Extraordinary Rendition: Not Yet Obsolete

Lebanese man is target of first rendition under Obama

Contractor Raymond Azar is arrested in Afghanistan, hooded, stripped and flown to the U.S. His alleged crime? Bribery. A human rights activist calls the case 'bizarre.'

By Bob Drogin / August 22, 2009

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A Lebanese citizen being held in a detention center here was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration.

Unlike terrorism suspects who were secretly snatched by the CIA and harshly interrogated and imprisoned overseas during the George W. Bush administration, Raymond Azar was flown to this Washington suburb for a case involving inflated invoices.

Azar, 45, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit bribery, the only charge against him. He faces a maximum of five years in prison, but a sentence of 2 1/2 years or less is likely under federal guidelines.

Defense lawyers and prosecutors declined to comment on the case Friday.

But Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch, called the case "bizarre."

"He was treated like a high-security terrorist instead of someone accused of a relatively minor white-collar crime," she said.

Justice Department lawyers have denied any misconduct in the case.

"The FBI followed standard operating procedures when transporting prisoners to the United States," Gina Talamona, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said Friday. She said restraints "were used with the sole purpose of ensuring the safety of the defendants and the agents."

As the Obama administration steps up efforts to curb fraud at military facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior Army official said Azar's case "should serve as a warning" to other contractors.

In court papers, Azar said he was denied his eyeglasses, not given food for 30 hours and put in a freezing room after his arrest by "more than 10 men wearing flak jackets and carrying military style assault rifles."

Azar also said he was shackled and forced to wear a blindfold, dark hood and earphones for up to 18 hours on a Gulfstream V jet that flew him from Bagram air base, outside Kabul, to Virginia.

Before the hood was put on, he said, one of his captors waved a photo of Azar's wife and four children and warned Azar that he would "never see them again" unless he confessed.

"Frightened for his immediate safety . . . and under the belief he would end up in the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib to be tortured," Azar signed a paper he did not understand, his lawyers told the court.

Prosecutors, however, said that Azar was "treated professionally," kept in a heated room, offered food and water repeatedly and "provided with comfortable chairs to sit in."

They said he was photographed naked and subjected to a cavity search to ensure that he did not carry hidden weapons and was fit for travel. Court records confirmed that Azar was shackled at the ankles, waist and wrists and made to wear a blindfold, hood and earphones aboard the plane.

Prosecutors also said that FBI agents read Azar his rights against self-incrimination on three occasions, and that he "voluntarily" waived them.

The FBI agent in charge, Perry J. Goerish, denied in an affidavit that Azar was "told he would never see his family again unless he confessed."

Arrested along with Azar was Dinorah Cobos, 52, a naturalized American from Honduras. Cobos, who did not make the same claims of abuse, this week pleaded guilty to conspiracy and bribery.

Their case is different from the widely criticized "extraordinary renditions" carried out after the Sept. 11 attacks. In those cases, CIA teams snatched suspected Al Qaeda members and other alleged terrorists overseas and flew them, shackled and hooded, to prisons outside the United States without any arrest warrants or other judicial proceedings.

The FBI arrested Azar and Cobos with warrants signed by a federal magistrate. And the State Department, Talamona said, asked the government of Afghanistan "for its consent in advance to take these two individuals into custody and return them to the United States to stand trial. They consented to our request."

Azar and Cobos worked for a Lebanese construction company, Sima Salazar Group, which was awarded more than $50 million in Pentagon contracts for reconstruction and supply work in Afghanistan. In December, according to the indictment, the pair offered to pay kickbacks to an Army Corps of Engineers officer in Kabul. In exchange, he agreed to approve $13 million in outstanding bills from Sima Salazar.

Over the next four months, according to the charges, more than $106,000 was wired to the officer's bank account in Manassas. But the case was an FBI sting, and Azar and Cobos were arrested at Camp Eggers, a U.S. military base in Kabul, after being lured to a meeting April 7.

Sima Salazar Group is also under indictment.

On Wednesday, Cobos' sister, Gloria Martinez, 61, pleaded guilty in federal court in New Orleans to conspiracy and two counts of bribery in a related case. Prosecutors said Martinez, a senior Army Corps of Engineers official, accepted $425,000 in cash, jewelry and other gifts for herself and Cobos from companies seeking military contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a candidate last year, President Obama vowed to end "the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries."

After taking office, he ordered the CIA to close its network of "black site" prisons and promised to shutter the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Justice Department has seized and transported foreign drug lords, terrorists and other high-profile fugitives to U.S. courtrooms when normal extradition was not considered possible. The Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that such renditions, as the transfers are known, are permissible.

In 1997, for example, FBI agents in Pakistan captured Mir Aimal Kasi, who was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, and returned him to Washington to stand trial. Kasi was convicted of murder in the killing of two CIA employees and was executed in Virginia in 2002.

Azar is hardly in the same league, but Talamona pointed out that "we take very seriously criminal fraud against the United States government."

Source / Los Angeles Times

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Moral High Ground: Elusive for the US Government

I will take some issue with Professor Cole, insofar as he does not acknowledge the extent of the bad behaviour by the United States government over the years, regardless of the political party in control. He writes as though it is only the Bush/Cheney regime that tortured and violated the Geneva Conventions. He is wrong - every administration since the Geneva Conventions were adopted has bent the rules a little, or a lot, depending on political expediency. Let's not pretend that the United States is the role model for the world. Other nations are aware that the US is actually the greatest terrorist threat, not these small extremist groups around the world.

Let's be completely clear about the facts. And the first fact is that the US never had the moral high ground in this discussion.

Richard Jehn / The Rag Blog

The picture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed deliberately released by the CIA in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
US Has Lost Moral High Ground on Treatment of Prisoners
By Juan Cole / July 22, 2009

The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan.

But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won't take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.

After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.

In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld's Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.

