Torture News Roundup: Panetta’s Move-On Torture Plan

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Scott Horton’s article, Licensed to Kill, discusses Panetta’s memo for subordinates and Congress of his move-on plan, which includes generalized “immunity” that may cover executive-level officials, including some now advising Panetta. The plan includes shutting down the CIA black sites, which is good, but as the CIA has already destroyed evidence of torture, will any evidence at these sites be preserved?

Other torture news includes:  Prisoners can not judicially enforce Geneva rights due to MCA; torture lawyer Bybee admits DOJ work shoddy; a court reinstated a Guantánamo defense lawyer fired by the Pentagon; Obama opposes habeas rights for Bagram prisoners because it may interfere with Afghanistan war, and a judge blasted Bush DOJ for hiding evidence that key witness used to build case against prisoners is mentally ill.

UPDATE: thanks to Compound F —

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.

   The six defendants-in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith-are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.”

   …Announcement of the prosecutor’s decision was delayed until after the Easter holiday in order not to interfere with a series of meetings between President Barack Obama and Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero. However, contrary to a claim contained in an editorial on April 8 in the Wall Street Journal, the Obama State Department has been in steady contact with the Spanish government about the case. Shortly after the case was filed on March 17, chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza was invited to the U.S. embassy in Madrid to brief members of the embassy staff about the matter. A person in attendance at the meeting described the process as “correct and formal.” The Spanish prosecutors briefed the American diplomats on the status of the case, how it arose, the nature of the allegations raised against the former U.S. government officials. The Americans “were basically there just to collect information,” the source stated.The Spanish prosecutors advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters. They pressed to know whether any such investigation was pending. These inquiries met with no answer from the U.S. side.

Panetta’s plan includes no more torture by the CIA, which will maintain rendition and temporary imprisonment.  A few parts of Panetta’s plan raise some additional questions:

(1) DOJ memos constituted interpretations, not authority, under Obama’s EO.

Panetta’s move-forward memo states that “[u]nder the Executive Order, the CIA does not employ any of the enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice from 2002 to 2009.”  However, Obama’s 1/22/09 EO did not state that the DOJ memos “authorized” torture.  Obama’s EO stated that unless the AG “provides further guidance,” government officers, employees and agents may use the AFM when conducting interrogations but may not rely upon DOJ’s interpretation of domestic and foreign anti-torture laws issued during Bush years.  

(2)  No more torture by CIA contractors.

Panetta is banning CIA contractors from conducting “interrogations,” which is great, but what about accountability for the torture and deaths committed by contractors? Horton notes that so far there has been no meaningful criminal prosecutions because the Bush DOJ provided a “license to kill”:  

[T]he Bush Administration aggressively prosecutes a bunch of grunts. But the military’s investigation showed that these enlisted personnel and NCOs were actually operating under the direction of a mysterious group of contractors. And it also concluded that a CIA officer was responsible for the one clear-cut homicide to emerge from Abu Ghraib-an individual who was literally tortured to death. The bit players are prosecuted, but the instigators, the individuals who bore real responsibility for what happened? They’re handed over to the crack “fast-lane” prosecutors in Virginia, the most political crew of a highly politicized Justice Department, and nothing happens.

Why? The Bush Administration issued a license to the CIA to torture and kill. The Justice Department itself was smack in the middle of this process, offering assurances that there would be no prosecutions. Moreover, a prosecution, had it been brought, would likely have resulted in disclosure of many uncomfortable details-how Bush cabinet officers approved not only techniques, but even specific torture programs, for instance; how the Justice Department itself connived in the entire process. A prosecution might have brought the truth close to the surface.

(3) No more permanent CIA black site prisons.

Horton notes the problem of decommissioning sites now that the nation is discussing how to handle torture by the Bush Administration. Panetta starts his message with the acknowledgment that “there is continuing media and congressional interest in reviewing past rendition, detention, and interrogation activities that took place dating back to 2002.” (This point will be discussed more in #5, but notice how Panetta has essentially set a cut-off date of the time period for any torture investigation as 2002.) The country has not yet decided whether to prosecute Bush officials, and the CIA has already destroyed key evidence of videotapes documenting torture. Now, any evidence at the black sites may be destroyed as well:

Some of these black sites are now the subject of criminal investigations seeking to ascertain whether crimes were committed there. One wonders what sort of care Panetta’s agents will take to preserve evidence of what transpired there, and what the criminal investigators think about the CIA “taking charge” of the process.

