That’s the headline at Common Dreams. My sentiments exactly.
I know there are serious things afoot, pull and tug on the Congressional scene, rifts and splits in the Progressive base and more change, change, change that doesn’t fit the picture we had in our mind … but more on that later.
Today a little tribute to a curmudgeon and genius, an old street fighter and bard of his times — and a loss that is at least softened by a lifetime on tape that will help us remember what real guts looked like.
I’ve heard a number of people say Carlin was their hero, and it’s worthwhile examining why that is — George, bless him, made political incorrectness simple, understandable and acceptable … why? Because it was laughable to begin with …. and Carlin blew away the smoke to find the quickest path to the laughs, pulling the trigger on the pomp and prudery that promoted it. You’ll find the transcript to “7 Dirty Words” last.
George Carlin has gone on to whatever’s next … and I hope he likes it better there than he did here. As for me, I’ve selected the image of him as the Bishop in “Dogma,” holding up his Buddy Christ icon and talking shit, to remember today … and if that next place has a sense of humor, he’ll be welcomed with laughter and and a standing ovation.
Yet for those of us left behind, destined to no longer have an irreverent but relevant reflection from time to time to keep us cheered, there’s only one response: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!
Jude
George Carlin Mourned as a Counterculture Hero
AP via CommonDreams
Monday, June 23, 2008
LOS ANGELES - Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.
“He was a genius and I will miss him dearly,” Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
Carlin’s jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the “Seven Words” - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government’s authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
“So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I’m perversely kind of proud of,” he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the “Saturday Night Live” debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was “loaded on cocaine all week long” - and appearing some 130 times on “The Tonight Show.”
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
“Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?” he once mused. “Are they afraid someone will clean them?”
He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, “George was fairly conservative when I met him,” said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early ’60s.
“We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away,” Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. “It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn’t exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction.”
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
“The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,” Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. “There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.”
Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
“Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot,” his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”
Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.
Only problem was, it didn’t work for him, and they broke up by 1962.
“I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn’t really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people,” Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, “It’s Bad For Ya.”
Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show “Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends” and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit “Cars.”
Carlin’s first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.++
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
LA Times FunnyPages
Jun 23 2008
One of my favourite comedians has passed away at age 71. Carlin was best known for his routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television,” which appeared on 1972’s “Class Clown” album. He will surely be missed and at least we have 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, television shows and movie appearances to remember him by.
My favourite Carlin quotes:
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
If God had intended us not to masturbate he would’ve made our arms shorter.
One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
Is a vegetarian permitted to eat animal crackers?
As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It’s just stale bread to begin with.
I’ll be watching random George Carlin youtube videos all day long. ++
George Carlin
Carlin speaks up about what’s wrong with Mickey Mouse, baby boomers, private property, and political activism.
Ricky Young, MotherJones
March 01, 1997
George Carlin wanted to be Danny Kaye when he grew up. Instead, his straight-arrow career was hijacked by the counterculture, and he became the angry voice of a generation. Today, he laments that generation’s loss of idealism, but he does so driving a BMW and luxuriating in his private flotation tank, which he calls “Our Lady of Good Salt.” After decades of misanthropic stand-up, Carlin promises that a newfound grace infuses his book Brain Droppings, which Hyperion is publishing this spring. “There’s a surprising amount of innocence and sweetness in it,” he says. And even though he excoriated Mickey Mouse when the “imaginary rodent’s” 65th birthday became a news item, the comedian wants you to celebrate when he turns 60 in May.
Q: Let me read you something from your own act: “I hope Mickey dies. I do. I hope he goddamn dies. I hope he gets ahold of some tainted cheese…”
A: “…and dies lonely and forgotten behind the baseboard of a soiled bathroom in a poor neighborhood with his hand in Goofy’s pants.”
Q: What did Mickey Mouse ever do to you?
A: That’s not how these things generate themselves. What Mickey Mouse did to me was to represent something — in this case, meaningless shit on the news, the way they fill our minds with all this stuff to distract us from the real tragedy. He’s a symbolic figure.
Q: This spring marks your 20th year on HBO, your 40th year in show business, and your 60th year on the planet. What makes your birthday different from Mickey Mouse’s?
A: I hope they don’t ever use my birthday as a news item. That would be one distinction. I would also hope to tell people I’m 60 because it’s a nice human fact for a guy like me to make it all the way to 60.
Q: Do you exercise?
A: I use a treadmill because I’ve had three heart attacks. My father died at 57. His first symptom of heart trouble was a trip to St. Raymond’s Cemetery.
Q: Do you have any of the appliances or equipment that you make fun of in your comedy routines: camcorders, pasta makers…?
A: I have no pasta maker. I probably have a device at home that would take pictures of moving images and would pass for a camcorder, but I don’t know where it is.
Q: What rating will your upcoming HBO special get?
A: Under the new rating system? I don’t know all the terminology of that system yet.
Q: Somewhere around an NC-17?
A: Or NC-35, even.
Q: Has censorship gotten stronger or weaker during your years in the business?
A: I think the trend to control speech — and therefore thought — continues. Because of the freer flow of information now, there’s more on the side of free thought.
Q: You have called baby boomers whiny, sarcastic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, cold, bloodless people…
A: …This is rhetoric. Rhetoric paints with a broad brush. I try to find targets I feel something about and express it my way, so it’s usually overdone.
Q: But aren’t boomers the main audience for HBO?
A: Baby boomers helped me a great deal in my career. They launched me. They were there for me to sing my song to. And I’m not saying I’m better than anyone, but I think they turned that anti-authority baby boom mentality into their own enemy. Now I identify very closely with their children.
Q: What went wrong?
A: The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god — that there’s a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn’t want you to do and you’ll burn for a long time if you do them — and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That’s the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on the stage. I feel betrayed by the people I’m part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures.
Q: Is there anyone or anything you like?
A: I love individuals. I think people are terrific as I meet and get to know them. I like imagination. I like the freedom that this society manages to parcel out to us in the midst of the rest of what they do to you. I also like thinking about the fact that the atoms in me are the same atoms that are in all the rest of the universe, and that every one of those atoms came from the middle of a star. In other words, it’s only me out there.
We use up words like “spiritual” so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago “spiritual” had a distinct meaning. But now there’s a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus — is “bogosity” a word? It should be — a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it “how I fit.”
Q: Speaking of how you fit, where do you fit on the political spectrum?
A: If the center line is really there, and I were anywhere, I would come down on the left of center.
Q: Right there with Bill Clinton.
A: I like Bill, by the way. If there were only one cherry pie in the world, and Bill Clinton owned it, I might get a piece of it. If Bush or Reagan owned it, you’d have to kill them to get a piece of pie. That’s my feeling about Bill. And Bill’s a good bullshitter. America likes a good bullshitter. That’s one of the reasons he was re-elected. Honesty has no place in politics. It would throw everything off.
Q: You don’t vote now. When was the last time you voted?
A: Maybe 1980.
Q: Carter?
A: That probably would have been it. And that would have been one of the few lines I voted on. I’m on the left because I think there’s a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don’t think much of political activism. It’s so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I’ve said that about environmentalists — I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction.
Q: But you have no particular love for the planet. You’ve wished disasters upon it.
A: When you look at it from that one picture, the one from space, it’s really a rather attractive thing. I have nothing against the planet per se. I root for the big comet or asteroid as a way of cleansing the planet. The comet or asteroid 65 million years ago is probably what gave us our opening to replace the reptiles. The greatest entertainment I have in my life is chronicling internally, not necessarily for the public, the slow dissolution of order.
Q: You must love the blowing up of buildings for entertainment in Las Vegas.
A: Yes, I do. I saw the Dunes blow up in person.
Q: How is Vegas different from a concert hall for a performance?
A: In Las Vegas, people are there for other reasons, and you are a sideline, an attraction, an “also.” So you don’t get all hard-core fans. Secondly, when you have tables and drinks and a seating arrangement, people are on their guard a little more. They will not reveal as much about themselves in those settings as they will in the darkness of a theater facing front.
Laughter reveals a lot about you. It’s voting in a way. So I’d say I skim off about 10 percent of the venom or 10 percent of the attack stuff on things people hold dear.
Q: Does Mickey Mouse get skimmed off?
A: No, just religion and overt attacks on people’s political affiliations. I don’t use the word “Republican,” for example, though I say a lot about conservatives. There’s something about the word “conservative” that gives people a little more freedom to join you if they want.
Q: It’s self-censorship.
A: Well, editing. It’s accommodating the reality of the world.
Q: Do you really care if they “balance the stupid fucking budget”?
A: I don’t care much about the outcome. I’d like for people to feel better and have better lives, but I don’t think that’s in the cards through political action. I think bloodshed is still the way you get dramatic change. That’ll never happen because they’ve got all the guns now. At least they’ve got the nice guns, the big ones, the ones with night vision.
