Maybe, just maybe, now that the words (emphasis added) have been spoken on the record, the spell will be broken.

“After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,” [Maj. Gen.] Taguba wrote. “The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Taguba, whose 2004 investigation documented chilling abuses at Abu Ghraib, is thought to be the most senior official to have accused the administration of war crimes. “The commander in chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture,” he wrote.

A White House spokeswoman, Kate Starr, had no comment.

[snip]

Leonard Rubenstein, the president of Physicians for Human Rights, said there was a direct connection between the Pentagon decisions and the abuses his group uncovered. “The result was a horrific stew of pain, degradation and … suffering,” he said. Source

Not a scintilla of reasonable doubt.

Such is not us — not We The People — not in any manner, way, shape or form.

The very soul of America and of freedom has been violated. Bring the inhuman, inhumane cretins to task.

Absolutely and indubitably a must-read (emphasis added):

Thomas Romig, a major general who was the Army’s judge advocate general from 2001 to 2005, agreed that the JAGs were pushed to the side: “It was a disaster,” he said.

[snip]

“As they viewed it, due process is legal mumbo jumbo,” said Romig, who’s now the dean of Washburn University’s law school. “They wanted to get them, get the facts and convict them. … If you’re caught as a terrorist, you’re presumed guilty and you have to prove you’re innocent. It was crazy.”

When Romig objected to pushing the boundaries of interrogation procedures during meetings in late 2002 or early 2003, he recalled that civilian defense officials replied that the time for law had passed.

“Guys, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. It’s time to take the gloves off,” Romig said he was told by Marshall Billingslea, a deputy to Douglas Feith — who was then the undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon’s third-ranking official.

Romig said that he and other military officers asked, “Do you realize the implications of what you’re saying?” Source

’nuff said.

It is our proprietary information. By dribs drabs and dollops, it is being taken from our possession and control.

If you wish to give it up, realize going in that it has a value (or it wouldn’t be so eagerly sought and hoarded) and that you — more often than not — are releasing it free and clear, along with any and all future control of the data.

What happens to our data happens to ourselves.

This shadow self doesn’t just sit there: It’s constantly touched. It’s examined and judged. When we apply for a bank loan, it’s our data that determines whether or not we get it. When we try to board an airplane, it’s our data that determines how thoroughly we get searched — or whether we get to board at all. If the government wants to investigate us, they’re more likely to go through our data than they are to search our homes; for a lot of that data, they don’t even need a warrant.

Who controls our data controls our lives.

[snip]

We need to take back our data.

Our data is a part of us. It’s intimate and personal, and we have basic rights to it. It should be protected from unwanted touch. Source

Distillation of Defense Secretary Gates’ shoulder-shrugging testimony :

Like, whaddaya expect? I’m only 6th in line to the President and head a department getting one-third of the budget. It’s not like I have any authority or anything.

Sheesh. Don’t get friction burns on the fingertips from passing those bucks at warp speed, Mr. Secretary.

Stifled freedoms: Like a homely dowager dripping with jewels the entire flawed, shabby and unattractive process is weighted down with layer upon layer upon layer of smothering (and deligitimizing) secrecy.

Five news organizations complained Wednesday that they are being denied access to much of the military commission proceeding against a Canadian terror suspect.

Various arguments in the case of Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are apparently made via e-mail - a communications channel to which the public has no access - and issues apparently are being raised in closed sessions for which no transcripts or summaries are available, the news organizations, including The Associated Press, wrote in a filing.

In addition, the filing stated, the public is not permitted access to motions and other documents submitted by the parties and “even the existence of a motion is not currently disclosed in any publicly accessible way.”

[snip]

Besides The AP, the organizations are The New York Times Co., Dow Jones & Company Inc., The Hearst Corp. and The McClatchy Company.

[snip]

The presiding judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, has postponed a decision on whether Khadr can be tried by the military as an unlawful enemy combatant. Khadr has not entered a plea, and no trial date has been set.

The military commissions, which will be conducted at Guantanamo Bay, are the first to be conducted since World War II. It is important that the proceeding in the Khadr case not only be fair but that it be perceived as fair, and that cannot happen unless the public is able to follow and understand the events as they transpire, the five news organizations said.

The Military Commissions Act and its regulations make clear that the public’s right to access extends beyond an actual trial to all proceedings, the filing stated.

In addition, the news organizations argued, the First Amendment protects the press and the public from blocking their rights of access to information about the operation of their government. Article

Centuries — nay, eons — to hone an accepted and viable judicial system set on a foundation of developed law and precedent, all but ground underfoot by the ‘make it up as we go along, the King cannot be wrong’ presumptions of the woebegone G. Walker administration. The world screams “Nay.”

