Lady Liberty’s face-plant in the muck

September 22nd, 2006

There are ethical hurdles we’ve jumped in the last five years that have taken my breath away — but none so dire, so despicable and so disastrous as this thing we’re poised on doing regarding torture and habeas corpus. This is one of those Crossing the Rubicon moments. If we do this thing, as it appears the Republican’s are determined to, the moral underpinnings of our agreement with the world … with each other in our human family … comes to a halt; we will no longer be able to see ourselves as a country strong in rule of law and Constitutional oversight … we’ll be just another nation flailing away to find it’s center … only bigger, louder and vastly more dangerous.

I wrote, a few years back, that apparently America needed some humbling and George Bush, faux-cowboy, was here to “git ‘er done.” I had hoped that we would get our come-uppance quickly and decisively, so we could move on from the goad of a shallow despot … evidently not. And now our checks and balances, the laws established for civil liberties and protections have been systematically stripped away, one by one, covertly and with intent.

It’s a Stephen King novel come to life … we’re riding a train into Hell with a load of laughing goons, and those of us who foresee the consequence can’t find an e-brake. The beasts at the engine will show us a milder face, and speak of another destination … but beasts they remain, and Hell lies ahead.

In America, with our busy-busy lives, we process all this information intellectually, far from the heart … the earliest stepping stone to disaster was actually holding a conversation about torture, making it a viable option. Allowing it to be “thinkable.” That was Pandora’s Box … once opened, the consequences were destined. And now they’re here, dearhearts.

Our hearts ache for the tortured, the innocent … but even that is a barrier to what this actually means, too far from the reality of such a proposition. In such a national policy, it’s evident to all but the deliberately obtuse that the “tortured” may turn out to be our neighbor, our child, our self. Did it have to become this personal? I guess it did. Did it require us to lose so much to decide who we really are, as Americans? I suppose so.

It’s kind of like the plot of Sophie’s Choice – remember that one? A woman in the Holocaust has to surrender one of her children to death at the hands of the SS in order for the other to live. Which will she sacrifice? How will she live with her choice? Can she survive for survival’s sake alone? And once done, are the ruined remains of her psyche enough reason to go on living with that terrible wound … or is ending her life at her own hand the mercy she sought but could not find?

We make our decision soon. Do we love Liberty so little that we will choose “safety and survival” over the well being of our national soul? What will remain of us if we compromise with darkness, traffic with the beasts? Will such an assault on our essence be enough, finally, to give us an understanding of how far we’ve fallen, how deep the hole, how MUCH we lose, day by day? And will such a glimpse of the “new reality” be enough, finally, to get us on our feet, to help us find our voice?

Is it “personal” enough yet?

I guess we’re gonna find out.

Below — Must Reads and Need To Know’s.

Jude

Compact with Evil: The McCain “Compromise” on Bush’s Torture Program
Chris Floyd
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/886

After George Bush’s Rose Garden hissy fit, in which he declared that he would simply stop interrogating suspected terrorists unless he could torture them, John “I Only Flip-Flop On Matters of Deep Principle” McCain and the other so-called “Senate rebels” have capitulated to the unpopular president’s petulant demands.

In the universe of moral perversion in which we now live, White House National Security (sic) Adviser Stephen Hadley called the pro-torture, anti-due process agreement between these deeply cynical power-gamesters “a good day for the American people.” Here’s how the Gamester-in-Chief described it (from the NYT):

-“I’m pleased to say this agreement preserves the most single, the most potent tool we have in protecting America and foiling terrorist attacks,” he said, adding, “The agreement clears the way to do what the American people expect us to do — to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists, and then to try them.”

In other words, not until this very day was the American government able to capture, detain, question and try terrorists. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. I’ll bet the men who were captured, detained, questioned, tried and convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing didn’t know that either. Really, that’s what Bush said; the agreement “clears the way” for the government to actually detain and interrogate terrorists — as if they weren’t able to do that before. What he means, of course, is that the ability to torture alleged terrorists — snatched arbitrarily, anywhere in the world, simply on the say-so of the Leader or his designated minions — will be preserved. Bush obviously has a deep psychological need to feel that someone is being tormented at his orders at all times.

But the demented psychology of this sad little shriveled-up nothing of a man is of slight import. What matters are the actions and policies that are being carried out by the junta operating in his name — and the countenancing of this gang’s crimes by the United States Congress. And that is what we have seen today: the countenancing of torture and kangaroo courts by some sad sacks of shinola lauded by the media as “men of principle.” This is what we’ve come to, this is where are today: sick bastards and cynical bastards openly and eagerly gutting the very core of American law.

Let’s have Bill Frist — surely one of the most pathetic creatures ever inflicted on the U.S. Senate and the long-suffering people of Tennessee — explain exactly what this great “agreement” means:

-Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, said the agreement had two key points. “Classified information will not be shared with the terrorists” tried before the tribunals, he said. And “the very important program of interrogation continues.”

There you have it. People snatched off the street — or sold to spies by snitches and scamsters — can be tried, in military tribunals, without seeing the evidence against them; and Bush’s “program of interrogation continues.”