The US refusal to so much as investigate American officials implicated in torture and breaking international law also does not help us gain credibility on seeing to it that those who mistreat our troops are tried on those charges. We even have Dick Cheney defending waterboarding, for which Japanese generals were tried and executed after WW II. It is disgusting.

And huffing and puffing that the Taliban are not a government won't get us very far either. They control 10 percent of the country.

You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of captives because it gives you the moral high ground with regard to the treatment of our troops. Not doing so endangers every single one of our men and women in uniform. The chickenhawks who called such international agreements 'quaint' and outmoded should be drafted and sent to the front.

What is really scary is that the shadowy set of secret military and intelligence teams charged by Cheney to break international law are continuing to do so despite President Obama's orders to cease torture. Obama had better get a handle on this issue, because it could well blow up in his face, in fact, Cheney may intend it to do so. I think there are still people in the US government who take their cues from the latter rather than the former.

Source / Informed Comment

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Even Genghis Kahn Knew Torture Doesn't Work

Genghis Kahn. Art from Chinese Culture / Brooklyn College.
Torture and the complicity of the physician

By Dr. Stephen R. Keister / The Rag Blog / April 27, 2009

Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to Thomas Cooper in 1823: "Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he has known nothing but what has passed under his own eye.”

There is an old adage that “young men have visions and old men dream dreams.” As a physician I have felt dirty, I have felt violated, by the fact that physicians were involved in the vile practices that my country has carried out at our detention facilities at Guantanamo. We, a profession dedicated to healing, to alleviate suffering, were overtly complicit in causing pain and suffering to other human beings that might -- and I emphasize “might” -- have been involved in doing harm to other human beings.

To compound the insult the administration seemingly has forgotten the Nuremberg trials and the so-called “Nuremberg Defense” ("I was ordered to do it"). Quite a few German subordinates went to the gallows or to prison because the tribunal at Nuremberg felt that this defense was without merit. The entirety of this hypocrisy is reviewed by Ray McGovern in an April 23 article in Common Dreams.

On television program after television program we are informed of the “complexities” of the problem. What is “torture,” what is "enforced interrogation?” That is the same as asking, "Did he have ‘sex' or did he have 'intercourse?’” Hours are spent parsing words, playing semantic games, trying to confuse the uninformed public. I watch this foolishness, this propaganda , and ask myself, “How did colleagues of mine become involved in this vile, immoral, unethical, endeavor?” This is naive on my part, as I have read, with much soul searching, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton's horrifying book "The Nazi Doctors.” One would hope that anyone interested in the controversy currently with us would take time to read Dr. Lifton's book. Are American physicians any more or less sophisticated than were our German colleagues?

We have the word of many interrogation experts -- from the CIA, FBI, army, navy, air force -- that information is much more easily obtained by civil means than by resorting to humiliation and pain. This was even apparent to Genghis Khan who forbade torture of his prisoners. Granted Khan was a brutal warrior, a master of the battlefield; however, once he had conquered he had the foresight to run a generally benevolent administration, with personal and religious freedom.

The classic example of the futility of torture in historical context reverts to the ongoing torture of Jacques de Molay in 1314. When the treasury of King Phillip IV of France ran dry, his advisers suggested that he destroy the order of The Knights Templar and take for himself the suspected considerable treasure that they had accumulated. Hence, with the approval of Pope Clement V, he undertook the task of arresting, executing and exiling many of the members. There are many historical variations, theories, of detail; hence, we will not try and resolve these problems. However, one thing is sure: de Molay, the Grand Master, was tortured for many days, being nailed to his wooden cell door with nails through his hands; he was beaten, burned, and humiliated, but he never broke (if, indeed, he was even aware of the treasure’s existence). He went to the pyre without giving any information to Phillip. The classic tale has him cursing Phillip and Clement from the pyre, invoking their deaths -- and both died within the year.

There are more recent examples such as the Gestapo torture of the French Resistance members, whom they alluded to as "terrorists,” with dental drills and pincers, or the classical Chinese "death of 1000 cuts.” One may refer to the Philippine Insurrection, after the Spanish American War. Little appears in U.S. History books regarding that event, but it lasted some years, destroyed thousands of lives, primarily among the natives, and produced the concept of waterboarding.

Largely as a result of Nuremberg the international community enacted an international ban on torture and emphasized it in the Geneva Convention. The nations of the civilized world adhered to the premise until George W. Bush, almost immediately after taking office, and long before 9/11, decreed that the United States would not be a member of the International Criminal Court. At the time I wondered why, but after the misinformation about 9/11 and subsequent events it became crystal clear. Now we can pride ourselves in joining Pol Pot and Idi Amin, in violating these concepts.

Should we be surprised at the developments? Not those of us aware of the plans and programs which came about as a result of the "brainwashing" of our troops during the Korean War. One can turn to the research done at McGill University under the auspices of clandestine departments of the U.S. government. It is these methods that are now applied to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. In the 1950s a Montreal doctor was funded to perform bazaar experiments on his psychiatric patients, keeping them asleep and in isolation for weeks, then administering huge doses of electroshock and experimental drug cocktails, including the psychedelic LSD and the hallucinogenic PCP, commonly known as angel dust.

This story is detailed in all of its horror in the initial chapter of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. I will quote one paragraph:

"In 1988 The New York Times ran a groundbreaking investigation into U.S. involvement in torture and assassinations in Honduras. Florencio Caballero, an interrogator with Honduras's brutal Battalion 3-16, told The Times, that he and twenty-four of his colleagues were taken to Texas and trained by the CIA. ‘They taught us psychological methods -- to study the fears and weaknesses of a prisoner. Make him stand up, don't let him sleep, keep him naked and isolated, put rats and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food, serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him, change the temperature.’”

This was part of a program funded by the U.S. government consisting of a decade of research in the 1950s, costing $25 million, involving 80 institutions, seeking to find new ways to break prisoners suspected of being Communists and double agents. It was first code-named Project Bluebird, then Project Artichoke, and finally renamed MKUltra. Interestingly most of the paperwork has vanished from official archives.

