Taking
Lady Liberty has, at minimum, a pernicious, severe and disfiguring rash; she’s systemically compromised — she isn’t down and out quite yet, but she’s twitchy and weakened … and that is a major concern we’ve begun to address now, although so late in the game I think you’ll agree that it will take an extended period of recovery to bring her back to health. While the Lady is currently infected by Bush, if her immune system had not been compromised by vicious strains of militarism, consumerism and empirical ambition, she could have shaken him off like a common cold.
We’ll take a look at her vitals, below, starting with an excerpt from Joe Conason’s book, It Can Happen Here. After that, a list of ills … Dubby’s newest overt crony nomination and the unprecedented legal purge in the DoJ, the trial exposing Jose Padilla’s “Stockholm Syndrome” at our hands, a confession that points Rummy’s “Bad Apple” theory back to the Neanderthal brain it came from, and how we’re using those bloody, damned “camps” now.
NOTE: Air America says that the average lawmaker DOESN’T know about the quietly passed furtherance of Posse Comitatus [makes you confident, doesn't it?] so it’s up to us to make sure they do — contact your Congresspersons and demand their support on the Pat Leahy/Kit Bond reversal bill. Don’t put that off.
Jude
It Can Happen Here
In light of the series of laws passed in Congress and precedents set by the Bush administration, people have good reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in America.
Joe Conason, AlterNet
February 23, 2007
The following is excerpted from Joe Conason’s new book, “It Can Happen Here” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).
Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of “it” is.
To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” “it” plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America’s most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe’s fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as “it.”
If “it” denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then “it” hasn’t happened here and isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
For contemporary Americans, however, “it” could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis’s darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today — along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.
For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.
Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.
Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes — as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.
As the midterm election showed, more and more Americans realize that something has gone far wrong at the highest levels of government and politics — that Washington’s one-party regime had created a daily spectacle of stunning incompetence and dishonesty. Pollsters have found large majorities of voters worrying that the country is on the wrong track. At this writing, two of every three voters give that answer, and they are not just anxious but furious. Almost half are willing to endorse the censure of the president.
Suspicion and alienation extend beyond the usual disgruntled Democrats to independents and even a significant minority of Republicans. A surprisingly large segment of the electorate is willing to contemplate the possibility of impeaching the president, unappetizing though that prospect should be to anyone who can recall the destructive impeachment of Bush’s predecessor.
The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known — from the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraqto the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith — by lies, cronyism, and corruption.
Everyone knows — although not everyone necessarily wishes to acknowledge — that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted billions of dollars, and probably tens of billions, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party.
Everyone knows, too, that the administration dissembled about the events leading up to the destruction of New Orleans. Its negligence and obliviousness in the wake of the storm were shocking, as was its attempt to conceal its errors. It has yet to explain why a person with few discernible qualifications, other than his status as a crony and business associate of his predecessor, was directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By elevating ethically dubious, inexperienced, and ineffectual management the administration compromised a critical agency that had functioned brilliantly during the Clinton administration.
To date, however, we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation. It is due to their dereliction that neither the president nor any of his associates have seemed even mildly chastened in the wake of catastrophe. With a single party monopolizing power yet evading responsibility, there was nobody with the constitutional power to hold the White House accountable.
Bolstered by political impunity, especially in a time of war, perhaps any group of politicians would be tempted to abuse power. But this party and these politicians, unchecked by normal democratic constraints, proved to be particularly dangerous. The name for what is wrong with them — the threat embedded within the Bush administration, the Republican congressional leadership, and the current leaders of the Republican Party — is authoritarianism.
The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime’s style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists.
What worries many Americans even more is that the authoritarians can excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 — and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda — demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Are those changes essential to preserve our survival — or merely useful for unscrupulous politicians who still hope to achieve permanent domination by their own narrowly ideological party? Not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power.
The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush’s reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.
Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for “a totalitarian type regime.”
Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the “main components of a police state” in the Bush administration’s declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is “a clear and present danger to the rule of law,” and that the president “cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses.” Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a “monarchical doctrine” in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.