Q: You sound like one of the Freemen.
A: I’ve said to myself — I don’t think I’ve said it to anyone else — that but for the racism and religious orientation of these militiamen, I very much like the spirit involved there. Those are two points that would stop me. Boy, do they hate “Jews and niggers” — that’s the way they say it, right? And they very much think Jesus has got a pretty good thing coming up soon. The end times, the tribulation…what’s the other word?
Q: Apocalypse?
A: The apocalypse, that’s even better, but there’s another one. The rapture! That sounds like fun.
Q: Are you lonely?
A: There is a core of loneliness. It’s partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn’t metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards.
So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself — I lived through the radio and through my imagination.
One of the interesting things about “outsidership” is that underneath it there’s a longing to belong. I just wish the thing I refused to belong to — the species, Western capital culture — was a little more respectable.
My one true relaxation is my flotation tank, in which I can either meditate or just drift off.
Q: Do you work in there?
A: No, that would defeat the whole idea.
Q: What was the bigger deal out of Dayton, the Bosnian peace accord or you meeting your wife, Brenda?
A: Ah, Brenda over Bosnia every time. These folks are wonderful, these peace people. The whole process of patching up these places that have thousand-year-old wounds….
Q: How have you and Brenda stuck together for more than 30 years?
A: There’s a lot of luck involved. Brenda and I got lucky the very first time and didn’t have to go through several spouses to do it. It’s a kind of complementary way of filling each other out and making each individual more complete. The key for us has always been to put the twosome ahead of either individual whenever that was an issue. That helps. And then, I don’t know, star-crossed something — it’s just magic.
Q: Fate? You believe in that?
A: I’m a believer that things happen. Fate is what happens. ++
Ricky Young is a reporter at the Orange County Register.
What the Media Did for Russert, the People Should Do for George Carlin
Kevin Gosztola, OpEdNews
I wouldn’t just call myself a fan of George Carlin. I never attended any of his comedy concerts, but I did watch his HBO specials on YouTube many times and often remembered what he had said when talking about society with others. I considered him to be a thinker, not just a comedian.
There’s a scene in Mel Brooks’ History of the World Part 1 where Mel Brooks’ character walks up to a window to get welfare and declares his job to be that of a stand-up philosopher.
George Carlin was more than a stand-up comedian. He was a stand-up philosopher.
Carlin broke down societal norms, customs, euphemisms, and human behavior methodically and meticulously.
In his last HBO comedy concert, “It’s Bad for Ya”, he tackled religion perfectly picking apart all the actions we think people must do because of religion.
“Life is Worth Losing” was a masterfully done comedy concert. While I enjoyed the earlier portion of the HBO special, I will never forget the “all suicide channel”, Carlin’s idea for a reality television show that would make tons of money because people, especially Americans, would enjoy watching people commit suicide. They would even line up to be on the channel.
I liked the more cynical George Carlin perhaps because this Bush administration has made me more cynical. I still have my ideas but life under King George makes your mind an easy target for the unmatched candor, cynicism, and wit of a genius like Carlin.
From his book, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? to the HBO specials to Carlin as the first host of Saturday Night Live to Carlin’s 7 words and to Carlin dissecting airplane announcements and talking about Persian Gulf warfare, George Carlin will be sorely missed, not just by me but by others who followed his career and by those who will come across him in the future.
I’m reading Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America by Richard Zoglin. Carlin was part of a counterculture revolution in comedy that changed the way comedy treated society and this revolution happened not just because of Carlin but because people like Richard Pryor, Robert Klein, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Albert Brooks, and Andy Kaufman created comedy with no boundaries that allowed every comedian to be smart, wild, and wise.
Of the seven comedians who started the comedy revolution, Carlin is the only one who continued on without feeling the need to make it big in something other than stand-up.
It is fitting that George Carlin is the 11th person to be awarded the Mark Twain American Humor award because he really stood up to the bullshit in the way that Mark Twain did during his life.
All I can say is the bullshit finally got to him.
He didn’t die of heart failure. He died from bullshit. ++
Sh*t: The Great One Is Gone
Richard Volaar, OpEdNews
June 23, 2008
The…dog…did it.
Death sucks.
St. John’s Hospital…the bringer of such good news as gerbils up the behind of Richard Gere…apparently didn’t take Carlin’s chest pains as seriously as they needed to.
I have to say that I didn’t much care for Carlin of late: the increasing cynicism and “dry drunk” behavior generally left me feeling, well, dry. On the other hand, while I had long since outgrown the old “fart jokes,” they pulled me through puberty and made my own battles with depression much more bearable. For that, George, I thank you.
Without a doubt, Carlin impacted us all in ways we’ll only now become familiar with.
I hope, given all the cocaine that inevitably weakened Carlin’s heart, he at least made, “the double yellow line.”
The dry drunk behavior Carlin exhibited in recent years is indicative of an addict who can not reconcile the need for a loving and personal “higher power” in a world made crazy by people who don’t even recognize that this is a problem for us all.
Nevertheless, his last great contribution, “Who Owns You,” was an important contribution to our social conscience and discourse. I grit my teeth at the hopeless, powerless, despairing place that his insights come from; however, they are nevertheless, “true dat.”
The only way OUT is IN. The only way IN, is OUT. I pray that George is pleasantly and happily surprised that god as he understands him actually likes fart jokes, freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, and people brave enough to be angry at those who can not see, much less appreciate, the simple truth plainly expressed. ++
How George Carlin Changed Comedy
RICHARD ZOGLIN, TIME Mag
Monday, Jun. 23, 2008
When the culture began to change in the late 1960s — when the old one-liner comics on the Ed Sullivan Show were looking pretty tired and irrelevant to a younger generation experimenting with drugs and protesting the War in Vietnam — George Carlin was the most important stand-up comedian in America. By the time he died Sunday night (of heart failure at age 71), the transformation he helped bring about in stand-up had become so ingrained that it’s hard to think of Carlin as one of America’s most radical and courageous popular artists. But he was.
When he broke into TV in the mid-1960s, on shows like Merv Griffin and Ed Sullivan, Carlin started doing stand-up comedy in the early ’60s and had fashioned a successful career by the middle of the decade: a short-haired performer with skinny ties, well known to TV audiences for his sharp parodies of commercials and fast-talking DJs and a “hippy dippy weatherman.” But as he watched the protest marches of the late ’60s and absorbed the new spirit of the counterculture, Carlin decided that he was talking to the wrong audience, that he need to change his act and his whole attitude.
So he grew long hair and a beard and began doing different kinds of material — about drugs and Vietnam and America’s uptight attitude toward language and sex. Fans of the old George Carlin weren’t ready for it. Carlin got thrown out of Las Vegas twice for material that today would seem tame (one offending routine was about his own “skinny ass”). At the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wis., he so riled up a conservative crowd with his jokes about Vietnam that he nearly caused an audience riot. Even Johnny Carson banned him as a Tonight show guest for a time because of his reputation as a drug abuser.
But by the early ’70s Carlin had completed a remarkable change, opened up a new audience for stand-up comedy and helped redefine an art form. Like Lenny Bruce — whom he idolized and who helped him get his first agent — Carlin saw the stand-up comic as a social commentator, rebel and truthteller. He challenged conventional wisdom and tweaked the hypocrisies of middle-class America. He made fun of society’s outrage over drugs, for example, pointing out that the “drug problem” extends to middle-class America as well, from coffee freaks at the office to housewives hooked on diet pills. He talked about the injustice of Muhammad Ali’s banishment from boxing for avoiding the draft — a man whose job was beating people up losing his livelihood because he wouldn’t kill people: “He said, ‘No, that’s where I draw the line. I’ll beat ‘em up, but I don’t want to kill ‘em.’ And the government said, ‘Well, if you won’t kill people, we won’t let you beat ‘em up.’”
Most famously, he talked about the “seven words you can never say on television,” foisting the verboten few into his audience’s face with the glee of a classroom cut-up and the scrupulousness of a social linguist. While his brazen repeating of the “dirty” words caused a sensation (and prompted a lawsuit that eventually made it to the Supreme Court, resulting in the creation of the “family hour” on network television), his intention was not just to shock; it was to question our irrational fear of language “There are no bad words,” said Carlin. “Bad thoughts. Bad intentions. And woooords.”
Fuzzy language and fuzzy thinking were always among Carlin’s favorite topics. He marveled at oxymorons like “jumbo shrimp” and “military intelligence,” and pointed out the social uses of euphemism: “When did ‘toilet paper’ become bathroom tissue’? When did house trailers become ‘mobile homes’?” He reminisced about his class-clown antics and Catholic upbringing in the rough Morningside Heights section of New York City. He took on all the taboos, even the biggest one, God. How could the Almighty be all-powerful, mused Carlin, since “everything he ever makes … dies.”
