Torture/Renditions, USA : Various

Prosecution of US leaders who've condoned torture and related:

First, Jail all Bush's Lawyers (A recommendation for Holder)
By Robert Parry (who first broke the story of the Iran-Contra Affair):
here

For actions US & World citizens can take:
here

Center for Constitutional Rights questions Eric Holder's evident decision not to prosecute those in the former US leadership who condoned torture
here
and
here

John Yoo
Since many who may also be following the torture & rendition items know well the name, John Yoo, here's something on him: Robert Gannon, a reporter who has been covering Professor John Yoo at UC Berkeley for the East Bay Express, writes in John Yoo, War Criminal? "The chances that the notorious UC Berkeley law professor will be investigated for war crimes appear to have increased in recent weeks." More at here

Some of the recent items on this topic may be only questions and conjecture. Yet certainly it's in our best interest and the interest of human rights to follow these.

Here are some of my usual reads - sites which feature ONGOING work related to Torture and Detainees:

GTMO detainees and related
here

Reprieve British - with US interaction - work also involves the death penalty...
here

Cageprisoners British-based - from a more or less Muslim and/or Arabic perspective...excellent, usually calm reporting - A must for all interested in the whole problem of torture and US detainees...
here

US -- Bill of Rights Defense Committee Articles related to US Bill of Rights & Constitution or the lack thereof in recent US operations/policy - often in regards to torture
here

Center for Constitutional Rights US This group works with many of the GTMO lawyers
here

Of course, do keep watching Human Rights groups in general on torture & Renditions: Amnesty I and AmnestyUSA, International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch and many others...
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Last week there was some buzz among rights & anti-war folk who highlighted the Center for Constitutional Rights' recent press releases. These items questioned President Barack Obama's January 22 orders on interrogation and closing Guantanamo. CCR cautioned that while the new US administration in no uncertain terms stated the CIA must close its secret black hole prisons - they may have left a loophole for the CIA to resume them.

A secret or extraordinary rendition refers to the practice of the CIA whereby it kidnaps suspects and flies them to a country where they are held in secret prisons and interrogated by non U.S. personnel. The International Red Cross has no access to them. No lists are made available as to who or how many people are victims of the practice. Some of the countries these suspects are shipped to practice torture.

The ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights and other human rights groups have been campaigning for several years to stop secret renditions. So do many other rights experts and groups. Secret renditions must stop. Now there's a question over whether Obama fully ordered it stopped or not.

See The Timesonline last few days...
here

Under executive orders signed on January 22, the CIA appears to have preserved its authority to carry out renditions – by which hundreds of terrorist suspects have been abducted and transferred to prisons in countries with questionable human rights records such as Egypt, Morocco or Jordan.

The measure, disclosed by the Los Angeles Times yesterday, gives some indication of how Mr Obama’s promise of change may be slower to be realised than once hoped, with the new Administration coming under concerted attack across a range of issues.

But, there may be a problem with the LA Times article.

Glenn Greenwald says the LA Times story about this order may be overblown. Hilzoy agrees. And Scott Horton says the LA Times got "punked".

...From The New York Times:

The country that receives the prisoners gives phony assurances to Washington that they will be well-treated, which allows the Central Intelligence Agency to claim, as they did in this case, that it “does not transport individuals anywhere for the purpose of torture.” Right, and waterboarding is not torture either.

Some may want to go to the 2007 European Union report on Secret Renditions. Apparently, the CIA operated more than 1,200 flights through European airspace. Not all were secret renditions of prisoners or suspects, but at least 21 cases of such are mentioned in the report. The report criticized European countries for turning a blind eye to the CIA's actions.
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Secret rendition is a big deal. What about Khaled el-Masri. Why should the CIA be allowed to grab people off the street and flying them on chartered planes to secret prisons outside the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. and Red Cross? And what about this practice of flying them to countries that may not comply with the Geneva conventions against torture?

Should not the U.S. must have one policy: We do not torture. Doesn't this mean we cannot be complicit in torture? If we flew them there, isn't this then in our name?