In the 2006 midterm election, disenchanted conservatives joined with liberals and centrists to deliver a stinging rebuke to the regime by overturning Republican domination in both houses of Congress. For the first time since 1994, Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the Democratic majority in the upper chamber is as narrow as possible, depending on the whims of Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Republican-leaning Democrat elected on an independent ballot line, who has supported the White House on the occupation of Iraq, abuse of prisoners of war, domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, far-right judicial nominations, and other critical constitutional issues. Nor is Lieberman alone among the Senate Democrats in his supine acquiescence to the abuses of the White House.
Even if the Democrats had won a stronger majority in the Senate, it would be naive to expect that a single election victory could mend the damage inflicted on America’s constitutional fabric during the past six years. While the Bush administration has enjoyed an extraordinary immunity from Congressional oversight until now, the deepest implication of its actions and statements, as explored in the pages that follow, is that neither legislators nor courts can thwart the will of the unitary executive. When Congress challenges that presidential claim, as inevitably it will, then what seems almost certain to follow is not “bipartisanship” but confrontation. The election of 2006 was not an end but another beginning.
The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis — or whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.
From “It Can Happen Here” by Joe Conason. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
Bush to Nominate Anti-Regulatory Lobbyist to Oversee Consumer Protection
2/22/07
Center for American Progress
The Consumer Product Safety Commission is charged with protecting the public from dangerous consumer products. Currently, the three-person commission has a vacancy. Media reports indicate that President Bush will likely fill the position with Michael Baroody, “executive vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group that opposes aggressive product safety regulation” and “has called for weakening the Consumer Product Safety Commission.” While at NAM, Baroody repeatedly lobbied for looser business regulations, at the expense of public safety. In 2000, NAM successfully killed a bill in the Senate that would have helped reduce safety risks to motorists by requiring tire manufacturers to report accident data and potential defects to the National Highway and Transportation Safety Board. It also opposes tougher rules regulating asbestos and in 2003, teamed up with the asbestos industry and spent $180,000 opposing asbestos reform legislation. NAM’s official position states that scientific data have “not confirmed evidence of global warming that can be attributed to human activities” and calls for “voluntary” measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It “opposes any federal or state government actions regarding climate change that could adversely affect the international competitiveness of the U.S. marketplace economy.” In 2001, Baroody wrote to Bush and personally thanked him for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol. Bush has repeatedly attempted to weaken regulations that protect the American public. Recently, he issued a directive that would give the White House greater control over federal regulations.
The Need for Continuing Congressional Scrutiny of Credible Claims that Bush Administration Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys Has Been Improperly Politically-Based
CARL TOBIAS, FindLaw
Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2007
On February 6, the U.S. Senate’s Judiciary Committee conducted a public hearing titled “Preserving Prosecutorial Independence: Is the Department of Justice Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys?” This hearing evaluated the revelation that the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the Bush Administration has asked numerous U.S. Attorneys — the chief federal prosecutors for the 94 federal districts in the U.S. — to resign.
Because the actual reasons for these departures remain unclear, Congress must continue to investigate why they happened and, if the lawyers are exiting for inappropriate reasons, address any improprieties it may find.
The Bush Administration’s Requests that U.S. Attorneys Resign: Evidence of Political, Not Performance-Related, Reasons
The change that sparked the controversy was the resignation of Bud Cummins, the U.S. Attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas. A high-ranking DOJ official requested Cummins’s resignation in June, suggesting that the Administration wished to afford someone else the opportunity for public service. The Administration replaced Cummins with Timothy Griffin, who had been an aide to Bush political advisor Karl Rove and had served as a spokesperson for the Republican National Committee. Last week, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty admitted he was “not aware of anything negative” about Cummins’s job performance that would have prompted removal - suggesting that this was simply a political switch.
Last December, DOJ had asked six other U.S. Attorneys to step down: David Bogden of Nevada, Paul Charlton of Arizona, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Carol Lam of San Diego, John McKay of Seattle and Kevin Ryan of San Francisco. McNulty testified that the six were fired for non-specific “performance-related” difficulties.
There is reason, however, to doubt that. Lam and Ryan had led high-profile corruption investigations. Lam oversaw the bribery conviction of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Cal.) and the continuing probe of that instance of corruption. Ryan headed the investigations relating to major league baseball players’ steroid use and corporate backdating of stock options.