In the 1970s Carlin was selling out college concerts, releasing bestselling records (his breakthrough 1972 album, FM & AM, spent 35 weeks on the Billboard pop charts, revitalizing a comedy-record business that had fallen on hard times). When NBC introduced a new late-night comedy show in 1975 called Saturday Night Live, Carlin was the comedian they turned to as the first guest host. And when HBO began rolling out its influential series of “On Location” comedy concerts, Carlin was among its most popular stars, headlining a record 14 one-man shows for the network, the last just a few months ago.
Carlin was a product of the counterculture era in lifestyle as well as comedy. His drug use became so heavy in the mid-’70s that it began to affect his health (he had a heart attack in 1978, the start of heart problems that eventually killed him) and his career as well. “I really wasn’t being as creative,” Carlin admitted years later. “I lost years. I could have been a pole vaulter in those years, and instead I was kind of like doing hurdles.”
But in the early ’80s, after kicking his drug habit, he revived his career, becoming a kind of curmudgeonly uncle, with small-bore “observational” humor and an aphoristic style. Then, in the ’90s, he tacked back to harder-edged political material, railing against everything from the environmental movement to the middle-class obsession with golf. Even in his late ’60s, Carlin could be as perceptive on the cliches and buzzwords of the era as ever:
“I’ve been uplinked and downloaded. I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech lowlife. A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art, bicoastal multitasker, and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond…”
Carlin’s material grew increasingly dark in later years, to the point where he was cheerleading (with only a trace of irony) for mass suicide and ecological disaster. “I sort of gave up on this whole human adventure a long time ago,” he said a couple of years ago. “Divorced myself from it emotionally. I think the human race has squandered its gift, and I think this country has squandered its promise. I think people in America sold out very cheaply, for sneakers and cheeseburgers. And I don’t think it’s fixable.”
But Carlin’s career, and his comedy, was anything but a downer. He was unique among stand-ups of his era in remaining a top-drawing comedian for more than 40 years, with virtually no help from movies or TV sitcoms. His influence can be seen everywhere from the political rants of Lewis Black to the “observational” comedy of Jerry Seinfeld. He showed that nothing — not the most sensitive social issues or the most trivial annoyances of everyday life — was off-limits for smart comedy. And he helped bring stand-up comedy to the very center of American culture. It has never left. ++
Richard Zoglin’s book Comedy on the Edge: How Stand-Up in the 1970s Changed America was published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.
George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words
Justin R. Erenkrantz
The big seven words you weren’t allowed to broadcast were: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.
Here is the original Carlin comedy routine that caused the Fracas.
“I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they’re my work, they’re my play, they’re my passion. Words are all we have really.
We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. You know, [humming]. And, then we assign a word to a thought, [clicks tongue]. And we’re stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It’s a matter of how you pick them.
There are some people that aren’t into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They’d have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That’s what they told us they were, remember? ‘That’s a bad word.’ ‘Awwww.’ There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.
And words, you know the seven don’t you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn’t even belong on the list, you know. It’s such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. ‘Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.’ It sounds like a snack doesn’t it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don’t mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can’t eat just one. That’s true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.
Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people’s feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list…like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are…those are heavy-weight words. There’s a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They’re just busy words. There’s a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K’s. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It’s like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.
And we mentioned shit earlier, of course. Two of the other 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words are Piss and Cunt, which go together of course. But forget about that. A little accidental humor there. Piss and Cunt. The reason Piss and Cunt are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said ‘Those are the two I am not going to say. I don’t mind Fuck and Shit, but P and C are out. P and C are out.’ Which led to such stupid sentences as ‘OK, you fuckers, I am going to tinkle now.’
And of course the word Fuck. The word Fuck, I don’t really…well, this is some more accidental humor, but I don’t really want to get into that now. Because I think it takes too long. But I do mean that. I mean, I think the word fuck is an important word. It’s the beginning of life, and, yet it’s a word we use to hurt one other, quite often. And uh, people much wiser than I have said, I’d rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one other. And I of course agree. I wish I know who said it first, and I agree with that. But I would like to take it a step further. I would like to substitute the word fuck, for the word kill in all those movie cliches we grew up with. ‘Okay Sheriff, we’re gonna fuck ya now. But we’re gonna fuck ya slow.’ So maybe next year I’ll have a whole fuckin’ rap on that word. I hope so.
Uh, there are two-way words, but those are the seven you can never say on television. Under any circumstances you just can not say them ever, ever ever, not even clinically. You can not weave them in the panel with Doc and Ed and Johnny, I mean it’s just impossible, forget those seven, they’re out.
But, there are some two-way words. There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? ‘And the cock crowed three times.”Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It’s in the bible.’ There are some Two-way words, like it’s okay for Curt Gowdy [mis-spelled in original transcription. -ed.] to say ‘Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.’ But he can’t say, ‘I think he hurt his balls on that play Tony, don’t you? He’s holding them. He must have hurt them by God.’ And the other two-way word that goes with that one is prick. It’s okay if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don’t finger your prick. No, no.” ++
“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
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
June 23rd, 2008
I don’t know how to reconcile this torture thing — it’s just frikken anti-American. Apologies to the world won’t get it. Restoration of the Geneva Convention is required, and habeas helps, but this is one of those things me mum referenced when she lectured me on fibbing: when you break trust, it takes a long loooong time to regain it.
I don’t know how long it will take us as a nation to regain our honor … or if we can, completely. This was one of those thresholds we dared not pass … before we did – which is why George W. Bush, Barbara’s first-born and the bane of Poppy’s existence … drooling, unwitting dupe of darker forces or canny, greed-mongering participant in the design of fascism … should be in an orange jump suit, accessorized with manacles.
McClatchy news, one of the few ‘good ones’ out there, exploded in the last few days with accounts of the actualities at Gitmo; the Armed Services Committee grilled the Pentagon’s top lawyer yesterday, Dana Milbank writes about that with the scathing contempt it deserves; Major General Anthony Taguba has accused the Bushies of war crimes. And all this on the heels of the Supreme decision has us hanging our heads in shame.
The reads are amazing — here’s Froomkin, Juan Cole, Ted Rall, several of the McClatchy articles and last, even George Will is peeved at John McCain for marching in lock step to betray the Constitution.
Jude
Ann Telaes ‘toon
General Accuses Administration of War Crimes
Dan Froomkin, Washington Post
6/18/08
The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the horrific detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability.
In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees.” He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” And, as Seymour M. Hersh reported in the New Yorker, he was rewarded for his honesty by being forced into retirement…
Abu Ghraib? Doesn’t Ring a Bell.
Dana Milbank, WaPo
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
If ever there was a case that cried out for enhanced interrogation techniques, it was yesterday’s Senate appearance by the Pentagon’s former top lawyer.
William “Jim” Haynes II, the man who blessed the use of dogs, hoods and nudity to pry information out of recalcitrant detainees, proved to be a model of evasion himself as he resisted all attempts at inquiry by the Armed Services Committee.
Did he ask a subordinate to get information about harsh questioning techniques?
“My memory is not perfect.”
Did he see a memo about the effects of these techniques?
“I don’t specifically remember when I saw this.”
Did he remember doing something with the information he got?
“I don’t remember doing something with this information.”
When did he discuss these methods with other Bush administration officials?
“I don’t know precisely when, and I cannot discuss it further without getting into classified information.”
Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) had had enough. “You say you don’t remember it any more clearly than what you’ve said,” he pointed out. “Therefore, going into classified session isn’t going to give us any more information than what you’ve said, which is you had conversations but your memory is bad.”
“Correct,” Haynes agreed.
“And that’s all you remember?”
“Correct,” Haynes repeated.
Luckily for the witness, they don’t allow naked pyramids and simulated electrocutions in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
It was the most public case of memory loss since Alberto Gonzales, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, forgot everything he ever knew about anything. And, like Gonzales, Haynes (who, denied a federal judgeship by the Senate, left the Pentagon in February for a job with Chevron) had good reason to plead temporary senility.
A committee investigation found that, contrary to his earlier testimony, Haynes had showed strong interest in potentially abusive questioning methods as early as July 2002. Later, ignoring the strong objections of the uniformed military, Haynes sent a memo to Donald Rumsfeld recommending the approval of stress positions, nudity, dogs and light deprivation.
Before Haynes took his seat at the witness table yesterday, a parade of underlings pointed the finger at him. The former top lawyer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified that Haynes “was aware that the services had concerns.” The woman on whose legal reasoning Haynes relied for his judgment on torture testified that she was “shocked” that he did so. And the former general counsel for the Navy said he had warned Haynes that the legal reasoning was “inadequate.”
