House Caves on FISA

By Farol

The House just passed the Hoyer/Bush FISA "compromise" bill by a whopping 293-129.

Since this bill is a clear violation not only of the Fourth Amendment, but of the whole principle of equality under the law, I expect to see some real outrage on the part of all the visible "good liberals" out there. How about it, Obama? What about a rousing speech on the Senate floor decrying the violation of the Constitution, plus a vow to block this legislation with a filibuster? How about you, Frank Rich? Surely you're going to use your influential voice to incite your readers to mobilize on this issue?

All kidding aside, it's worth noting that the people who called in to C-Span as I was watching the House vote on this were almost all infuriated and saddened in equal measure. The disconnect between the words of these angry citizens and the spectacle taking place on the screen was shocking. (One woman reported that her representative's office hung up on her). It was enough to make you feel that democracy in this country is dead and buried.

The Second Coming of the FISA Flood

By Farol

The fact that Democratic leaders in Congress are utterly desperate to give amnesty to telecoms that broke the law by spying on Americans without a warrant should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying even the slightest bit of attention to this issue. The only thing that's been preventing them from caving for this long has been intense grassroots activism. And no grassroots activist has pursued this issue with more dedication, passion, and knowledge than Glenn Greenwald.

In an amazingly short amount of time, Greenwald has assembled a diverse group of bloggers and activists to run ad campaigns against "blue dog" Democrats who support amnesty (and other destructive Bush policies). The group's short-term goal is to stop the sham "compromise" bill which the House Democratic leadership is now trying to force through Congress as quickly and quietly as possible (and which would guarantee immunity for the telecoms). The long-term goal is to create an organized, efficient grassroots movement devoted to civil-liberties issues. This is particularly important considering that, as Greenwald notes, Barack Obama has yet to take serious action on these issues. There is no guarantee that he will live up to his rhetoric should he become president.

I encourage everyone to head over to Greenwald's blog now to get all the details. The relevant posts are here, here, here, and here.

Guantánamo Detainees Allege Being Drugged Against Their Will

By Farol

Here's another nugget for all of you Gitmo fans out there. From the Washington Post:

Adel al-Nusairi remembers his first six months at Guantanamo Bay as this: hours and hours of questions, but first, a needle.

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.' "

Nusairi, now free in Saudi Arabia, was unable to learn what drugs were injected before his interrogations. He is not alone in wondering: At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.

Like Nusairi, other detainees believed the injections were intended to coerce confessions.

The Defense Department and the CIA, the two agencies responsible for detaining terrorism suspects, both deny using drugs as an enhancement for interrogations, and suggest that the stories from Nusairi and others like him are either fabrications or mistaken interpretations of routine medical treatment.

Yet the allegations have resurfaced because of the release this month of a 2003 Justice Department memo that explicitly condoned the use of drugs on detainees.

Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of "mind-altering substances" on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or "profound" psychological damage. U.S. law "does not preclude any and all use of drugs," Yoo wrote in the memo. He declined to comment for this article.

The memo has prompted new calls for the Bush administration to give a full accounting of its treatment of detainees, and to make public detailed prison medical records. Legal experts and human rights groups say that forced drugging of detainees for any nontherapeutic reasons would be a particularly grave breach of international treaties banning torture.

"The use of drugs as a form of restraint of prisoners is both unlawful and unethical," said Leonard Rubenstein, an expert on medical ethics and the president of Physicians for Human Rights. "These allegations demand a full inquiry by Congress and the Department of Justice."

Scott Allen, a physician and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I, noted that there are no accepted medical standards for the use of drugs to subjugate prisoners. Thus, any such use in interrogations "would have to be considered an experimental use of medicine."

Yes, that's right: Your government has authorized the illegal forced drugging of illegally held prisoners. And not only that, but the use of these drugs was experimental by its very nature.

One of the important things to note here is that the confessions extracted from prisoners using these coercive methods were almost certainly false ("Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.") Yes, I'm sure glad the Pentagon and the CIA are keeping us safer by tormenting people until they make shit up.

