Justin's Political Corner
As hunger strikes at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay increasingly become a human rights concern, a new exhaustive report from a group of bipartisan former officials, and medical and legal experts declares that U.S. treatment of detainees after September 11, 2001 constituted torture.
The 577-page report comes out of more than two years of research, interviews, investigation, and analysis. It was led by staunch Republican Asa Hutchinson, who told the New York Times, “This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players … But I just think we learn from history.”
The report issues a series of unanimous recommendations. However, there was one point on which they could not reach consensus: whether or not the detention center should be closed. They repeatedly lamented the lack of declassified government information, and suggested that more access might enable them to reach a conclusion on that question. Below are seven key findings from the report.
1. U.S. forces used interrogation techniques that constitute torture, and many more constituted “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” — both violations of international treaty obligations. Techniques included sleep deprivation, stress positions, nudity, sensory deprivation, and threatening detainees with dogs. During a press conference today, former Ambassador Thomas Pickering lamented: “I spent my life as a diplomat and spent a good part of that life trying to importune other governments to life up to the rule of law. I was chagrined, embarrassed and in many ways felt undermined.
2. The nation’s most senior officials bear responsibility for “allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal interrogation techniques.” The report explains: “The most important element may have been to declare that the Geneva Conventions, a venerable instrument for ensuring humane treatment in time of war, did not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban captives in Afghanistan or Guantánamo. The administration never specified what rules would apply instead. The other major factor was President Bush’s authorization of brutal techniques by the CIA for selected detainees.” The CIA also created its own detention and interrogation facilities in several other locations.
3. There is no compelling evidence that illegal torture techniques were effective. In fact, it is likely that torture techniques are less effective, since they often compel false confessions, and distinguishing what is useful from what is misleading is difficult at best.
4. Lawyers in President Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel repeatedly gave wrong advice that authorized illegal and torturous interrogation techniques. In doing so, they willfully ignored the advice of those in other departments with substantial expertise and “ did not properly serve their clients: the president the American people.
5. The United States violated its international legal obligations in capturing individuals and transferring them to another country for interrogation without legal process. From the Report: “After September 11, 2001, the extraordinary rendition program consisted of individuals being captured in one part of the world and transferred extrajudicially to another location for the purpose of interrogation rather than legal process. The U.N. officials involved did not notify the detainees’ families of their whereabouts, or provide the detainees with legal representation in any locations operated by the CIA as ‘black sites’ or for proxy detention. What’s more, the commission found that U.S. officials committed torture at these black sites, and that suspects were more likely than not to be tortured in the detaining countries, in spite of diplomatic assurances to the contrary.
6. Forced feeding techniques used on hunger strikers are a form of torture and must end. While the commission sympathizes with the U.S. interest in preventing inmate suicides, it calls for physicians to oversee this invasive and painful process, and to determine the competence of the detainees — man of whom have now lost hope that they will ever see legal process — to make their own decisions.
7. The U.S. government should not invoke the state-secrets privilege to block lawsuits seeking internationally recognized relief for torture. The Convention Against Torture requires states to ensure that the legal system contains an adequate means for torture redress; ours does not when every lawsuit is blocked by government claims of immunity without an opportunity for the judge to review, in secret, the information the government claims must remain secret.
Although commissioners did not come to a consensus on how to handle prisoners indefinitely detained at Guantánamo, those who called for the detention center’s closure said detainees should get a trial either in U.S. courts or in a military commission with equivalent rights to the U.S. system. In recent weeks, increasing signs have emerged that the legal process for detainees who are getting a trial is not even close to living up to American values, with defendants’ legal files disappearing, and new evidence that intelligence officials were spying on confidential lawyer-client conversations.
Fox News host Sean Hannity is so adamant that waterboarding is not torture that he once offered to be waterboarded at a charity event and donate the proceeds to soldiers’ families. Four years later, a yet-to-be-waterboarded Hannity did not take kindly to being called out about it on his own radio show.
On April 22, 2009, Charles Grodin appeared on Hannity’s Fox News show and asked Hannity, if he doesn’t believe waterboarding is torture, would he agree to be waterboarded. “Sure,” Hannity said. “I’ll do it for charity. I’ll let you do it. I’ll do it for the troops’ families.” But four years later, Hannity has yet to follow through on his offer.
When ThinkProgress brought up the matter at the beginning of an appearance on his radio show on Wednesday, Hannity’s displeasure was palpable. “I’m not getting into your five-year-old issue,” Hannity grumbled. We pressed on when he was planning to hold the event, the Fox host lost it. “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. I get to ask the questions on the program,” Hannity said:
SCOTT KEYES: Before we get started I wanted to say one quick thing. Back in April 2009, you’d made a very generous offer. To prove that it’s not torture, you agreed on your television show to be waterboarded for charity and to donate the proceeds to the troops’ families.
HANNITY: I said Charles Grodin could do it.
KEYES: Now I know you’re an honorable guy Sean, when are you planning to hold the event?
HANNITY: You’re obviously taping this. I’m not getting into your five-year-old issue. Here I am bringing you on the program and give you an opportunity to give your pretty radical left-wing point of view, that’s kind of the way you treat me. But that’s all right.
KEYES: Sean, I’m just curious because you don’t think this is torture.
HANNITY: Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me. I get to ask the questions on the program.
Hannity gave no indication that he was planning to follow through on his promise to be waterboarded for charity.
Immediately following the show, Hannity was so incensed that he personally called ThinkProgress to complain. He accused ThinkProgress of being “fixated” on the matter, baffled that we brought up an issue that he said hasn’t been news for years.
Waterboarding is still an extremely important, and undercovered, story today. It still exists, it’s still torture, and the only American who’s been sentenced to prison over the matter is a former CIA agent and vocal torture opponent who spoke out about the practice. Waterboarding is now part of the mainstream with the help of defenders like Hannity who insist that it’s not actually torture.
NewsHounds and Reddit have kept a running tally of how long it’s been since Hannity first offered to be waterboarded for charity. January 30 marked 1,379 days since Hannity reneged the promise.
He is such a sicko.
In the first verdict of its kind since former President George W. Bush left office, he and several members of his administration have been successfully convicted in absentia of war crimes in Malaysia.
Yes, this is a BFD.
This past Friday, a five panel tribunal delivered a unanimous guilty verdict after a week long trial that, unsurprisingly, was not covered by American media. The witnesses included several ex-Guantanamo detainees that gave testimony on the conditions and human rights violations that were systematically carried out under orders of the Bush administration.
Former President Bush, Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo that crafted the legal ‘justification’ for torture that basically said, ‘we can if we want to even if it’s illegal’ were the defendants. None were present, of course, but international war crime trials do not require the presence of the accused. The trial was run according to the standards set by the Nuremberg Trials to convict war criminals after World War II.
Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution said, “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”.
The United States is subject to international law which makes this trial significant beyond the borders of Malaysia.
The best possible outcome is that the world court delivers a guilty verdict that sends a clear message to President Obama and his successors that the United States is not above the law, American Exceptional-ism be damned. It’s a lesson we’ve forgotten and need to relearn.