Haynes knew he was in for some cruel and unusual treatment. He took a swig from his Diet Pepsi bottle, put on his reading glasses and announced: “I don’t have a formal opening statement.” He then read his formal opening statement, in which he defended all those things he couldn’t remember doing by saying that “we all rightly fear another assault on our country, one perhaps even more horrific than the last.”
He then rested his elbows on the witness table, revealing a big gold watch on his wrist, and allowed the amnesia to wash over him.
Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) asked when he became aware of a Justice Department memo justifying torture. “I don’t know when I became aware of that,” Haynes replied.
Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) asked about other legal opinions objecting to the techniques. “I do not recall seeing the memoranda,” Haynes answered.
Jack Reed (D-R.I.) asked why Haynes didn’t request the opposing viewpoints. “I don’t know that I was aware of those,” he said. “I don’t recall being aware of any particular memoranda.”
Haynes mixed his forgetfulness with a dash of insolence. He suggested to McCaskill that “it’s important that you understand how the Defense Department works.” He cut off Reed with a “Let me finish, Senator!” and disclosed that he had been too busy to give more attention to the Geneva Conventions: “I mean, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions made every day. This was one.”
Reed, a West Point graduate, was enraged. “You did a disservice to the soldiers of this nation,” he said. “You empowered them to violate basic conditions which every soldier respects, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Geneva Convention. . . . You degraded the integrity of the United States military.”
Haynes, wisely, retreated to his default position. In the span of just a few minutes, he treated the chairman to a whole new level of forgetfulness:
“I don’t recall seeing this memorandum before and I’m not even sure this is one I’ve seen before. . . . I don’t recall seeing this memorandum and I don’t recall specific objections of this nature. . . . Well, I don’t recall seeing this document, either. . . . I don’t recall specific concerns. . . . I don’t recall these and I don’t recall seeing these memoranda. . . . I can’t even read this document, but I don’t remember seeing it. . . . I don’t recall that specifically. . . . I don’t remember doing that. . . . I don’t recall seeing these things.”
In two hours of testimony, Haynes managed to get off no fewer than 23 don’t recalls, 22 don’t remembers, 16 don’t knows, and various other protestations of memory loss.
It was an impressive performance, to be sure. But let’s see him try to do that with a hood over his head, standing on a crate with wires attached to his arms. ++
The Great Torture Scandal
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Thursday, June 19, 2008
McClatchy and other reporters are abruptly pulling the curtain away from the Bush team’s illegal practices in arresting people arbitrarily, declining to offer proof that they were guilty of anything, detaining them indefinitely without trial or charges, and deliberately torturing them to the extent of leaving long-term scars and disabilities. The torture practices originated not with lower-level officers but with Donald Rumsfeld and others in Bush’s inner circle, who then later blamed lower-level officials for developing the ideas that Rumsfeld ordered them to develop. Nothing they have done has survived a court challenge where one has been permitted.
Recent reports, taken together, provide a chilling glimpse of a vast torture operation, deliberately planned out by serial torturers in Bush’s White House and possibly by the president himself. The program was designed to repeal the Geneva Conventions, which the US and Israel have long found inconvenient, even though they were legislated to prevent futher abuses such as those of the Nazis. AP interviews with former detainees show that they were systematically tortured and sometimes permanently injured.
A Senate report details the evidence that Rumsfeld and other high officials were complicit in ordering torture. That is, they are war criminals.
The Bush administration committed clear war crimes at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram, according to Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The only question, he says, is whether anyone will be held accountable.
The Underscretary of Defense for Planning, Douglas Feith abruptly pulled out of his testimony on Capitol Hill about torture techniques, apparently because he was afraid to testify in the same session as Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of Colin Powell. Wilkerson was high enough to hear the real story on a lot of issues and could have shredded Feith’s lies into confetti if they testified together.
Medical examinations of former US detainees shows that they were tortured. The full report is here.
CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredson appears to have argued that virtually anything short of lethal force was permitted. He told the Pentagon that torture “is basically subject to perception.” He did admit the principle that “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”
Then there is the McClatchy series, based on extensive interviews with dozens of released former detainees from Guantanamo and Bagram:
Tom Lasseter writes:
“The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn’t the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers. It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.”
A lot of Bush’s detainees had no connection to international terrorism. Some had even fought the Taliban, been captured, and then were sold to the Americans by the Taliban, who had in the meantime changed turbans and begun pretending to be loyal to Karzai.
At Afghan bases, the US military routinely practiced torture on prisoners.
In fact, the US torture turned some innocent detainees into terrorists, determining them to attack the US on their release.
McClatchy has posted many of the documents on which its series is based.
Aljazeera International interviews McClatchy reporters, who spent a year tracking down and interviewing former detainees.
Part I … and Part II:
[open link for video]
The Public Record wonders why Bush, McCain and the Wall street Journal are rushing to defend torture now.
The tendency of the bureaucracy to experiment on human guinea pigs reached beyond the torture of detainees to mentally distressed Veterans. The Veterans Administration experimented on them with pharmaceuticals, without their knowledge. The VA neglected to tell them the drug they were being fed had serious side effects, including “anxiety, nervousness, tension, depression, thoughts of suicide, and attempted and completed suicide.” Oh, yeah, that’s what a person who has been through hell in Iraq and has post-traumatic stress really needs.
So all these revelations should be on cable news 24/7, right? Not so much.
As Gen. Taguba says, the fact of the extensive torture is not in doubt. The question is whether the Bushies will get away with it. It is looking as though they will. But there are going to be some European countries where Bush and his cronies would be ill advised to visit. ++
OOPS NATION
A Superpower of Lazy Slobs
Ted Rall
Tue Jun 17, 7:59 PM ET
NEW YORK–Tens of thousands of innocent detainees have passed through Guantánamo, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia and other U.S. torture facilities. Thousands remain “disappeared,” possibly murdered. Some may be on one of the Navy vessels recently revealed to have been repurposed as prison ships. Dozens have been beaten to death or killed by willful medical neglect.
For seven years, the Bush Administration, the Democratic Congress and its media allies have denied “unlawful enemy combatants” (or, as Dick Cheney called them, “the worst of the worst” terrorists) the right to habeas corpus, the centuries-old right of persons arrested by the police to face their accusers and the evidence against them in a court of law.
Thanks to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, America’s latest flirtation with fascism is coming to an end. Parts of the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 that eliminated habeas corpus have been declared unconstitutional. Prisoners at Guantánamo and possibly other American gulags, will now be allowed to demand their day in court. Since the government doesn’t have evidence against them, legal experts say, most if not all of “the worst of the worst” will ultimately walk free. “Liberty and security can be reconciled,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
In short: Oops.
“America is back,” Barack Obama has said he will tell the world if he becomes president. Even if McCain wins, Guantánamo will probably be closed. Torture will be re-illegalized. Which is really, really great. But there’s a problem. How do we give back the four years we stole from Murat Kurnaz?
In December 2001, Kurnaz was a 19-year-old German Muslim studying in Pakistan. He was pulled off a bus by Pakistani security services, who delivered him to the CIA for a $3,000 bounty. He was flown to Guantánamo concentration camp, where he received what The Village Voice’s Nat Hentoff calls “the standard treatment: beatings, sleep deprivation, and special month-long spells of solitary confinement in a sealed cell without ventilation.”
He went on hunger strike, and Kurnaz’s tormentors apparently worried he might starve to death. After 20 days “they gagged me and shoved a tube up my nose, stopping several times because the tube filled with blood,” Kurnaz remembers.
What did this “worst of the worst” do to deserve such treatment? Nothing. But don’t take my word for it. Six months into his ordeal, the U.S. military determined, there was “no definite link or evidence of detainee having an association with Al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”
The U.S. government knew Kurnaz was innocent. Yet they held on to him another three and a half years.
Oops.
It would be comforting if the torture of innocent men sold by self-interested bounty hunters were an aberration. It wasn’t. A McClatchy Newspapers analysis confirms the horrifying results of a Seton Hall University study. “Only eight percent of Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces,” reports McClatchy. “86 percent were turned over to the U.S. by Pakistan or by the Northern Alliance,” a coalition of Afghan warlords. “The bounty hunters were often the source of allegations.”
Right-wingers say security matters can only be entrusted to the military. “The courts,” writes Richard Samp of the pro-government Washington Legal Foundation in USA Today, “simply lack the expertise and resources to justify second-guessing military experts on such issues.” Maybe. But the military is run by liars.
“The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush Administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantánamo detention center that many prisoners weren’t ‘the worst of the worst.’ From the moment that Guantánamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least one-third of the population didn’t belong there.”
At least six died at Gitmo. (The Pentagon characterized a spate of suicides as clever acts of “asymmetrical warfare.”)