So does Obama's order give the CIA the option to re-institute secret rendition or not? Let's be glad that the CCR and ACLU, which have represented many tortured detainees and sued over the Ghost Air flights are staying on the case!

Human Rights Watch: (This may be an overly paraphrased summary of their temporary conclusion) The order does not address the legality of what is known as rendition to torture - the practice of illegally transferring a person to a country where he or she faces torture or persecution - and instead leaves review of that practice to the task force as well.

The best known case over time has been that of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian-Syrian citizen arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy airport in September 2002, flown to Jordan, and then driven across the border to Syria, where he was detained in a tiny cell for almost a year and tortured repeatedly.

Obama repeatedly condemned the practice of rendition to torture on the campaign trail, and they have urged him to put an end to this illegal practice as well.

Yes, United States policy will be different from what it's been under Dick "waterboarding -- it's a no brainer" Cheney. The generals are telling President Obama that the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has not just damaged the US reputation, but contributed to US losses in Iraq. Worldwide public opinion -- and protests here in the US that affected US public opinion -- turned against Bush. Obama, as the new commander in chief of a largely disgraced military, wants to distance his administration from the policies associated with Bush.

As many have pointed out, torture was not invented by the Bush White House. Tens of thousands of us protested over the last 20 years at the School of the Americas precisely because the U.S. has been "out-sourcing" torture for many years, and training others to perform it. We, the citizens of the US and various Rights experts and activists must take a large share of the responsibility for what happens under this new administration in regards to torture. (Items & questions here are - in part - paraphrased from The World Can't Wait.)

The following cover some essential points in Obama's statements - and what these reporters/activists surmise that the US will now do:

Jill McLaughlin, in No I Can't: A Dissident to U.S. Empire But A Fighter For Humanity here writes, "According to Allan Nairn, the executive order that Obama signed only covers those detained by any officer, employee, and agent of the U.S. in facilities operated or owned by the U.S. in an armed conflict. This leaves room for the U.S. interrogator to do as he/she pleases in places not in armed conflict as Nairn points out. Nairn also points out the U.S. history of torture by proxy. When one thinks of Abu Ghraib now reopened and under control of the Iraqi security forces one can only think of all kinds of torture by proxy taking place there. Then there is also the prison outside of Kabul, Afghanistan called Pul-i-charki which expanded in 2006 and is run by U.S. allies in Afghanistan. There is little known about this prison since the detainees there are denied legal counsel, and the International Red Cross has been denied access there.. There are also possible loopholes in this ban on torture. Obama may decide to employ some interrogation techniques not outlined in the Army Field Manual."

Ken Theisen, Closing Gitmo is not Enough! We Need to Hold Those Responsible for the War of Terror Accountable!here "As Obama becomes the Commander in Chief, he will take over the war of terror and its vast prison gulag. While he will close Gitmo eventually, he will still maintain the prisons run around the world by the Department of War. We need to hold him not only accountable for the detainees in Gitmo, but the thousands of others held by the Pentagon and its allies. We also need to demand that thousands be released; that they be compensated for their abuse; and that those responsible for the U.S. war of terror be prosecuted. But this will not happen if left to Obama, the Congress, or the courts. Only a mass movement of the people will force real accountability. Anything less will allow the Bush regime policies in the war of terror to continue under a younger and smoother talking Commander-in-Chief.

Jeremy Miller, Obama Lets CIA Keep Controversial Renditions Tool, here in the Chicago Tribune today, writes, "Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the rendition program is poised to play an expanded role because it is the main remaining mechanism-aside from Predator missile strikes-for taking suspected terrorists off the street. The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured. The European Parliament condemned renditions as an "illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a subsidiary of Boeing Corp., which is accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights. But the Obama administration appears to have determined that the rendition program was one component of the Bush administration's war on terrorism that it could not afford to discard."