See also, Guantánamo Attorneys Urge Panetta To Preserve CIA Black Site Evidence : “Attorneys for detainee Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri today sent a letter to CIA Director Leon Panetta requesting that the CIA “black site” buildings, interrogation cells, prisoner cells, shackles, water boards and other equipment be preserved for inspection and documentation.”

(4)  CIA “immune” from investigations and prosecutions.

Panetta believes that the DOJ memos “authorized” torture and therefore the CIA should not be prosecuted and its officers should not even be investigated:

We will do that even as we cooperate with Congressional reviews of past interrogation practices. Officers who act on guidance from the Department of Justice-or acted on such guidance previously-should not be investigated, let alone punished. This is what fairness and wisdom require.

(5) Given that the known torture memo was dated August 1, 2002, does that mean that the CIA can, according to Panetta, be investigated and prosecuted for torture that occurred prior to that date?

In the ACLU case on the release of material relating to the destroyed CIA torture tapes, the DOJ states that the “destroyed tapes were made between April and December of 2002.”  The DOJ also admits that “August 2002 was the month during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations.”  We know of one torture memo that was dated August 1, 2002, as shown on this list of government memos on torture and international law. Prior to August 1, 2002 torture memo, the government memos addressed the application of Geneva Conventions.

However, Horton notes that torture was conducted prior to the August 1, 2002 memo that is claimed as “authority” for “immunity”:

But start with the fact that much of the worst abuse occurred well before the first of the Justice Department’s torture memoranda, from August 2002. How exactly were CIA agents relying on “guidance from the Department of Justice” that had not yet been issued? They weren’t. Note that the Justice Department’s letter in response to the ACLU’s FOIA request stated that the 92 tapes that the CIA destroyed (in yet another criminal act) were made between April and December 2002. The Justice Department acknowledges that these tapes would have contained evidence of torture. Therefore we know that the CIA was implementing the Bush torture program a half year before John Yoo came in to craft his infamous torture memo. Moreover, Yoo was brought in to write only in response to push-back from CIA officers and others who properly labeled these techniques as unlawful.

Knowing that the reliance on DOJ torture memo advice can’t be stretched to cover the torture and abuse before August 2002, the DOJ told the judge in the ACLU FOIA litigation that they “will produce no evidence from the period before the issuance of the Justice Department’s opinion”:

It’s not that such evidence doesn’t exist. It’s that the evidence would establish criminal conduct for which Panetta’s defense of “reliance on advice of counsel” doesn’t work. We are witnessing something akin to an institutional invocation of the Fifth Amendment, and in an act of ultimate perversion, it is being asserted by prosecutors.

The ACLU was not pleased with the CIA restrictions to August 2002:

Although the letter acknowledges that the destroyed tapes were made between April and December 2002, the letter said that the agency would provide reasons for withholding only 65 documents relating to interrogations conducted during August of 2002, while noting that August was the month during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations. The CIA’s unwillingness to produce details on interrogation-related documents for months other than August 2002 is highly suspect, especially in light of the fact that the Office of Legal Counsel did not give written authorizations to CIA interrogation methods until August 1, 2002. And, according to a DOJ Office of Inspector General report (PDF), Abu Zubaydah was subjected to “borderline torture” in the spring of 2002.

In a letter to the judge (pdf file), the ACLU wrote that it was entitled to records relating to “months before and after August 2002,” noting that the DOJ torture memo allegedly “authorizing” torture was dated August 1, 2002.

(6) What about prosecuting executive-level CIA officials?

