Another Bush Foreign Policy Success

Spiegel Online:

The arrest warrants German authorities have issued against 10 CIA agents have strained German-American relations. Now, prosecutors in Munich want the agents extradited to Germany so they can stand trial for their alleged roles in the illegal kidnapping of terror suspects.

The Most Despicable Man In America

Washington Post:

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney's lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby. The meeting marked "the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up" among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. "The CIA guys said, 'We're going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees'" if interrogators confined themselves to humane techniques allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden "torture" and permitted use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

Let's be clear, because the Washington Post won't be: we're talking about war crimes. We're talking about the Vice President of the United States advocating for and implementing a policy of war crimes.

"Massive and Systematic Violations of Human Rights"

Spiegel Online:

In his second report on so-called "extraordinary renditions" of terror suspects, Council of Europe special investigator Dick Marty writes that there is "enough evidence to state" that American secret prisons in Poland and Romania existed. The illegal deportation of suspects by CIA kidnapping teams in Europe amounts to a "massive and systematic violations of human rights," the report states.

Marty, who conducted the investigation on behalf of the Council of Europe, accuses the CIA of having committing a series illegal acts: "We believe we have shown that the CIA committed a whole series of illegal acts in Europe by abducting individuals, detaining them in secret locations and subjecting them to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture."

The Bush Administration are war criminals. Period.

Feinstein Seeks To Shut Down Guantanamo!

Los Angeles Times:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced a measure Monday to force the Pentagon to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and move the trials of Al Qaeda suspects to the United States.

But the Defense Department got another green light for those Guantanamo tribunals to continue, when the Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the appeal of two detainees who challenged the legality of the military commissions.

In a statement, Feinstein said the detention facility had hurt America's credibility around the world because of allegations of abuse there and doubts about the legal rights afforded detainees.

I'm not a fan of Feinstein- she tends to be too centrist, for my taste; so, this is a particularly noteworthy effort, because no one can accuse her of being a partisan lefty. Kudos.

Bush White House Upset By U.N. Human Rights Report on Iraq

Washington Post:

A new human rights report by the United Nations mission in Iraq described high levels of ongoing violence, an unfair and potentially abusive detainee system and a country suffering a "breakdown in law and order." The report upset the U.S. Embassy here, which characterized it as inaccurate and not credible.

The 30-page report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq, an appraisal of human rights conditions from January through March, said the Iraqi government is up against "immense security challenges in the face of growing violence and armed opposition to its authority and the rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis."

For the first time, the United Nations did not include civilian death tolls, statistics that are usually provided to it by the Health Ministry and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad. The data have become a key gauge of the level of violence in Iraq. In the last report, the United Nations said 34,452 Iraqi civilians had died violently in 2006, a number that the Iraqi government later said was exaggerated.

The report said the Iraqi government told the United Nations "that it had decided against providing the data, although no substantive explanation or justification was provided."

You know the drill. All these bad reports undermine the war effort. Nevermind that the war effort is causing all these bad reports.

DOJ Wants To Limit Lawyers' Access To Their Guantanamo Clients

Ho hum. Just another day in the budding dictatorship.

From the New York Times:

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

Sure. Why not? Why even pretend to pretend to care about the rule of law and the concept of justice? Intractable problems. Laws and justice are so difficult and messy. Feh. Why bother?

Amnesty International Says Guantanamo Getting Worse

Spiegel Online:

Amnesty International has sharply criticized conditions at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In a report released on Thursday, the organization said around 80 percent of the 385 inmates are being held in "cruel conditions of isolation" with almost no contact with the outside world.

"While the United States has an obligation to protect its citizens" the report said, "that does not relieve the United States from the responsibilities to comply with human rights."

Earlier moves to relax the conditions and to increase opportunities for socialization among detainees seem to have been reversed, Amnesty said. The isolated prisoners are now spending 22 hours alone in a windowless cell with no natural light or fresh air. They exercise alone, often at night and can go for days without seeing daylight. Inmates have their meals alone in their cells, which are constantly lit, and they are observed 24 hours a day.

International Court of Justice clears Serbia of Genocide

BBC:

But the International Court of Justice did rule that Belgrade had violated international law by failing to prevent the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica....

The case is the first of a state being charged with genocide. Individuals have been convicted of genocide in Bosnia....

In the ruling, the president of the court, Judge Rosalyn Higgins, said: "The court finds that the acts of genocide at Srebrenica cannot be attributed to the respondent's (Serbia) state organs."

In this case, the definition of genocide fails on the difference between crimes of omission and commission. It's an interesting dividing line. If those who fail to stop genocide are deemed guilty of it, much of the world could be held responsible for Darfur. On a legal level, it makes sense; on a moral level, it doesn't.

The New York Times editorial page gets it

American Liberty at the Precipice:

In another low moment for American justice, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that detainees held at the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, do not have the right to be heard in court. The ruling relied on a shameful law that President Bush stampeded through Congress last fall that gives dangerously short shrift to the Constitution.

The right of prisoners to challenge their confinement — habeas corpus — is enshrined in the Constitution and is central to American liberty. Congress and the Supreme Court should act quickly and forcefully to undo the grievous damage that last fall’s law — and this week’s ruling — have done to this basic freedom....

When the Founding Fathers put habeas corpus in Article I of the Constitution, they were underscoring the vital importance to a democracy of allowing prisoners to challenge their confinement in a court of law. Much has changed since Sept. 11, but the bedrock principles of American freedom must remain.

The Republican War on the Constitution continues

AP:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that foreign-born prisoners seized as potential terrorists and held in Guantanamo Bay may not challenge their detention in U.S. courts, a key victory for President Bush's anti-terrorism plan.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that civilian courts no longer have the authority to consider whether the military is illegally holding the prisoners — a decision that will strip court access for hundreds of detainees with cases currently pending.

Both majority judges are Republican appointees...

Most criticized by Democrats and civil libertarians was a provision that stripped U.S. courts of the authority to hear arguments from detainees who said they were being held illegally. The law instead authorizes three-officer military panels to review whether there is sufficient evidence to justify the detention.

On Daily Kos, Big Tent Democrat provides legal analysis.War

Rebuilding our republic...

Spencer Ackerman, at TPM Muckraker, reports the Senators Chris Dodd and Bob Menendez will introduce a bill to radically reform Bush's demented law on foreign detainees. Among other basics, Dodd and Menendez want to restore habeas corpus and bar the use of evidence obtained through torture. Will they have the votes to pass the reform? Unclear. Will they have the votes to over-ride a certain Bush veto? Probably not. But it at least begins shifting the momentum.

The Bush bill was passed during a heated election campaign, and many Democrats supported it because they were too timid about voting down the entire bill based on those particular violations of basic human rights. They knew that to vote against the entire bill would have led to Republican and corporate media accusations that they were "soft on terror." No honor in their putting fear above principle. But they now have the opportunity to keep the legitimate parts of the law, while ridding it of its most obscene depredations. They might lose the votes, but they can at least force people to put on the record where they stand specifically on habeas corpus and torture.