Attorney Candace Gorman (featured toward end of -The Torture Team- by Philippe Sands) writes about her client Mr. Al-Ghizzawi, who is still locked up in the "hell hole we call Guantanamo" in Flower Power.here more "Last week I received an email from the 'privilege team,' the ones that read our attorney/client mail. The email informed me that Al-Ghizzawi sent me a picture and on the back of the picture, there was a note stating that the picture was his gift to me. The privilege team decided that the note was 'personal' and that Al-Ghizzawi violated the rules in sending the picture through the legal mail. They informed me that I would have to send the picture back to him (through the legal mail) and tell Al-Ghizzawi to resend it to me through the 'non-legal mail.' (Really, I cannot make this shit up)." It turned out that Mr. Al-Ghizzawi sent her a photo of flowers, and she refused to return it to him and make him re-send it.

And Robert Gannon, a reporter who has been covering Professor John Yoo at UC Berkeley for the East Bay Express, writes in John Yoo, War Criminal? "The chances that the notorious UC Berkeley law professor will be investigated for war crimes appear to have increased in recent weeks." More at here

The common question keeps coming up: Should all those associated with the Bush torture policies be indicted for war crimes, and prosecuted? Many think so...yet, would this tie up the US citizenry and legal experts so that the actual restoration of the rule of law, constitutional precepts and even follow-through on human rights such as closing GTMO and stopping Rendition program by CIA not be stopped?

Israel/Palestine - Surprises /Behind Scenes/Concerns

here
A Lecture by Norman Finklestein

For Finklestein's speaking engagements go
here (see more links to his work below Cockburn excerpt)

JUST in: Israeli/Palestinian attacks batter ceasefire (Barak says no more all-out war)
here

Various Excerpts/Sources

Israeli "Peace Deal" would still leave 230,000 West Bank Soldiers here

A betting man, the morning after Obama’s inauguration, would surely have found odds-on stakes that the new president’s first daring cavalry charge would be an assault on the economic crisis, worsening day by day. Our Wednesday-morning gambler would have found much longer odds being offered on any surprising moves in that graveyard of presidential initiatives sign-posted “Israel-Palestine”.

(What can be said of the)...Israel lobby which rewarded Obama’s tireless blandishments last year with enthusiastic pre-election endorsements, to the effect that here was a true friend of Israel.(?)

In his inaugural speech Obama proclaimed that “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.” Muslims were ahead of Jews in that line, which caused some eyebrows to twitch. The next morning, in his opening round of phone calls to Middle Eastern leaders Obama placed the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and only the next to Olmert. Uri Avnery pointed out on this site that (NOTE) Ha’aretz twice adjusted reality, reporting wrongly that Olmert was first in line. Hardly had Obama settled in before he appointed a fellow Democrat and former US Senator, George Mitchell, as his peace broker between Israel and the Palestinians. Mitchell’s mother came to America from Lebanon at the age of 18, and Mitchell's father, orphaned from his Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.

Then Obama gave his first formal tv interview to the Dubai-based cable station Al Arabiya, where he remarked at the outset that “I think it is possible for us to see a Palestinian state -- I'm not going to put a time frame on it -- that is contiguous, that allows freedom of movement for its people…” Contiguous? You can read that a number of ways, bad and good, including the possibility that Obama is obliquely criticizing Israel’s strategy of corralling Palestinians into mini-Bantustans on the West Bank, divided by military roads, walls and Jewish settlements.

As Avnery, whose biography stretches back to Israel’s earliest days, remarked, “These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support, from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now be reaching its limits.”

As buttress for Avnery’s claim that US “support may be reaching its limits”, we can instance a report on CBS’ “60 Minutes”, the most widely watched news show on US television

here

CBS’ reporter Bob Simon’s filmed report of the arrogance and brutality of Israelli soldiers and settlers was, at least in the memory of your CounterPunch editors, the single most savage indictment of Israel ever broadcast on U.S. network television (which of course has avoided any such indictments like the plague). At one point Simon’s crew got footage of a Palestinian home in Nablus, seized by the IDF,for use as as a lookout post. They kicked the family downstairs, while the Israeli soldiers took over the kids’ bedrooms. When the kids came home from school, they couldn’t get into the house. The piece also featured a fanatical settler leader, Daniella Weiss, pledging that never again will any settlement be dismantled by the IDF.