Let’s be very clear on the latter point. What Bush has been talking about and protesting against were efforts to ensure that CIA interrogators could not torture suspects. Because of course they could continue to use ordinary methods of interrogation — which experts uniformly agree produce better intelligence — just as they have always been able to. When Bush and Tennessee cat-torturer talk about the “program of interrogation” continuing, they mean allowing the CIA to torture captives by various methods without being charged with war crimes and felony violations of American law. That is precisely what they are talking about, and nothing else. But you won’t see it put that way on the pages of our most august journalist institutions nor on the broadcasts of our world-renowned network news shows.

And let us make one other point — and in a most impolitic way, for the truth is often an impolitic commodity: John McCain is a goddamned liar. Yes, he himself suffered torture, yes he came through it, yes, we all admire his fortitude during that ordeal in his youth: but his record in later life, in politics, is that of a moral coward with good PR skills. (Not that it takes much skill to wow the poltroons who squat on the commanding heights of the corporate media world today.) And today, he has opened his mouth and emitted a damnable lie, to wit: “the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.”

This is an untrue statement, analogous to saying the moon is located in his rectum or that he can bite through pig iron with his bare teeth. Every step the Bush gang has taken in this pro-torture, don’t-prosecute-us campaign is designed to weaken the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions, which have been adopted into American law by Congress — in bills sponsored and championed by Republicans — are crystal clear on torture.

There is no need to “preserve” their integrity with new legislation; there is nothing wrong with the Conventions that need to be “fixed” — unless, of course, you wish to use interrogation techniques that any sentient human being would recognize as torture. In that case, of course you have to “fix” the Conventions by gutting their integrity, letter and spirit.

John McCain might be a moral coward in his old age, but he’s not stupid. He knows all this. He knows that the Bush Administration has been trying to wriggle out of the Conventions since the earliest days of the “War of Terror.” He knows that gutting the Conventions is at the heart of Bush’s “interrogation program” which McCain and his “rebels” have just saved with their grand “compromise.”

Therefore, we will say it again clearly, so that even the nabobs on the Washington Post editorial page can hear it: John McCain is a goddamned liar, and his “agreement” today serves some of the most evil principles ever supported openly by the United States government since slavery.

And let’s put this other point plainly one more time: the American government has always been able to capture, detain, question and try terrorists. Always. The American government has for 28 years had the power to eavesdrop on anyone in the world or in the country whom they suspected even slightly of terrorism or terrorist connections. And they could and can do that instantly, without waiting for a court order or jumping through any bureaucratic hoops, under the long-existing law. Everything that Bush says his clearly illegal surveillance programs do can already be done within the law. Therefore, it is clear that the whole raison d’etre behind the illegal programs is to establish the principle that the president is beyond the law. (And also, almost certainly, to perform illegal surveillance that has nothing to do with terrorism.)

What we have seen today is no “grand compromise,” no “great debate,” no “act of principle” and certainly no “preservation” of the Geneva Conventions. What we have seen instead is a small group of rich, cynical, power-hungry old bastards belch forth lies in the service of torture and tyranny. And if you’re not angry about that, if you’re not “shrill” about that, then by God you are one piss-poor American citizen. You shame every man and woman who have fought and died and marched and worked and dreamed for our freedoms. ++

The torture battle royal: The public violation of the Geneva convention has created a schism between the president and military
Sidney Blumenthal
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/891

President Bush’s torture policy has provoked perhaps the greatest schism between a president and the military in American history. From the outside, this battle royal over his abrogation of the Geneva conventions appears as a shadow war. But since the supreme court’s ruling in Hamdan v Rumsfeld in June, deciding that Bush’s kangaroo court commissions for detainees “violate both the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the four Geneva conventions”, the struggle has been forced into the open.

On September 6 Bush made his case for torture, offering as validity the interrogation under what he called an “alternative set of procedures” of an al-Qaida operative named Abu Zubaydah. Bush claimed he was a “senior terrorist leader” who “ran a terrorist camp” and had provided accurate information about planned terrorist attacks. In fact, Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel agent (literally a travel agent), who, under torture, spun wild scenarios of terrorism that proved bogus. Zubaydah, it turns out, is a psychotic with the intelligence of a child. “This guy is insane, certifiable,” said Dan Coleman, an FBI agent assigned to the al-Qaida taskforce.

Bush’s argument for torture is partly based on the unstated premise that the more sadism, the more intelligence. While he referenced Zubaydah, he did not mention Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, described by the FBI, according to the New Yorker, as “arguably the US’s most valuable informant on al-Qaida”, who is wined, dined and housed by the federal witness protection programme.

On September 15 the Senate armed services committee approved a bill affirming the Geneva conventions, sponsored by three Republicans with military backgrounds - John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The former secretary of state Colin Powell, Bush’s “good soldier,” released a letter denouncing Bush’s version. “The world,” he wrote, “is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” and Bush’s bill “would add to those doubts”. That sentiment was underlined in another letter signed by 29 retired generals and CIA officials. General John Batiste, former commander of the 1st army division in Iraq, appeared on CNN to scourge the administration’s policy as “unlawful”, “wrong”, and responsible for Abu Ghraib.

