A “sinister new America.”
Now that we’ve driven Jose Padilla certifiably insane, we’ve dropped our ‘dirty bomb’ charges against him … we’re all heart, eh? His trial is commencing — the legal eagles over at FireDogLake will cover it, so visit them to catch the latest.
The conservative testosterone-pumping love affair with the merciless, hard-ass persona was on display at the latest Pub cook-off and presidential debate the other day. Hosted by FOX News [and proving the wisdom of the Dem candidates in refusing their sponsorship] they were given a grisly terrorist attack scenario to respond to … the majority tried to out-spit each other, with Tancredo summoning the spectre of Jack Bauer, FOX TV fictional spy-boy and ruthless torturer, as the answer to all our security needs. FOX has recently ordered two more years of this programming, wildly popular with its audience.
Tancredo is a lover of big fictions anyway — here’s a quote:
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“We are the last best hope of Western civilization. When we go under, Western civilization goes under.”
And here’s Mitt Romney:
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“I am glad [detainees] are at Guantanamo. I don’t want them on our soil. I want them on Guantanamo, where they don’t get the access to lawyers they get when they’re on our soil. I don’t want them in our prisons, I want them there. Some people have said we ought to close Guantanamo. My view is we ought to double Guantanamo.”
I watch more TV now than I used to … I use it to decompress. I pick shows with complex characters and clever writing — and no, I don’t watch 24. I’ve long followed Crossing Jordan and Boston Legal — BL has a history of taking on political topics with aplomb and wit, and they seldom fail me. Recently, their leading character, Alan Shore, took on the case of a man suing Gitmo. Shore’s trial summations are genius at poking holes in our hypocrisy and soiled national “values.” CJ went political the other day by having one of their beloved characters, Bug, an East Indian immigrant, arrested and tortured by Homeland Security. We got up close and personal with blank-eyed intimidation, lack of habeas corpus and water boarding.
Art imitating life. We torture. Some of us like it. The Pubs even seem to brag about it.
First article is on Padilla. Second piece is a truly frightening account of abduction — I swear, this is the actual Evil in the Axis. What we’ve seen in terms of Bush’s WOT over these last years is the REAL terror we live under — the “be afraid” smoke they blew up our bums, and still try to, is nothing compared with what we are willing and able to do to one another to be “safe” [sic].
The third story here is about the Fort Dix Six — I saw that one of them had asked for bail today. What a dreamer! They’ll be lucky to see the light of day again. The next bit tells us about what’s being done with those “usual suspects” [by the thousands] that Bush’s “surge” is producing — there is no other word for what’s happening there than obscenity. 24/7, year after year. And as counterpoint to that one, I’ve added current news about our boys recently kidnapped and killed. Our warriors were frantic to find bodies, to take prisoners — I’d suspect that a good many innocents were killed or terrorized in that quest.
As long as we believe that “right” is on our side, we will not see our own actions mirrored back to us. Yet with no problem killing and torturing, now, we have no moral high ground to stand on when it happens to our own. War is the end to reason — it’s a monstrous proposition. The incident in question is also a glaring portrait of an under-staffed, under-trained and under-equipped military. What did these kids die for? Anybody know?
Toward the bottom, I’ve included an Andrew Sullivan [conservative ... but not quite, anymore] editorial from the archives, on Jose. That’s the piece from which I’ve borrowed this posts ledeline. And last, I’ve included a short piece for those not familiar with Jack Bauer and his bloody hijinks on the “real time” sensation, 24.
As sickening as terrorist attacks are, our response to them has proven this nation to be full of vengeful, frightened children and characters out of The Lord of the Flies. As Einsten put it:
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“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”
Jude
US terror trial begins, minus dirty bomb charge
Times, UK
May 14, 2007
An American terrorist suspect arrested five years ago and held without charge as an “enemy combatant” will finally go on trial today, but prosecutors have been forced to drop allegations of a radioactive bomb plot.
Jose Padilla became a cause célèbre for the US civil rights movement who argued he was held illegally after his arrest at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in 2002. He was accused of planning a dirty bomb attack on America.
