Tag: ACLU

It’s been about ten weeks since I fell and broke both wrists on August 18th. I am just now finally almost back to normal functioning. Whatever that means. While there has not been a whole lot going on in my visible outer world, there’s a lot going on in my own little mind. Still churning and brewing.

Meanwhile. August on, it’s been Health Care Insurance Not Reform farce and the rise of Grayson and lots of other fun stuff.

Guess what has been churning and brewing behind the MSM radar scenes in torture/justice news? I don’t know, somehow I quit paying attention. Thank goodness, the usual suspects did not.

First up, ACLU has this new video up. Go to their site to view it.

The men in this video were held at Guantanamo for years without charge and denied any meaningful opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention. But now they are finally free. This is their story.

from Sherwood Ross, June 28, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Please support Torture Awareness Day

Simulposted at Daily Kos

Medical reports corroborated the detainee’s account, stating that the detainee had a broken nose, fractured leg, and scars on his stomach. In addition, soldiers confirmed that Task Force 20 interrogators wearing civilian clothing had interrogated the detainee. However, after initially reporting the abuse, the detainee said that he was forced by an American soldier to sign a statement denouncing the claims or else be kept in detention indefinitely. He agreed.

    An investigator who reviewed the signed statement concluded that “[t]his statement, alone, is a prima facie indication of threats.” However, despite the medical report and testimony from other soldiers, the criminal file was ultimately closed on the grounds that the investigation had “failed to prove or disprove” the offenses.

ACLU.org

    Does anything stand against the American concept of the rule of law more than this?

I originally posted this here at the Great Orange Satan. I stated then and I will state now that my rights are not for sale. Now, Philip Gourevitch seeks to sell my right to know what is being done in my name down the river in the New York Times. I will repost here and then add a rebuttal to Mr. Gourevitch down below.

Crazed & Confused thinks that Obama was right not to release the torture photos. But he ignores the basic problems with Obama’s rationale — transparency is essential to a functioning democracy. It was the clear intent of the Founding Fathers that the government follow a policy of transparency — in fact, the Constitution requires that Congress publish a journal of its proceedings. If we do not have maximum transparency in our government, then how will we know if we are still a functioning democracy? How will we know if our elected officials are following the Constitution? This is the very sort of thing that Obama ran on. I suggest that he do what he was elected to do and provide more transparency in government by releasing these pictures.  

Barack Obama backflipped on his promise to make public photos depicting detainee abuse by U.S. personnel overseas, however one intrepid independent reporter has managed, digging through government files obtained through an ACLU FOIA request, to unearth detailed documents describing the photographs.

U.S. Army soldiers in Afghanistan took dozens of pictures of their colleagues pointing assault rifles and pistols at the heads and backs of hooded and bound detainees and another photograph showed two male soldiers and one female solider pointing a broom to one detainee “as if I was sticking the end of a broom stick into [his] rectum,” according to the female soldier’s account as told to an Army criminal investigator.

President Barack Obama said Wednesday he would not release these photographs, reversing a promise he made a month ago, fearing it would stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.

I found the documents that describes the photographs on the website of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU obtained the files, but not the photographs, in 2005 as part of the organization’s wide-ranging Freedom of information Act lawsuit against the federal government related to the Bush administration’s treatment of “war on terror” prisoners in U.S. custody.

Read the entire article at The Public Record…

My ex-wife has been representing a Guantanamo detainee for a few years now.  She took a case she couldn’t afford and has devoted a significant portion of her resources the last few years to seeking justice for a foreign stranger accused of committing terrorist acts.  The struggle has been difficult, because her opponent has been the richest, most powerful country in the world–the government of the United States of America.  Her inability to sleep well while someone tortured in her name is the reason I fell in love with her forty years ago.  We scarcely communicate, now that our wonderful children are grown, but we did exchange emails today.  The impersonal letter she forwarded to me, the subject of this diary, brought me to tears.  This diary is to share one small development in a long, difficult struggle being carried forward by a few Americans who stand up for human rights.

In an effort to derive some direction and a way forward to accountability, on March 20, 2009, Colleen Costello of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Jamil Dakwar of the American Civil Liberties Union, spoke before the Inter-American Commission Human Rights, in  Washington D.C.  The issue:  “Accountability for Violations of Human Rights in the United States.”

Colleen Costello laid forth the details of our torture, including the waterboarding of Sheik Khalid Mohamed, our detention systems, renditions, and secret prisons.

Michael Ratner spoke with passion concerning the many obstacles confronting our efforts to achieve accountability, including some of the “legal” ones put in place by the Bush Administration, such as the Military Commissions Act, a lack of habeas corpus and how all efforts, thus far, have been thwarted by the Obama administration.  That Sen. Leahy has called for a “truth commission” with immunity provisions, but would not lead necessarily to criminal prosecutions.  He spoke with a sense of urgency and there truly is one, in terms of the U.S. statute of limitations on torture, we have a window of one and half years to prosecute.  Moreover, Ratner pointed out that an Executive Order banning torture can easily be reversed by the next President and thus, accountability is the only conceivable way to assure that the U.S. is no longer a party to torture.  One of the panel members of the IACHR reminded Ratner that there was no statute of limitations on the torture in international terms.

Jamil Dakwar spoke concerning the difficulty in obtaining documents because of the “state secrecy” stance, and that they (the UCLA) were able to obtain some documentation through the Freedom of Information Act.

Also speaking was Lewis Amselem, Deputy Permanent Representative of the United States to the Organization of American States (OAS).  He spoke about the immediate steps of President Obama to end torture, close down Guantanamo, close CIA prisons by his Executive Orders.  He went on and on about these accomplishments without really confronting the issue of accountability.  

A Sarah Paoletti, Division of the Legal Clinic, University of Pennsylvania, also spoke briefly.

In the proceedings, and at the conclusion various members of the IACHR, i.e., Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, Commissioner of the CIDH, asked what the Commission could do.  Santiago A. Canton, Executive Secretary of the CIDH, spoke and asked that documents be produced to the Commission, as well as any cases that have been brought for trial on torture.

The entire video may be seen here.  It is about an hour long and very worth while seeing.  (Home)

Also, written complaints filed with the IACHR will be posted here.