Oops.
Deranged leaders who carry out horrific acts of mass murder and oppression with the consent of the people are hardly new to American history, reminds Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States. “Begin with the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s,” he told a commencement ceremony at Southern Methodist University.
“Move forward to the Alien and Sedition Acts of the early Republic, and from there to the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Turn then to the arbitrary political arrests of the First and Second World Wars, the many abuses of the Cold War McCarthy era, and from there the civil liberties climate in our time.”
So many oopsies! But those are temporary excesses, Weinstein reassures. “Self-corrective forces at work in American society”–lefties, liberals, a single swing vote on the U.S. Supreme Court–always pull us back before we careen off the brink. Disaster is avoided.
Which would be fine if it weren’t for the problem that: (1) one of these days, Justice Kennedy won’t be around to restore the rule of law. The other problem being (2): a lot of “witches” get drowned during our periodic episodes of madness.
No one was ever held accountable for blacklisting actors or massacring Native Americans. Such tacit endorsement of villainy sets the stage for the next outrage committed during a future “temporary madness” driven by national security worries. Apologies are rare. Penance is scarce and stingy. The government stole the homes and businesses of Japanese-Americans and shipped them to concentration camps during World War II; decades passed before Congress cut them checks for a measly $10,000.
We think we Americans are good people who do bad things when we’re not on top of our game. “Self-corrective forces,” we pat ourselves on our collective backsides, always kick in before we go too far.
But that’s not really how it is.
Some Americans are good. Other Americans are bad. And the good ones are often lazy, willing to let the bad ones get their way. ++
Exams prove abuse, torture by U.S.
Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross
Warren P. Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers
6/18
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military hid the locations of suspected terrorist detainees and concealed harsh treatment to avoid the scrutiny of the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to documents that a Senate committee released Tuesday.
“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC is around. It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques,” Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, a military lawyer who’s since retired, said during an October 2002 meeting at the Guantanamo Bay prison to discuss employing interrogation techniques that some have equated with torture.
Her comments were recorded in minutes of the meeting that were made public Tuesday. At that same meeting, Beaver also appeared to confirm that U.S. officials at another detention facility — Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — were using sleep deprivation to “break” detainees well before then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved that technique. “True, but officially it is not happening,” she is quoted as having said.
A third person at the meeting, Jonathan Fredman, the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, disclosed that detainees were moved routinely to avoid the scrutiny of the ICRC, which keeps tabs on prisoners in conflicts around the world.
“In the past when the ICRC has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD (Defense Department) has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC,” Fredman said, according to the minutes.
The document, along with two dozen others, shows that top administration officials pushed relentlessly for tougher interrogation methods in the belief that terrorism suspects were resisting interrogation.
It’s unclear from the documents whether the Pentagon moved the detainees from one place to another or merely told the ICRC they were no longer present at a facility.
Fredman of the CIA also appeared to be advocating the use of techniques harsher than those authorized by military field guides “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong,” the minutes report Fredman saying at one point.
Beaver testified that she didn’t recall making the comment about avoiding “harsher operations” while ICRC representatives were around, but she said she probably was referring to the need to conduct extended periods of interrogations of detainees without disruption.
The minutes of the Guantanamo meeting were among 25 documents released Tuesday by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is leading a probe of the origins of cruel treatment of detainees in President Bush’s “war on terrorism.”
The administration overrode or ignored objections from all four military services and from criminal investigators, who warned that the practices would imperil their ability to prosecute the suspects. In one prophetic e-mail on Oct. 28, 2002, Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, wrote a colleague: “This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. … Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.” The objections from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines prompted Navy Capt. Jane Dalton, legal adviser to the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, to begin a review of the proposed techniques.
But Dalton, who’s now retired, told the hearing Tuesday that the review was aborted quickly. Myers, she said, took her aside and told her that then-Defense Department general counsel William Haynes “does not want this … to proceed.”
Haynes testified that he didn’t recall the objections of the four uniformed services.
Officials in Rumsfeld’s office and at Guantanamo developed the techniques they sought by reverse-engineering a long-standing military program designed to train U.S. soldiers and aviators to resist interrogation if they’re captured.
The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was never meant to guide U.S. interrogation of foreign detainees.
An official in Haynes’ office sought information about SERE as early as July 2002, the documents show. Two months later, a delegation from Guantanamo attended SERE training at Fort Bragg, N.C. Levin said, “The truth is that senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees.” The documents confirm that a delegation of senior administration lawyers visited Guantanamo in September 2002 for briefings on intelligence-gathering there. The delegation included David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; Haynes; acting CIA counsel John Rizzo; and Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and now the homeland security secretary. Few of the Republicans at Tuesday’s hearing defended the Bush administration’s detainee programs. Guidance provided by administration lawyers “will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation’s military intelligence communities,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C..
Regarding the ICRC, the United States long has complained that other countries such as China or the old Soviet Union prevented independent access to prisoners or made their conditions look better when outsiders were inspecting. The Bush administration appears to have engaged in similar practices, however.
Bernard Barrett, the ICRC’s Washington spokesman, said, “We knew that we did not always have full access to all detainees. It was a fairly serious issue.” “It’s been addressed,” he said. “We are confident we now have access to all detainees at Guantanamo.” ++
‘If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong’
McClatchy
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Following are excerpts from some of the documents released today by the Senate Armed Services Committee:
“The CIA is not held to the same rules as the military. In the past when the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) has made a big deal about certain detainees, the DOD has ‘moved’ them away from the attention of the ICRC. Upon questioning from the ICRC about their whereabouts, the DOD’s response has repeatedly been that the detainee merited no status under the Geneva Convention. The CIA has employed aggressive techniques on less than a handful of suspects since 9/11.
“Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely. Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. The mental part if explained as poorly as the physical. Severe physical pain described as anything causing permanent damage to major organs or body parts. Mental torture described as anything leading to permanent, profound damage to the senses or personality. It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong.
” . . . Any of these techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents. . . . When the CIA has wanted to use more aggressive techniques in the past, the FBI has pulled their personnel from the theatre.
” . . . if someone dies while aggressive techniques are being used, regardless of cause of death, the backlash of attention would be severely detrimental. Everything must be approved and documented.”
* Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel, CIA Counter-terrorism Center, according to the minutes of an Oct. 2, 2002, Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting.
“This looks like the kind of stuff Congressional hearings are made of. Quotes from LTC (lieutenant colonel) Beaver regarding things that are not being reported gives the appearance of impropriety. Other comments like ‘It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong’ and ‘Any of the techniques that lie on the harshest end of the spectrum must be performed by a highly trained individual. Medical personnel should be present to treat any possible accidents’ seem to stretch beyond the bounds of legal propriety. . . . Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”
* e-mail from Mark Fallon, deputy commander, Defense Department Criminal Investigation Task Force to five other DOD officials, Oct. 28, 2002.
“I am forwarding Joint Task Force 170’s proposed counter-resistance technologies. I believe the first two categories of techniques are legal and humane. I am uncertain whether all the techniques in the third category are legal under US law, given the absence of judicial interpretation of the US torture statute. I am particularly troubled by the use of implied or expressed threats of death of the detainee or his family. However, I desire to have as many options as possible at my disposal and therefore request that the Department of Defense and Department of Justice lawyers review the third category of techniques.”
* Gen. James T. Hill, USA, Commander, U.S. Southern Command, in a memo to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Oct. 25, 2002.
“The Air Force has serious concerns regarding the legality of many of the proposed techniques, particularly under Category III. Some of these techniques could be construed as ‘torture,’ as that crime is defined by 18 U.S.C. 2340.
” . . . Implementation of these techniques could preclude the ability to prosecute the individuals interrogated. Successful prosecutions in military commissions or subsequent use of detainee statements in Federal prosecutions will require that the evidence obtained be admissible.
” . . . The Level III techniques will almost certainly result in any statements being declared as coerced and involuntary, and therefore inadmissible. Such a finding may also exclude any evidence derived from the coerced statement. . . .
Additionally, the techniques described may be subject to challenge as failing to meet the requirements outlined in the military order to treat detainees humanely and to provide them with adequate food, water, shelter and medical treatment. Defense counsel will undoubtedly argue that any evidence derived by the prosecution must be excluded because the Government did not abide by its own rules.”
* Col. Donald E. Richburg, USAF, in a memo to the United Nations and Multilateral Affairs Division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Nov. 4, 2002
“The suggested Tier III and certain Tier II techniques may subject service members to punitive articles of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice).
” . . . any information derived from the aggressive techniques, although admissible, will be of diminished value during any subsequent proceedings. The taint concerning the diminished weight accorded the statements would apply not only to the detainee making the statements, but also against those individuals about whom the detainee has provided incriminating information.