Simon concluded this fierce report as follows:

"Demographers predict that, within ten years, Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state, the Israelis would have three options. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank. They could give Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option, but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid, have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians. But apartheid regimes don't have a very long life."

Newsweek’s current edition has a story titled: "Israel Has Fewer Friends than Ever”. Huge numbers of people here can tune into Jon Stewart’s Daily Show or go on line and visit sites such as CounterPunch and get fierce reporting on Israel’s monstrous conduct.

So the media context has changed, and this change has to be factored in to overall assessments of what is possible politically. Of course the range of options entertained in Washington and in the tottering official media remains mostly, and obdurately, tilted to Israeli rejectionism. There are endless instances, cited recently on this site in the interview of Noam Chomsky by Afshin Rattansi of Press TV and by Norman Finkelstein, of Israel’s successful sabotage of peace initiatives, decade after decade.

Obama may well be smarting from the criticism across the world he incurred from keeping his mouth shut about Israel’s bloody rampages in Gaza. The furious public letter denouncing US-Israeli conduct from Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States and former intelligence chief probably also prompted Obama to “reach out”...

So far the Israel lobby here has held its peace. The Jewish Forward newspaper...has editorialized positively about Obama’s moves.

“But time is running out. Most Israelis know that if Israel doesn’t reach a peace agreement and leave the West Bank very soon, it will find in another decade that it is no longer a Jewish democracy. Israel’s pro-Western Arab neighbors, led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia, fear that if Israel and the Palestinians don’t settle their differences soon, then anger on the Arab street will boil over and force those moderates to abandon the peace option.

“Total victory is no longer an option, if it ever was. This is a time to put war aside and give diplomacy a chance. Friends of Israel, those who care about Israel’s future, need to cast off their doubts and give full-throated support to George Mitchell.”

But the minute Mitchell comes up with a concrete proposal discomfiting to Israel and to its likely new leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, then the atmosphere could become sulphurous with blinding speed. That will be the testing time for Obama and a true test of leadership and hard-nosed cunning. If he is going to get anywhere constructive, his position has to evolve beyond ongoing efforts to write Hamas out of the picture and stick with the utterly discredited Abbas. That will be Mitchell’s hardest negotiating job, reconciling his president with the facts on the ground.

In other words, Obama – to offer yet again one of my favorite quotes from Lenin - has to become as radical as reality itself...It will take resources of political cunning and courage that Obama has yet to evince, for him to shape US policy towards Israel/Palestine in a positive direction.

A prudent bettor would still have to wager that Obama simply won’t want to spend that kind of political capital. But a prudent bettor wouldn’t have predicted the moves he’s made so far. (Excerpt)

FROM: Obama and the Oddsmakers: Weekend Edition January 30/February 1, 2009

By Alexander Cockburn who can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

Other items which have a bearing - from Norman Finkelstein:

What can learn from Gandhi
here

Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza
here

The Silence of the Jurists
here

Bringing Democracy to the Arab World
here

Palestine's Fault? (only?)
here

Remember, a lot of the bombs dropping on Arabs/Palestinians/Muslims and Christians are US Made...just as in Lebanon...

And although there are brutal stories about Hamas, it's not easy to write off such Israeli-encouraged brutality such as this incident which has been haunting me ever since I read it - I believe to be actual since it comes from a friend who's made many missions of peace into the Occupied Territories. It was sent with the title, "Sopie's Choice" which some of you will recognize as a story about a similar holocaust event.

"I received the following letter written by my friend a Jewish-American woman who founded the Middle East Children's Alliance, a great organization to contribute to if you can here Her account turned my stomach: January 23, 2009 'Dear A, I entered the Gaza Strip on Wednesday night with my friend and fellow activist Sharon Wallace after waiting ten hours at the Egypt/Gaza border. The destruction and trauma is even greater than I expected.