Before the committee vote, Bush’s administration had tried to coerce the top military lawyers, the judge advocates general (JAGs), into signing a statement of uncritical support, which they refused to do. The Republican senators opposing Bush’s torture policy first learned about the military’s profound opposition from the JAGs. For years, the administration has considered them subversive and tried to eliminate them as a separate corps and substitute neoconservative political appointees.

In the summer of 2004 General Thomas J Fiscus, the top air force JAG, informed the senators that the administration’s assertion that the JAGs backed Bush on torture was utterly false.

Suspicion instantly fell upon Fiscus, one of the most aggressive opponents of torture policy, as the senators’ source. Within weeks he was drummed out under a cloud of anonymous allegations by Pentagon officials of “improper relations” with women. His discharge was trumpeted in the press, but his role in the torture debate remained unknown.

Bush had intended to use his post-Hamdan bill to taint the Democrats, but instead he has split his party and further antagonised the military. His standoff on torture threatens to leave no policy whatsoever, and leave his war on terror in a twilight zone beyond the rule of law. ++

The Torture of Liberty
BOB HERBERT
September 21, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/pszb5

After traveling to Ottawa to interview Maher Arar last year, I wrote: “If John Ashcroft was right, then I was staring into the malevolent, duplicitous eyes of pure evil … But all I could really see was a polite, unassuming, neatly dressed guy who looked like a suburban Little League coach.”

It turns out John Ashcroft was wrong. After an exhaustive investigation, a government commission in Canada ruled definitively and unequivocally this week that Maher Arar was no terrorist. He was nothing more than a quiet family man who found himself sucked into a vortex of incompetence, hysteria and a so-called war on terror that has gone completely haywire.

He’s lucky he survived. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria, was snatched by American authorities as he waited for a connecting flight home from Kennedy Airport in September 2002. The Americans apparently were acting on bad information fed to them by Canadian investigators.

As in the witch hunts of old, no one seemed to care whether there was any factual basis for the allegations against Mr. Arar. Without even a nod in the direction of due process, the Americans put him on a government jet and shipped him off to Jordan, where he was promptly driven to Syria, where he was tortured.

Welcome to extraordinary rendition, a reprehensible practice in which people are kidnapped by the U.S. government and sent off to countries that specialize in the evil arts of torture.

Mr. Arar lived in torment for nearly a year, confined most of the time to a tiny underground cell, about the size of a grave. Despite the torture, the Syrians were unable to connect him to terrorism in any way. The Canadian government managed to secure his release in October 2003.

If this were just a bad but honest mistake, we might be able to simply wish Mr. Arar well and vow never to let it happen again. Instead, the United States is about to ensure that many more individuals who are falsely accused are deprived of the single most fundamental tool they need to establish their innocence.

In the push to enact legislation dealing with the interrogation and prosecution of terror suspects, both the White House and dissident Republicans in the Senate intend to strip away the hallowed safeguard of habeas corpus for some noncitizens held in U.S. custody outside the United States.

Habeas corpus (literally “produce the body”) is a legal proceeding that allows one to challenge his or her detention in a court of law. It is the most significant safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment. Someone deprived of this right — which is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and has been recognized by various societies all the way back to the Middle Ages — can be locked up, whether innocent or guilty of any offense, and never heard from again.

I can’t believe that most Americans think this is all right.

“This is recognized as a broad common-law and constitutional right,” said Bill Goodman, the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has been fighting to secure basic legal protections for prisoners in American custody at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

At a minimum, said Mr. Goodman, “A person has a right to know what crime he’s being charged with. And a court can demand that the government produce evidence indicating that there is a reason to hold that person.”

The authority to demand that even the highest officials in a nation — even the president, even the king back in the days of the Magna Carta — justify the detention of a human being is powerful, and essential in a free society.

The right to file for a writ of habeas corpus, insisting that this authority be exercised, is a crucial check on naked governmental power. It’s a check on injustice.

In Washington, instead of saluting this cornerstone of freedom, politicians are about to deep-six it for some people without even much in the way of debate.

Talk about freedom is cheap. We hear it all the time. Real protection against tyrannical behavior by powerful government officials is another matter.

I spoke to Mr. Arar by phone yesterday. He said now that the Canadian government has publicly cleared his name, he would like the U.S. government to follow suit. But the U.S. government is busy trying to make sure that other innocents, trapped unfairly in a cage, have absolutely nowhere to turn. No recourse at all. ++

Future Shock: Evidence of Plans to Torture US Demonstrators
RJ Eskow
Sep 22 2006
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/896

Remember this story from last week? “The Air Force secretary says nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield.” It’s worse than we heard … much worse. These weapons, which cause “intolerable pain” and have been condemned by scientists as mass torture devices, may be coming soon to a demonstration near you. And there are stranger and more lethal weapons where these came from.

The Secretary, Michael Wynne, is a longtime exec at defense contractor General Dynamics - a fox now in charge of the henhouse. The weapon he was describing is “intended to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds,” as described in this Australian newspaper account.