” . . . One detainee subjected to these techniques could taint the voluntary nature of all other confessions and information derived from detainees not subjected o the aggressive techniques.”
* Maj. Sam W. McCahon, Chief Legal Advisor, Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Task Force, in a memo to the commander of the CITF, Nov. 4, 2002
“As set forth in the enclosed memoranda, the Army interposes significant legal, policy and practical concerns regarding most of the Category II and all of the Category III techniques proposed.
” . . . From a policy standpoint, employing many of the suggested techniques would create a PA (public affairs) nightmare. The War on Terror is expected to last many years and ultimate success requires strong domestic and international support. Whatever interrogation techniques we adopt will eventually become public knowledge. If we mistreat detainees, we will quickly lose the morale (cq) high ground and public support will erode.”
* Memo from John Ley to the Office of the Army General Counsel, undated
“Navy staff recommends, however, that more detailed interagency policy review be conducted on proposed techniques. Such policy review should address the possibility, if not the likelihood, that techniques will be inadvertently disclosed through the visits to the detainees in Cuba by the International Red Cross or foreign government delegations, which could lead to international scrutiny. Navy staff also recommends that the classification level of counter-resistance techniques be increased to the Top Secret level.”
* Memo from Capt. D.D. Thompson, USN, special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations for Joint Chiefs of Staff matters, to the Director for Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate of the Joint Staff.
“I have discussed this with the Deputy (Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz), (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) Doug Feith and (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Gen. (Richard) Myers. I believe that all concur in my recommendation that, as a matter of policy, you authorize the Commander of USSOUTHCOM to employ, at his discretion, only Categories I and II and the fourth technique listed in Category III (’Use of mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing’).
” . . . While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time. Our Armed Forces are trained to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint.”
* Memo to then-secretary of defense Donald H. Rumsfeld from William J. Haynes II, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, Nov. 27, 2002. Rumsfeld, who used a stand-up desk in this Pentagon office, approved the recommendation, but wrote at the bottom:
“However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?”
“LEA (law enforcement agency) does not believe that coercive interrogation techniques are effective. However, on those rare occasions when these techniques have yielded results, the reliability of the information gathered has proven to be highly questionable. Detainees who are coerced into making admissions often develop strong feelings of anger and resentment toward their interrogators. Instead of creating an environment conducive to fostering continued cooperation, the interrogation process ends up fueling hostility and strengthening a detainee’s will to resist.
“A recovered Al Qaeda training manual instructs its members to expect Americans to use coercive interrogation tactics, even torture, to elicit information. The manual draws attention to these techniques and characterizes them as further proof of the evil and unjust acts which Americans commit against Muslims. Thus, the use of coercive techniques only serves to reinforce these erroneous perceptions. In essence, we end up proving ourselves worthy of the detainees’ righteous resolve and inspiring continued resistance.
“Despite the advice of LEA behavioral experts who have consistently advocated the use of a rapport-based approach, there seems to be a tendency to revert to a shortsighted coercive model of interrogation.”
* Memo from Timothy C. James, Special Agent in Charge, Criminal Investigation Task Force, Guantanamo, to Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, Dec. 17, 2002. ++
America’s prison for terrorists often held the wrong men
Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers
6/15/08
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
They shouted “Allahu Akbar” — God is great — as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar’s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.
Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as “the worst of the worst.”
But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo’s Camp Four who hissed “infidel” and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn’t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.
“He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,” a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.
An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men — and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds — whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials — primarily in Afghanistan — and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.
Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.
While he was held at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, “When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, ‘What is my crime?’ the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs.”
The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.
Of course, Guantanamo also houses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who along with four other high-profile detainees faces military commission charges. Cases also have been opened against 15 other detainees for assorted offenses, such as attending al Qaida training camps.
But because the Bush administration set up Guantanamo under special rules that allowed indefinite detention without charges or federal court challenge, it’s impossible to know how many of the 770 men who’ve been held there were terrorists.
A series of White House directives placed “suspected enemy combatants” beyond the reach of U.S. law or the 1949 Geneva Conventions’ protections for prisoners of war. President Bush and Congress then passed legislation that protected those detention rules.
However, the administration’s attempts to keep the detainees beyond the law came crashing down last week.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that detainees have the right to contest their cases in federal courts, and that a 2006 act of Congress forbidding them from doing so was unconstitutional. “Some of these petitioners have been in custody for six years with no definitive judicial determination as to the legality of their detention,” the court said in its 5-4 decision, overturning Bush administration policy and two acts of Congress that codified it.
One former administration official said the White House’s initial policy and legal decisions “probably made instances of abuse more likely. … My sense is that decisions taken at the top probably sent a signal that the old rules don’t apply … certainly some people read what was coming out of Washington: The gloves are off, this isn’t a Geneva world anymore.”
Like many others who previously worked in the White House or Defense Department, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the legal and political sensitivities of the issue.
McClatchy’s interviews are the most ever conducted with former Guantanamo detainees by a U.S. news organization. The issue of detainee backgrounds has previously been reported on by other media outlets, but not as comprehensively.
McClatchy also in many cases did more research than either the U.S. military at Guantanamo, which often relied on secondhand accounts, or the detainees’ lawyers, who relied mainly on the detainees’ accounts.
The Pentagon declined to discuss the findings. It issued a statement Friday saying that military policy always has been to treat detainees humanely, to investigate credible complaints of abuse and to hold people accountable. The statement says that an al Qaida manual urges detainees to lie about prison conditions once they’re released. “We typically do not respond to each and every allegation of abuse made by past and present detainees,” the statement said.
LITTLE INTELLIGENCE VALUE
The McClatchy investigation found that top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren’t “the worst of the worst.” From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.
Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.
Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.
If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.
Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar’s house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.
The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who’d harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.
“In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role” in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.
He didn’t want his name used, partly because he didn’t want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.
“There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence,” said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. “In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans … the Americans were taking action without checking this information.”
Nusrat Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.
By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan — who’d had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk — was half-mad and couldn’t stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.
Several Afghan officials, including the country’s attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn’t a threat to anyone; he’d been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.
Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a man who’d risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan’s brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.
The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy’s findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.
The Pentagon’s only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.
“These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians,” Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.
“Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban,” he said in a phone interview.
Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.
“It’s all about developing the mosaic … there’s value to both ends of the spectrum,” he said.
Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy’s conclusions squared with their own observations.
“As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless,” a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military’s slang for Guantanamo.
Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command “rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement,” said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. … I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO.”
‘WAR COUNCIL’ REWRITES DETAINEE LAW
At a Pentagon briefing in the spring of 2002, a senior Army intelligence officer expressed doubt about the entire intelligence-gathering process.
“He said that we’re not getting anything, and his thought was that we’re not getting anything because there might not be anything to get,” said Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral who was the head of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the time.
Many detainees were “swept up in the pot” by large operations conducted by Afghan troops allied with the Americans, said former Army Secretary White, who’s now a partner at DKRW Energy, an energy company in Houston.
One of the Afghan detainees at Guantanamo, White recalled, was more than 80 years old.
Army Spc. Eric Barclais, who was a military intelligence interrogator at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan from September 2002 through January 2003, told military investigators in sworn testimony that “We recommended lots of folks be released from (Bagram), but they were not. I believe some people ended up at (Guantanamo) that had no business being sent there.”
“You have to understand some folks were detained because they got turned in by neighbors or family members who were feuding with them,” Barclais said. “Yes, they had weapons. Everyone had weapons. Some were Soviet-era and could not even be fired.”
A former Pentagon official told McClatchy that he was shocked at times by the backgrounds of men held at Guantanamo.
” ‘Captured with weapon near the Pakistan border?’ ” the official said. “Are you kidding me?”
“The screening, the understanding of who we had was horrible,” he said. “That’s why we had so many useless people at Gitmo.”
In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn’t belong there, a former White House official said.
Despite the analyst’s findings, the administration made no further review of the Guantanamo detainees. The White House had determined that all of them were enemy combatants, the former official said.
Rather than taking a closer look at whom they were holding, a group of five White House, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers who called themselves the “War Council” devised a legal framework that enabled the administration to detain suspected “enemy combatants” indefinitely with few legal rights.
The threat of new terrorist attacks, the War Council argued, allowed President Bush to disregard or rewrite American law, international treaties and the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit unlimited detentions and harsh interrogations.
The group further argued that detainees had no legal right to defend themselves, and that American soldiers — along with the War Council members, their bosses and Bush — should be shielded from prosecution for actions that many experts argue are war crimes.
With the support of Bush, Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the group shunted aside the military justice system, and in February 2002, Bush suspended the legal protection for detainees spelled out in Common Article Three of the 1949 Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which outlaws degrading treatment and torture.