When McNulty testified that the firings were “performance-related,” Western District of Washington Chief Judge Robert Lasnik and his colleagues offered a strong, prompt response: “[W]e unanimously agreed that [John McKay] was an absolutely superb U.S. Attorney and by every measure the performance of his office improved during his tenure [and] for the Justice Department to suggest otherwise is unfair.” Lasnik elaborated that local prosecutors and sheriffs and the FBI “never had the kind of service” in terms of “cooperation and aggressive handling of cases that they had under McKay’s leadership.”
McKay then himself disputed McNulty’s claim that he’d been fired for performance-related reasons, saying, “[T]hat is unfair.” The contention “reflects on my former colleagues in the office and the good work that we did, and I know that’s not true,” McKay added. McKay also stated that the DOJ official who had ordered him to resign had said nothing about “performance issues [or] management or anything else.” Last year, McKay had actually received a glowing performance review from DOJ.
Bogden, the Nevada U.S. Attorney, similarly remarked that DOJ never said there was a problem with him or his office. Finally, Charlton, the Arizona U.S. Attorney, analogously stated he “certainly was given no indication there were performance concerns.”
Are U.S. Attorneys’ Hirings and Firings Being Based on Political Favoritism?
One major concern here is that U.S. Attorney firing and hiring may have become overly politicized. Closely related is the idea that the changes are not based on merit, but rather on political favoritism, which in turn might compromise U.S. Attorneys’ independence. Senator Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) argued that even our top federal prosecutors’ resignation and appointment have been “infused and corrupted with political” considerations.
Top-level DOJ officers vociferously denied, however, that politics motivated the resignations. In January, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that he would never replace a U.S. Attorney for political reasons or to disrupt an ongoing investigation. McNulty echoed these sentiments, claiming that the Administration never “will seek to remove a U.S. Attorney to interfere with an ongoing investigation or in retaliation for a prosecution.” He also testified that Senators’ claim of DOJ’s politicization of the process was “like a knife in my heart [and] completely contrary to my experience” while remarking that the Cunningham bribery prosecution “was a good thing for the American people.”
The New Law that Allows the Appointment of Interim U.S. Attorneys - and How Lawmakers Can Respond
This dispute was fueled by authority recently granted the Attorney General to appoint U.S. Attorneys on an interim basis, when a permanent replacement is not been confirmed within 120 days. A little-noticed provision in the 2006 USA Patriot Act amendments shifted this power to the Attorney General (it had previously been exercised by district judges) and allowed DOJ to appoint temporary replacements for an indefinite period of time.
Numerous senators are concerned that such “acting” U.S. Attorneys may ultimately serve until the Bush Administration’s end without undergoing any Senate confirmation process. McNulty testified, in response, that this “authority has not and will not be used to circumvent the confirmation process.”
One action that senators might take is attempting to ensure that the Administration promptly nominates highly competent replacements who receive expeditious approval. If lawmakers conclude that legislation is necessary, an obvious possibility would be restoring the status quo that existed before last year’s USA Patriot Act amendment. Indeed, on Thursday, the Committee approved legislation that would effect this change.
Last month, Gonzales stated that judges should not name U.S. Attorneys because they “tend to appoint friends and others not properly qualified to be prosecutors.” McNulty concomitantly registered “strong opposition” in DOJ to this idea, as it permits the judiciary to appoint executive branch officials. This apparent separation of powers concern, however, is not a serious one — because the Administration can rather felicitously obviate the need for any interim appointments simply by promptly nominating highly-qualified lawyers.
Congress must keep scrutinizing why U.S. Attorneys are departing and, if the lawyers are indeed leaving for improper reasons, should institute action to address the wrongful politicization of the process. Several Committee members prefer this approach; however, they must join forces with other lawmakers first to clarify exactly why the U.S. Attorneys are leaving and then, if the reasons are indeed questionable, to initiate corrective measures.
A Trial for Thousands Denied Trial
Naomi Klein, The Nation
March 12 2007 Issue
Something remarkable is going on in a Miami courtroom. The cruel methods US interrogators have used since September 11 to “break” prisoners are finally being put on trial.