And guess which company is one of the world’s leaders in military microwave technology? General Dynamics. So you can rest assured that Wynne’s very knowledgeable about this technology’s intended use here and abroad, both by the military and other agencies.

Microwave beam devices are just one of a number of new weapons under development that could be used against US crowds. This article in Defense Update magazine describes the variety of anti-personnel energy weapons being developed by the Department of Defense.

These include the Laser Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) pictured above, which can “work like ‘artificial lightning’ to disable human targets” and “can be adjusted for non-lethal or lethal use.”

Other weapons being developed include the “Pulsed Energy Projectile” (PEP) device which, as New Scientist explains, “delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away.”

New Scientist observes that “pain researchers are furious that (medical research) aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon,” adding that “they fear that the technology will be used for torture.”

The Wynne story came and went so quickly that radio journalist Charles Goyette from KFNX in Phoenix tried to follow up. An interview was scheduled with the Air Force Secretary’s spokesman, USAF Major Aaron Burgstein, to get elaboration on the Secretary’s remarks. But Burgstein cancelled at the last minute without explanation.

Burgstein’s email to Goyette added that “SECAR (Wynne) is not advocating using non-lethal weapons on the American public,” just that they be “fully tested first before they’re employed overseas” because our enemy “uses any and all opportunities to wage a propaganda war.”

Sounds benign enough. Unfortunately, it directly contradicts what Wynne actually said. “If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens,” said Wynne, “then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation.”

“If they are used in the US,” Burgstein wrote Goyette, “it would be by the police, not the military.” Burgstein equates these energy beams to tasers, perhaps unaware of the controversy surrounding a number of taser injuries and deaths.

Wynne, a major defense contractor turned Pentagon insider, tipped his hand. Pentagon planners intend to use high-tech weapons on Americans before turning them on Iraqis, either directly or by making the technology available to police and other agencies. And that’s not a new story, either. ABC News reported in 2004 that there were active discussions to use sonic weaponry against demonstrators during the Republican National Convention in New York.

When in “weapon” mode, the “LRAD” (long range acoustic device) “blasts a tightly controlled stream of caustic sound that can be turned up to high enough levels to trigger nausea or possibly fainting.”

Sounds like waterboarding, doesn’t it? It too would pass the Gonzales test of not “duplicating the pain associated with major organ failure” (assuming anyone has done a study comparing the two levels of pain.) As it turned out, there were no reports of LRADs being used against demonstrators in 2004, although many citizens were illegally detained during a temporary suspension of civil liberties on the streets of New York. (The city was eventually fined for mass violations of due process.)

As for the microwave beam, New Scientist reported that when it was tested, “experimenters banned glasses and contact lenses to prevent possible eye damage to the subjects, and in the second and third tests removed any metallic objects such as coins and keys to stop hot spots being created on the skin. They also checked the volunteers’ clothes for certain seams, buttons and zips which might also cause hot spots.”

In other words, this beam doesn’t only inflict agony on its targets. If you can’t move out of the way quickly enough it can cause serious burns and potentially even fuse contact lenses onto their wearers’ eyeballs.

Goyette stayed on this story long enough for me to realize that I had missed its real significance. He’s understandably struck by how quickly the Secretary’s remarks seem to have been forgotten. I am, too, but I think I understand. This government is dismantling the world as we know it at an unprecendented rate. The suspension of civil liberties and the codifying of torture into law are only two examples. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for many people to keep up with the pace of change while its happening, either psychologically or cognitively.

These revelations about mass “torture technology,” and the Secretary’s remarks, need to be viewed in the context of our collective “future shock.” This Administration - which illegally uses the military to spy on Quaker peace demonstrators, violates laws and the Constitution with impunity, and degrades its country through torture - is literally capable of anything.

The idea of subjecting demonstrating Americans to group torture may seem unthinkable today. Yet a few years ago we couldn’t have imagined that our government woul ban public demonstrations by forcing protesters into “Free Speech Zones” behind fences, miles away from other Americans. The unimaginable has now become real. This is only the next logical step, and it could happen soon.

Welcome to the Brave New America. Be careful out there. ++

Secret CIA Prisons in Your Backyard
Onnesha Roychoudhuri, Truthdig
September 22, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/41923/

The largest covert CIA operation since the Cold War is run not only by shadowy government contractors in the darkest corners of Afghanistan, but also by unassuming Americans in places like Dedham, Mass.

When U.S. civilian airplanes were spotted in late 2002 taking trips to and from Andrews Air Force Base, and making stops in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, journalists and plane-spotters wondered what was going on. It soon became clear that these planes were part of the largest covert operation since the Cold War era. Called extraordinary rendition, the practice involves CIA officials or contractors kidnapping people and sending them to secret prisons around the world where they are held and often tortured, either at the hands of the host-country’s government or by CIA personnel themselves.

On Sept. 6, after a long period of official no-comments, President Bush acknowledged the program’s existence. But the extent of its operations has yet to be publicly disclosed.