Well, all that remains to be done now is arrest those who authorized and carried out these illegal acts. Pretty clear-cut case of lawbreaking. I'm waiting....

(A note about the Post's article: Like all mainstream media pieces dealing with the abuse of government detainees, it automatically assumes the detainees are "terrorism suspects". In fact, many of the people held by the U.S. in Gitmo and elsewhere were turned in for the flimsiest of reasons—personal grudges, bounties, etc. To refer to all these people as "terrorism suspects" simply because they are held by the U.S. is fundamentally misleading.)

The Road to Gitmo Begins in Washington

By Quill and Farol

By now the latest revelations of U.S. policy on torture have hit the blogospheric fan, and while the continued authorization of torture by the government is old news, the Yoo Memos validated what were previously just speculations held by opponents of the pro-torture policies. The most important by far is the now indisputable fact that these orders came from the top and trickled down to the bottom, not the other way around, as the administration has consistently claimed.

The fact is, senior officials, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, William Haynes, the general counsel to the U.S. Department of Defense, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, and former undersecretary of defense for policy (the no. 3 position at the Pentagon) Douglas Feith, have their dirty little fingerprints all over the atrocities being committed at Guantánamo and around the world in the name of the United States of America.

For an incredibly in-depth and damning explanation of the story behind how the higher-ups in Washington directed underlings in the military to use more "aggressive techniques" that constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution, see Philippe Sands' jaw-dropping article "The Green Light" in Vanity Fair (of all places...keep up the good work, guys). It demands to be read in full.

Besides the previously mentioned proof of top-down influence, some of the article's revelations that stuck out to us most were:

1. Douglas Feith is a comically diabolical man. This evil little shit actually glowed with delight has he told Sands how clever his circumvention of Geneva was:

Douglas Feith had a long-standing intellectual interest in Geneva, and for many years had opposed legal protections for terrorists under international law. He referred me to an article he had written in 1985, in The National Interest, setting out his basic view. Geneva provided incentives to play by the rules; those who chose not to follow the rules, he argued, shouldn’t be allowed to rely on them, or else the whole Geneva structure would collapse. The only way to protect Geneva, in other words, was sometimes to limit its scope. To uphold Geneva’s protections, you might have to cast them aside.

But that way of thinking didn’t square with the Geneva system itself, which was based on two principles: combatants who behaved according to its standards received P.O.W. status and special protections, and everyone else received the more limited but still significant protections of Common Article 3. Feith described how, as he and Myers spoke with Rumsfeld, he jumped protectively in front of the general. He reprised his “little speech” for me. “There is no country in the world that has a larger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions as law than the United States,” he told Rumsfeld, according to his own account, “and there is no institution in the U.S. government that has a stronger interest than the Pentagon.” So Geneva had to be followed? “Obeying the Geneva Conventions is not optional,” Feith replied. “The Geneva Convention is a treaty in force. It is as much part of the supreme law of the United States as a statute.” Myers jumped in. “I agree completely with what Doug said and furthermore it is our military culture It’s not even a matter of whether it is reciprocated—it’s a matter of who we are.”

Feith was animated as he relived this moment. I remained puzzled. How had the administration gone from a commitment to Geneva, as suggested by the meeting with Rumsfeld, to the president’s declaration that none of the detainees had any rights under Geneva? It all turns on what you mean by “promoting respect” for Geneva, Feith explained. Geneva didn’t apply at all to al-Qaeda fighters, because they weren’t part of a state and therefore couldn’t claim rights under a treaty that was binding only on states. Geneva did apply to the Taliban, but by Geneva’s own terms Taliban fighters weren’t entitled to P.O.W. status, because they hadn’t worn uniforms or insignia. That would still leave the safety net provided by the rules reflected in Common Article 3— but detainees could not rely on this either, on the theory that its provisions applied only to “armed conflict not of an international character,” which the administration interpreted to mean civil war. This was new. In reaching this conclusion, the Bush administration simply abandoned all legal and customary precedent that regards Common Article 3 as a minimal bill of rights for everyone.