This was not supposed to happen. The Bush Administration’s plan was to put José Padilla on trial for allegedly being part of a network linked to international terrorists. But Padilla’s lawyers are arguing that he is not fit to stand trial because he has been driven insane by the government.
Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, Padilla, a Brooklyn-born former gang member, was classified as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina. He was kept in a 9-by-7-foot cell with no natural light, no clock and no calendar. Whenever Padilla left the cell, he was shackled and suited in heavy goggles and headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days. He was forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who punctured the extreme sensory deprivation with sensory overload, blasting him with harsh lights and pounding sounds. Padilla also says he was injected with a “truth serum,” a substance his lawyers believe was LSD or PCP.
According to his lawyers and two mental health specialists who examined him, Padilla has been so shattered that he lacks the ability to assist in his own defense. He is convinced that his lawyers are “part of a continuing interrogation program” and sees his captors as protectors. In order to prove that “the extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged,” his lawyers want to tell the court what happened during those years in the Navy brig. The prosecution strenuously objects, maintaining that “Padilla is competent,” that his treatment is irrelevant.
US District Judge Marcia Cooke disagrees. “It’s not like Mr. Padilla was living in a box. He was at a place. Things happened to him at that place.” The judge has ordered several prison employees to testify at the hearings on Padilla’s mental state, which begin February 22. They will be asked how a man alleged to have engaged in elaborate antigovernment plots now acts, in the words of brig staff, “like a piece of furniture.”
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of these hearings. The techniques used to break Padilla have been standard operating procedure at Guantánamo Bay since the first prisoners arrived five years ago. They wore blackout goggles and sound-blocking headphones and were placed in extended isolation, interrupted by strobe lights and heavy metal music. These same practices have been documented in dozens of cases of CIA “extraordinary rendition” as well as in prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many have suffered the same symptoms as Padilla. According to James Yee, former Army Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo, there is an entire section of the prison called Delta Block for detainees who have been reduced to a delusional state. “They would respond to me in a childlike voice, talking complete nonsense. Many of them would loudly sing childish songs, repeating the song over and over.” All of Delta Block was on twenty-four-hour suicide watch.
Human Rights Watch has exposed a US-run detention facility near Kabul known as the “prison of darkness” - tiny pitch-black cells, strange blaring sounds. “Plenty lost their minds,” one former inmate recalled. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors.”
These standard mind-breaking techniques have never faced scrutiny in a US court because the prisoners in the jails are foreigners and have been stripped of the right of habeas corpus - a denial that, scandalously, was just upheld by a federal appeals court in Washington, DC. There is only one reason Padilla’s case is different: He is a US citizen. The Administration did not originally intend to bring Padilla to trial, but when his status as an enemy combatant faced a Supreme Court challenge, the Administration abruptly changed course, charging Padilla and transferring him to civilian custody. That makes Padilla’s case unique: He is the only victim of the post-9/11 legal netherworld to face an ordinary US trial.
Now that Padilla’s mental state is the central issue in the case, the government prosecutors have a problem. The CIA and the military have known since the early 1960s that extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload cause personality disintegration - that’s the whole point. “The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject’s mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure.” That comes from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, a 1963 declassified CIA manual for interrogating “resistant sources.”
The manual was based on the findings of the agency’s notorious MK Ultra program, which in the 1950s funneled about $25 million to scientists to research “unusual techniques of interrogation.” One of the psychiatrists who received CIA funding was the infamous Ewen Cameron of Montreal’s McGill University. Cameron subjected hundreds of psychiatric patients to large doses of electroshock and total sensory isolation and drugged them with LSD and PCP. In 1960 Cameron gave a lecture at the Brooks Airforce Base in Texas in which he stated that sensory deprivation “produces the primary symptoms of schizophrenia.”
There is no need to go so far back to prove that the US military knew full well that it was driving Padilla mad. The Army’s field manual, reissued just last year, states, “Sensory deprivation may result in extreme anxiety, hallucinations, bizarre thoughts, depression, and anti-social behavior,” as well as “significant psychological distress.”