'Out of all the devastation I have seen so far, there is one story in particular that I think the world needs to hear. I met a mother who was at home with her ten children when Israeli soldiers entered the house. The soldiers told her she had to choose five of her children to "give as a gift to Israel."

'As she screamed in horror they repeated the demand and told her she could choose or they would choose for her.

'Then these soldiers murdered five of her children in front of her. The concept of "Jewish morality" is truly dead. We can be fascists, terrorists, and Nazis just like everybody else.' "

Iraq Auditor Warns of Waste, Fraud In Afghanistan

Stuart Bowen's office is releasing a book recounting missteps in Iraq.

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus - Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 2, 2009; Page A06

After five years of investigations and 250,000 pages of audits, Stuart W. Bowen Jr. wishes he could say that the $50 billion cost of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was money accounted for and well spent.

"But that's just not happened," Bowen said.

Instead, the largest single-country relief and reconstruction project in U.S. history -- most of it done by private U.S. contractors -- was full of wasted funds, fraud and a lack of accountability under what Bowen, the congressionally mandated special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, calls an "ad hoc-racy" of lax or nonexistent government planning and supervision.

And despite the Iraq experience, he said, the United States is making many of the same mistakes again in Afghanistan, where U.S. reconstruction expenditures stand at more than $30 billion and counting.

"It's too late to do the structural part and make it quickly applicable to Afghanistan," Bowen said in an interview last week. None of the substantive changes in oversight, contracting and reconstruction planning or personnel assignments that Congress, auditors and outside experts proposed as the Iraq debacle unfolded has been implemented in Afghanistan.

But President Obama could take several steps to mitigate future damage, Bowen said. They include devoting more attention to military and civilian personnel and to reconstruction and relief assignments, and taking advantage of the expertise developed through hard-won experience in Iraq. Instead of the "multiple versions" of the federal acquisition regulations adopted and amended by "multiple agencies" operating in Iraq, Obama "could just issue a FAR regulation applicable to Afghanistan that everyone will follow" in issuing and supervising contracts, he said.

"To bring this all together," Bowen said, "the president should order a Red Cell," a high-level group drawing from the departments of State and Defense and the U.S. Agency for International Development that would turn Obama's orders into action.

Bowen's office, known as SIGIR, is releasing a book today that recounts the Iraq experience and suggests how to avoid future mistakes. "Hard Lessons" is being published as the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting holds its first public hearing. Created by Congress last year, the commission will examine expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan and propose solutions for "systemic" problems that waste taxpayer dollars.
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Legislation to create the commission was introduced by Democratic Sens. James Webb (Va.) and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and was inspired by the "Truman Committee," which conducted hundreds of hearings and investigations into government waste during and after World War II.

"Hard Lessons," a draft of which was leaked to the news media in December, concludes that the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq was a failure, largely because there was no overall strategy behind it. Goals shifted from "liberation" and an early military exit to massive, ill-conceived and expensive building projects under the Coalition Provisional Authority of 2003 and 2004. Many of those projects -- over budget, poorly executed or, often, barely begun -- were abandoned as security worsened.

In a preface to the 456-page book, Bowen writes that he knew the reconstruction was in trouble when he first visited Iraq in January 2004 and saw duffel bags full of cash being carried out of the Republican Palace, which housed the U.S. occupation government.

Security was a constant problem, not only for military and civilian officials serving in Iraq but also for SIGIR. Auditor Paul Converse was killed in March during a rocket attack in Baghdad, following a year in which five other SIGIR employees were wounded.

The book recounts, in colorful detail based on SIGIR interviews with nearly all the principals, the deep divisions during the same period between the Pentagon, under Donald H. Rumsfeld; the State Department under Colin L. Powell; and the White House office of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage recounts an argument between Rumsfeld and Rice in the fall of 2003 during which each said the other was in charge of supervising the Coalition Provisional Authority.