Despite being a US citizen, he was classed as an “enemy combatant” and taken to a Navy base in South Carolina for interrogation. He was given no access to a lawyer and charged with no offences for three and a half years. He also claims he was tortured while in custody.
Mr Padilla will appear at a federal court in Miami today accused of plotting to murder, kidnap and maim people outside of the United States and of aiding a US al-Qaeda cell, which provided recruits and funding to Islamist extremists around the world.
The charges brought against Mr Padilla will be an embarrassment to the Justice Department who justified his extra-legal detention by citing far more serious allegations.
“The crimes he has been charged with pale in comparison to the initial allegations,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor University of Miami. “This is a far cry from being a major front in the government’s war on terrorism.”
The 36-year-old of Puerto Rican descent was a Chicago gang member before converting to Islam. He was arrested after returning from Pakistan where it is alleged he was undergoing jihadist training.
Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, both 45, are also due in court today. They will also be charged with assisting an American al-Qaeda cell, it will be argued that they were the men responsible for recruiting Mr Padilla.
Mr Hassoun and Mr Jayyousi were under FBI surveillance for much longer than Mr Padilla. The prosecution will present hundreds of intercepted phone calls and various money transfers between the two men and alleged al-Qaeda operatives.
The key piece of evidence against Mr Padilla is an application form for an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, prosecutors say the document was filled in in July 2000 and bears his fingerprints.
There will be absolutely no mention of the dirty bomb plot, which led to his initial arrest, during the trial. Nothing Mr Padilla told interrogators during his three years in the military prison is admissible.
Mr Padilla was transferred to the civilian judicial system in 2005 before the Supreme Court was asked to rule on the legitimacy of his detention. In 2003 a panel of three judges ruled that the internment of a US citizen in a military camp outside the American legal system was not justified.
President Bush and the White House rejected this decision and relented only when a legal challenge in the Supreme Court was pending.
The then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, released details of the allegations against Mr Padilla. There were two major allegations. He was accused of conspiring with another man to blow up high-rise apartments in New York or Washington by renting as many flats as possible in a single block and leaking gas into them.
He was then said to have decided it would be impossible to rent so many apartments without raising suspicions. At this point he allegedly proposed the dirty bomb plot as an alternative.
The Justice Department billed his arrest as a major breakthrough in the War on Terror at a time when the intelligence services were under scrutiny for their investigations in the run up to the September 11 attacks.
Mr Padilla’s lawyers have alleged that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, threats of execution, exposure to noxious fumes and extreme heat and cold, and was forced to wear a hood during his detention at the Navy base.
In the case, which is expected to last until August, the three men will plead not guilty and could be sentenced to life imprisonment if found guilty. ++
Two Immigrants Say U.S. Agents Drugged Them
Rob Schmitz, NPR
Sunday, May 13, 2007
In Los Angeles, the unusual case of two immigrants whose deportations were botched by U.S. immigration officials has allowed a rare glimpse into internal proceedings within the Department of Homeland Security.
The men say that U.S. immigration officials drugged them in order to ease their removal from the country — but airline officials ultimately put a stop to the deportations.
Both immigrants are back in Los Angeles, appealing their deportations. And they’ve now obtained government medical records that seem to confirm their accounts.
One of the men, Raymond Soeoth, is a Christian minister from Indonesia who came to the United States in 1999 to flee religious persecution. But on Dec. 7, 2004, immigration agents told him he was going to be deported.
Soeoth says that an agent asked him if he needed medication to relax him for the trip. He replied that he did not. But a few hours later, says Soeoth, several agents came into his cell. One of them, he says, was a medic. He was holding a syringe.
“Two officers grabbed my legs, two officers grabbed my hands. Then they opened my pants. And then I said, ‘Why are you guys doing this to me?’ and I was crying and crying, and I said ‘Why? I’m not animal.’”
Soeoth says the medic injected him in the buttocks. He says he lost consciousness on the way to the airport. The deportation was eventually cancelled because agents failed to notify airline security.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement medical records, Soeth was injected with Haldol, a very powerful sedative.
