr. Bush said.

The State Department and human rights groups have continued to report on human rights abuses against Uzbeks in prison.

The State Department’s latest human rights report on Uzbekistan, issued in February, said: “Torture was common in prisons, pretrial facilities, and local police and security service precincts.” In addition, the State Department report noted that in 2003 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture “concluded that torture or similar ill-treatment was systematic.”

Amnesty International and other groups have documented specific cases. In the summer of 2002, Amnesty International reported, Fatima Mukhadirova, a 62-year-old Tashkent shopkeeper, was sentenced to six years of hard labor after denouncing the government for the death of her son, Muzafar Avozov, in a Tashkent prison.

An independent examination of photographs of the body, conducted by the University of Glasgow, showed that Mr. Avozov died after being immersed in boiling water, human rights groups reported. The examination said his head had been beaten and his fingernails removed.

Human rights activists pressed for Ms. Mukhadirova’s release. She was freed shortly before a planned visit by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in February 2004.

Human rights activists say that the United States has a difficult balancing act to maintain in its dealings with Uzbekistan.

“The relationship between the US and Uzbekistan is problematic,” Ms. Gill of Human Rights Watch said. “It can be useful that the US is powerful enough to push for certain concessions. That being said, the US should not be saying that Karimov is a partner, is an ally, is a friend. The US should send the message that Uzbekistan won’t be considered to be a good ally of the United States unless it respects human rights at home.”

The delicate diplomatic balance played out in the early spring of 2004, after a series of suicide bombings in Tashkent killed 47 people, many of them Uzbek police officers. The government cracked down against people on religious grounds, setting off international condemnation.

Three months later, despite the urgings of the Uzbek foreign minister, Sodik Safoyev, the State Department said it would cut $18 million in military and economic aid to Uzbekistan because of its failure to improve its human rights record.

But the next month, on Aug. 12, 2004, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chief of Staffs, visited Tashkent. He met with President Karimov and other officials, and he announced that the Pentagon would provide an additional $21 million to help Uzbekistan in its campaign to remove its stockpile of biological weapons.

General Myers said the United States had “benefited greatly from our partnership and strategic relationship with Uzbekistan.”

While he noted that there were genuine concerns about Uzbekistan’s human rights record, General Myers said: “In my view, we shouldn’t let any single issue drive a relationship with any single country. It doesn’t seem to be good policy to me.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

It’s Called Torture
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

February 28th, 2005

As a nation, does the United States have a conscience? Or is anything and everything O.K. in post-9/11 America? If torture and the denial of due process are O.K., why not murder? When the government can just make people vanish - which it can, and which it does - where is the line that we, as a nation, dare not cross?

When I interviewed Maher Arar in Ottawa last week, it seemed clear that however thoughtful his comments, I was talking with the frightened, shaky successor of a once robust and fully functioning human being. Torture does that to a person. It’s an unspeakable crime, an affront to one’s humanity that can rob you of a portion of your being as surely as acid can destroy your flesh.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen with a wife and two young children, had his life flipped upside down in the fall of 2002 when John Ashcroft’s Justice Department, acting at least in part on bad information supplied by the Canadian government, decided it would be a good idea to abduct Mr. Arar and ship him off to Syria, an outlaw nation that the Justice Department honchos well knew was addicted to torture.

Mr. Arar was not charged with anything, and yet he was deprived not only of his liberty, but of all legal and human rights. He was handed over in shackles to the Syrian government and, to no one’s surprise, promptly brutalized. A year later he emerged, and still no charges were lodged against him. His torturers said they were unable to elicit any link between Mr. Arar and terrorism. He was sent back to Canada to face the torment of a life in ruins.

Mr. Arar’s is the case we know about. How many other individuals have disappeared at the hands of the Bush administration? How many have been sent, like the victims of a lynch mob, to overseas torture centers? How many people are being held in the C.I.A.’s highly secret offshore prisons? Who are they and how are they being treated? Have any been wrongly accused? If so, what recourse do they have?

President Bush spent much of last week lecturing other nations about freedom, democracy and the rule of law. It was a breathtaking display of chutzpah. He seemed to me like a judge who starves his children and then sits on the bench to hear child abuse cases. In Brussels Mr. Bush said he planned to remind Russian President Vladimir Putin that democracies are based on, among other things, “the rule of law and the respect for human rights and human dignity.”