How extensive is it? Trevor Paglen, an expert in clandestine military installations, and A.C. Thompson, an award-winning journalist for S.F. Weekly, spent months tracking the CIA flights and the businesses behind them. What they found was a startlingly broad network of planes (including the Gulfstream jet belonging to Boston Red Sox co-owner Phillip Morse), shell companies, and secret prisons around the world. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation of their new book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights is the collusion of everyday Americans in this massive CIA program. From family lawyers who bolster the shell companies, to an entire town in Smithfield, N.C., that hosts CIA planes and pilots, Torture Taxi is the story of the broad reach of extraordinary rendition, and, as Hannah Arendt coined the phrase, the banality of evil.

Trevor and A.C. joined me by phone to explain how they managed to follow a paper trail that led to some of the most critical unknowns about the extraordinary rendition program.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: How did the idea for the book come about?

Trevor Paglen: I research military secrecy at Berkeley and there is a community there trying to figure out what military programs are. At some point, this hobbyist community became aware that there were these civilian planes flying around, acting as if they were working in military black programs. These people started tracking the planes and repeatedly seeing them in places like Libya and Guantanamo Bay. It became pretty clear that this was a CIA thing and that these were planes that were involved in the extraordinary rendition program.

Roychoudhuri: When did the pieces start to come together?

Paglen: Late last year, there was a big uproar about secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Dana Priest at the Washington Post broke the story and Human Rights Watch put out a press release. At that moment the pieces started making sense and we could start explaining what was going on. By that time I had collected a number of files on this just as a curiosity. I brought them over to A.C.’s job, where he has access to some tools to do investigative journalism.

A.C. Thompson: Trevor had this aviation and military expertise and all this information when he came to my office. I’ve been doing corporate research for years and when we started looking at these possible CIA front companies associated with the planes, it immediately became very apparent that we were looking at phony companies.

Roychoudhuri: How did you track the extraordinary rendition program?

Thompson: We wanted to gather up as much information as we could to create this mosaic of evidence to show the broad picture of extraordinary rendition. We went from Smithfield, N.C., to Gardez, Afghanistan, to piece it together. This is something that people have only really had snapshots of thus far. We reverse-engineered the program. We used the paper trails and evidence left behind, from FAA flight logs to the testimony of former prisoners in Afghanistan to piece it all together.

Paglen: We conceived of the book as a travel diary. We showed up at the addresses on this paper trail and followed the leads. The point was to find the story behind the address. Then we would go to the places where those companies actually fly those airplanes and provide the pilots. Then, when we saw that the airplanes frequently landed in Afghanistan, we went there, too.

Roychoudhuri: You relied on data from amateur plane-spotters with data from all over the world. Can you explain how that works?

Paglen: There are many plane-spotting websites with data regarding the movements of these aircrafts along with pictures. The data can be very scattered and difficult to do much with. But some of these plane-spotters have developed advanced techniques to get information on aircraft movement. That became very helpful in piecing some of this together. If you are a plane-spotter and you are interested in the history of a particular aircraft, you know there are many documents publicly available: registration papers and airworthiness certificates from the FAA. You can also get flight data from the FAA. And in the cases that data has been blocked, people have figured out ways to get around those blocks. When the plane-spotter community and journalists came together, it became one of the few ways to see the outlines of this program.

Roychoudhuri: The fact that the CIA is using civilian planes actually makes it easier to track them.

Paglen: Civilian law around aviation is much looser than those governing military. Civilian planes can basically fly wherever they want in the world. The U.S. military needs special permission to fly over somebody else’s airspace. Using the civilian companies is a way to create mobility and avoid drawing attention.

Thompson: The CIA wants to exist in the civilian world. It wants to create these entities so that it can move without a lot of scrutiny. But in the civilian world, you have to interact with other parts of the government all the time. If you create a shell corporation that is going to supposedly own an airplane that will be used to transport people to dungeons around the world, you have to file incorporation papers with the state the company is based in. When you go and get these corporate papers, you can analyze things like the signatures on the documents.

Roychoudhuri: What did you find when you examined some of these documents?

Thompson: We found Colleen Bornt who was an exec at a company called Premier Executive Transport Services. Premier was the company that owned the plane that took Khaled el-Masri to the Salt Pit. When you go look at the paper documents that Colleen signed, you find that every one of her signatures looks completely different. That’s because each one was made by a different person. When we started looking for more traces of Colleen there was no home address, no phone number, nor any other proof that she’s existed at all.

That’s the same with all these companies. They don’t have real headquarters, staff or anything besides these paper documents they filed to incorporate and a handful of lawyers who helped set these companies up and serve as the registered agents for them. These are the people who receive summons and subpoenas for the companies.

Roychoudhuri: What are these lawyers?

Thompson: These lawyers are the only humans you can find who actually exist in these companies. We went to look to talk to people at Keeler and Tate, another shell company implicated in el-Masri’s abduction. Keeler and Tate were sued by el-Masri with the help of the ACLU. We went to the only address for Keeler and Tate–a law office in Reno, Nevada. We told the secretary “One of the lawyers here is a registered agent and you have been named in a lawsuit alleging a connection to the CIA and extraordinary rendition, what do you think of that?”

She didn’t seem at all surprised, but she threw us out pretty quickly.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these lawyers?