In Soeoth’s case, his government medical records say a physician prescribed Haldol because Soeoth threatened to kill himself if he was deported.
Soeoth denies that he said this; there is no documentation in his medical records of any other suicide threats, or any history of mental illness.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman Mark Raimondi says sedation is sometimes necessary, but that he cannot talk about Soeoth’s specific case.
Still, Raimondi says that before drugs were administered, “First there would be an attempt to do verbal counseling to get the detainee to comply and calm down. If that failed, the attempt would be to do physical constraints. If that failed, then, as a last resort, a sedative could be administered.”
Raimondi says forcefully injecting a detainee with a sedative would only occur in extraordinary circumstances.
That appeared to be the case in February of 2006, when immigration agents told Senegalese immigrant Amadou Diouf that he was going to be deported. A federal court had given Diouf a stay of deportation, but agents brought him to the airport anyway.
On the plane, Diouf asked to speak to the pilot. He says this angered his government-appointed medical escort, who tried to force Diouf into the plane’s lavatory.
“He took the bag out, and he took the syringe,” Diouf said. “At that point I knew that, you know, they’re going to sedate me. Next thing you know, I refused to get inside the lavatory anyway, and I was pushed to the back and wrestled to the ground.”
Diouf says agents injected him with a drug, and then they were kicked off the plane. He says his legs were so numb that on the way out, he fell down the plane’s stairs onto the tarmac.
Diouf’s medical records confirm that he was given medication. It does not list the type of medication.
The American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is representing both Soeoth and Diouf says his organization is investigating whether to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security. ++
Rob Schmitz reports from member station KQED.
Judge: Hold Fort Dix plotters ‘indefinitely’
JOHN MARTINS, Press of Atlantic City
Saturday, May 12, 2007
CAMDEN — As U.S. marshals escorted Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer into a federal courtroom Friday morning, the 22-year-old flashed a smile and waved at his family like an excited schoolboy.
Dressed in a drab olive prison-issued jumpsuit and wearing leg shackles, he blew a kiss toward his family — some in traditional Muslim headscarves — sitting in a gallery full of reporters.
Shnewer is one of six men — all in their 20s — implicated in a 13-month-long conspiracy to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix, a crime punishable by life in prison. They were arrested Monday night by federal agents and are being held in a Philadelphia detention
center, where a judge ordered them Friday to stay indefinitely.
According to the complaint, Shnewer, a Philadelphia cab driver who lived with his parents in Cherry Hill, was the alleged ringleader of a group of Muslim men who planned to carry out a jihadist attack on the United States, both in this country and overseas.
The group allegedly focused on Fort Dix because one of the men, Serdar Tatar, 23, frequently delivered pizzas from his father’s nearby restaurant to soldiers stationed there.
According to court filings, Shnewer described the Turkish-born Tatar as knowing Fort Dix “like the palm of his hand.”
In court Friday, the men — Shnewer; Tatar; Agron Abdullahu, 24, of Buena Vista Township; and the Duka brothers of Cherry Hill, Dritan, 28, Shain, 26, and Eljvir, 23 — appeared with their court-appointed lawyers for bail hearings before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider.
Assistant U.S. attorneys Stephen Stigall and William Fitzpatrick argued on behalf of the federal government, which requested that all of the men be held without bail.
None but Shnewer contested the detention. Each defense attorney, however, indicated he or she wanted to reserve the right to argue for bail in the future.
Shnewer’s attorney Rocco Cipparone told the court that his client’s family had offered to put up four properties — two in Cherry Hill, one in Pennsauken and one in Hammonton — worth a total of $580,000 as collateral for Shnewer’s release.
Cipparone also said that Shnewer would willingly wear a 24-hour monitoring bracelet.
Stigall, however, said that the violent nature of the crimes makes Schnewer a threat to the safety of the community and a flight risk.
“He ordered a fully automatic AK–47 and conducted surveillance of Fort Monmouth,” Stigall said. “He faces life in prison.”
Cipparone said that Shnewer, who is Palestinian but was born in Jordan, has strong ties to the United States, adding that he is an American citizen, has lived in this country for 20 years and has extended family in New Jersey.