If these techniques drove Padilla insane, that means the US government has been deliberately driving hundreds, possibly thousands, of prisoners insane around the world. What is on trial in Florida is not one man’s mental state. It is the whole system of US psychological torture.
An Iraq Interrogator’s Nightmare
Eric Fair, Washington Post
Friday, February 9, 2007
A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.
That dream, along with a host of other nightmares, has plagued me since my return from Iraq in the summer of 2004. Though the man in this particular nightmare has no face, I know who he is. I assisted in his interrogation at a detention facility in Fallujah. I was one of two civilian interrogators assigned to the division interrogation facility (DIF) of the 82nd Airborne Division. The man, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, was a suspected associate of Khamis Sirhan al-Muhammad, the Baath Party leader in Anbar province who had been captured two months earlier.
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.
Despite my best efforts, I cannot ignore the mistakes I made at the interrogation facility in Fallujah. I failed to disobey a meritless order, I failed to protect a prisoner in my custody, and I failed to uphold the standards of human decency. Instead, I intimidated, degraded and humiliated a man who could not defend himself. I compromised my values. I will never forgive myself.
American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking.
Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency. The violence raging there today is evidence that those tactics never worked. My memories are evidence that those tactics were terribly wrong.
While I was appalled by the conduct of my friends and colleagues, I lacked the courage to challenge the status quo. That was a failure of character and in many ways made me complicit in what went on. I’m ashamed of that failure, but as time passes, and as the memories of what I saw in Iraq continue to infect my every thought, I’m becoming more ashamed of my silence.
Some may suggest there is no reason to revive the story of abuse in Iraq. Rehashing such mistakes will only harm our country, they will say. But history suggests we should examine such missteps carefully. Oppressive prison environments have created some of the most determined opponents. The British learned that lesson from Napoleon, the French from Ho Chi Minh, Europe from Hitler.
The world is learning that lesson again from Ayman al-Zawahiri. What will be the legacy of abusive prisons in Iraq?
We have failed to properly address the abuse of Iraqi detainees. Men like me have refused to tell our stories, and our leaders have refused to own up to the myriad mistakes that have been made. But if we fail to address this problem, there can be no hope of success in Iraq. Regardless of how many young Americans we send to war, or how many militia members we kill, or how many Iraqis we train, or how much money we spend on reconstruction, we will not escape the damage we have done to the people of Iraq in our prisons.
I am desperate to get on with my life and erase my memories of my experiences in Iraq. But those memories and experiences do not belong to me. They belong to history. If we’re doomed to repeat the history we forget, what will be the consequences of the history we never knew? The citizens and the leadership of this country have an obligation to revisit what took place in the interrogation booths of Iraq, unpleasant as it may be. The story of Abu Ghraib isn’t over. In many ways, we have yet to open the book.
The writer served in the Army from 1995 to 2000 as an Arabic linguist and worked in Iraq as a contract interrogator in early 2004.
Man Without a Face
jurrasicpork, Welcome To Pottersville
It starts out like this:
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A man with no face stares at me from the corner of a room. He pleads for help, but I’m afraid to move. He begins to cry. It is a pitiful sound, and it sickens me. He screams, but as I awaken, I realize the screams are mine.
Sounds like the opening paragraph of a Jeffery Deaver or John Connolly novel, doesn’t it? Sounds as if it’s narrated by one of their twisted serial killers, no?
You’d be wrong. This was an article published in today’s Washington Post entitled “An Iraq Interrogator’s Nightmare.”
Its author, Eric Fair, used to be a contract interrogator in Iraq in early 2004 and he tells us that he’s had trouble sleeping. From what relatively little he tells us in this article/confession, I’m not surprised why.
Now, how an Arabic linguist, of which we have pitifully few, makes the transition to professional interrogator seemingly without Army or some other kind of government training perplexes me but that’s not important.
The screams that end up as his begin with a man’s whose name he’s long since forgotten nor probably cares to recall. It must’ve been tough getting up from his bed, knowing he had another twelve hour shift ahead of him, knowing that he was in for another half a day of beating, humiliating and degrading his fellow human beings for a paycheck and an eroding sense of making a positive difference in the world. If you think your job sucks, try abusing people in the most savage manner possible.