Horton ends by advocating that accountability should focus not on the “ground-level agents who were implementing decisions taken high-up in the government,” but on those officials who adopted and ordered the torture, which includes a “handful of senior figures in the CIA, several of whom have emerged as Panetta’s closest advisors”:

As John Sifton notes in today’s Daily Beast:

   Accountability… should focus primarily on executive-level directors, such as the current CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes and Michael Sulick, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service-both high-level officials in the CIA’s operations directorate when the worst detainee abuses were committed. Investigations should focus also on high-level executive officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) who are still at the agency, for example, G- -, a former deputy to Jose Rodriguez, the chief of CTC back in 2002-2004 and who now enjoys a prestigious CIA station-chief posting in Europe.

These individuals are giving Leon Panetta plenty of advice today, and that advice serves their interests, but not those of the CIA or the United States.

Video of MSNBC Countdown interview with John Sifton.

Do prisoners really have Geneva rights.  President Obama issued an EO stating that every person “detained in any armed conflict” is entitled to Geneva rights.  In Bostan v. Obama, lawyers for prisoners wanted to solidify Geneva rights with the federal courts so that the rights are not dependent upon a presidential order and can be judicially enforced. In a pleading filed last Thursday (pdf file), the Obama DOJ agreed with the Bush DOJ that Geneva rights can not be enforced in court by prisoners filing habeas corpus petitions to challenge the conditions of their confinement.  

According to the Obama DOJ’s brief, habeas corpus can only be used to challenge the “fact, duration, or location of confinement, not conditions of confinement.”  This is apparently an area of law not settled. The brief notes that the Court of Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court have “not categorically ruled out the possibility that some sort of conditions claims might be brought under habeas,” but the “majority of Circuits” hold that claims involving conditions of confinement are beyond the scope of habeas.  

Moreover, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 prohibits prisoners from filing actions against US officials regarding “any aspect of the detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement” and also nixes the right to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions against the government and military. Rather, the brief cites a US Supreme Court decision for the proposition that the Geneva Convention “conferred rights on alien enemies that could be vindicated ‘only through protests and intervention of protecting powers,’ not through the courts.”

Investigations & Prosecutions

• Torture lawyer Bybee retained law firm, admits to law clerks DOJ work shoddy: If there are no criminal charges filed, the only domestic remedy is the infamous off-the-table impeachment because judges are not regulated by Nevada Bar Association and US Judicial Conference disciplinary actions limited to bench-related conduct.
  

  Bybee declined to talk about his work at the Office of Legal Counsel. But when he gathered former clerks last year at a Las Vegas steak house for a five-year reunion, he was more revealing.

  “He said our work has been well-researched, carefully written, and that he was very proud of the work that we’ve done and the opinions his chambers has issued,” said Tuan Samahon, who was Bybee’s first judicial clerk and is now a UNLV professor.

  According to Samahon, the judge then added: “I wish I could say that of the prior job I had.”

  Such sentiments contrast with public comments from John Yoo, Bybee’s former deputy at the OLC, who maintains that all of his legal memos were fully vetted by management. That could foreshadow potential finger pointing as the legal process plays out.

• Does Spain have the authority to prosecute Americans for crimes that didn’t take place on Spanish soil?
  

  The answer is yes. It’s called “universal jurisdiction.” Universal jurisdiction is a well-established theory that countries, including the United States, have used for many years to investigate and prosecute foreign nationals for crimes that shock the conscience of the global community. It provides a critical legal tool to hold accountable those who commit crimes against the law of nations, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Without universal jurisdiction, many of the most notorious criminals would go free.

• DC’s move on mantra is a one-way street to protect government officials. Binyam Mohamed’s lawyer faces criminal charges by DC for sending redacted memo to President Obama about how Binyam was tortured at Guantánamo. Glenn provides the details in article and radio interview of Binyam’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.
• Last week, Valtin reported how the Pentagon fired a military attorney who represented Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr because the attorney “clashed with superiors over defense tactics” for prisoners.  
  

  Kuebler, who says his firing stems from strategy disagreements with Masciola, said he has been barred from the defense counsel’s office and prevented from accessing files as the team tries to meet an April 15 deadline to submit documents to a review team appointed by Obama.