Thompson: The kind of people we’re talking about are Dean Plakias in Dedham, Mass., outside of Boston. He is not a high-profile guy. He’s a family lawyer with a small practice and how he ended up in this world is still a mystery. This is an American story, a neighborhood story. When we started looking at all the front companies the CIA had erected, we realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that’s even farther away.

Roychoudhuri: When you have a false entity like Colleen Bornt signing for purchases of planes, is that breaking business laws?

Thompson: As far as I can tell, it’s 100% illegal under the business and professions codes in any state. I don’t think that it would be legal anywhere. I also don’t think that it’s legal in any state for a lawyer to set up a phony business for people who they know don’t exist. It’s also likely at odds with the ethics provisions of most state bar organizations for lawyers. Strictly speaking, I don’t think any of these things are legal.

Roychoudhuri: Where was the most interesting place you traveled?

Thompson: We went to Nevada, Massachusetts and New York to track down the front companies. We went to Beale Air Force base in Northern California to track U2 spy planes. We went to Smithfield, N.C, which is home to the airfields that many of these airplanes fly out of. Then we went to Kabul and Gardez, Afghanistan.

But the two most interesting places were the rural town of Smithfield and Kinston down the road, where there’s another airstrip that a company called Aero Contractors uses. Aero is the company that flies many of these missions for the CIA. We went there and talked to a pilot who had worked for Aero about exactly what they did and how the program worked. There’s nothing random about the CIA using this rural area in North Carolina. If you wanted to shut up a secret operation, this is where you would do it. It’s a God, guns and guts area.

Roychoudhuri: When you asked questions, what kind of answers did you get?

Thompson: What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don’t want to talk about it and don’t take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there–and many congregants believed it was.

Paglen: It’s this small town with this open secret that nobody wants to talk about. It shows what’s going on culturally. When a country starts doing things like torturing and disappearing people, it’s not just a policy question, it’s also a cultural question.

Roychoudhuri: When you started to put the pieces of the rendition program together, what did you see?

Paglen: Take Khaled el-Masri for example. His case was a blueprint for this program because it’s the most complete account. He showed up in Germany after having disappeared for five months and told this incredible story. His interrogators told him not to tell anybody because they wouldn’t believe him anyway. But when you excavate his story, there is a trail of evidence to corroborate it.

He says he was kidnapped in Macedonia on a certain day. It turns out that a plane-spotter took a picture of a known CIA airplane in Majorca [Spain] the day before el-Masri was kidnapped. German journalists went to the airport of Skopje [Macedonia] with this picture and verified the plane was there on that date. The plane had also filed a flight plan from Macedonia to Kabul. El-Masri said he was taken to Kabul. In Kabul, he said he was taken on a 10-minute drive to a prison. He drew a map of what he thought the prison floor plan was. We got on Google Earth, looked at Kabul and drew a ring around how far you could go in about 10 minutes. Then we compared the buildings in that ring to the map that el-Masri had drawn. We found a building that looks exactly like it. So we drove out there. There is indeed a giant facility with Americans there. He could not have made this up.

Roychoudhuri: You actually went to one of the places el-Masri believes he was held–the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.

Paglen: There have been at least three or four black sites in and around Kabul, Afghanistan. The one we definitely knew the location of was the Salt Pit. We found a driver who would take us out there. When you drive out to the Salt Pit, you have these wide plains; it’s very isolated. We were driving up and there was a traffic jam which was a goat herder with a bunch of goats on the road. As we’re waiting, he turns around and he’s wearing a hat that says KBR–Kellogg Brown and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton). As we drove farther, we saw a huge complex with a big wall around it. There are signs in English saying this is an Afghan military facility, no entrance. There’s then a checkpoint. We were stopped. We told the guards we were turning around and going back to Kabul. We asked what goes on there and the guard said he didn’t know exactly. Then we asked if there were Americans there. And he said, “Oh yes, there’s lots of Americans here.” And we saw some Americans sitting on a Humvee.

Roychoudhuri: Did you get a sense of the scope of the rendition program through your travels in Afghanistan?

Thompson: When Trevor and I went to Afghanistan we realized that this wasn’t about a handful of CIA secret prisons. The U.S. military has erected some 20 detention centers throughout Afghanistan –which all operate in near total secrecy. These are facilities that the U.N., the Afghan government, journalists, and human rights groups can’t get into. Extraordinary rendition is one facet of a much broader story of secrecy and imprisonment that spans the globe.

In Kabul and Gardez, we interviewed many people–in human rights organizations, NGOs, local journalists, and former detainees. We realized that the kinds of distinctions that we were making between CIA and military black sites, CIA and military torture made absolutely no sense to people. It’s more like the U.S. is treating this whole country as if it were a giant black site.

Paglen: This rendition and torture is one flavor of a larger thing going on: the U.S. taking people all over the place, imprisoning and torturing them without charge.

Thompson: From interviewing a lot of detainees and Dr. Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, it was clear that the Americans had grabbed hundreds and hundreds of people. They’re being held without charges, in some 20 different facilities.

Roychoudhuri: Who are these people?