The United Nations has registered its unease over the military trial of Canadian terror suspect Omar Khadr.

Radkhika Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, complained Tuesday to the secretary of state’s top legal adviser, John Bellinger.

“She raised her concerns about the creation of an international precedent where an individual is being tried for war crimes with regard to alleged acts committed when he was a child,” said spokeswoman Laurence Gerard.

[snip]

Human rights groups say his military trial contravenes the Optional Protocol of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the United States has signed.

The protocol says youths under the age of 18 in armed conflict are entitled to special protection. Article

Summary here.

Noted FYI:

The US military’s operating manual for the Guantanamo prison camp has been posted on the internet, providing a glimpse of the broad rules and tiniest minutia for detaining suspected terrorists.

The 238-page manual, Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta, is dated March 27, 2003, and signed by Army Major General Geoffrey Miller, who was then the commander of the prison that still holds about 300 al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects.

It appeared to be an authentic copy of the rules as they existed at the time at the US naval base in Cuba, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention operation, Lieutenant Colonel Ed Bush, said overnight. Article

Unbrave new world? First off, privacy and anonymity are related, but not synonymous. However, the latter is a necessary subset of the former.

As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

Kerr’s comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

[snip]

Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group that defends online free speech, privacy and intellectual property rights, said Kerr’s argument ignores both privacy laws and American history.

“Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms,” Opsahl said. “The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together.”

Opsahl also said Kerr ignores the distinction between sacrificing protection from an intrusive government and voluntarily disclosing information in exchange for a service.

“There is something fundamentally different from the government having information about you than private parties,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to give people the choice between taking advantage of modern communication tools and sacrificing their privacy.”

“It’s just another ‘trust us, we’re the government,’” he said. Article

With primary season fast approaching (and with further delays undoubtedly anticipated after a SCOTUS decision expected in 2008), the politically-motivated rush to have a ‘victory’ to wave is evident.

The Pentagon’s twice-derailed effort to try a former child soldier who allegedly killed a Delta Force commando in Afghanistan resumes Thursday – and few expect the proceedings to go smoothly.

[snip]

A hastily appointed military appeals court said this summer that the judge can decide whether to add the “unlawful” to Mr. Khadr’s status – and thus subject him to a commission trial.

Defence lawyers predict other bumps in the road in a system that has never been tested and that critics say was hastily slapped together after the Supreme Court last year declared the previous system unconstitutional.

“We haven’t even begun to identify all of the issues or kinks or flaws in this commission process, let alone address them,” said Army Col. Steve David, the chief defence counsel for the military commissions.

The lead defence attorney in the case said the judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, is prohibiting Mr. Khadr from citing international, constitutional, or criminal law in backing any claim that he is not an unlawful enemy combatant.

The attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the judge has also refused to hear arguments on whether his client can be tried for crimes allegedly committed when Mr. Khadr was a minor. Article

As to previous unctuous statements of proceedings being “open” — well, draw your own conclusions regarding restrictions on the press.

Gone are the days when military escorts turned over the press conference podium here to independent American lawyers, who would comment on - and invariably criticize - the evolving U.S. effort to stage the first U.S. war crimes tribunals since World War II.

In one memorable remark, seasoned Miami defense attorney Neal Sonnett said drolly after a particularly chaotic day that included a military judge’s refusal to accredit a well-known New York litigator: “This process is not yet ready for prime time.”

But last week, attorneys acting as observers since August 2004 were e-mailed new ground rules that stripped them of podium privileges for this visit - as a condition for watching a hearing Thursday in which a third attempt will be made to arraign Canadian captive Omar Khadr, 21, under the latest formula for a Military Commission.

The trend toward muting the criticism was already evident during the last round - when two judges threw out charges against Khadr and Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a stunning setback, and a Pentagon spokeswoman announced to the press room that observers would be available to cameras for a few minutes “in the parking lot.”

At the time, the monitors were from the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. This time, the Pentagon has expanded the monitoring pool and added three new observers - a delegate from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a retired lieutenant colonel who is now a national security fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a retired colonel from a New York think tank called the Carnegie Council.

None, however, will be able to speak to the Canadian TV cameras at a close-of-hearing briefing inside an auditorium alongside the press filing center. “We’re not making those government facilities available to them,” said Army Lt. Col. Les Melnyk, a traveling press escort from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Article

Big Brother’s big ears. One more time: the hoary argument over whether one has “something to hide” is irrelevant; it is the unilateral assertion of an unfettered power to listen and to monitor speech (24/7, and universally) which is the nub.