I took the Hippocratic Oath in 1943 and did my best over many years to adhere to its tenants. When I know that colleagues of mine were involved in the inhumanities at Guantanamo, I feel revulsion. Several certified psychologists were involved, early on, in the interrogations and their names have become part of the public record. I would hope that the leaders in the field of medical ethics would choose to speak up regarding the physicians involved even though the revelations are cloaked in the excuse, "They were merely following orders.” I would suggest that we as professionals in the future not co-mingle with the degenerates who achieve pride in becoming the torturer.

Finally, we are indoctrinated to believe that harsh methods are needed in case, for instance, that an atomic device has been placed in an American city and a suspect taken into custody. Is torture permissible in that instance? Can anyone imagine a terrorist group, aware of this possibility, choosing a trigger man who would break under torture? Come on, if these folks will put on explosive belts, to maim and kill themselves and others, they would select a perpetrator with care and be assured that, in deference to Allah, he would not give way to earthly pain and suffering.

[Dr. Stephen R. Keister, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, lives in Erie, PA. He is a retired physician who is active in health care reform. His previous articles on The Rag Blog can be found here.]

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Rafah Crossing: Let the Doctors Through !

Rafah crossing, Egypt
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border
By Bill Quigley / January 9, 2009

Rafah, Egypt -- Dr. Nicolas Doussis-Rassias and many other volunteer doctors have been waiting in Rafah, Egypt for days. Nicolas and the other physicians came to Rafah to go through the border into Gaza to help the 3000 people wounded by Israeli bombs and heavy weapons.

Rafah is a heavily armed Egyptian border crossing into Gaza, a four hour drive away from Cairo. Sonic booms of high flying jets cut through the stark blue sky. Military drones hover over the border as the air smells of burning.

"Three thousand victims of bombs and gunfire would overwhelm the medical system of New York city," Nicolas said. "Gaza now has no functioning medical system at all. Most of it has no electricity nor running water. These people are in crisis - they need medical help, so we are here to help them."

But today, instead of helping the thousands of wounded, Nicolas and other doctors are holding up a hand lettered red and blue banner outside the Egyptian border station saying - Let the Doctors Through!

Why? Doctors of Peace and numerous other doctors from around the world have been prevented from entering Gaza for seven days. They cannot get in to help through Israel nor Egypt.

Nicolas is not an anti-Israeli radical. He is a jolly 49 year old Athens doctor. Father of two children, he is the president of a organization of volunteer Greek physicians called Doctors of Peace. These doctors pay their own way and volunteer to help the victims of war and natural disasters. They have helped out in Latin America with victims of Hurricane Mitch, in Sri Lanka with tsunami victims, and the victims of wars in Lebanon, Serbia, Turkey, and Pakistan.

But the borders of Gaza are sealed off preventing basic humanitarian and medical assistance from entering.

Richard Falk, the UN Special Reporter on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, pointed out the human rights violations of the sealed border: "Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza's besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims."

The people of Gaza have been cutoff from basic medical and humanitarian resources for a long time by an ongoing blockade by Israel, but everything is much worse in the last few weeks.

Falk, like many others, also condemned the rocket attacks launched from Gaza against Israel. More than a dozen Israelis have died since the war began, as have more than 800 Gazans. But Falk's harshest words were reserved for the catastrophic human toll from the Israeli airstrikes and "those counties that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel's violations of international law."

Frida Berrigan pointed out that "During the Bush administration Israel has received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid. The bulk of Israel’s current arsenal is composed of equipment supplied under U.S. assistance programs. For example, Israel has 226 U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter and attack jets, over 700 M-60 tanks, 6,000 armored personnel carriers, and scores of transport planes, attack helicopters, utility and training aircraft, bombs, and tactical missiles of all kinds."

Palestinian medical officials say more than half of the 800 dead and 3000 wounded are civilians. Denial of humanitarian and medical assistance to civilian casualties is a clear violation of basic human rights.

The people of Egypt are challenging the denial of medical help for Gaza. Halfway through our drive from Cairo to Rafah, we saw a hundred young Egyptians sitting in the middle of the highway protesting Egypt's inaction.

After seven days, the border is starting to open a little. The Egyptian Red Crescent was allowed to deliver supplies to the border today and some of the waiting doctors were allowed in. With great show, two dozen Egyptian ambulances were allowed to enter the border area - only to be parked inside to wait for the injured to make it to the border. Two ambulances left Rafah with patients inside.

Doctors of Peace were still not allowed in today. Some physicians, tired from the seven day blockade, have started to return home.

Nicolas is going back to the Rafah border crossing tomorrow to try again. Why? "Because there are 3000 injured people who need help. I am going to keep trying."

[Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola New Orleans. He is in Egypt as a human rights representative of the National Lawyers Guild, the Society of American Law Professors, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the War Resisters League. Kathy Kelly of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Audrey Stewart are also in Egypt and contributed to this article. His email is quigley77@gmail.com.]

Source / CounterPunch

Thanks to Jeffrey Segal / The Rag Blog

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Israel and Gaza : 100 Eyes for an Eye

Gaza's central security headquarters and prison, known as the Seraya, after it was hit in an Israeli missile strike in Gaza City on Sunday. Photo by Adel Hana / AP.

'Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.'

By Norman Solomon / December 30, 2008

See 'Israeli patrol boat collides with aid ship off Gaza,' Below.

Israelis and Arabs "feel that only force can assure justice," I. F. Stone noted soon after the Six-Day War in 1967. And he wrote, "A certain moral imbecility marks all ethnocentric movements. The Others are always either less than human, and thus their interests may be ignored, or more than human and therefore so dangerous that it is right to destroy them."