Someone should tell that to Maher Arar and his family.

Mr. Arar was the victim of an American policy that is known as extraordinary rendition. That’s a euphemism. What it means is that the United States seizes individuals, presumably terror suspects, and sends them off without even a nod in the direction of due process to countries known to practice torture.

A Massachusetts congressman, Edward Markey, has taken the eminently sensible step of introducing legislation that would ban this utterly reprehensible practice. In a speech on the floor of the House, Mr. Markey, a Democrat, said: “Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us. It is morally wrong whether it is captured on film or whether it goes on behind closed doors unannounced to the American people.”

Unfortunately, the outlook for this legislation is not good. I asked Pete Jeffries, the communications director for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, if the speaker supported Mr. Markey’s bill. After checking with the policy experts in his office, Mr. Jeffries called back and said: “The speaker does not support the Markey proposal. He believes that suspected terrorists should be sent back to their home countries.”

Surprised, I asked why suspected terrorists should be sent anywhere. Why shouldn’t they be held by the United States and prosecuted?

“Because,” said Mr. Jeffries, “U.S. taxpayers should not necessarily be on the hook for their judicial and incarceration costs.”

It was, perhaps, the most preposterous response to any question I’ve ever asked as a journalist. It was not by any means an accurate reflection of Bush administration policy. All it indicated was that the speaker’s office does not understand this issue, and has not even bothered to take it seriously.

More important, it means that torture by proxy, close kin to contract murder, remains all right. Congressman Markey’s bill is going nowhere. Extraordinary rendition lives.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Thrown To The Wolves
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

February 25th, 2005

If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil, the eyes of a man with the mass murder of Americans on his mind. But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.

If Mr. Ashcroft was right, then Maher Arar should have been in a U.S. prison, not talking to me in an office in downtown Ottawa. But there he was, a 34-year-old man who now wears a perpetually sad expression, talking about his recent experiences - a real-life story with the hideous aura of a hallucination. Mr. Arar’s 3-year-old son, Houd, loudly crunched potato chips while his father was being interviewed.
“I still have nightmares about being in Syria, being beaten, being in jail,” said Mr. Arar. “They feel very real. When I wake up, I feel very relieved to find myself in my room.”

In the fall of 2002 Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, suddenly found himself caught up in the cruel mockery of justice that the Bush administration has substituted for the rule of law in the post-Sept. 11 world. While attempting to change planes at Kennedy Airport on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunisia, he was seized by American authorities, interrogated and thrown into jail. He was not charged with anything, and he never would be charged with anything, but his life would be ruined.

Mr. Arar was surreptitiously flown out of the United States to Jordan and then driven to Syria, where he was kept like a nocturnal animal in an unlit, underground, rat-infested cell that was the size of a grave. From time to time he was tortured.

He wept. He begged not to be beaten anymore. He signed whatever confessions he was told to sign. He prayed.

Among the worst moments, he said, were the times he could hear babies crying in a nearby cell where women were imprisoned. He recalled hearing one woman pleading with a guard for several days for milk for her child.

He could hear other prisoners screaming as they were tortured.

“I used to ask God to help them,” he said.

The Justice Department has alleged, without disclosing any evidence whatsoever, that Mr. Arar is a member of, or somehow linked to, Al Qaeda. If that’s so, how can the administration possibly allow him to roam free? The Syrians, who tortured him, have concluded that Mr. Arar is not linked in any way to terrorism.

And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a sometimes-clownish outfit that seems to have helped set this entire fiasco in motion by forwarding bad information to American authorities, is being criticized heavily in Canada for failing to follow its own rules on the handling and dissemination of raw classified information.

Official documents in Canada suggest that Mr. Arar was never the target of a terror investigation there. One former Canadian official, commenting on the Arar case, was quoted in a local newspaper as saying “accidents will happen” in the war on terror.

Whatever may have happened in Canada, nothing can excuse the behavior of the United States in this episode. Mr. Arar was deliberately dispatched by U.S. officials to Syria, a country that - as they knew - practices torture. And if Canadian officials hadn’t intervened, he most likely would not have been heard from again.

Mr. Arar is the most visible victim of the reprehensible U.S. policy known as extraordinary rendition, in which individuals are abducted by American authorities and transferred, without any legal rights whatever, to a regime skilled in the art of torture. The fact that some of the people swallowed up by this policy may in fact have been hard-core terrorists does not make it any less repugnant.