The plain-spoken, bespectacled Klein, 62, said he may be the only person in the country in a position to discuss firsthand knowledge of an important aspect of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program. He is retired, so he isn’t worried about losing his job. He did not have security clearance, and the documents in his possession were not classified, he said. He has no qualms about “turning in,” as he put it, the company where he worked for 22 years until he retired in 2004.

“If they’ve done something massively illegal and unconstitutional — well, they should suffer the consequences,” Klein said. “It’s not my place to feel bad for them. They made their bed, they have to lie in it. The ones who did [anything wrong], you can be sure, are high up in the company. Not the average Joes, who I enjoyed working with.”

In an interview yesterday, he alleged that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T . Contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists, Klein said, much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic. Klein said he believes that the NSA was analyzing the records for usage patterns as well as for content.

He said the NSA built a special room to receive data streamed through an AT&T Internet room containing “peering links,” or major connections to other telecom providers. The largest of the links delivered 2.5 gigabits of data — the equivalent of one-quarter of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s text — per second, said Klein, whose documents and eyewitness account form the basis of one of the first lawsuits filed against the telecom giants after the government’s warrantless-surveillance program was reported in the New York Times in December 2005.

Claudia Jones, an AT&T spokeswoman, said she had no comment on Klein’s allegations. “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security,” she said.

[snip]

In summer 2002, Klein was working in an office responsible for Internet equipment when an NSA representative arrived to interview a management-level technician for a special job whose details were secret.

“That’s when my antennas started to go up,” he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

The job entailed building a “secret room” in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

“That was my ‘aha!’ moment,” Klein said. “They’re sending the entire Internet to the secret room.”

The diagram showed splitters, glass prisms that split signals from each network into two identical copies. One fed into the secret room, the other proceeded to its destination, he said.

“This splitter was sweeping up everything, vacuum-cleaner-style,” he said. “The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customers but everybody’s.” “That’s when my antennas started to go up,” he said. He knew that the NSA was supposed to work on overseas signals intelligence.

The job entailed building a “secret room” in an AT&T office 10 blocks away, he said. By coincidence, in October 2003, Klein was transferred to that office and assigned to the Internet room. He asked a technician there about the secret room on the 6th floor, and the technician told him it was connected to the Internet room a floor above. The technician, who was about to retire, handed him some wiring diagrams.

[snip]

“I flipped out,” he said. “They’re copying the whole Internet. There’s no selection going on here. Maybe they select out later, but at the point of handoff to the government, they get everything.”

[snip]

Klein said he decided to go public after President Bush defended the NSA’s surveillance program as limited to collecting phone calls between suspected terrorists overseas and people in the United States. Klein said the documents show that the scope was much broader. Article

Inquisition: The shame — the ineradicable stain — on our good name, on our professed principles.

In his book, officially cleared for publication, Tenet confirms how the CIA outsourced al Libi’s interrogation. He said he was sent to a third country (inadvertently named in another part of the book as Egypt) for “further debriefing.”

The Bush administration has said that terrorists are trained to invent tales of torture.

Yet, on this occasion, the CIA believed al Libi’s tales of torture — an account that has proved to be one of the most serious indictments of the agency’s practice of extraordinary rendition: sending suspected Islamic terrorists into the hands of foreign jailers without legal process.

In a CIA sub-station close to al Libi’s jail cell, the CIA’s “debriefers,” who had been talking to al Libi for days after his return from Cairo, were typing out a series of operational cables to be sent Feb. 4 and Feb. 5 to the CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va. In the view of some insiders, these cables provide the “smoking gun” on the whole rendition program — a convincing account of how the rendition program was, they say, illegally sending prisoners into the hands of torturers.

Under torture after his rendition to Egypt, al Libi had provided a confession of how Saddam Hussein had been training al Qaeda in chemical weapons. This evidence was used by Colin Powell at the United Nations a year earlier (February 2003) to justify the war in Iraq. (”I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these [chemical and biological] weapons to al Qaeda,” Powell said. “Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story.”)

But now, hearing how the information was obtained, the CIA was soon to retract all this intelligence. A Feb. 5 cable records that al Libi was told by a “foreign government service” (Egypt) that: “the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq…This was a subject about which he said he knew nothing and had difficulty even coming up with a story.”