The closing days of 2008 have heightened the Israeli government's stature as a mighty practitioner of the moral imbecility that Stone described.

Israel's airstrikes "have killed at least 270 people so far, injured more than 1,000, many of them seriously, and many remain buried under the rubble so the death toll will likely rise," Phyllis Bennis, of the Institute for Policy Studies, pointed out on Sunday, two days into Israel's attack. "This catastrophic impact was known and inevitable, and far outweighs any claim of self-defense or protection of Israeli civilians." She mentioned "the one Israeli killed by a Palestinian rocket attack on Saturday after the Israeli assault began was the first such casualty in more than a year."

Even if you set aside the magnitude of Israel's violations of the Geneva conventions and the long terrible history of its methodical collective punishment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, consider the vastly disproportionate carnage in the conflict.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind," Gandhi said.

What about a hundred eyes for an eye?

It makes some of the world ill with rage. And it turns much of the United States numb with silence. Routinely, the politicians and pundits of Washington can't summon minimal decency in themselves or each other on the subject of Israel and Palestinians.

While officialdom inside the Beltway seems frozen in fear of risking "anti-Semitism" charges by actually standing up for the human rights of Palestinian people, some progress at the grassroots level has been noticeable. It includes the growth of groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, Tikkun and The Shalom Center, where activists have worked to refute the false claims that American Jews are united behind Israeli policies.

At the epicenters of the conflict -- where the belief that "only force can assure justice" seems to be even stronger than when I. F. Stone wrote about it 41 years ago -- the conclusion has been drawn and redrawn so many times that deadly repetition has become paralytic. While some Palestinian "militants" have terrorized and murdered, the Israeli government has terrorized and murdered on a much bigger scale, using a vast arsenal largely financed by US taxpayers.

From afar, in the United States, it's too easy to shake our heads at the lethal loss of moral vision. Don't they know that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"? But the cycle of violence is extremely asymmetrical - while the US government provides Israel with billions of dollars and invaluable "diplomatic" support.

What's going on in Gaza right now is not just an eye for an eye. It's a hundred eyes for an eye. And the current slaughter is not only an ongoing Israeli war crime. It has an accomplice named Uncle Sam.

[Norman Solomon is the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." To watch video of his recent appearance on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," click here.]Source / truthout

Activists aboard the Dignity boat (R) arrive to the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre. Photo by AFP.
Israeli patrol boat collides with aid ship off Gaza

TYRE, Lebanon — An Israeli naval vessel collided on Tuesday with a boat carrying activists and medical supplies that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza, forcing it to divert to a port in Lebanon.

Passengers on board the 20-metre (66-foot) Dignity said the Israeli patrol boat rammed their vessel causing extensive damage, but Israel insisted the two boats collided as the Israeli navy was trying to contact its captain.

Television pictures of the boat entering the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre showed a large gash in the bow of the boat on the port side, with pieces of wood and broken glass covering the deck.

The boat was struck a "massive" blow, said Australian passenger Renee Bowyer.

"The glass shattered over top us. I was thrown across the room. The tables and benches broke around me," Bowyer told AFP.

"We were all pretty sure we were being shot at and that we'd sink," she added saying they quickly grabbed for their life jackets and "prepared for the worst."

Another activist on the Gaza-bound boat, former American congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, said the Israeli actions had been deliberate.

"Our mission of solidarity and humanitarian relief was deterred by the Israelis purposefully to keep us from delivering the medical supplies to Gaza," McKinney told AFP.

She described the experience as "absolutely harrowing, but pales in comparison to what the people in Gaza are experiencing right now."

At least 363 Palestinians -- including 39 children -- have been killed and 1,720 wounded since an Israeli air offensive began on Saturday, Gaza medics say.

"I wouldn't call it accosting. I would call it ramming. Let's call it as it is. Our boat was rammed three times, twice in the front and once on the side," McKinney told CNN.

No one was injured in the collision between the patrol boat and Dignity -- operated by the Free Gaza Movement -- which was trying to take three tonnes of medical supplies into Gaza.

Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP that the naval vessel tried to contact the aid boat by radio for identification and to inform it that it could not enter Gaza.

"After the boat did not answer the radio, it sharply veered and the two vessels collided, causing only light damage," Palmor said.

However, the boat's captain, Briton Denis Healey, 54, said on arriving in Tyre that the Israeli navy had made "no contact" with the Dignity.

"Two Israeli gunboats were on our port side distracting us with their bright lights when another Israeli gunboat with its lights turned off rammed us from the front. I think they were distracting us from the port side," Healey told AFP.

"The boat initially took in a lot of water," added Healey who said he was "a bit frazzled."

The Israeli spokesman accused the international activists of "seeking provocation more than ever."

But McKinney insisted: "We are on a humanitarian mission... All we want to do is deliver medical supplies... This is the first time that I am aware of that a vessel was attacked for no reason by Israelis."

The Free Gaza Movement, which has run the blockade six times since August to take humanitarian supplies into Gaza, said the vessel could still sail after the ramming.

Paul Larudee, one of the group's founders, said the Dignity had been "surrounded" in international waters about 70 kilometres (45 miles) off the Israeli coast and 135 kilometres from Gaza.

"It was surrounded by 11 Israeli naval vessels," he said.

"They ordered the boat to stop, and we didn't. They began firing over our boat and into the waters next to the boat. When the boat wouldn't turn back, one of the naval vessels rammed the boat, but not enough to disable the boat."

The Dignity was given a rousing welcome when it arrived in Tyre, with hundreds of residents clambering aboard fishing boats to greet the activists with cheers and a colourful display of Lebanese flags as well as flags of the Shiite Hezbollah and Amal movements.

Lebanese President Michel Sleiman had earlier said in a statement that the boat was welcome to dock in any Lebanese port.