Mr. Arar, who is married and also has an 8-year-old daughter, said the pain from some of the beatings he endured lasted for six months.

“It was so scary,” he said. “After a while I became like an animal.”

A lawsuit on Mr. Arar’s behalf has been filed against the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. Barbara Olshansky, a lawyer with the center, noted yesterday that the government is arguing that none of Mr. Arar’s claims can even be adjudicated because they “would involve the revelation of state secrets.”

This is a government that feels it is answerable to no one.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Why Are We Welcoming This Torturer?
By Victoria Brittain
The Guardian U.K.

February 24th, 2005

Europe is tacitly condoning the Bush regime’s appalling practices.

George Bush is this week having an extravagantly orchestrated series of meetings with Europe’s leaders, designed to show a united front for the creation of democracy around the world. Tony Blair talks of our “shared values”. No one mentions the word that makes this show a mockery: torture.
It is now undeniable that the US administration, at the highest levels, is responsible for the torture that has been routine not only, as seen round the world in iconic photographs, at Abu Ghraib, but at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram. Meanwhile, in prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Syria (and no doubt others we do not know about), Muslim men have been tortured by electric shocks to the genitals, by being kept in water, by being threatened with death - after being flown to those countries by the CIA for that very purpose.

How can it be that not one mainstream public figure in Europe has denounced these appalling practices and declared that, in view of all we now know of cells, cages, underground bunkers, solitary confinement, sodomy and threatened sodomy, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, mock executions and kidnapping, President Bush and his officials are not welcome? Perhaps it’s not surprising given the British army’s own dismal record in southern Iraq. Why has no public figure had the honesty to admit that the democracy and freedom promised for the Middle East are fake and mask US plans to leave Washington dominant in the area? And why does no one say publicly that what is really happening in the “war on terror” is a war on Muslims that is creating a far more dangerous world for all?

From the flood of declassified material from Guantánamo, from recent reports by the military that reveal evidence of abuse and even deaths at Bagram being destroyed, from the war between the FBI and the CIA about who is responsible for the interrogations, from the utter confusion about who is to be responsible for the prisoners who will never be released, one thing is clear: even in its own terms, the torture strategy is a failure.

As far back as September 2002, a secret CIA study into the Guantánamo detainees suggested that many were innocent or such low-level recruits to the Taliban forces that they had no intelligence value whatever. You do not have to be a specialist in torture to know that after a short period anyone will confess to anything to stop the pain. Men in Guantánamo have been interrogated more than 100 times - always shackled, always the same questions. No wonder prisoners simply stop answering. No wonder there are so many unconvincing confessions.

Now The Torture Papers - 1,249 pages of government memos and reports, edited by Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the centre on law and security at the New York University School of Law - shows the American government to be guilty of a “systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms”.

The young women interrogators in Guantánamo who put red ink in their pants, then smeared what appeared to be menstrual blood on devout Muslim men, and mocked them by turning off the water so they could not wash before prayers, did not dream up such an idea and send home for red ink. It was policy. Like the wearing of lacy underwear - only - for work sessions, it was designed to humiliate and break men. These reports have come from an army translator, Eric Saar, as well as from prisoners. Lawyer Michael Ratner of the New York Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents over 100 prisoners, said it reminded him of “a pornographic website - it’s like the fantasy of these S and M clubs”.

The lack of moral courage that prevents our leaders, religious as well as political, from speaking out against all this is deeply disturbing. Either they choose not to know or, by not speaking out, they tacitly condone it.

Whichever it is, their behaviour is in stark contrast to the dignity of the relatives of the prisoners, or of the returned prisoners in many countries. The care and concern that many of them display to the isolated, the sick, the frightened and the traumatised among the families are a testimony to the very best of the human spirit. If only these were the shared values that Tony Blair liked to highlight. these men are driven by a feeling of responsibility for trying to end the ordeal of those 540 men still at Guantánamo, including six UK residents. Among these are a Palestinian refugee, Jamil el Banna, and an Iraqi, Bisher al Rawi, men who have lived here for 10 and 20 years respectively, have families here, and who the foreign secretary shamefully refuses to bring home from hell.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Our Friends, The Torturers
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

February 18th, 2005

The United States has long purported to be outraged over Syria’s bad behavior, the latest flash point being the possible Syrian involvement in the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri.
From the U.S. perspective, Syria is led by a gangster regime that has, among other things, sponsored terrorism, aided the insurgency in Iraq and engaged in torture. So here’s the question. If Syria is such a bad actor - and it is - why would the Bush administration seize a Canadian citizen at Kennedy Airport in New York, put him on an executive jet, fly him in shackles to the Middle East and then hand him over to the Syrians, who promptly tortured him?