The book also includes numerous demonstrations of the Bush administration's lack of preparation to run Iraq after the March 2003 invasion. In one previously publicized case recounted in "Hard Lessons," Bowen's auditors discovered a cash disbursement of $57.8 million by the CPA to the U.S. comptroller for south-central Iraq. "Pallet upon pallet of hundred-dollar bills" were removed from the CPA vault in Baghdad and driven to the regional office in two unarmored SUVs. There, the local acting comptroller, Robert J. Stein Jr., who later was convicted for money laundering and fraud, had himself photographed with mountains of cash.

Overall, SIGIR and other law enforcement agencies have obtained 35 convictions, including two major bribery schemes involving $14 million solicited by U.S. military officers who ran Kuwait-based units contracting for the billions of dollars in supplies sent to Iraq.

SIGIR also reported on the inability of Iraqi firms to compete with U.S. contractors, due in part to the complicated U.S. bidding system: "Online contracting, which frequently entailed bids of more than a hundred pages, bewildered Iraqi contractors who were used to sealing a business deal with just a handshake."

When he took the job five years ago, Bowen said, "I didn't know that we didn't have a system to protect our interests abroad in post-conflict or contingency operations. . . . It would have been a much funner job to issue 250 reports on how well our rebuilding program went . . . and that the money was well accounted for and that we're leaving Iraq a peaceful and democratic place and nonviolent country."

Given that $4 billion in appropriated U.S. reconstruction funds remain unspent in Iraq, Bowen's work is not likely to end anytime soon.

Gang ransacks Venezuela synagogue

Anti-semitic and anti-Israeli slogans were painted on the walls of Caracas's oldest synagogue [AFP]

Top_news
By Agencies

A group of armed men has desecrated a Jewish synagogue in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, in what Jewish leaders have called the worst attack ever on their community.

At least 15 unidentified men overpowered two security guards and occupied the building for several hours, spraying graffiti on the walls that read: "We don't want murderers," and "Jews, get out."

Scriptures were damaged and the group called for all Jewish people to be expelled from the country.

Jewish leaders say tensions have risen since Venezuela cut off diplomatic relations with Israel in January over its war on Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead.

"Never in the history of Venezuela's Jewish community have we been the target of such an aggression," Elias Farache, the president of Venezuela's Jewish Association, said.

"The climate is very tense. We feel threatened, intimidated, attacked," he said.

'Respect'

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's foreign minister, condemned the synagogue attack and promised it would be investigated, while reiterating his government's opposition to what he called Israel's "criminal" government.

"We respect the Jewish people, but we ask respect for the people of Palestine and their right to life," Maduro said in a ceremony held to welcome home two Venezuelan diplomats expelled from Israel this week.

The Israeli government ordered Venezuela's ambassador in Tel Aviv and his two staff, along with the country's chief diplomat in the occupied West Bank, to leave after Caracas decided to cut off diplomatic relations on January 14.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, labelled Israeli leaders as "genocidal."

Leaders of Venezuela's estimated 15,000-member Jewish community warned that vocal denunciations of Israel by Chavez and state-run media may have encouraged Friday's attack.

"These declarations permeate society," Abraham Levy, president of the Venezuelan Confederation of Israelite Associations, said.

Obama to allow renditions?

Terror suspects can still be secretly seized and sent to other countries.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Sunday, February 01, 2009

WASHINGTON — The CIA's secret prisons and Guantánamo Bay detention center are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits.

But, under executive orders issued by President Barack Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out "renditions," the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program may be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it is the main remaining mechanism — aside from Predator missile strikes — for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

"Obviously you need to preserve some tools. You still have to go after the bad guys," said an Obama administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the legal reasoning. "The legal advisers working on this looked at rendition. It is controversial in some circles. ... But if done within certain parameters, it is an acceptable practice."

The decision to preserve the program didn't draw major protests, even among some human rights groups.

"Under limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place" for renditions, said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.