Schneider agreed with the government.
“No condition will reasonably ensure the appearance of the defendant as required or the safety of any other person or the community,” Schneider said.
The Duka brothers, who authorities said are in the country illegally, did not contest their detentions or request a probable cause hearing. Eljvir, or “Elvis,” Duka asked for a copy of the Quran.
The eldest Duka, Dritan, or “Tony,” worked as a roofer. A father of five, he was born in what is now known as the Republic of Macedonia, which was part of Yugoslavia before the Balkan War.
It was unclear Friday where his brothers were born.
In addition to the conspiracy charge, Dritan Duka also is charged with being an illegal alien in possession of a firearm.
According to the complaint against Dritan Duka, he told a government informant that he owned a .357-caliber firearm and was looking to buy several shotguns and revolvers.
Dritan Duka’s attorney, Michael Huff of Camden, said Duka came to the United States when he was 5, living in Macedonia, Italy and Mexico before arriving in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Huff said he did not request bail because the government most likely would keep the brothers in custody for immigration violations anyway.
Agron Abdullahu, a resident alien who works at the ShopRite in Williamstown with two other family members, is charged with the lesser crime of aiding and abetting the other men in obtaining firearms.
In the extensive recorded conversations the government accumulated through two cooperating informants, Shnewer and others said they believed Abdullahu had been a Kosovo sniper.
Abdullahu allegedly was recorded instructing other men how to hold shotguns during one of the group’s training excursions to the Pocono Mountains in Gouldsboro, Pa.
He faces 10 years in prison if convicted. Abdullahu’s attorney, federal public defender Lisa Evans Lewis, asked the court to provide a bail hearing next week on the grounds that his lesser charge makes him eligible to be considered for release. ++
New Detainees Strain Iraq’s Jails
Sharp Rise Follows Start of Security Plan; Suspects Housed With Convicts
Joshua Partlow, Washington Post
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
BAGHDAD — The capture of thousands of new suspects under the three-month-old Baghdad security plan has overwhelmed the Iraqi government’s detention system, forcing hundreds of people into overcrowded facilities, according to Iraqi and Western officials.
Nearly 20,000 people were in Iraqi-run prisons, detention camps, police stations and other holding cells as of the end of March, according to a U.N. report issued last month, an increase of more than 3,500 from the end of January. The U.S. military said late last week that it was holding about 19,500 detainees, up more than 3,000 since the U.S. and Iraqi governments began implementing the security plan in mid-February.
Estimates of those inside Iraqi facilities, where reports of beatings and torture are common, vary widely because detainees are dispersed among hundreds of locations run by different ministries. The U.S. military holds detainees at two main centers, Camp Bucca in southern Iraq and Camp Cropper near Baghdad, and officials say they are committed to avoiding the abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Iraq’s prisons for convicted criminals are managed by the Justice Ministry, but because of crowding in Iraqi army detention centers, authorities have transferred many untried detainees to live with convicts.
“We made some space for them, but now our space is full,” said Deputy Justice Minister Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei. Referring to the military, he added, “This is their problem, not mine.”
Yei, in an interview at his Baghdad office, said the Justice Ministry had taken in 1,843 such detainees from the military from the start of the security plan in February through April 21, an influx that now accounts for more than 15 percent of the ministry’s prison population.
“The reason why there’s more detainees is because there’s more forces on the ground, both Iraqi and coalition, out there doing operations. So you’ve got more people to go out and detain them,” said Brig. Gen. Joseph Anderson, chief of staff for the top American military field commander in Iraq. “The bottom line is we have more than we can handle collectively.”
The Iraqi constitution mandates that documents outlining the preliminary investigation must be submitted to a judge within 24 hours of a suspect’s arrest, with a possible extension of another day. But the flood of prisoners has worsened a situation in which many often wait weeks or months before their cases are heard.
To filter through the rapidly growing list of detainees, authorities have dispatched teams of judges, prosecutors and investigators — known as “tiger teams” — to determine whether there is enough evidence in a case to hold the suspect, according to a Western official in Baghdad familiar with the prison system. But the teams cannot keep up with the influx.