The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror. It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.

The man grabbed at Kennedy Airport and thrown by American officials into a Syrian nightmare was Maher Arar, a 34-year-old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. No one, not even the Syrians who tortured him, have been able to present any evidence linking him to terrorism.

He was taken into custody on the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2002, and was not released until Oct. 5, 2003. He was never charged, and when he wasn’t being brutalized, he spent much of his time in an unlit, rat-infested cell that reminded him of a grave.

Government officials know that this kind of activity is not just wrong but reprehensible, which is why they won’t admit publicly to the policy that permits them to kidnap individuals like Mr. Arar and send them off to regimes known to engage in torture. The policy is known as extraordinary rendition, which is an extreme variation of a little-known but longstanding legal principle called rendition. Rendition most commonly refers to the extrajudicial transfer of individuals from a foreign country to the United States for the purpose of answering criminal charges.

Think, for example, of a drug kingpin who is abducted in Colombia and brought to the U.S. to stand trial for trafficking. The defendant is said to have been “rendered” to justice in the U.S.

The courts here have tended to overlook the circumstances surrounding the seizure of such suspects. But upon arrival in the U.S., the normal rules of due process in criminal proceedings kick in, and the suspect is entitled to a fair trial.

In extraordinary rendition there are no rules. The person seized, presumably a terror suspect, is thrust into a highly secret zone of utter lawlessness, with no rights whatever. The entire point of this atrocious exercise is to transfer the suspect to a regime skilled in the art of torture. It’s as if a cop picked up a suspect on the street and handed him over to the Mafia to extract a confession. One’s guilt or innocence is not relevant. No legal defense is permitted. If a mistake is made, too bad.

U.S. officials knew what they were doing when they gave the signal to ship Mr. Arar to Syria. As far back as 1996, the State Department had this to say in a report about human rights in Syria:

“Former prisoners and detainees have reported that torture methods include electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; the forced insertion of objects into the rectum; beatings, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyperextension of the spine; and the use of a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine.”

According to the State Department, torture was most likely to occur at one of the many detention centers run by the Syrian security forces, “particularly while the authorities are trying to extract a confession or information about an alleged crime or alleged accomplices.”

Extraordinary rendition is antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative - that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even in a time of war and great fear.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

I Remember Negroponte
by William Rivers Pitt
American Politics Journal

July 27th, 2001

“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
— Tacitus

A wise friend recently offered the reminder that the best weapon anyone can bring to bear upon that which they oppose is a long memory.

I was fifteen years old in 1987, working behind the snack bar of a public golf course. A battered old television was propped up in the corner, and it was on all the time during the Iran-Contra hearings. I pulled sodas and served coffee and shot the breeze with the regulars, and I watched every damned minute of those hearings.

It is then, I think, that the first true stirrings of my current political ideology rose up and peered with furrowed eyebrows at Lt. Colonel Oliver North. I was young, and not able to understand fully the scope and magnitude of what was happening. Despite that, it was clear to me, and from what I could tell it was likewise clear to the nation, that something had gone fundamentally wrong in the White House.

And then, of course, the wheels came off. The hearings degenerated into long, lazy afternoons filled with softball questions tossed up to North and his lawyers. Hunter Thompson best described the scene in ‘Generation of Swine’:

“By the end of the Thursday session, North had been fed so many home run balls that he and his lawyer were laughing out loud and slapping each other on the back every time Nields asked a question - and then North would give another 20 minute speech about how much he loved his wife and his children and his uniform and, above all, his commander-in-chief, The President.”

North was a hero, the hearings went seemingly nowhere, Reagan served out his term, and later on a number of the leading lights within the scandal were given Presidential pardons by George Herbert Walker Bush. I finished out the summer at the course and proceeded to grow up, a bit wiser for having watched it all unfold.

That boy has grown into a man who happens to have become a teacher of history. It is my job to recall with alacrity the details and individuals that have coursed through our national events. Simply put, I get paid to have that long memory. I remember Iran-Contra.