I’m not saying this guy’s Charles Graner and Jack the Ripper rolled into one. I haven’t enough to go on. But this guy’s nightmares are just starting and people generally don’t have nightmares just for rapping someone’s knuckles with a wooden ruler. And what he did he did for his President, for his country, which is certainly honorable.
Except his President and much of his nation, especially in the red states, don’t, can’t or won’t officially acknowledge his service to his country.
That’s not honorable. Hasn’t Bush ever heard that Tammy Wynette song, “Stand By Your Man”?
Eric Fair is having a hard time forgiving himself and that’s the way it ought to be. Forgiveness after doing the things that now keep him up at night ought not come easy. George Bush, on the other hand, recently boasted to us about how easily he sleeps at night. Sleep for the wicked comes easy when the crimes initiated by you and your legal counsel are committed tribally, by proxy. People like George Bush don’t wake up in a sitting position at three in the morning because they never had to listen to people begging to be killed, for making people wish they were never born.
For in a bubble no one can hear them scream. Especially from 6000 miles away.
No, all George W. Bush hears is the tinkle of fine lead crystal and the scrape of silver on bone china at state dinners, the dull roar of well-picked crowds and applause at faux Town Hall meetings and an endless diet of Yes’es.
George Bush has no problem with working out his salvation because he thinks that he’d already gotten his salvation years ago when Jesus found him in a gutter and that he has never once steered him wrong since then. Eric Fair was passed over for salvation and redemption and will have to wait a little while longer for it for not having the balls to stand up to his superiors and to say, “This is wrong.” I do not feel sorry for Eric Fair because he chose to be a contracted interrogator, he chose to go to Iraq and must’ve done so with eyes wide open, knowing what he’d be called upon to do. He should’ve known that the interrogations wouldn’t be all verbal.
But at least he’s making his story known and hopefully others will follow. Hopefully, people such as he and Seymour Hersh will be but the first to tell their people what’s being done in their good name, of the sin that we’ve inherited, the sins that will continue to subtract from our nation’s security, our reputation, our honor and collective humanity.
Families Behind Bars: Jailing Children of Immigrants
Thanks to US immigration policy, children (including infants and toddlers) whose parents are in immigration courts, are being locked up at detention centers.
Kari Lydersen, In These Times/AlterNet
Thursday 22 February 2007
Named after the co-founder of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center in Taylor, Texas, opened as a medium-security prison in 1997. Today, the federal government pays CCA, the nation’s largest private prison company, $95 per person per day to house the detainees, who wear jail-type uniforms and live in cells.
But they have not been charged with any crimes. In fact, nearly half of its 400 or so residents are children, including infants and toddlers.
The inmates are immigrants or children of immigrants who are in deportation proceedings. Many of them are in the process of applying for political asylum, refugees from violence-plagued and impoverished countries like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Somalia and Palestine. (Since there are different procedures for Mexican immigrants, the facility houses no Mexicans.)
In the past, most of them would have been free to work and attend school as their cases moved through immigration courts. “Prior to Hutto, they were releasing people into the community,” says Nicole Porter, director of the Prison and Jail Accountability Project for the ACLU of Texas. “These are non-criminals and nonviolent individuals who have not committed any crime against the U.S. There are viable alternatives to requiring them to live in a prison setting and wear uniforms.”
But as a result of increasingly stringent immigration enforcement policies, today more than 22,000 undocumented immigrants are being detained, up from 6,785 in 1995, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Normally, men and women are detained separately and minors, if they are detained at all, live in residential facilities with social services and schools. But under the auspices of “keeping families together,” children and parents are incarcerated together at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center, as it is now called, and at a smaller facility in Berks County, Penn. Attorneys for detainees say the children are only allowed one hour of schooling, in English, and one hour of recreation per day.
“It’s just a concentration camp by another name,” says John Wheat Gibson, a Dallas attorney representing two Palestinian families in the facility.
In addition, there have been reports of inadequate healthcare and nutrition.