  “I am Omar Khadr’s lawyer and I am assigned to the office of military commissions and my boss is keeping me from doing my job,” he told The Associated Press in a phone interview from his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

• A federal judge now reinstates Kuebler, ruling Pentagon does not have authority to fire the defense lawyer.
  

  A military judge has refused to allow Pentagon officials to dismiss the lead attorney for the last western prisoner at Guantánamo, adding to turmoil for the Canadian’s defense on Wednesday as a key deadline approaches.

  Army Col. Patrick Parrish ruled late Tuesday that the chief defense counsel for the Guantánamo war crimes trials lacked authority to dismiss Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler from the defense team of Omar Khadr, who was 15 when captured after allegedly killing an American soldier.

• Australia debating torture investigations.
  

  What would be a useful exercise for Rudd at this ASIO leadership transition would be a review of all Australian experience and policies relating to the treatment of prisoners and suspects in the campaign against al-Qaeda terrorism since 2001. Many question marks still hang over the stories of the two Australians captured in Afghanistan or Pakistan in late 2001, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, who were transferred to US custody and ended up in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

  …Nonetheless, our public deserves some reassurance about what our Government and its agencies consider to be torture. Up until recently, we have been told that what happens at Guantanamo Bay is not torture. Can anyone now be sure of that? If other Australian citizens are surrendered to US custody, what safeguards now apply?
  

Status of Guantánamo & Disappeared Prisoners

• “Obama administration to appeal Bagram detainees habeas ruling”. Last week, federal district court judge Bates ruled that prisoners held at Bagram prison in Afghanistan may proceed with habeas corpus challenges to their imprisonment. This is the ruling that the Obama DOJ is appealing.
• Obama DOJ wants to nix the court ruling confirming constitutional rights of Bagram prisoners to challenge imprisonment because litigation might divert military’s attention from Afghanistan war.
  

  “If this Court were to proceed with these cases during the pendency of the appeal,” the motion argued, “the Court would impose serious practical burdens on, and potential harm to, the Government and its efforts to prosecute the war in Afghanistan.”

  …Responding in court to these three cases, “and to the potentially large number of other petitions filed by Bagram detainees who may now allege that they are similarly situated,” the Department argued, “would divert the military’s attention and resources at a critical time for operations in Afghanistan, potentially requiring accomodation and protection of counsel and onerous discovery.”

  …Judge Bates had limited his ruling to just three Bagram detainees, saying they were not nationals of Afghanistan and had been captured elsewhere and simply transferred to Bagram for detention.  Bagram, however, holds somewhere around 600 detainees; it is unknown how many of them would fit in the category covered by Bates’ decision; the judge himself said it would apply to only a limited number there.

  …The document described a series of possible inhibitions of military choices about capturing and detaining individuals in wartime situations.  Among them was a complaint that extending habeas to Bagram might keep the military from sending to Bagram individuals captured in Pakistan, whether the military does not have facilities for screening or detaining prisoners.

• Rights Groups Submit Allegations Against NATO Supreme Commander General Craddock for Force Feeding in Guantanamo in 2004-2006.
  

  Guantanamo hunger strikers protesting their abusive detention conditions and lack of rights were and continue to be brutally force-fed through abnormally large nasal tubes while strapped into a six-point restraint chair. In 2006, General Craddock suggested that the restraint chair method served as an “effective deterrent” to hunger striking, and went so far as to joke that at least hunger strikers got to choose the flavor of the lozenges used to soothe irritation caused by the feeding tubes. (Source: Adam Zagorin, At Guantanamo, Dying is not Permitted, Time Magazine, June 30, 2006)

  The brutal force-feeding of Guantánamo detainees amounts to torture, or at the very least, cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment under international human rights law. In 2007, the European Court of Human Rights found that “repeated force-feeding, not prompted by valid medical reasons but rather with the aim of forcing the applicant to stop his protest, and performed in a manner which unnecessarily exposed him to great physical pain and humiliation, can only be considered as torture.” (Ciorap v. Moldova)

• Uighurs at Guantánamo ask Supreme Court for their freedom. (Photo of the five Uyghur prisoners released in 2006 to Albania.)
  