Al Libi indicated that his interrogators did not like his responses and then “placed him in a small box approximately 50cm X 50cm [20 inches x 20 inches].” He claimed he was held in the box for approximately 17 hours. When he was let out of the box, al Libi claims that he was given a last opportunity to “tell the truth.” When al Libi did not satisfy the interrogator, al Libi claimed that “he was knocked over with an arm thrust across his chest and he fell on his back.” Al Libi told CIA debriefers that he then “was punched for 15 minutes.” (Sourced to CIA cable, Feb. 5, 2004).

Here was a cable then that informed Washington that one of the key pieces of evidence for the Iraq war — the al Qaeda/Iraq link — was not only false but extracted by effectively burying a prisoner alive.

Although there have been claims about torture inflicted on those rendered by the CIA to countries like Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Uzbekistan, this is the first clear example of such torture detailed in an official government document.

The information came almost one year before the president and other administration members first began to confirm the existence of the CIA rendition program…

[snip]

Meanwhile, al Libi, who told fellow prisoners in Bagram he was returned to U.S. custody from Egypt on Nov. 22, 2003, has disappeared. He was not among the “high-value prisoners” transferred to Guantanamo last year. Article

Numerical comparisons with a time when there was a draft (or shortly after) and literally millions were conscripted are tricky, but the traumatic disintegration of individual lives is a constant marker of failure to those who served.

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job. Article

What’s up:

A U.S. appeals court is refusing to block military commission proceedings against Canadian Omar Khadr, who is being held at Guantanamo Bay.

[snip]

The one-sentence denial was handed down today. Article

The doctrine of No First Use — a “quaint” concept?

The Federation of American Scientists’ director of the nuclear information project Hans Kristensen reports that he has gotten ahold of a surprising document that shows the Bush White House guided the US military to change the US nuclear posture in 2002 to develop nuclear strike plans against rogue states, including North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

“Everybody got so afraid of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists and the combination of the two that White House guidance ordered the military to prepare nuclear strike plans against them,” Kristensen tells me in a phone interview Monday. “This particular document is the main surprise here. It is a briefing that that US strategic command held sometime in 2002 which is about national nuclear war plans that went into effect in March 2003. Since then, there has been only upgrade of the plan.”

Kristensen says the document he got hold of is a compilation of slides, 126 pages. “They only released 23 of those, and most of that is heavily redacted,” Kristensen says. “But one thing they surprisingly let through is the identification of new strike plans against rogue states. And this is a surprise. … This shows nuclear strike planning rose all the way to the top, the national strategic war plan, a new development.”

[snip]

Kristensen says that back in March 2002, part of the Bush administration nuclear posture review - a big review the Pentagon did - was leaked and described in an article in the Los Angeles Times. “It led to a huge debate. Are we actually going to target rogue states with nuclear weapons? These used to be something focused only on Russia and China,” Kristensen says. “At that point, government officials played it down. They suggested this was not really a guidance document.” But clearly, it was.

About his latest discovery, Kristensen says, “This is a milestone in our knowledge about nuclear planning and how it has evolved after the Cold War. The document tells the various military commands what to do. They have to implement this guidance. Targeters in strategic command start targeting those facilities. Where do we have those weapons, submarines, bombers. They weave together this whole very orchestrated strike plan. If the president decided to nuke Iran, here’s the plan.” Article

If not slavishly worshiping at the throne of a corporatocracy, certainly giving aid and comfort. That former Attorney General John Ashcroft so stridently makes crystal clear that he has little to no undertsanding of the place and the function of a system of courts (and indeed fears the very process and proceduresof justice as well as subcribing to a ‘The Tsar can do no wrong’ stance) shouldn’t, at this juncture, boggle the mind — but it does.

24 former “intelligence and military officers, diplomats, and law enforcement professionals” add to the chorus for the Constitution:

We feel this more acutely than most others, for in our careers we have frequently had to navigate the delicate balance between morality and expediency, all the while doing our best to abide by the values the vast majority of Americans hold in common. We therefore believe we have a particular moral obligation to speak out. We can say it no better than four retired judge advocates general (two admirals and two generals) who wrote you over the weekend, saying: “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.”

[snip]

The most likely explanation for Mukasey’s reticence is his concern that, should his conscience require him to condemn waterboarding, this could cause extreme embarrassment and even legal jeopardy for senior officials this time not just for the so-called “bad apples” at the bottom of the barrel. We believe it very important that the Senate not acquiesce in his silence—and certainly not if, as seems the case, he is more concerned about protecting senior officials than he is in enforcing the law and the Constitution.

It is important to get beyond shadowboxing on this key issue. In our view, condoning Mukasey’s evasiveness would mean ignoring fundamental American values and the Senate’s constitutional prerogative of advice and consent.