Paglen: When A.C. interviewed people who had been held at the military air base Bagram, prisoners told him that there were Iraqis, Yemenis, an international cast of characters at this DOD prison. So what the hell are they doing there? These are not high-profile renditions like el-Masri or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. So who are these guys? How did they get there? Is this part of the rendition program, or has the practice of transferring prisoners to these different places around the world become a standard practice?

Roychoudhuri: In the book, you make clear that the rendition program has been around for years. What has changed?

Paglen: The program was established over multiple administrations, Democrat and Republican. For example, Aero Contractors was set up under the Carter administration. The counter-terrorist unit in the CIA was set up under the Reagan administration, but the rendition program was set up under Clinton. It’s an accumulation of the capacity of this infrastructure. After 9/11, the CIA went about setting up this entire infrastructure. Materially, they started getting airplanes and secret prisons together. They also started putting together a corporate structure, meaning shell companies. All of this was already in place, but not solidified. All the controls seemed to be taken off of it. They’re not planning each operation so meticulously, they’re not getting presidential authorization for each operation.

We’re hearing about it now because it grew so big, clearly expanding beyond what the intention of the program was at first. There is no question that some of these guys they’re picking up did nothing and are the wrong people. One of the differences between the pre- and post-9/11 is that the CIA becomes squarely in charge of the program. Before, the CIA was working with the FBI.

Thompson: The pre-9/11 program was geared more towards adjudicating people domestically who were suspected of crimes against American citizens. That was obviously not quite as controversial as running this huge program that’s snatching people and taking them to secret dungeons around the world.

Roychoudhuri: Clearly, other countries have to be at least partially aware of the program in order for the U.S. program to operate. Did you get a sense of the level of collaboration?

Paglen: We know that immediately after 9/11 the CIA set up a program to collaborate with 80 foreign countries to varying degrees. The CIA also started funding other intelligence services in order to use them as proxies. We also know that some of these collaborations were kept off the record; supposedly there is no paper trail.

Roychoudhuri: Has that off-the-record quality caused glitches in the program?

Paglen: What happened in October of 2001 is that one of these airplanes landed in Pakistan.

The Pakistani intelligence service (ISI) picked up a guy named Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed. The plane landed on the tarmac; they had this guy in chains. That guy was handed over to the Americans and put into this Gulfstream. They were going to fly him out of there, but the air traffic controllers require a landing fee and they refused to pay. The ISI then went to the airport officials and told them to waive the landing fee, so the plane took off. But it created a stir, and drew attention to the aircraft. A Pakistani journalist heard about this and published it, including the tail number of the plane in the newspaper. American journalists then got their hands on this tail number, and this is one of the very early keys that began to unlock parts of this story.

Roychoudhuri: As journalists have begun tracking plane numbers, the CIA has attempted to reshuffle. They change the number on the plane, or they change the phone line of the shell companies. How much do you think public scrutiny can achieve?

Thompson: A ton. If people want the CIA to be reined in and if they feel we shouldn’t go around the world summarily detaining and torturing people, they can truly pressure their government to make that happen. They did it in the ’70s through Frank Church, the Idaho senator, and the Church Committee. They severely curbed the transgressions and the misdeeds of the CIA. The thing is, by and large Americans don’t care about this. Europeans, who play a much smaller role in this, are absolutely outraged about it; their governments are outraged about it. The day Americans decide that they don’t think torture is something we should do, than maybe we’ll see some pressure to change these things.

Roychoudhuri: You quote 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick in the book: “In criminal justice, you either prosecute suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them, you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with those people?” Based on the fact that it’s so difficult to bring these people back out of this extralegal system, do you have any sense of where the rendition program is going?

Paglen: This is the crucial question that we are facing right now. Bush transferred a handful of guys to Guantanamo and acknowledged they were kept in these secret prisons. Congress has to come up with a framework to prosecute these guys. It’s common knowledge that most of the guys at Guantanamo are nobodies. Many were turned in by bounty hunters. But the guys that Bush transferred to Guantanamo Bay are guys that everybody agrees are bad guys. The sticking point is that they have tortured them for years and the evidence against them is totally tainted by rendition and torture. These are guys that people definitely want to see put on trial.

By moving them to Guantanamo Bay, Bush is basically challenging Congress and saying, “If you want to put Khaled Sheikh Mohammed on trial, you’re going to have to retroactively authorize torture, rendition, and the black site program.”

If Congress does authorize the president’s version of the bill, they’re not only retroactively authorizing torture, they’re creating a legal framework for the future. That would create a system where disappearing and torturing people would become a part of the law. ++

Outrage And Shame
by tristero
Friday, September 22, 2006
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

From Marty Lederman:

[I]t only takes 30 seconds or so to see that the Senators have capitualted entirely, that the U.S. will hereafter violate the Geneva Conventions by engaging in Cold Cell, Long Time Standing, etc., and that there will be very little pretense about it. In addition to the elimination of habeas rights in section 6, the bill would delegate to the President the authority to interpret “the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions” “for the United States,” except that the bill itself would define certain “grave breaches” of Common Article 3 to be war crimes.

So tell me, my fellow Americans:

How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture?

How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers?

How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to the American fascists in charge of this country’s legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?