(Feith then lit a pipe, twirled his moustache, and went, "BWAHAHAHAHA!")

This type of circular logic is emblematic of the current administration's agenda to legislate immunity for those complicit in its reckless law-breaking, such as the telecom companies involved in warrantless wiretapping.

2. Feith, along with John Yoo, are now ensconced in cushy teaching positions in two of America's most respected educational institutions - Georgetown University and Berkeley College, respectively. It is utterly horrifying that these war criminals are actually getting paid to teach the future lawyers of America the ways of justifying torture and the circumvention of the U.S. Constitution and international law to achieve the ends of a corrupt and morally bankrupt administration. Which is a great segue into our third point...

3. These kind of people still enjoy protection from prosecution for their crimes by an apathetic Congress and press corps. It is absolutely reprehensible that an article of this magnitude goes largely unnoticed by the very people whose duty it is to inform the public of this blatant disregard of the law, not to mention those who should be punishing lawbreakers. If Congress doesn't investigate the claims made by Sands in his article, it will be complicit in the deeds committed by these war criminals.

4. Sands reveals that some of these prisoners in Gitmo are actually being tortured our of their minds after 54 consecutive days of "enhanced interrogation techniques":

The abusive interrogation of al-Qahtani lasted a total of 54 days. It ended not on January 12, as the press was told in June 2004, but three days later, on January 15. In those final three days, knowing that the anything-goes legal regime might disappear at any moment, the interrogators made one last desperate push to get something useful out of al-Qahtani. They never did. By the end of the interrogation al-Qahtani, according to an army investigator, had “black coals for eyes.”

5. What happened in Gitmo lead directly to what happened in Abu Ghraib. The Haynes memo made it all the way to Iraq via a general and legal consultant at Guantánamo months before the scandal was uncovered, surely contributing to the appalling abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

While it is highly unlikely that the "torture team" will ever be tried for their crimes in our own country, Sands holds out hope that if they ever step foot on foreign soil again, what happened to another infamous war criminal - Pinochet - might just happen to them.

Shocking Revelation: The US Government Breaks the Law

By Farol

From The Guardian:

Faced with a litany of lawsuits and objections to its plans to build a 670-mile fence along the border with Mexico, the US government moved yesterday to bypass more than 30 laws and regulations in its effort to complete the fence by the end of the year.

Opposition to the 2006 secure fence act, which instructed the department of homeland security to build the fence by the end of 2008, has united an unlikely coalition of property owners and environmentalists.

Property owners and developers have launched numerous lawsuits to deny the government access to their lands, arguing that their property rights would be violated or the values of their homes suffer.

Environmentalists have challenged the government, saying that the plans would harm the natural habitats of species ranging from big cats to owls.

Native American groups have also protested that their traditional lands and burial sites would be desecrated by the fence.

The administration's action echoes a controversial provision of a 2005 act, which allowed the department of homeland security to waive all laws "necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads".

In a just world, all of this would be causing national outrage. It would be on the front page of every major newspaper and discussed by every TV pundit. But in the twisted world that has become reality in the U.S. today, it's just accepted that the government can break our laws with impunity. (Or, in the more polite language preferred by media outlets, "bypass" them. Can we please retire this word—at least, as it applies to laws—forever? When the government ignores the law, or asserts that it is above it, it BREAKS THE LAW, pure and simple).

In a way, there's really very little reason to be surprised by what the administration is doing here. This is, after all, an administration that has consistently asserted that it is exempt from laws that apply to everyone else. If lawyers at Justice can author decisions claiming that the U.S. has the right to violate treaties regarding torture to which it is a party, then why can't the Department of Homeland Security just decide to break "over 30 laws and regulations" in order to pander to the xenophobia of the Republican base? It makes perfect sense, in a sick sort of way.