I remember the Walsh Report, and have read it many times. It can be found here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/

The Walsh Report describes the whole sordid deal rather succinctly in its Executive Summary, which reads in part below:

“The Iran/contra affair concerned two secret Reagan Administration policies whose operations were coordinated by National Security Council staff. The Iran operation involved efforts in 1985 and 1986 to obtain the release of Americans held hostage in the Middle East through the sale of U.S. weapons to Iran, despite an embargo on such sales. The contra operations from 1984 through most of 1986 involved the secret governmental support of contra military and paramilitary activities in Nicaragua, despite congressional prohibition of this support.

“The Iran and contra operations were merged when funds generated from the sale of weapons to Iran were diverted to support the contra effort in Nicaragua. Although this ‘diversion’ may be the most dramatic aspect of Iran/contra, it is important to emphasize that both the Iran and contra operations, separately, violated United States policy and law. The ignorance of the ‘diversion’ asserted by President Reagan and his Cabinet officers on the National Security Council in no way absolves them of responsibility for the underlying Iran and contra operations.”

So much good reading here for an historian! So much to remember. What the Walsh Report does not speak to, what it glosses over, are the wretched facts of our involvement in Central America during this time. This omission is pressing today, because the ghosts of Iran-Contra have come back to haunt us.

John Dimitri Negroponte stands today as the nominee to represent the United States at the U.N. Negroponte is currently the Executive Vice President for Global Markets at McGraw Hill Companies, Inc., and served for 37 years with the United States Department of State as a career diplomat.

One of his diplomatic postings was as the American Ambassador to Honduras. He served there from 1981 to 1985, at the height of the Iran-Contra actions taking place in Central America. If nominated, Negroponte will join Elliot Abrams in the governmental service. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress for his role in covering up the operation for the President and Vice President.

Eyewitness accounts have allowed us, with the passage of time, to understand the horrors that occurred in Honduras because of the direct actions of the Reagan administration. Eyewitness accounts tell us what Negroponte and Abrams surely knew at the time.

One such eyewitness is Sister Laetitia Bordes, a nun who worked in Central America during the 1980s and the 1990s. She has written a book entitled ‘Our Hearts Were Broken.’ Sister Bordes describes Honduras and Ambassador Negroponte in words we all need to hear:

“My mind went back to May 1982 and I saw myself facing Negroponte in his office at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa. I had gone to Honduras on a fact-finding delegation. We were looking for answers. Thirty-two women had fled the death squads of El Salvador after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 to take refuge in Honduras. One of them had been Romero’s secretary.

“Some months after their arrival, these women were forcibly taken from their living quarters in Tegucigalpa, pushed into a van and disappeared. Our delegation was in Honduras to find out what had happened to these women. John Negroponte listened to us as we exposed the facts. There had been eyewitnesses to the capture and we were well read on the documentation that previous delegations had gathered.

“Negroponte denied any knowledge of the whereabouts of these women. He insisted that the US Embassy did not interfere in the affairs of the Honduran government and it would be to our advantage to discuss the matter with the latter.

“Facts, however, reveal quite the contrary. During Negroponte’s tenure, US military aid to Honduras grew from $4 million to $77.4 million; the US launched a covert war against Nicaragua and mined its harbors, and the US trained Honduran military to support the Contras.

“John Negroponte worked closely with General Alvarez, Chief of the Armed Forces in Honduras, to enable the training of Honduran soldiers in psychological warfare, sabotage, and many types of human rights violations, including torture and kidnapping. Honduran and Salvadoran military were sent to the School of the Americas to receive training in counter-insurgency directed against people of their own country.

“The CIA created the infamous Honduran Intelligence Battalion 3-16 that was responsible for the murder of many Sandinistas. General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, a graduate of the School of the Americas, was a founder and commander of Battalion 3-16. In 1982, the US negotiated access to airfields in Honduras and established a regional military training center for Central American forces, principally directed at improving fighting forces of the Salvadoran military.

“In 1994, the Honduran Human Rights Commission outlined the torture and disappearance of at least 184 political opponents. It also specifically accused John Negroponte of a number of human rights violations. Yet, back in his office that day in 1982, John Negroponte assured us that he had no idea what had happened to the women we were looking for.