But Malinowski said he has urged the Obama administration to require that prisoners be transferred to other countries only when there is a guarantee they will get a public hearing in an official court. "Producing a prisoner before a real court is a key safeguard against torture, abuse and disappearance," Malinowski said.
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Also see:

here

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Blogger's Note: Something is wrong with this picture...Remember SUSPECTS are being seized. There is NO guarantee there will be a fair public hearing in any court nor any stipulation of how soon. I am surprised at Human Rights Watch. There has got to be more to this story!

Sen. Whitehouse backs call for investigation into use of torture by U.S.

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, February 1, 2009

By Philip Marcelo

Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, speaking at a conference for health and medical professionals at Brown University yesterday, made the case for holding the Bush administration accountable for changing the nation’s policy on torture.

“We need to follow this thing into those dense weeds and shine a bright light into what was done,” said the state’s junior senator. “We can paper it over if we choose, but the blueprint is still lying there for others to do it all over again. … It’s important that we not let this moment pass.”

Whitehouse, a Democrat, spoke at the close of the first of two days of the Physicians for Human Rights’ National Student Conference, an annual gathering of medical, public health, nursing and undergraduate school students.

Challenging the former administration’s use of torture has been one of the key areas of advocacy for the D.C.-based organization, and its leaders passed on to Whitehouse a petition signed by conference goers calling for Congress to form a committee to investigate the federal government’s use of torture and other coercive methods of interrogation.

Nearly 400 students from 75 schools across the nation were at yesterday’s conference.

Whitehouse focused his remarks on why the nation, despite the daunting challenges it faces on the economic front, must confront the issue of torture early in the Obama administration.

Under Bush, “the U.S. government took part in inhumane, brutal interrogation techniques that were torture,” he said. “The question is, what does it mean when a country as a whole heads down a road like this? It is an important story to tell to understand the way democracy works.”

The former state attorney general and former U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island has become a vocal figure nationally on issues of torture and abuse as a member of the Senate Judiciary and the Senate Intelligence committees.

Whitehouse explained how in 2002, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo that became the standard for how the federal government under Bush would define acts of torture –– as those acts that caused organ failure or death in their subjects.

“They got that standard, from all places, from health-care reimbursement law,” said Whitehouse. “The words happened to be useful to them, but they were taken out of context.”

Whitehouse pointed out that the Department of Justice in the 1980s prosecuted a county sheriff in Texas for using waterboarding (the practice of simulating drowning by covering a victim’s face with a towel and dousing him or her with water) to coerce confessions from suspects.

Even then, the U.S. government had deemed waterboarding as torture, he said.

“It’s beyond malpractice,” said Whitehouse of the 2002 ruling. “It raises the specter that these things were overlooked” purely for political ends, he said.

Some have argued that digging into the actions of the Bush administration would open deep wounds at a time when the nation is trying to heal. But those at the conference, including Whitehouse, disagreed.

“It’s an issue of accountability,” said John Bradshaw, chief policy officer for the Physicians for Human Rights. “We need to re-establish the fact that no one is above the law.”

pmarcelo@projo.com

Guantánamo: What's Next? (with executive order)

President Obama has ordered that Guantánamo be shut down. But what’s next? What will we do with the 250 people who are at the prison?

HRF has been gearing up for this situation for years, reporting on the failed military commissions, working with prosecutors who say that the federal courts are up to the task of delivering justice in these cases, and producing a detailed blueprint on how the prison should be closed.

here

Many of HRF's suggestions were included in President’s order issued last Thursday

here

but there is still much work to be done.

Obama has taken a promising step in the right direction. But we need to keep up the pressure on the administration and Congress to make sure that the system of indefinite detention without trial is not imported to the United States or replicated elsewhere. The federal courts can handle these cases.

Help us send President Obama a message — thanking him for this historic step and urging him not to create another ad hoc system of justice or detention.

here

Stay tuned for our ongoing work on this issue.

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Also keep tuning into Andy Worthington's ongoing updates:

here