Source / AFP

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Andy Worthington On Addressing the Bush Administration Legacy of Torture

Eric Holder, Obama's choice for Attorney General.
Obama and Holder Must Return to a September 10th Mind-Set
By Andy Worthington / December 8, 2008

During the election campaign, one of the sticks with which John McCain’s team attempted to beat Barack Obama was a claim that he was soft on terrorism, or, as Senator McCain’s national security director Randy Scheunemann declared to reporters in June, “Senator Obama is a perfect manifestation of a September 10th mind-set ... He does not understand the nature of the enemies we face.”

Far from providing a rebuke to Barack Obama, this simple phrase encapsulated all that was wrong with the counter-terrorism policies of the last seven years: a misguided belief that an appropriate response to the 9/11 attacks was to launch an ill-defined but far-reaching global war on terrorism, to grant the President the power to seize anyone he regarded as a terrorist -- or a terrorist sympathizer -- and imprison them indefinitely without charge or trial, to wage an unprecedented assault on the U.S. Constitution, and to discard the UN Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions.

Even now, apologists for the crimes of the last seven years refuse to concede that the 9/11 attacks had anything to do with U.S. foreign policy, with the failures of the intelligence services to monitor the threat posed by al-Qaeda, and with the failure of successive administrations -- both Bill Clinton’s and George W. Bush’s -- to take the threat on board.

And yet, a September 10th mind-set is exactly what is required to begin undoing the damage inflicted on America’s moral standing by President Bush and those closest to him, who were responsible for driving the country on a fear-filled journey to the “Dark Side.” Specifically, those most culpable are Vice President Dick Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Cheney’s former legal counsel and now chief of staff, David Addington, all exponents of the “unitary executive theory” of government, for whom the declaration of a state of permanent war provided the perfect opportunity to grant the President dictatorial powers.

It remains to be seen whether, in dismantling the tyrannical aspirations of the Bush administration, President Obama will be able to call the crimes to account without implicating the perpetrators. My hope is that it will be impossible to let Cheney, Addington and Rumsfeld off the hook as more is revealed about the extent of their crimes, but in the meantime Barack Obama’s most important course of action is to adhere to the promises he made over the last year and a half: to close Guantánamo, to repeal the Military Commissions Act, to uphold the absolute ban on torture, and to trust the federal court system to bring criminals to justice. He will, in addition, need to make sure that the CIA’s post-9/11 job revision -- involving the industrial-scale “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to torture, and running secret prisons -- is also brought to an end.

Much of this return to the law -- as it existed on September 10, 2001 -- will involve breaking the chain of command that led from the Office of the Vice President to the Pentagon, but if Obama does repeal the Military Commissions Act, then those most closely involved with Cheney and Addington’s pet project will also be out of a job; in particular, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who was the Commissions’ supposedly impartial “Convening Authority,” despite being a close friend of Cheney and Addington, and Daniel Dell’Orto, the acting general counsel who took over from the torture ideologue William J. Haynes II in February, when Haynes resigned following severe criticism by Col. Morris Davis, the Commissions’ former chief prosecutor.

Even more crucial, therefore, is Obama’s choice to overhaul the Justice Department, which, under orders from Cheney and Addington, was ruthlessly purged of any critics of the administration’s law-shredding policies, as it is here that effective plans to close Guantánamo will have to be implemented. These, presumably, will involve a rapid and dispassionate review of the existing cases, the release of the majority of the prisoners, and the transfer of those considered truly dangerous (perhaps three dozen at most) to the U.S. mainland to face trials in federal courts.

Though largely overlooked in the column inches devoted to the return of Hillary Clinton, Obama’s choice of Attorney General, Eric Holder, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling (where some of his colleagues represent 17 Yemeni prisoners at Guantánamo), seems admirably equipped to oversee the necessary transformation of the Justice Department. Snipers have already picked up on the fact that, in January 2002, Holder delivered a speech about Guantánamo that could have been scripted by David Addington -- full of references to the limitations on interrogation imposed by the Geneva Conventions, and his impression that terror suspects were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions -- but as Glenn Greenwald recently pointed out, few lawyers were demanding rights for the Guantánamo prisoners back in January 2002.

More significant, therefore, are the comments that Holder made about the conduct of the “War on Terror” in June this year, to a meeting of the American Constitution Society, in which his rhetoric matched that of Barack Obama. After stating that the Bush administration had taken many steps that were “both excessive and unlawful” in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, he explained,

I never thought I would see the day when a Justice Department would claim that only the most extreme infliction of pain and physical abuse constitutes torture and that acts that are merely cruel, inhuman and degrading are consistent with United States law and policy, [and] that the Supreme Court would have to order the president of the United States to treat detainees in accordance with the Geneva Convention … This disrespect for the rule of law is not only wrong, it is destructive in our struggle against terrorism.

He then signaled his willingness to close Guantánamo, transfer the remaining prisoners to the US mainland, and adopt an “expedited and procedurally fair” review process for evaluating the status of the prisoners, which, of course, is just what long-term critics of Guantánamo have been suggesting. As with all speculation, of course, we will have to wait for January 21 to see what will actually emerge, but for now, at least, the omens are good.

[Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press).]

Source / Informed Comment

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Guantanamo: A US Government Desperate Not to Accept Responsibility for Its Mistakes

More treachery at Guantanamo
By Andy Worthington / November 03, 2008

For many of the prisoners at Guantanamo, the forthcoming US presidential election holds little promise of change. Although both Barack Obama and John McCain have pledged to close Guantanamo, the problem for at least 50 of the 261 prisoners still held at the prison is not that the US government is unwilling to release them, but that there is nowhere for them to go.

These men are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya, Tunisian and Uzbekistan. Although they have been approved for release after multiple military review boards - some for at least three years - they cannot be repatriated because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries with poor human rights records, where they face the risk of torture. Attempts to find other countries willing to take them have also failed (with the exception of Albania, which accepted eight former prisoners in 2006), in part because, although they are approved for release, the government insists on maintaining that they are still "illegal enemy combatants."