The Bush administration didn’t launch a formal review of the detentions until a 2004 Supreme Court decision forced it to begin holding military tribunals at Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ruling last week said that the tribunals were deeply flawed, but it didn’t close them down.
In late 2004, Pentagon officials decided to restrict further interrogations at Guantanamo to detainees who were considered “high value” for their suspected knowledge of terrorist groups or their potential of returning to the battlefield, according to Matthew Waxman, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, the Defense Department’s head official for detainee matters, from August 2004 to December 2005.
“Maybe three-quarters of the detainees by 2005 were no longer regularly interrogated,” said Waxman, who’s now a law professor at Columbia University.
At that time, about 500 men were still being held at Guantanamo.
So far, the military commissions have publicly charged only six detainees — less than 1 percent of the more than 770 who’ve been at Guantanamo — with direct involvement in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; they dropped the charges in one case.
Those few cases are now in question after the high court’s ruling Thursday.
About 500 detainees — nearly two out of three — have been released.
During a military review board hearing at Guantanamo, Mohammed Akhtiar had some advice for the U.S. officers seated before him.
“I wish,” he said, “that the United States would realize who the bad guys are and who the good guys are.”
HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP
How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:
After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.
The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties — advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 — there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees’ backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees — 22 out of 66 — whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who’d been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.
American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.
Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren’t present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them. ++
Militants found recruits among Guantanamo’s wrongly detained
Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
GARDEZ, Afghanistan — Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.
U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he’d made connections to high-level militants.
In fact, he’d become a Taliban leader. When the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency released a stack of 20 “most wanted” playing cards in 2006 identifying militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — with Osama bin Laden at the top — Farouq was 16 cards into the deck.
A McClatchy investigation found that instead of confining terrorists, Guantanamo often produced more of them by rounding up common criminals, conscripts, low-level foot soldiers and men with no allegiance to radical Islam — thus inspiring a deep hatred of the United States in them — and then housing them in cells next to radical Islamists.
The radicals were quick to exploit the flaws in the U.S. detention system.
Soldiers, guards or interrogators at the U.S. bases at Bagram or Kandahar in Afghanistan had abused many of the detainees, and they arrived at Guantanamo enraged at America.
The Taliban and al Qaida leaders in the cells around them were ready to preach their firebrand interpretation of Islam and the need to wage jihad, Islamic holy war, against the West. Guantanamo became a school for jihad, complete with a council of elders who issued fatwas, binding religious instructions, to the other detainees.
Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, acknowledged that senior militant leaders gained influence and control in his prison.
“We have that full range of (Taliban and al Qaida) leadership here, why would they not continue to be functional as an organization?” he said in a telephone interview. “I must make the assumption that there’s a fully functional al Qaida cell here at Guantanamo.”
Afghan and Pakistani officials also said they were aware that Guantanamo was churning out new militant leaders.
In a classified 2005 review of 35 detainees released from Guantanamo, Pakistani police intelligence concluded that the men — the majority of whom had been subjected to “severe mental and physical torture,” according to the report — had “extreme feelings of resentment and hatred against USA.”
The report warned that unless steps were taken to rehabilitate the men, they had the potential of “becoming another Abdullah Mehsud,” a former Guantanamo detainee who became a high-ranking Taliban commander in the Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Mehsud killed himself with a grenade last July to avoid being taken prisoner by Pakistani troops.
“A lot of our friends are working against the Americans now, because if you torture someone without any reason, what do you expect?” Issa Khan, a Pakistani former detainee, said in an interview in Islamabad. “Many people who were in Guantanamo are now working with the Taliban.”
According to Afghan authorities, Mohammed Naim Farouq was a rural gangster, not a terrorist.
“He was with a group that was kidnapping people. It was a criminal group. It did a lot of extortion,” said Attorney General Abdul Jabar Sabit, who interviewed Farouq in Guantanamo.
But, Sabit found, Farouq wasn’t linked to the Taliban or al Qaida when the Americans arrested him.
No more. Since Farouq was released from Guantanamo, the Defense Intelligence Agency said, he’s had a relationship with al Qaida and the Taliban and heads a group of Taliban militiamen.
“Naim was a very, very small guy before, but now that he’s been released, he’s a very big problem,” said Taj Mohammed Wardak, a former Afghan interior minister who also served as the governor of Farouq’s province. “It has a really bad effect when these men return to their communities.”
Discussing the effect that Guantanamo had on him, Farouq measured his words.
“Why did the Americans treat me this way?” he said during an interview with McClatchy in Gardez. “I wanted to keep my district peaceful.”
A NETWORK FOR RADICALIZING
In interviews, former U.S. Defense Department officials acknowledged the problem, but none of them would speak about it openly because of its implications: U.S. officials mistakenly sent a lot of men who weren’t hardened terrorists to Guantanamo, but by the time they were released, some of them had become just that.
Requests for comment from senior Defense Department officials went unanswered. The Pentagon official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, declined interview requests even after she was given a list of questions.
However, dozens of former detainees, many of whom were reluctant to talk for fear of being branded as spies by the militants, described a network — at times fragmented, and at times startling in its sophistication — that allowed Islamist radicals to gain power inside Guantanamo:
Militants recruited new detainees by offering to help them memorize the Quran and study Arabic. They conducted the lessons, infused with firebrand theology, between the mesh walls of cells, from the other side of a fence during exercise time or, in lower-security blocks, during group meetings.
Taliban and al Qaida leaders appointed cellblock leaders. When there was a problem with the guards, such as allegations of Quran abuse or rough searches of detainees, these “local” leaders reported up their chains of command whether the men in their block had fought back with hunger strikes or by throwing cups of urine and feces at guards. The senior leaders then decided whether to call for large-scale hunger strikes or other protests.
Al Qaida and Taliban leaders at Guantanamo issued rulings that governed detainees’ behavior. Shaking hands with female guards was haram — forbidden — men should pray five times a day and talking with American soldiers should be kept to a minimum.
The recruiting and organizing don’t end at Guantanamo. After detainees are released, they’re visited by militants who try to cement the relationships formed in prison.
“When I was released, they (Taliban officials) told me to come join them, to fight,” said Alif Khan, an Afghan former detainee whom McClatchy interviewed in Kabul.
“They told me I should move to Waziristan,” a Taliban hotbed in Pakistan.
Most of the 66 former Guantanamo detainees whom McClatchy interviewed were hesitant to talk about their religious and political transformations in prison.
Ilkham Batayev, a Kazakh, described his stay at Guantanamo in bitter, angry terms. “I learned the traditions of many people,” he said. “Of course it changed me inside, but this is something private.” He said that Arab detainees spent a lot of time teaching him Arabic and giving him lessons about the Quran.
Others said that fellow detainees showed them the path of fundamentalist Islam.
Taj Mohammed, an Afghan detainee, said that the time he spent at Guantanamo studying the Quran and discussing Islam with radicals helped him see the world more clearly.
“There were detainees who did not pray or who spoke with female soldiers,” Mohammed said. “We stopped speaking with these men. Sometimes we beat them.”
The U.S. government accused Mohammed of being a member of two insurgent groups in Afghanistan’s Konar province and taking part in an attack on a U.S. military base.
Mohammed maintained that he was a shepherd. Mohammed Roze, an official with the Afghan government’s peace commission in Konar province, said Mohammed was set up by a cousin with whom he was feuding.
U.S. ATTEMPTS AT SEPARATION BACKFIRE
American officials tried to stop detainees from turning Guantanamo into what some former U.S. officials have since called an “American madrassa” — an Islamic religious school — but some of their efforts backfired.
The original Guantanamo camp, Camp X-Ray, was little more than a collection of wire mesh cells in which detainees were grouped together without much concern for their backgrounds.
In April 2002, U.S. officials shifted the detainees to Camp Delta, which grew to include a series of camps organized by security level.
For example:
Camp One was for better-behaved detainees, who were given toiletry items such as toothpaste and shampoo and more time for outdoor exercise.
Camp Two was set up for cooperative detainees — especially those who helped interrogators — who still posed a high security threat to guards. They were given time in exercise areas, but were watched carefully.
Camp Three was a high-security facility where detainees spent most of their time in cells with steel mesh walls and little more than mattresses and copies of the Quran.
Camp Four was for the best-behaved detainees, and featured communal living spaces, librarian visits and lawns for soccer.
Camp Five resembled a U.S. maximum-security prison, with automatic sliding cell doors and a central guard station.
The idea was that detainees who presented graver threats and were uncooperative would be separated from those with looser ties to international terrorism.
What the plan overlooked — according to several detainees and a former U.S. defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject — is that even midlevel al Qaida members had been trained in resistance techniques, and that one of them was to avoid calling attention to yourself. An angry cabdriver from Kabul, in other words, may have been more likely to attack a guard and end up in Camp Three than an al Qaida militant was.