  Muslims from China now held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to order their release into the United States.

  In court papers, a group of Uighurs says the high court should overrule a federal appeals panel in Washington, which has blocked the release of the Uighurs.

  A federal judge determined in October that the Uighurs should be freed because the Pentagon no longer considered them enemy combatants. U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said they should be allowed into this country because the administration could find no other country willing to accept them.

• Still no accounting of ghost and disappeared prisoners.
  

  The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own “black site” prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week.

  Although President Bush made a brief public allusion to the transfers in September 2006, the U.S. government has never offered any accounting of precisely how many detainees were moved and what became of them.

  … Nor were U.S. State Department officials given details of the transfers or details about the nature of the “assurances” of humane treatment provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA, according to a former top Bush administration official who was aware of the transfers but who asked not to be publicly identified because the issue remains highly classified. “This issue has been hiding in plain sight-but nobody has connected the dots,” said the former official.

• Valtin reported about D.C. Court: No Judicial Appeal on Torture Transfer for Uighurs, Other Gitmo “Detainees”:  Our government is no longer required to provide 30 days advance notice before a prisoner is transferred from Guantánamo to another nation to ensure prisoner is not transferred to a country where they will likely be tortured some more.  As a dissenting judge stated:
  

  The stakes of unlawful custody, which led the Court in Boumediene to extend habeas protections to the detainees in the first place, are no higher than the stakes of unlawful transfer. Indeed, because an unlawful transfer will deny the detainees any prospect of judicial relief, protecting their habeas rights in this context is vital.

• A federal judge accused the Bush DOJ of hiding evidence in Guantánamo cases.  This case involves Aymen Saeed Batarfi, A Yemeni doctor, who has been imprisoned for 6 years. Judge Sullivan was forced to delay ruling on the release of Batarfi because the government withheld at least 10 documents of classified information from the court.

  What is the nature of evidence Bush team used in a number of cases? Judge blasts DOJ for using in a number of Guantánamo cases a government witness who is a fellow prisoner with mental illness and for withholding key psychiatric records of witness used to build cases against others Guantánamo prisoners.

  In a little-noticed ruling last week, Judge Emmet Sullivan found that the witness’s testimony in other cases could be challenged as unreliable.

  During a hearing last week, Sullivan castigated the government for not turning over the medical records and ordered department lawyers to explain why he shouldn’t cite them for contempt of court.

  ”To hide relevant and exculpatory evidence from counsel and from the court under any circumstances, particularly here where there is no other means to discover this information and where the stakes are so very high . . . is fundamentally unjust, outrageous and will not be tolerated,” Sullivan said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

  “How can this court have any confidence whatsoever in the United States government to comply with its obligations and to be truthful to the court?”

  Judge Sullivan could not believe that the DOJ would offer this prisoner as a credible witness when his medical records indicate that he has an antisocial personality disorder that could mean he is “prone to lying and lacks regard for the difference between right and wrong.” Indeed, Judge Sullivan warned sanctions:

  Sullivan, however, was skeptical of the government’s explanation and warned that ”someone’s going to pay a price” for not disclosing the information.

  ”The sanction is going to be high,” he said. “I’ll tell you quite frankly if I have to start incarcerating people to get my point across, I’m going to start at the top.”

  Sullivan ordered DOJ to notify other judges of psychiatric records “so they could assess whether the government’s failure to reveal the extent of the witness’s mental problems has bearing on other detainee cases.”

  In Batarfi’s case, the DOJ accidentally released the medical records to his lawyer. But this is not the only dubious witness used by DOJ.

  Detainee Yasim Muhammed Basardah gave evidence in dozens of cases, even though his reliability was questioned by military officials from the start.

  Under the Obama administration, Batarfi is the 2nd prisoner to be released.  

  Separately, the Justice Department decided last week to release Batarfi, signaling that it no longer had sufficient evidence that he was an enemy combatant although he was held for seven years.

  Judge Sullivan also warned the DOJ that he will be monitoring the release process to make sure it does not take months of more delays.