Generally ignored by the media, which focuses instead on the few prisoners chosen to face special "terror trials" (the Military Commissions), these men receive no special favors, in spite of their status, and are mostly held in conditions of strict solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day.

Recently, however, some of these men have received extensive media coverage, Seventeen Uyghurs - Chinese Muslims who were sold to US forces after fleeing a settlement in Afghanistan where they had sought refuge from Chinese oppression - were allowed to present their case to a US court on October 7. The judge, Ricardo Urbina, ruled that their continued imprisonment was unconstitutional, and that, because no other country would take them, they should be rehoused in the United States.

This prompted a frantic appeal from the government, which is desperate not to accept responsibility for its mistakes by welcoming any former prisoners into the United States. The appeal was accepted, and arguments on both sides are scheduled to take place on November 24. If the appeals court upholds Judge Urbina's ruling, this might bring an end to some of the other prisoners' extensive legal limbo, but in the meantime the silence surrounding their predicament masks a darker truth, which has only just come to light.

Since June 2007, the administration has been stealthily attempting to repatriate various North African prisoners, under the cover of "diplomatic assurances" with the governments of Algeria, Libya and Tunisia. These are supposed to guarantee that, if returned, the prisoners will be given "humane treatment," but as various human rights organizations have reported, the "diplomatic assurances" are worthless.

After two Tunisians were repatriated last June, the "diplomatic assurance" with the government of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali melted away when the men faced show trials on trumped-up charges (extracted through the torture of other prisoners) and received jail sentences of three and seven years.

Fearing that other cleared prisoners would receive similar treatment, several lawyers sought help from the US courts to prevent their clients' forcible return. A District Court blocked the return of a third Tunisian, and lawyers for at least two other prisoners petitioned to prevent their clients' forced repatriation.

One was Abdul Rauf al-Qassim, a Libyan with an Afghan wife and a daughter he has never seen, and another was Ahmed Belbacha, an Algerian who had sought asylum in the UK in 1999. Belbacha, who was seized and sold by bounty hunters in Pakistan, had fled Algeria because he had been working for a government-controlled oil company and had been threatened by militants, but the British government refused to accept his return to the UK because he was kidnapped while his asylum claim was still pending. Terrified of being returned to Algeria, he told his lawyers that he would rather stay in Guantanamo, even though his cell was "like a grave."

For most of this year, it appeared that the lawyers' attempts to prevent their clients' return to torture had been successful, but last month, during a visit with Cori Crider, staff attorney at the London-based legal action charity Reprieve, Ahmed Belbacha explained that in July he had been taken aside by a group of US soldiers who had ordered him to sign papers approving his release from Guantanamo. Knowing that a court had put a stay on his repatriation, Belbacha refused, but his lawyers did not hear about it until Crider's latest visit with him last month.

Although lawyers for other prisoners are not at liberty to speak about similar cases (because their cases are sealed before the US courts), it appears that this was not an isolated case. The only conclusion that can be drawn is a bleak one: In an attempt to clear out unwanted prisoners from Guantanamo - and also, no doubt, to prevent them from seeking asylum in the United States if Judge Urbina's ruling stands - the authorities at Guantanamo are deliberately undermining rulings made in courts on the US mainland to prevent the forced repatriation of vulnerable prisoners.

This is shocking, of course, but it is unsurprising given that those who established Guantanamo have consistently expressed disdain for the law, and have sought nothing less than unfettered executive power.

Andy Worthington is the author of "The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison" (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

Source / Daily Star Lebanon

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Canadian Court Sides With U.S. Deserter

Joshua Key on stage in Ottawa talking about his memoir The Deserter's Tale. Photo by John W. McDonald .

Read a gripping excerpt from Joshua Key's book, "The Deserter's Tale," at the end of this article. It is a revelation.

Ruling: Soldier witnessed enough rights abuses to gain Canadian asylum
By Janice Tibetts / July 5, 2008

OTTAWA -- A Canadian court has sided for the first time with a military deserter who fled to Canada seeking refugee status, ruling yesterday that the U.S. soldier witnessed enough human rights abuses during a stint in Iraq that he could qualify for asylum.

The decision also marked the first time that the Federal Court, which has heard a handful of cases involving deserters, concluded that military action against civilians in Iraq violates the 1949 Geneva Conventions, an international prohibition against humiliating and degrading treatment.

Federal Court Justice Richard Barnes ordered the Immigration and Refugee Board to reconsider the failed refugee claim of Joshua Key, a soldier who entered Canada with his wife, Brandi, and their small children in March 2005.

Key, an army private, deserted during a two-week break from serving as a combat engineer in Iraq, where he spent eight months in 2003 and says he was involved in military-condoned home invasions against civilians.

"This is a real breakthrough," said Lee Zaslofsky of the Toronto-based War Resisters Support Campaign. "What excites us is this may also apply to other war resisters who took part in Iraq."

Barnes ruled that the board too narrowly interpreted refugee eligibility by concluding only soldiers who seek protection from committing war crimes need apply.

"Officially condoned military misconduct falling well short of a war crime may support a claim to refugee protection," said the ruling.

Barnes said it "cannot be seriously challenged" that some of the conduct in which Keys participated violated the Geneva Conventions.

"This included the responsibility for conducting night-time raids of private Iraqi homes in search of weapons," said the decision.

"Pte. Key's role in this was to blow open the doors with explosives and then to assist in both securing the premises and detaining the adult male occupants. Mr. Key alleged that during these searches he witnessed several instances of unjustified abuse, unwarranted detention, humiliation and looting by fellow soldiers, much of which he said was ignored by his superior officers."

The Geneva Conventions prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" and "unlawful confinement."

Key, 30, is the co-author of The Deserter's Tale, a book about serving in Iraq and his flight from the U.S. military. He was born in Oklahoma in 1978, enlisting in the military in 2002. He now lives in Spiritwood in northern Saskatchewan and says that he suffers from post-traumatic stress, including insomnia, nightmares and hallucinations that "flash me right back to Iraq."