“The kids are getting sick from the food,” says Frances Valdez, a fellow at the University of Texas Law School’s Immigration Law Clinic. “It could be a psychological thing also. These are little kids, given only one hour of playtime a day, the rest of the time they’re in their pods in a contained area. There are only a few people per cell so families are separated at night. There’s a woman with two sons and two daughters; one of her sons was getting really sick at night but she couldn’t go to him because he’s in a different cell. One client was pregnant and we established there was virtually no prenatal care.”
When local staff for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) collected toys for the children at Christmas, Hutto administrators would not allow stuffed animals to be given to the children, according to LULAC national president Rosa Rosales.
“That’s what these children need - something warm to hug,” she says. “And they won’t even allow them that, why, I can’t imagine. They say they’re doing a favor by keeping families together, but this is ridiculous.”
A CCA spokesperson refers media to the San Antonio office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but that office did not return calls for this story.
Immigrants have been housed at the facility since last summer, and public outrage and attention from human rights groups has grown in the past few months as more people have become aware of the situation.
In mid-December, Jay J. Johnson-Castro, a 60-year-old resident of Del Rio, Texas, walked 35 miles from the Capitol to the detention center, joined by activists along the way and ending in a vigil at the center.
“Everyone I have talked to about this is shocked that here on American soil we are treating helpless mothers and innocent children as prisoners,” says Johnson-Castro, who had previously walked 205 miles along the border to protest the proposed border wall. “This flies in the face of everything we claim to represent internationally.”
A coalition of attorneys, community organizations and immigrants rights groups called Texans United for Families is working to close the facility. The University of Texas Immigration Law Clinic is considering a lawsuit challenging the incarceration of children.
Valdez sees the center as a political statement by the government.
“Our country likes to detain people,” says Valdez. “I think it’s backlash for the protests that happened in the spring - like, ‘We’re going to show you that you’re not that powerful.’ It’s about power.”
Groups Seek to Close Immigrant Center
AP - NYT
Thursday 22 February 2007
Washington - Advocacy groups for immigrant families and the Department of Homeland Security are at odds over detention facilities in Texas and Pennsylvania that critics argue are inhumanely housing adults and young children in jail-like conditions.
In a report released Thursday, groups speaking for immigrants demanded the immediate closure of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center north of Austin, the Texas capital, a facility that once was a jail.
The advocacy groups - the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services - said they based their complaints on visits to these sites by their members and interviews with detainees.
At the Hutto site, their report said, a child secretly passed a visitor a note that read: “Help us and ask us questions,” it said. The groups reported that many of the detainees cried during interviews.
“What hits you the hardest in there is that it’s a prison. In Hutto, it’s a prison,” said Michelle Brane, detention and asylum project director for Women’s Commission.
At a news conference, the groups charged that some families are kept up to two years in the facilities, with those petitioning for asylum or trying to prove they shouldn’t be deported, remaining there the longest.
“We are taking people who fear persecution and locking them up,” said Ralston H. Deffenbaugh, president of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.
The Homeland Security Department defended the centers as a workable solution to the problem of illegal immigrants being released, only to disappear while awaiting hearings. Also, they deter smugglers who endanger children, said Mark Raimondi, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS division that oversees detention facilities.
“ICE’s detention facilities maintain safe, secure and humane conditions and invest heavily in the welfare of the detained alien population,” Raimondi said.
White House press secretary Tony Snow said last week that finding facilities for families is difficult, and “you have to do the best with what you’ve got. ”
The Pennsylvania center - the Berks County Shelter Care Facility - has about 84 beds and the Texas facility can house up to 512 people. The groups fear that government will expand detentions in similar facilities.
The facility in Leesport, Pa., about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia, is a former nursing home and “less jail-like,” allowing families to go on field trips and having a better education system for children. But it also has problems, the groups said. It is part of a larger juvenile facility housing U.S. citizens charged with or convicted of crimes and detained juveniles.
The groups suggested that immigration officials release families who are not found to be a security risk, and said the federal government should consider less punitive alternatives to the detention centers, such as parole, electronic bracelets and shelters run by nonprofit groups.
“Unless there’s some crime or some danger, families don’t belong in detention,” Deffenbaugh said. “This whole idea of trying to throw kids and their parents in a penal-like situation is destructive of all the normal family relationships we take for granted.”
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
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