  Sullivan threatened to have government attorneys return to court in 14 days to report on the progress of freeing Batarfi “and every 14 days thereafter.”

  “I’m not going to continue to tolerate indefinite delay on the part of the United States government,” Sullivan said. “I mean this Guantanamo issue is a travesty . . . a horror story . . . and I’m not going to buy into an extended indefinite delay of this man’s stay at Guantanamo.”

Additional News

• Eugene Robinson: Crimes That Deserve Punishment.
  

  It’s no longer possible to mince words, or pretend we didn’t know. The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced” interrogation methods, used on “high-value” terrorism suspects, plainly constituted torture. The time for euphemisms is over, and the time for accountability has arrived.

  I have believed all along that we urgently need to conduct a thorough investigation into the Bush administration’s moral and legal transgressions. Now I am convinced that some kind of “truth commission” process isn’t enough. Torture — even the torture of evil men — is a crime. It deserves not just to be known, but to be punished.

  From George W. Bush on down, individuals decided to sanction, commit and tolerate the practice of torture. They took pains to paper this vile enterprise with rationalizations and justifications, but they knew it was wrong. So do we.  

See also, teacherken’s diary with same name.

• San Francisco Chronicle calls for “full and open investigation” of the use of torture by Bush administration.
• ICRC confirmed that the confidential ICRC report posted online by Mark Danner was authentic. The same article provides a FAQ with numerous links to answer the questions: “U.S. Medical Personnel and Interrogations: What Do We Know? What Don’t We Know?”
• New witness accounts of KLA torture camps 10 years ago.
  

  A former KLA prisoner, a Kosovo Albanian, has given the BBC an eye-witness account of the torture of Serbs, Albanians and Roma held in a camp in Kukes.

  Serbs, Roma and Kosovo Albanians had been locked up, tortured and killed in northern Albania, the witness said. The source, who was also a prisoner, confirmed that organ harvesting and trafficking had also occurred in Albania.

See also, Horrors of KLA prison camps revealed.

See also, The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted civilians in Kosovo who were then mistreated and in some cases killed, a BBC investigation has found.

• Guantánamo at Home:  Jeanne Theoharis reports on how closing Guantánamo will not return the US to the rule of law as long as our nation continues a shadow system where material-support laws based on guilt by association are used to imprison persons under circumstances where both human rights and legal rights are violated.
  

  It is here, in Lower Manhattan, Minneapolis and Miami, in our Justice Department, where we must shift the ground. It is here where US citizens and residents–in our federal court system and under our watch–await trial, often facing secret and specious evidence under inhumane conditions that rise to the level of cruel and unusual punishment. The task of ending Guantánamo requires that we examine and rebuild the political and judicial systems within our borders–to reform the Justice Department, the courts and prison policy.

• Lawyers, Judges Bitter At Obama Guantanamo Delays.
  

  Lawyers and judges working on Guantanamo Bay legal cases are showing signs of exasperation at President Barack Obama’s administration, which they accuse of slowing federal judicial procedures for detainees.

  Two federal judges tasked with examining cases by five Guantanamo prisoners contesting their detention — a right to habeas corpus granted by the Supreme Court in June 2008 — have made a rare public row of their impatience with government prosecutors.

  “Respondent’s counsel violated all three orders,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in an unusually harshly worded court document seen Wednesday.

  …Like other lawyers interviewed by AFP, Cynamon said the new administration favors having the Guantanamo prisoners’ cases reviewed by political appointees rather than federal judges.

This is a new weekly series with editors Valtin, Meteor Blades and Patriot Daily. If you have not signed the petition for a special prosecutor to investigate Bush, Cheney et al, you’re just one click away!

Bloggers Against Torture oppose torture and cruel, inhuman & degrading treatment of all persons, whether they be prisoners at Guantánamo, Bagram or CIA black sites; immigrants; civilians, or prisoners in civilian prison systems. Most members support investigation & prosecution of Bush officials for war crimes & torture.

Thanks for help with this edition of WTR to Valtin,  and to ek hornbeck and srkp23 whose invaluable guidance and assistance enabled this diary to be published!