His lawyer, Jeffry House, said it was not lost on Key that the ruling was released on July 4, the U.S. national holiday.

"He's crossing his fingers that he and his family will be able to stay," House said.

Source. / Times-Colonist, Victoria

Thanks to Steve Russell / The Rag Blog

Photo by Ishiku.

Why I fled George Bush's war
What happened to make a patriotic, gung-ho soldier desert the U.S. army, and turn against the war in Iraq.
By Joshua Key

[Joshua Key, 28, was a poor, uneducated Oklahoma country boy who saw the U.S. army and its promised benefits -- from free health care to career training -- as the ticket to a better life. In 2002, not yet 24 but already married and the father of two , Key enlisted. He says his recruiting officer promised he'd never be deployed abroad, but a year later he was in Iraq. Only 24 hours after arriving, as Key recounts in The Deserter's Tale(Anansi), he experienced his first doubts about what he and his fellow soldiers were doing there.]

I was scared out of my wits that first day in Ramadi. Our own air force had just finished bombing these people, but as soon as we got out of our vehicles we began patrolling their streets, on foot. With nearly 100 lb. of weaponry, equipment and clothing on my back, I was about as mobile as a cow. It was just my platoon, 20 guys, walking single file through streets full of Iraqis. I could not stop thinking that anywhere, at any time, some half-starved sniper on a roof could have taken me out in no time flat. Iraqi kids surrounded me in swarms, hands out, asking for water and food. I kept hearing the last words [my wife] Brandi said to me before I flew out: "Don't you let those terrorists near you, Josh. Even if they are kids. Get them before they get you."

I was awakened at 3 a.m. that first night and told to get my ass up quickly because in one hour we were going to raid a house full of terrorists. Capt. Conde and some sergeants showed me and my squad mates a satellite photo of a house and a drawing of the layout of the inside. Our assignment was to blow off the door, burst into the house, raid it fast and raid it good -- looking for contraband, caches of weapons, signs of terrorists or terrorist activity, then rounding up the men and getting out damn fast. The longer we stayed in any one location, the longer somebody would have to put us in the sights of a rocket-propelled grenade or lob mortars at us.

I had no idea what to expect. Would I charge through the door, only to be blown to bits by a grenade? Would somebody with an AK-47 knock my Oklahoman ass right back out that door? Would some six-year-old terrorist with two days of gun training be waiting to put me in his crosshairs? The minutes ticked on, and I wanted the hour to speed forward so we could get on with it. One or two guys did push-ups to pump themselves up. I borrowed Mason's portable CD player and bombed out my eardrums to the beat of Ozzy Osbourne. It got me going. High and ready for action. I checked my watch, wished it would accelerate, and stuck some dip -- Copenhagen, bourbon flavor -- behind my lip. You can't manage a cigarette when you've got an M-249 automatic weapon on your arm. So dip was best. Makes your mouth black as sin, and rots the roots right out of your gums, but dip was my nicotine hit of choice going into that raid.

I committed our instructions to memory. I knew the angles of the house, what door I would help blow down, how many floors were in the house, and who would do what when we busted inside. I would be third in the door, which means I was the second most likely to get shot if anybody had a mind to take us down, and I'd head to the left. Always, for every raid, I would be third in, heading left. I gripped my M-249. Yes, it could belt out 2,000 rounds a minute but only in theory. You couldn't really hold your finger down that long. When you were blazing away like that, the bullets turned the barrel as hot as Hades. And if you held your finger down too long, it would warp the barrel.

It took thirty seconds for Jones and me to put the charge of C-4 plastic explosive on the door. Then we dashed around to the side of the house so we wouldn't blow ourselves up. You'd be fried meat if you were anywhere near the explosion. I set off the blast, and then the six of us charged in. Jones went first -- that skinny, red-haired Ohio boy was always hot to trot. With Jones leading the way we burst into the house, armed to the hilt. Kevlar helmets, flak jackets, machine guns, combat boots, the whole nine yards.

I'd never been inside an Iraqi's house before. We charged through a kitchen. I had been told by squad leader Padilla to check everything, so I even opened the fridge. Perhaps, I thought, I would find guns or grenades hidden inside. No such luck. In the fridge, all I saw was a bit of food. In the freezer I found big slabs of meat, uncovered. No wrapping. No plastic. Frozen, just like that. We ran into a living room with long couches, one along each wall. In this room with the couches we found two children, a teenager, and a woman. We also found two young men in the house. One looked like a teenager and the other was perhaps in his early 20s -- brothers.

We hollered and cussed. I spat dip on the floor and screamed along with the other soldiers at the top of my lungs. I knew they didn't understand, but I hollered anyway.

"Get down," I shouted. "Get the fuck down. Shut the fuck up."

They didn't know what "get down" meant, so we knocked the two brothers to the floor, face down. We put our knees on their backs, pulled their hands behind them, and faster than you can bat an eye we zipcuffed them. Zipcuffs are plastic handcuffs that lock on tight. They must have bit something fierce into those young men's skin. There was no key, nothing -- the only way to get them off was to slice them with cutters.

We pushed the brothers outside, where 12 other soldiers from our platoon were waiting. The Iraqi brothers were taken away to an American detention facility for interrogation. I don't know what it was called, and I don't know where it was. All I know is that we sent away every man -- pretty well every male over five feet tall -- that we found in our house raids, and I never saw one of them return to the neighbourhoods we patrolled regularly.

Inside, we kept on ransacking the house. The more obvious it became that we would find no weapons or contraband, the more we kicked the stuffing out of the house. We knocked over dressers, sliced into mattresses with knives, kicked our way through doors, raiding the three bedrooms on the second floor, then raced up to the third floor. We turned over everything we could and broke furniture at random, searching for contraband, weapons, proof of terrorist activity, or signs of weapons of mass destruction. We found nothing but a CD. Soldiers initially said it showed proof of terrorist activity, but it turned out to have nothing on it but a bunch of speeches by Saddam Hussein.