“I had to wait 13 years to find out. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun in 1996, Jack Binns, Negroponte’s predecessor as US ambassador in Honduras, told how a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women we had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, before being placed in helicopters of the Salvadoran military. After take off from the airport in Tegucigalpa, the victims were thrown out of the helicopters. Four children had been captured with the women.

“They were turned over to the Salvadoran military and their whereabouts are unknown. Binns told the Baltimore Sun that the North American authorities were well aware of what had happened and that it was a grave violation of human rights. But it was seen as part of Ronald Reagan’s counterinsurgency policy.”

There are still many threads from Iran-Contra waving in the wind. To be sure, a vital area of interest is the sudden and irreversible incapacitation of CIA Head William Casey. Casey knew where the bodies were buried, and who knew what, and when. But Casey was delivered insensate to his Maker without ever having The Questions put to him under oath.

Someday, perhaps, we will know the whole ugly truth. We will finally understand what Reagan meant to America.

In the meantime, we must rise up as one voice and denounce in the strongest terms the nomination of John Negroponte to be our Ambassador to the United Nations. Such a man, with such a bloody history, can not be allowed to represent this nation before a body that stands for the protection of human rights.

Our reputation on the world stage is tarnished enough as it is. We rush pell-mell towards the status of full-fledged pariah. At the very least, the nomination of Negroponte would further sully our flag. At worst, the nomination of Negroponte would wipe away some of the darkest crimes ever committed by any American administration in all of our history.

It cannot happen. Call your Senators, your Congressional representatives. Call the head of the Democratic Party in your state.

Call them, and tell them: I remember John Negroponte.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Ugly Truths About Guantánamo
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post

January 4th, 2005

Somewhere in the U.S. government is the person who came up with the idea of fusing the wail of an infant with an incessant meow from a cat food commercial to torment detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Detainees were also subjected to popular songs by the likes of Eminem and Rage Against the Machine. What Liberace would have done to an observant Muslim, I can only imagine, but it is a mad genius who realized that ordinary American culture can, with repeated exposure, be nearly lethal. God help us all.
In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” it was rats, as I recall, that were used to torture Winston Smith. It was not that the rats could do real physical damage; rather it was that Smith was phobic about them - “his greatest fear, his worst nightmare” - and so he succumbed, denounced his beliefs and even his girlfriend, and went back to his pub where he wasted his days drinking gin. This was Orwell’s future, our present.

The term “Orwellian” is much abused, and back in the actual year 1984 I thought Orwell himself overrated. The essential novelist of the 20th century, I thought then, was Kafka, who realized that there is no more efficient murder weapon than what the critic George Steiner called “the lunatic logic of the bureaucracy.”

Orwell, however, was off by only 20 years. With immense satisfaction, he would have noted the constant abuse of language by the Bush administration - calling suicidal terrorists “cowards,” naming a constriction of civil liberties the Patriot Act and, of course, wringing all meaning from the word “torture.” Until just recently when the interpretation of torture was amended, it applied only to the pain like that of “organ failure, impairment of body function, or even death.” Anything less, such as, say, shackling detainees to a low chair for hours and hours so that one prisoner pulled out tufts of hair, is something else. We have no word for it, but it is - or was until recently - considered perfectly legal.

The administration’s original interpretation of torture was promulgated by the Justice Department, under John Ashcroft, and the White House, under its counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales. The result has deeply embarrassed the United States. Among other things, it produced the abuses of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which we were assured were an unaccountable exception. My God, if only higher authorities had known.

Now we all know. The International Committee of the Red Cross has complained that some of what has been done at Guantánamo - Guantánamo, not Abu Ghraib - was “tantamount to torture.” The American Civil Liberties Union has complained, but that you would expect. So, though, have the FBI and military lawyers, former and current. Just about across the board, the Bush administration has raised itself above the law. It pronounced itself virtuous, but facing a threat so dire, so unique, that Gonzales found the Geneva Conventions themselves “obsolete.” Such legal brilliance does not long go unrewarded. He has been nominated to become attorney general.

The elevation of Gonzales is supposed to be a singular American success story. This son of Mexican immigrants bootstrapped his way to Harvard Law School and from there to Bush’s inner circle, first in Austin, then in Washington. There he came up with a brilliant definition of torture, one so legally clever that only the dead could complain and they, of course, could not. Everyone was off the hook. Is it any wonder the Senate will probably soon confirm him? By next year, he will undoubtedly receive a cherished Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to those who successfully serve the president but dismally fail the nation. In the audience, unseen but nonetheless present, Orwell and Kafka look on.