“We’re just storing up a tidal wave of cases, with a judicial system that cannot cope with what they’ve got,” said the official, who is not authorized to speak publicly and was interviewed on condition of anonymity. “They’re basically closing their eyes to the problem under the Baghdad security plan.”
Human rights officials say Justice Ministry facilities offer the best an Iraqi prisoner can hope for, as they generally meet international standards for space and treatment. But officials are increasingly concerned about the detention camps run by the Iraqi army and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police force. In particular, several officials raised concerns about a detention center in Kadhimiyah, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of northern Baghdad. The center, built to hold about 400 people, is said to house more than 1,000, with juveniles mixed into the population, officials said.
Some former inmates at Kadhimiyah have told human rights officials that they were tortured.
“They described routine ill treatment or abuse while they were there,” said a U.N. official in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “Routine beatings, suspension by limbs for long periods, electric shock treatment to sensitive parts of the body, threats of ill treatment of close relatives. In one case, one of the detainees said that he was forced to sit on a sharp object which caused an injury.”
An Interior Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, denied that detainees are abused at the Kadhimiyah facility.
A government legal committee, created under the security plan to monitor prisons, was denied access to Kadhimiyah when it requested an inspection, said Jasim al-Bahadeli, who heads the committee.
Understanding the scope of the Interior Ministry’s detention program is difficult because prisoners are scattered across more than 800 police stations throughout Iraq, and the tracking system is not up to the standards of other ministries, officials said.
“The concern with the [Interior Ministry] is it’s a black hole and no one knows what’s going on inside,” said the Western official.
Under the security plan, the Iraqi army maintains at least five detention facilities in Baghdad, but these are filled with scores, if not hundreds, more people than they were designed to hold, Bahadeli said.
During a recent visit to a detention center in the town of Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad, his committee found 827 prisoners in four wards built for a total of 300 people. A visit to the detention center at Muthana air base in Baghdad revealed 272 people crammed into a facility intended for 75, said Maan Zeki al-Shimmari, another official with the committee.
In cells intended for individuals, “there were six people in every one,” he said. “And if they want to use the bathroom, they have to do it inside these rooms using a bottle.”
The spokesman for the Defense Ministry, Mohammed al-Askari, was not available for comment despite repeated attempts to reach him.
Ahmed Kadhum Latif, 20, said he was imprisoned a year ago at Muthana air base on suspicion of planting a roadside bomb. His account of his detention could not be independently confirmed, but it echoes the reports of human rights officials.
Soon after he was arrested, Latif said, guards demanded he confess. For a while, he refused. “They hung me in the air by my legs and beat me with a stick,” he said in a telephone interview. “They beat me with pipes on my back and my stomach. They said, ‘Will you be confessing now or not?’ ”
Latif said the guards, who were drinking alcohol, used electric shocks to burn his hands and held him for three days without food.
“I finally said, ‘Yes, I have planted the explosives.’ I didn’t do it, but because of the beating, I confessed.”
“No detainee goes in that doesn’t get beaten,” said Shimmari. “They take confessions by force.”
Iraqi government officials acknowledge that the prisons are overcrowded and that abuses have taken place, but they tend to characterize mistreatment as an aberration rather than a systemic problem. Iraq’s minister of human rights, Wijdan Salim, said the soldiers who serve as guards in Iraqi military prisons are not trained to care for detainees.
“It’s not their job,” she said. “They don’t know how to deal with them.”
The State Department chronicled a series of detainee abuses in its human rights report published in March. The report found “many, well-documented instances of torture and other abuses by government agents and by illegal armed groups.”
Instances of abuse inside Defense and Interior Ministry facilities reported by local and international human rights groups included “application of electric shocks, fingernail extractions, and other severe beatings. In some cases, police threatened and sexually abused detainees and visiting family members,” the report said.
To accommodate the burgeoning prison population and try to prevent such mistreatment, U.S. and Iraqi authorities are building two detention facilities in eastern Baghdad, one at an existing prison complex in Rusafa, capable of accommodating 5,250 people. At a camp in Baladiyat, to hold 850 prisoners, detainees will live in tents built for 30 people each, said Yei, the deputy justice minister.