As a result, some senior radicals ended up in Camp Four, free to preach their message of international jihad to petty criminals, Taliban conscripts and detainees who had little or no previous affiliation with Islamic militancy.
At times, detainee leaders would order other men to break camp rules so that the guards would send them to higher-security blocks, where they could carry messages from their leaders, said Charles “Cully” Stimson, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs from January 2006 to February 2007.
“The communications network there is like the communications network in any jail,” Stimson said. “When Americans are in captivity, they respect rank. … I suspect it’s no different down there.”
Buzby, the Guantanamo commander, said that he, too, suspected that information flowed freely between militant leaders and their men at Guantanamo’s camps.
“It would be foolish to not believe that there is a hierarchy of information being passed up and down the chain of command,” Buzby said.
Abdul Zuhoor, an Afghan detainee who spent time in Camp Four, said that radical detainees used the system to their full advantage.
Zuhoor said he remembered watching groups of senior Taliban and Arab detainees meet in the exercise yard.
“They considered themselves the elders of Guantanamo,” Zuhoor said in an interview in the Afghan town of Charikar. “They met as a shura (religious) council.”
The group, Zuhoor said, acted in concert with others across Guantanamo to issue fatwas, which then were disseminated by detainees who were being moved to other areas for medical checkups, interrogations or transfers to higher-security blocks.
An attorney for one Arab detainee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared implicating his client, said his client told him at one point that he couldn’t meet with his legal team anymore.
“He said there were five or six detainees who had assumed positions of leadership in the camp, and that he had to deal with them,” the attorney said. “And they said that he would need a fatwa to continue speaking with us, to continue speaking with Americans.”
The fatwa, the shura council told the attorney’s client, couldn’t come from just any imam; it had to be from a senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, a hotbed of fundamentalist Sunni Islam.
In June 2006, Zuhoor said, a Taliban member at Guantanamo bragged to him that there soon would be three “martyrs.”
“The Arabs and some Taliban sat together and issued a verdict,” Zuhoor said. “Three of the men volunteered to kill themselves to get more freedom for the other detainees.”
The next morning, Zuhoor said, the news spread across Guantanamo: Three Arabs had committed suicide.
The Guantanamo commander at the time, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, called the suicides acts of “asymmetric warfare.” ++
More on Boumediene
Dr. Steven Taylor, PoliBlog
6/17
Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune regarding Boumediene v. Bush (Guantanamo and the limits of power) wrote:
The administration asserted that in time of war, even an unconventional war against a shadowy foe, the executive branch has the power to capture a foreigner abroad and hold him for the rest of his life, without any independent review by the courts
Short of claiming the right to do that to an American citizen arrested on U.S. soil—a claim the administration had also made, only to see it repudiated by the courts—that’s about as vast and dangerous a power as you could find. So it is not surprising that the Supreme Court balked.
This is why claims (made by people like Scott Johnson at Powerline) that we “give al Qaeda more rights than German POW’s during World War II” are absurd. First, we did not claim the right to hold German POW’s for the the rest of their lives.
Second, and more to the point, not everyone in our custody is a member of al Qaeda and therefore it is not unreasonable for detainees to have the right to challenge their captivity. Too many in the administration and too many of their defenders have bought into the poisonous notion that the United States only capture the guilty, which is manifestly not the case.
I noted yesterday the case of Nazar Chaman Gul, who was imprisoned both in Afghansitan and at Guantanamo. There is also the case of Murat Kurnaz, who was rounded up during a security check in Pakistan at the age of 19, and turned over to the US, which held him as a prisoner for almost five years. Several other examples are noted in a post today by Glenn Greenwald, including al Jazeera camerman Sami al-Haj, who spent years in captivity. It is worth noting that neither man was captured in combat. Gul was arrested in a private residence based on a tip (that proved to be false) that he was a terriorist and al-Haj was detained as part of a customs check. Yet both where treated to the “enemy combatant” routine.
Indeed, the aforementioned Kurnaz was held despite any evidence as to his guilt (source: a WaPo story at the time of his release):
Declassified records in his case made public last year show that he was kept behind bars and designated an enemy combatant even though U.S. military intelligence and German law enforcement officials had largely concluded that there was no information tying him to al-Qaeda or terrorist activities.
Since it is clearly possible for US forces to have arrested the wrong people, I cannot see how it is an abuse for SCOTUS to decide that those in captivity should have the right to question their detention.
It is incredibly selfish and myopic to take the attitude that because foreigners are being detained that it somehow doesn’t matter that innocent people are being caught up in the dragnet.
To put it another way, when the FARC kidnaps someone for political reasons and holds them without chance of release simply because they believe they have the right to do so within the context of a self-defined cause, we all find that to be an abomination. Why is it is any different if the US government engages in the same activity?
This is frightening power to give to any human being, and yet it seems that some believe that that power ought to reside, unchallenged, in the hands of the President of the United States. No wonder the GOP “brand” is so tarnished at the moment.
I will also reiterate a point I made yesterday: this type of behavior is allegedly about making us safe, but the arrest and detention of innocents will not make people love us, it will make them hate us. How that makes us “safe” is beyond me. ++
Contempt Of Courts
McCain’s Posturing On Guantanamo
George F. Will, WaPo
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
The day after the Supreme Court ruled that detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo are entitled to seek habeas corpus hearings, John McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” Well.
Does it rank with Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), which concocted a constitutional right, unmentioned in the document, to own slaves and held that black people have no rights that white people are bound to respect? With Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which affirmed the constitutionality of legally enforced racial segregation?
With Korematsu v. United States (1944), which affirmed the wartime right to sweep American citizens of Japanese ancestry into concentration camps?
Did McCain’s extravagant condemnation of the court’s habeas ruling result from his reading the 126 pages of opinions and dissents? More likely, some clever ignoramus convinced him that this decision could make the Supreme Court — meaning, which candidate would select the best judicial nominees — a campaign issue.
The decision, however, was 5 to 4. The nine justices are of varying quality, but there are not five fools or knaves. The question of the detainees’ — and the government’s — rights is a matter about which intelligent people of good will can differ.
The purpose of a writ of habeas corpus is to cause a government to release a prisoner or show through due process why the prisoner should be held. Of Guantanamo’s approximately 270 detainees, many certainly are dangerous “enemy combatants.” Some probably are not. None will be released by the court’s decision, which does not even guarantee a right to a hearing. Rather, it guarantees only a right to request a hearing. Courts retain considerable discretion regarding such requests.
As such, the Supreme Court’s ruling only begins marking a boundary against government’s otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely, treating Guantanamo as (in Barack Obama’s characterization) “a legal black hole.” And public habeas hearings might benefit the Bush administration by reminding Americans how bad its worst enemies are.
Critics, including Chief Justice John Roberts in dissent, are correct that the court’s decision clouds more things than it clarifies. Is the “complete and total” U.S. control of Guantanamo a solid-enough criterion to prevent the habeas right from being extended to other U.S. facilities around the world where enemy combatants are or might be held? Are habeas rights the only constitutional protections that prevail at Guantanamo? If there are others, how many? All of them? If so, can there be trials by military commissions, which permit hearsay evidence and evidence produced by coercion?
Roberts’s impatience is understandable: “The majority merely replaces a review system designed by the people’s representatives with a set of shapeless procedures to be defined by federal courts at some future date.” Ideally, however, the defining will be by Congress, which will be graded by courts.
McCain, co-author of the McCain-Feingold law that abridges the right of free political speech, has referred disparagingly to, as he puts it, “quote ‘First Amendment rights.’ ” Now he dismissively speaks of “so-called, quote ‘habeas corpus suits.’ ” He who wants to reassure constitutionalist conservatives that he understands the importance of limited government should be reminded why the habeas right has long been known as “the great writ of liberty.”
No state power is more fearsome than the power to imprison. Hence the habeas right has been at the heart of the centuries-long struggle to constrain governments, a struggle in which the greatest event was the writing of America’s Constitution, which limits Congress’s power to revoke habeas corpus to periods of rebellion or invasion. Is it, as McCain suggests, indefensible to conclude that Congress exceeded its authority when, with the Military Commissions Act (2006), it withdrew any federal court jurisdiction over the detainees’ habeas claims?
As the conservative and libertarian Cato Institute argued in its amicus brief in support of the petitioning detainees, habeas, in the context of U.S. constitutional law, “is a separation of powers principle” involving the judicial and executive branches. The latter cannot be the only judge of its own judgment.
In Marbury v. Madison (1803), which launched and validated judicial supervision of America’s democratic government, Chief Justice John Marshall asked: “To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?” Those are pertinent questions for McCain, who aspires to take the presidential oath to defend the Constitution. ++
“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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June 19th, 2008