The revelations coming out of Guantánamo are hideous. The ordinary abuse of prisoners, the madness instilled by gruesome incarcerations, the incessant lying of the authorities, plus the mock interrogations staged for the media, in which detainees and their interrogators share milkshakes - all this soils us as a nation. It’s as if the government is ahistorical, unaware of how communists and fascists also strained language and ushered the world into torture chambers made pretty for the occasion. We now keep some pretty bad company.

The Bush administration has fused Orwell with Kafka in the same way someone fused the cry of an infant with that of a cat from the Meow Mix television commercial. The upshot is Gonzales, ticketed maybe for the Supreme Court because he winked at torture and yessed the president. He’s Kafka’s man, Orwell’s boy and Bush’s pussycat. Know him for his roar.

Meow.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Undiplomatic Immunity
By Chris Suellentrop
Slate.com

January 6th, 2004

Did Al Gonzales say the president can authorize torture?

Remember what Dick Cheney said to Sen. Patrick Leahy this past June on the Senate floor? Think of Alberto Gonzales’s testimony Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Leahy is the ranking Democrat, as the Bush administration’s logical follow-up: “And your mother.”
By late afternoon, Leahy had became so frustrated with Gonzales’s refusal to give clear answers to questions from him and other Democrats that he held aloft a bulky file that he said was filled with unanswered letters and queries addressed to Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee for attorney general. “If he’s confirmed, I’m sure he will feel that he never has any duty to answer them,” Leahy said. Leahy’s file may have been bursting with questions, but for most of Thursday’s nearly nine-hour hearing the committee’s Democrats wanted an answer to just one question: Does Gonzales think the president has the power to authorize torture by immunizing American personnel from prosecution for it?

During the hearing, Leahy called this idea, which comes from the August 2002 document dubbed the “Bybee memo,” “the commander-in-chief override.” And by hearing’s end it was clear that Gonzales believed in it. (Otherwise, why not simply answer, “No”?) Early in the day, Gonzales professed the requisite faith that America was “a nation of laws and not of men,” but his opinion of the president’s ability–however limited–to authorize individuals to engage in criminal acts suggests the opposite. This is a government of good men, Gonzales implicitly assured the senators, so there’s no need to worry about legal hypotheticals like whether torture is always verboten. Don’t worry, because we don’t do it. It’s a strange argument from a conservative: We’re the government. Trust us.

Committee chairman Sen. Arlen Specter kicks off the questioning with a softball. “Do you approve of torture?” he asks, and Gonzales assures him, “Absolutely not.” In fact, Abu Ghraib “sickened” him, Gonzales says, and if anything illegal went on at Guantanamo, well, he condemns that, too. But that’s the crux of the entire debate: When it comes to torture, what’s legal and what’s illegal?

Specter realizes this and tells Gonzales, “As chairman, I think further amplification is necessary.” But he’s sure the rest of the committee will handle that, and they do. Leahy asks Gonzales if he agrees with the definition of torture–”For an act to violate the torture statute, it must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”,devised by an August 2002 memo that was addressed to him. Gonzales says he doesn’t remember. Leahy asks if he agrees today. No, Gonzales says.

Then comes the question of the day: “Now, as attorney general, would you believe the president has the authority to exercise a commander-in-chief override and immunize acts of torture?” Leahy asks. That’s “a hypothetical that’s never going to occur,” Gonzales says, because we don’t torture people. He continues, “This president has said we’re not going to engage in torture under any circumstances, and therefore that portion of the opinion was unnecessary and was the reason that we asked that that portion be withdrawn.” Translation: Yes, I think the president has the legal authority to immunize acts of torture, but he doesn’t want to, so I’m not going to bother with defending the idea.

Pressed for an answer, Gonzales concedes, “I do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a statute that the president may view as unconstitutional,” and therefore the president may ignore it. That’s a general statement of principle, Leahy says, but I’m asking a specific question. Can the president immunize torture? Gonzales retreats to the that’s-hypothetical-and-it’s-not-gonna-happen defense. OK, Leahy says. What about leaders of other countries? Can they immunize torture? I’m not familiar with their laws, Gonzales replies.