The new prison space is part of a massive project called the Rusafa Law and Order Complex, a fortified compound near the Interior Ministry building that, when finished, will include a courthouse and dormitories for lawyers and judges, within a guarded perimeter. The goal is to create a second Green Zone-style haven where authorities can push through the growing backlog of criminal cases.
“This represents a small step forward — and it must be emphasized that this is merely a foothold — on two fronts: the political will to embrace the rule of law and the capacity to render justice through secure and legitimate proceedings,” U.S. Army Col. Mark S. Martins, senior staff judge advocate, said in a statement. ++
Special correspondents Saad al-Izzi, Naseer Nouri and Naseer Mehdawi contributed to this report.
Report Says Soldiers Were Not Protected
LOLITA C. BALDOR, AP
Thursday, May 17, 2007
WASHINGTON — Three U.S. soldiers slaughtered in a grisly kidnapping-murder plot south of Baghdad last June had been left alone for up to 36 hours in a poorly planned mission, a military investigation concluded. Two officers have been relieved of their commands.
Neither of the officers faced criminal charges as a result of the litany of mistakes that left the soldiers exposed, a military official familiar with the investigation told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
A report on the investigation said the platoon leader and company commander - whose names were not released - failed to provide proper supervision to the unit or enforce military standards.
A seven-page summary of the investigation provided to the AP also said it appears insurgents may have rehearsed the attack two days earlier, and that Iraqi security forces near the soldiers’ outpost probably saw and heard the attack and “chose to not become an active participant in the attack on either side.”
“This was an event caused by numerous acts of complacency, and a lack of standards at the platoon level,” said the investigating officer, Lt. Col. Timothy Daugherty, in the summary.
Three 101st Airborne Division soldiers were killed in the June 16, 2006, attack. Spc. David J. Babineau, of Springfield, Mass., was found dead at the scene, and two others - Pfc. Kristian Menchaca of Houston and Pfc. Thomas Tucker of Madras, Ore. - were abducted. Their mutilated bodies were found three days later, tied together and booby-trapped with bombs.
Details of the attack and what led up to it came as thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces were scouring the same area near Youssifiyah, in what’s called the Triangle of Death, for three soldiers believed to have been abducted last Saturday by an al-Qaida-related group.
According to the investigation of last June’s attack, Tucker, Menchaca and Babineau were ordered to guard a mobile bridge over a canal in order to prevent insurgents from planting mines. Other members of their platoon, who were at two locations up to three-quarters of a mile away, heard small arms fire at 7:49 p.m. When they arrived at the checkpoint about 25 minutes later, Babineau was dead and the others were gone.
Daugherty said the soldiers were told to stand guard for up to 36 hours with just one Humvee, and there were no barriers on the road to slow access to them or provide early warning.
To expect them to operate an observation post for 24 to 36 hours was unrealistic, he said.
“From the time a vehicle was seen, it would have been in front or beside the (Humvee) in a matter of seconds,” he wrote.
Daugherty concluded that the platoon did not get the supervision or direction it needed. And he said the unit was hurt by the loss of 10 troops, including several leaders, who were killed in action as well as by the need to shuffle the platoon’s leadership three times.
The platoon also had been dogged by an ongoing investigation into the rape and killing of an Iraqi girl and the killing of her family by several other members of the unit.
Daugherty said there was no malicious intent by the officers who were leading the unit.
“Although the leaders in this platoon care and are staying in the fight, the platoon is frayed,” he said in his report.
Daugherty’s investigation found no evidence linking the three soldiers’ deaths to the rape-murder, which occurred three months earlier. An al-Qaida-linked group, the Mujahedeen Shura Council, claimed last July that the attack on Babineau, Menchaca and Tucker was revenge for the rape-killing.
Lt. Gen. James D. Thurman, who was serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad last year, ordered the investigation, and later handed out the punishments. His decision to remove the two officers - a lieutenant and a captain - from their commands was a harsher penalty than the one recommended by Daugherty, who suggested they get letters of reprimand.