Once we had everybody outside the house and had done our initial job of ransacking, another squad took over inside. They kept raising hell in there, breaking and turning over more furniture, looking for weapons that we might have missed. Outside, under a carport, I was assigned to watch the women and children. We weren't arresting them, but we weren't allowing them to go anywhere either. The family members couldn't go back inside, and they couldn't wander off into the neighbourhood. They had to stay right there while we tore the hell out of their house.

A girl in the family -- a teenager -- started staring at me. I tried to ignore her. Then she began speaking to me. Inside, when we had been screaming at her and the others, I'd assumed that nobody understood a word of English. But this young girl spoke to me in English, and her eyes bored holes right through me. She was skin and bones, not even 100 lb., not yet a full-grown woman, but something about her seemed powerful and disturbing. I feared that girl, and I wanted to get away from her as fast as I could, but it was my job to stay right there and make sure she didn't move. I had my weapon ready. She was wearing a blue nightgown and had a white scarf covering her hair. She had no veil, so I could see her face perfectly. Her eyes were coal black and full of hatred.

In English, she asked me, "Where are you taking my brothers?"

"I don't know, Miss," I said.

"Why are you taking them away?"

"I'm afraid I can't say."

"When are you bringing them back?"

"Couldn't tell you that either."

"Why are you doing this to us?"

I couldn't answer that.

I hoped she would not raise a fuss. I didn't want her to start screaming, which could attract the attention of my squad mates. One or two, I feared, would be more than happy to use a rifle butt to knock out her teeth.

I hadn't been in Iraq more than 24 hours and already I was having strange feelings.

First, I was vulnerable, and I didn't like it. Even with all these soldiers and all this equipment, I knew that anywhere, at any time, any Iraqi with a gun, a wall to hide behind, and one decent eye could pick me off faster than a hawk nabs a mouse. Second, with hardly one foot into the war, I was also uneasy about what we were doing there. Something was amiss. We hadn't found anything in this girl's house, but we had busted it up pretty well in 30 minutes and had taken away her brothers.

Inside, another squad was still ransacking the house. I didn't enjoy being stuck guarding this girl under the carport, in the cool April air before dawn in Ramadi. Her questions haunted me, and I didn't like not being able to answer them -- even to myself.

Busting into and ransacking homes remained one of my most common duties in Iraq.

Before my time was up, I took part in about 200 raids. We never found weapons or indications of terrorism. I never found a thing that seemed to justify the terror we inflicted every time we blasted through the door of a civilian home, broke everything in sight, punched and zipcuffed the men, and sent them away. One raid was far worse.

It was a handsome two-story house and quite isolated. As usual, I put the charge of C-4 explosives on the door and we blew it in. As we rushed into the house, women were staggering out of their rooms. Three teenage girls screamed when they saw us.

Some of my squad mates grabbed them and held them at gunpoint, and the rest of us ran through the house. We found no men at all, just six more women in their 20s and 30s. The guys in my squad couldn't find a thing, not even any guns -- and it seemed that the more incapable they were of locating contraband, the more destructive they became. They smashed dressers, ripped mattresses, broke cabinets, and threw shelves to the floor.

Outside I found Pte. 1st Class Hayes with a woman under an empty carport. He pointed his M-16 at her head but she would not stop screaming.

"What are you doing this for?" she said.

Hayes told her to shut up.

"We have done nothing to you," she went on.

Hayes was starting to lose it. I told her that we were there on orders and that we couldn't speak to her, but on and on and on she bawled at Hayes and me.

"You Americans are disgusting! Who do you think you are, to do this to us?"

Hayes slammed her in the face with the stock of his M-16. She fell face down into the dirt, bleeding and silent. The woman lay still on the ground. I pushed Hayes away.

"What are you doing, man?" I said to him. "You have a wife and two kids! Don't be hitting her like that."

He looked at me with eyes full of hatred, as if he was ready to kill me for saying those words, but he did not touch the woman again. I found this incident with Hayes particularly disturbing because during other times I had seen him in action in Iraq, he had showed himself to be one of the most level-headed and calm soldiers in my company. I had the sense that if he could lose it and hit a woman the way he had, any of us could lose it too.

Then something happened that haunts my dreams to this day. All the women were led back inside the house and our entire platoon was ordered to stand guard outside it. Four U.S. military men entered the house with the women. They closed the doors. We couldn't see anything through the windows. I don't know who the military men were, or what unit they were from, but I can only conclude that they outranked us and were at least at the level of first lieutenant or above. That's because our own second lieutenant Joyce was there, and his presence did not deter them.

Normally, when we conducted a raid, we were in and out in 30 minutes or less. You never wanted to stay in one place for too long for fear of exposing yourself to mortar attacks. But our platoon was made to stand guard outside that house for about an hour. The women started shouting and screaming. The men stayed in there with them, behind closed doors. It went on and on and on.

Finally, the men came out and told us to get the hell out of there.

It struck me then that we, the American soldiers, were the terrorists. We were terrorizing Iraqis. Intimidating them. Beating them. Destroying their homes.

Probably raping them. The ones we didn't kill had all the reasons in the world to become terrorists themselves. Given what we were doing to them, who could blame them for wanting to kill us, and all Americans? A sick realization lodged like a cancer in my gut. It grew and festered, and troubled me more with every passing day. We, the Americans, had become the terrorists in Iraq.

In December 2003, Key went home on a two-week leave. He never returned to Iraq. Instead, Key went into hiding. The following March, he and his family crossed the Canadian border at Niagara Falls.

[Published by House of Anansi. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.]

Source. / Macleans, CA.

The Deserter's Tale at Amazon.com.

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