Gonzales declares himself agnostic on an astonishing array of issues, including whether torture is a useful interrogation tactic. Sen. Herb Kohl of Wisconsin notes that Ashcroft has said torture doesn’t work. What does Gonzales think? “Sir, I don’t have a way of reaching a conclusion on that. All I know is that the president has said we’re not going to torture under any circumstances.”

Sen. Lindsay Graham is the lone Republican to blast Gonzales. His boyish face comes paired with a kindergartner’s hyperactivity, as he impatiently rocks his chair while waiting for his turn. During Gonzales’s answers to others’ questioning, Graham sometimes wears a look of confusion mingled with disgust. “I think we’ve dramatically undermined the war effort by getting on a slippery slope in terms of playing cute with the law,” Graham, a reserve Air Force JAG officer, says. He adds later, “And I think you weaken yourself as a nation when you try to play cute and become more like your enemy instead of like who you want to be.”

Gonzales senses that Graham has made a mistake and seizes on it. “We are nothing like our enemy, Senator,” he protests. They behead people, like Danny Pearl and Nick Berg. Graham notes that this is a pretty low moral standard for America to aspire to. I agree that we’re nothing like the enemy, he says. “But we’re not like who we want to be and who we have been.” (During Graham’s second round of questioning, Gonzales tells him that government lawyers did the very best they could when they wrote the memo. “Well that’s where you and I disagree,” Graham retorts. “I think they did a lousy job.”)

Later, it’s Sen. Dick Durbin’s turn to try to get Gonzales to elucidate his views on the separation of powers. Can the president immunize people from prosecution for torture? Gonzales restates that it’s theoretically possible for Congress to pass an unconstitutional law that the president can justifiably ignore. “Has the president ever invoked that authority?” Durbin asks. No, Gonzales says. When Leahy’s turn comes around again, the ranking Democrat complains, “You never answered my question.” But Gonzales has answered. Leahy and the Democrats just don’t like his answer.

Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican, comes to Gonzales’s defense. President Clinton’s solicitor general, Walter Dellinger, wrote in 1994 that the president can refuse to execute laws he considers unconstitutional, Cornyn notes. Sen. Russ Feingold dismisses this during his turn to speak. There’s a difference between not enforcing a statute and authorizing people to break the law, he says. Look, Gonzales reiterates. That 2002 memo is no longer administration policy. And on top of that, we don’t torture people. But, Feingold asks, does President Bush have the power to authorize violations of criminal law? Gonzales makes some noise about “a presumption of constitutionality” and his oath as attorney general to defend congressional statutes, then gives his real answer: I’d take it very seriously if I ever advised the president to do such a thing. “So the president’s above the law?” Feingold asks. No, Gonzales says, but he can choose not to enforce unconstitutional laws. That’s not what I’m asking, Feingold complains. We don’t torture people, Gonzales says. Feingold gives up and pleads, Will you just let us know instead of waiting two years next time?

Durbin tries to get Gonzales to clarify. Can U.S. personnel, under any circumstances, engage in torture? Gonzales still can’t muster a definitive “no.” “I don’t believe so, but I’d want to get back to you on that,” he says. “There are a number of laws that prohibit that.”

By day’s end, Leahy’s frustration drives him to a hilarious tangential inquiry as to how Gonzales vetted Bernie Kerik, President Bush’s withdrawn nominee for secretary of homeland security. (Gonzales protests that Kerik wasn’t nominated. “It was an announcement of an intent to nominate,” he says.) Leahy wants to know whether Gonzales knew about Kerik’s so-called “9/11 apartment,” or his extramarital affair, or best of all, whether the nanny that he said he didn’t pay Social Security taxes for even existed. No one knows her name or what country she comes from, Leahy says. “Do you know whether there ever was a nanny?” Gonzales answers by saying that Kerik is no longer under consideration. “Maybe there was such a nanny,” Leahy muses. “I don’t know.”

Finally, Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale professor of international law (and dean of the Yale Law School), solves the riddle–about the “commander-in-chief override” not the mysterious nanny–by proposing a simple question for Gonzales. He tells the Judiciary Committee, “A simple question you could have asked today was, ‘Is the anti-torture statute constitutional?” If Gonzales answers yes, then he does not believe the president can override the statute. Mystery solved. Only one problem with this professorial inquiry: By the time Koh testified, Gonzales was already gone.

Chris Suellentrop is Slate’s deputy Washington bureau chief. You can e-mail him at suellentrop@slate.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)