Thurman, who is now commander of Fifth Corps in Heidelberg, Germany, also accepted Daugherty’s recommendations that the platoon be ordered to stand down for 10 days to address combat stress and get refresher training. In addition, administrative actions were taken against an unknown number of other officers, but those have not been disclosed because they are protected by the privacy act.
Release of the investigation’s results has been delayed for months. The probe was completed and the punishments delivered by last August. Families of the three soldiers were given unclassified briefings on the results of the investigation later in the fall. According to a military official, part of the delay was due to legal reviews and the movement of the units involved out of Iraq.
In the rape-killing case, five soldiers were charged in the March 12, 2006 incident. Three have entered guilty pleas, one soldier’s trial has been delayed and the fifth is being prosecuted in federal court because he had already left the military when he was charged. ++
Jose, victim of a sinister new America
Andrew Sullivan, Time, UK
December 10, 2006
Jose Padilla was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1970, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants. He was a troubled youth, joining a street gang when the family moved to Chicago, and was once jailed for aggravated assault.
After serving his sentence, he converted to Islam and professed non-violence. He went to the Masjid Al-Iman mosque in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and worked for a charity suspected of Islamist terror ties. He visited Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
Returning to Chicago on May 8, 2002, Padilla was arrested and held under a warrant related to the 9/11 attacks. A month later, as a court was about to rule on whether there was any evidence to merit his detention, President George W Bush declared Padilla an “enemy combatant” and he was sent to a military brig in South Carolina. No charges were brought against him for 3½ years.
The basic principle of Anglo-American liberty for several hundred years has been habeas corpus — the notion that the government cannot detain a citizen without charging him with crimes that can be brought before a court and a jury of his peers. It is the keystone of any notion of a free society. For the first time in the history of the United States, it has been indefinitely suspended, and Padilla is the proof.
Padilla was not charged for three years, but he was accused. He was accused by government sources of being part of a plot to detonate a dirty bomb in an American city; he was accused by talk radio of being John Doe No 2 in the Oklahoma City bombing; and he was accused of plotting terrorist acts in the US.
After three years in solitary confinement, the Bush administration feared its detention of Padilla might be struck down by a court, and so it finally decided to charge him with a crime. The charges it brought in November 2005 included no mention of any dirty bomb, no link to Al-Qaeda, and no charge of conspiracy to commit acts of terror in America. A judge threw out other charges. None of the charges that remain involve actual terrorist activity, just of being connected to a group that may have financed such activity in Bosnia and Chechnya.
So Padilla, an American citizen, was detained without being charged for 3½ years. It was nearly two years before he had access to a lawyer.
This is what Padilla’s lawyer claims was done to Padilla in the custody of President Bush: “Mr Padilla was often put in stress positions for hours at a time. He would be shackled and manacled, with a belly chain, for hours in his cell.
“Noxious fumes would be introduced to his room causing his eyes and nose to run. The temperature of his cell would be manipulated, making his cell extremely cold for long stretches of time. Mr Padilla was denied even the smallest and most personal shreds of human dignity by being deprived of showering for weeks at a time, yet having to endure forced grooming at the whim of his captors . . .
“He was threatened with being cut with a knife and having alcohol poured on the wounds. He was also threatened with imminent execution. He was hooded and forced to stand in stress positions for long periods.
“He was forced to endure exceedingly long interrogation sessions, without adequate sleep, wherein he would be confronted with false information, scenarios and documents to further disorientate him. Often he had to endure multiple interrogators who would scream, shake and otherwise assault Mr Padilla.”
As a consequence of this, his legal team now says he is mentally unfit to stand trial. One person who recently interviewed him said the following: “During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body. The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel.”
To put it bluntly: he has been sent mad. Last week, new photographs surfaced of the way in which Padilla has been treated. He needed to be escorted from his cell to get root canal treatment. Padilla has never exhibited any violent behaviour in detention of any kind, according to his jailers. Yet he was manacled head-to-toe, he was barefoot, and given blackout goggles so he could see no light and soundproof ear-muffs so he could hear nothing. He was escorted by three soldiers in full riot gear, visors and weapons. Suddenly, you get a glimpse of the sadism inflicted on him for three years of total isolation.