And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn’t torture?

I’ll tell you how I feel. I am outraged and ashamed.

Kudos to Digby for calling this exactly right from the start. Shame, shame, shame on the cowards in both parties that permitted this disgracefully grotesque farce to happen. This is as inexcusable a stupidity as the neglect that permittted the 9/11 attacks, the idiotic reasoning and intellectual blindness that advocated and executed the Bush/Iraq war, and the failure to prepare for Katrina. What the hell is going on, that a country that prides itself on its heritage of freedom and liberty, that fought such an awful war over the degrading enslavement of human beings - that such a country would vote to permit some of the most repulsive and evil practices human beings are capable of and place the power to do so directly in the hands of a moral midget? ++

Reclaiming The Issues: “Keep George Out Of Jail”
Thom Hartmann
Thursday, September 21, 2006 by CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0921-28.htm

The Republicans are trying to keep George W. Bush out of jail. So far, the media and the Democrats haven’t done much to stop them.

On the surface, it seems the Republicans are having a debate about “wiretapping terrorists” and “harsh interrogation of prisoners.” These frames about the current “rebellion” by McCain, Graham, Warner, et al, are today embraced by both the Republican Party and the mainstream media.

But the real issue is whether Republicans in Congress will trade the principles of democracy and the rule of law to keep George W. Bush and several of his colleagues out of jail, or whether they’ll uphold the rule of law and American democracy while abandoning him to face the consequences of his illegal acts.

On June 29, 2006, in the Hamden Case, the US Supreme Court ruled that Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration had violated the Geneva Convention and other international treaties with regard to the treatment and prosecution of detainees in the so-called “war on terror.”

The logic of the decision could subject Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld - along with those down the chain of command who followed their orders - to prosecution as war criminals both in the United States and internationally. If they violated Common Article 3 and others of the Geneva Conventions, they could be subject to lengthy imprisonment in the US for violating US laws, as well as being brought before the United Nation’s International Court of Justice at The Hague, the same as Slobodan Milosevic.

A hastily convened conference call by the Justice Department to discuss the ruling caused Brian Roehrkasse at the Department of Justice Public Affairs Office to comment to those on the call that “the Supreme Court’s holding indicates the military commissions, as currently constituted by DOD, while robust in affording enemy combatants more process than this or any other country has ever afforded enemy combatants, are not consistent with current congressional statutes, especially the UCMJ and treaty provisions, Common Article 3.”

A plain English translation would be close to: “The Supreme Court said we’ve broken US law, we’ve broken the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and we’ve broken the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3.”

About six weeks later, on August 17, 2006, Federal Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled in Detroit that George W. Bush and his administration had committed numerous felonies with regard to wiretapping American citizens without a legal warrant, including violating the FISA act (which carries a 5-year prison term as the penalty for each violation) and violating the Constitution (which carries impeachment as its penalty). Later in the day, the Department of Homeland Security facilitated the arrest in Thailand of John Mark Karr for killing JonBenet Ramsey, sweeping the story off the front page and out of the weekend news analysis shows, but the ruling is still there.

Thus the Republicans are scrambling.

If either of these precedents carry forward or are seriously prosecuted - as could happen if Democrats take either the House or the Senate and gain the power to investigate crimes of the Bush Administration, or could simply happen as the normal course of events if lawyers in the Justice Department and the United Nations enforce the law - Republicans are faced with the very real possibility that George W. Bush and others in his administration could go to prison. Impeachment is a virtual given.

Thus the spin. And the compromises. And the debates within the Republican Party. And the corporate media’s efforts to limit the discussion to the “wiretapping debate” and the “prisoner interrogation/torture debate.”

Scratch the veneer off, though, and you quickly see that this is really about keeping George out of jail.

This one will be interesting to watch.

Will the Republicans bail George out the way Osama’s half-brother, Salem Bin Laden (who soon thereafter died in a plane crash in Texas), did when Dubya’s Harken Oil Company was going bust? Will they keep him from being prosecuted the way his father did when Poppy shut down an SEC investigation of Junior’s inside trading? Will they keep him out of federal custody the way his daddy did when Dubya left the Texas Air National Guard to desert the military and go on a year-long drinking binge in Alabama?

And will the Democratic Party seize the frame - or use as an October Surprise - the fact of George W. Bush’s vulnerability to criminal prosecution?

Or will the Republicans - and maybe even Poppy Bush (who’s spending an eerie amount of time with his new surrogate son, Bill Clinton) - simply decide that after sixty years it’s finally time for George to fend for himself, and leave our laws intact?

It could, after all, be the best way for a “maverick” Republican like McCain to reclaim the Republican party and pin all the blame for five years of High Crimes And Misdemeanors on Dubya, paving the way for a “cleaner” Republican slate in the ‘08 elections. Many of these same Republicans, remember, were pushing hard for jail time for Bill Clinton for lying to a Grand Jury about having sex in the Oval Office - and were quite vocal about how a president could be both impeached and prosecuted for crimes.

The next few weeks - and the fine print in the “compromises” being hammered out among Republicans in the Senate right now - will tell. ++

What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers

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Entry Filed under: Political Waves