Could this still happen? Yes, it could. In fact, if another American citizen were today to be arrested by the president, and declared an enemy combatant, he would be barred from any recourse to the federal courts. The Military Commissions Act — passed in the last week of the outgoing Congress before the recent elections — stripped the courts of any jurisdiction over new military commissions set up to try and convict American citizens.
Here’s the language: “Notwithstanding any other law (including section 2241 of title 28, United States Code, or any other habeas corpus provision), no court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider any claim or cause of action whatsoever, including any action pending on or filed after the date of enactment of this chapter, relating to the prosecution, trial, or judgment of a military commission convened under this section, including challenges to the lawfulness of the procedures of military commissions under this chapter.”
So habeas corpus is over in America. The president can now detain any citizen he so designates, remove him from the judicial system and subject him to a military commission, with much weaker rules than a civilian court. Torture is formally banned, but torture techniques such as waterboarding are still at the president’s discretion.
More than two centuries after the construction of the US constitution, almost eight centuries since Magna Carta, Americans are at the mercy of a new king, who can jail without charges and torture at will.
The rationale? A war that has no definable end. The constitution itself declares that habeas corpus is inviolate except in cases of invasion or rebellion. But under this president, the constitution no longer applies. You want proof? Remember Jose Padilla. No one in Washington has. ++
`24′ is good TV, but bad policy for real war on terror
MARY C. CURTIS, Charlotte Observer
5/17/07
Was it wishful thinking, naivete or utter cluelessness?
There’s no denying that — during Tuesday night’s debate of Republican candidates in Columbia — the needle on the applause-o-meter went wild at the mention of Jack Bauer.
Bauer was U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo’s go-to guy when confronted by debate moderators with a hypothetical terrorist attack on the country.
And why not?
Bauer has proven time and again that he can save the country — the world, even — in the space of a day.
The trouble is, Bauer is not an actual person; he is the fictional tough-guy hero of Fox television’s “24.” Tancredo might as well have said he would ask “Spider-Man” to shoot super-strong webbing over the bad guys before hauling them off to the hoosegow.
More troubling is the mood that the comment, and the enthusiastic applause, revealed.
When trying to extract information that will avert doomsday, Jack Bauer will do anything, anything, to make terror suspects talk.
He will break every U.S. law against torture. He will throttle, drug, suffocate and scald. Then he will get serious.
In a February New Yorker article, “24″ co-creator Joel Surnow had no problem acknowledging the show’s appeal in a post 9-11 world. He said the series is “ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people’s fears are — their paranoia that we’re going to be attacked.”
“There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,” Surnow told the magazine’s Jane Mayer. “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer. He’s a patriot.”
No, he’s Kiefer Sutherland giving a performance. The actors on the receiving end of the Bauer treatment may be victims of Hollywood typecasting, but their tender parts aren’t really getting fried.
“24″ is escapist fare; the torture scenes are terror porn. Witness gruesome, dramatically titillating torture scenes, and the torture gradually loses the ability to shock.
It helps that, unlike in real life, the torture always works and Jack never enjoys it. See, he’s a good guy after all.
Real-life military commanders aren’t fans.
A delegation that included the dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and FBI interrogators asked the show’s producers to stop its glamourous torture tableaux. The ethically challenged Jack Bauer is hurting the training of American soldiers who want to be just like him.
I sympathize with the “24″ staff. It’s a TV show. They want ratings, not a seal of approval. Scenes of an actual interrogation will never trump a cattle prod in the kidneys.
Jack Bauer is a black-and-white realist in a world of gray. He’s also as real as “Rambo.”
At the debate, candidate after candidate greeted the terror scenario with strong talk. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California said he would tell the secretary of defense, simply: “Get the information.”
Sen. John McCain was real. A prisoner of war in Vietnam who was subjected to years of torture, he was most adamant in condemning it. “It’s not about the terrorists, it’s about us,” he said. “It’s about what kind of country we are.”
Sounds good, but he’s no Jack Bauer. ++
“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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