At stake in your committee and this nomination are questions of legality, morality, and our country’s values. And these are our primary concerns as well. As professional intelligence officers, however, we must point to a supreme irony—namely, that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation practices are ineffective tools for eliciting reliable information. Our own experience dovetails well with that of U.S. Army intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. John Kimmons, who told a Pentagon press conference on September 6, 2006: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.” Source

Op-ed du jour:

Sometimes, though, the questions we face about detainees and interrogation get more specific. One such set of questions relates to “waterboarding.”

That term is used to describe several interrogation techniques. The victim may be immersed in water, have water forced into the nose and mouth, or have water poured onto material placed over the face so that the liquid is inhaled or swallowed. The media usually characterize the practice as “simulated drowning.” That’s incorrect. To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.…

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. According to those who have studied waterboarding’s effects, it can cause severe psychological trauma, such as panic attacks, for years.

The United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government — whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community — has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it. Article

What’s up:

Eleven detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay - eight Afghans and three Jordanians - have been transferred to the custody of their home countries, the Pentagon announced Sunday. Article

Quadruple yuppers.

Meritorious analysis du jour:

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in the Pentagon’s budgeting office 20 years ago and awoke today, his first reaction would be that nothing had changed. President George W. Bush has asked for $505 billion for the peacetime U.S. military establishment in 2008 — almost exactly the amount, in real dollars, that President Ronald Reagan sought in 1988. Rip would start scratching his head, however, when he discovered that the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself had imploded more than 15 years ago and that Washington now spends almost as much on its military power as the rest of the world combined and five times more than all its potential enemies together. Told that Pentagon planners were nonetheless worried about overstretch and presidential candidates were vying to pledge even higher budgets and even larger forces, Rip’s head might just explode.

The current strains on resources and forces are due, of course, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the costs of those wars are not included in the half-trillion-dollar “baseline” figure noted above. A supplemental request for an extra $142 billion covers them, bringing the total 2008 military budget request to a whopping $647 billion — a budget more than 25 percent larger, in real terms, than the one for 1968, at the height of combat in Vietnam, a bigger and bloodier conflict than any the United States has seen since. And even that total figure does not include the $46 billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security, whose functions would be handled by the Defense Ministry in many other countries.

[snip]

In recent years, U.S. national security policy has responded to a visceral sense of threat spawned by the frightening intentions of the country’s enemies rather than to a sober estimate of those enemies’ capabilities and what it would take to counter them effectively. The United States faces very real dangers today and potentially bigger ones in the future, but these are not threats that can be tamed by current spending on the most expensive components of military power.

U.S. political leaders, meanwhile, have forgotten the craft of balancing commitments and resources responsibly. Nobody younger than 80 can remember a peacetime United States without vast standing armed forces, even though that was the norm for the first 150 years of the republic. So the post-Cold War situation does not seem as odd as it should. Contractors who live off the defense budget have also become more adept at engineering political support by spreading subcontracts around the maximum number of congressional districts. And the traditional constituencies for restrained spending in both major political parties have evaporated, leaving the field free for advocates of excess. Article

Update 5:15 a.m.: Mario Cuomo and Paul Krugman held a wide-ranging and erudite 40-plus minute video interview. Ye old scribe links here to a small segment of that video — running just over one minute and twenty seconds — which is especially recommended.

Color ye old scribe skeptical (to the point of incredulity). Noted strictly FYI:

Bush administration officials are considering granting Guantanamo detainees greater rights as part of an effort to close the detention center and possibly move much of its population to the United States, according to officials involved in the discussions.

One proposal that is being widely discussed in the administration would overhaul the procedure for determining whether detainees are properly held by granting them legal representation at detention hearings and by giving federal judges, not military officers, the power to decide whether suspects should be held. Article

Four former military Judge Advocates General of the Navy, the Army and the Marines are eminently clear and stern: it is long-settled; there is no debate, there is no wiggle room (emphasis added).

…Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.

[snip]

…Major General Scott Black, U.S. Army Judge Advocate General, Major General Jack Rives, U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General, Rear Admiral Bruce MacDonald, U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General, and Brigadier Gen. Kevin Sandkuhler, Staff Judge Advocate to the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, unanimously and unambiguously agreed that such conduct is inhumane and illegal and would constitute a violation of international law, to include Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

We agree with our active duty colleagues. This is a critically important issue - but it is not, and never has been, a complex issue, and even to suggest otherwise does a terrible disservice to this nation. All U.S. Government agencies and personnel, and not just America’s military forces, must abide by both the spirit and letter of the controlling provisions of international law. Cruelty and torture - no less than wanton killing - is neither justified nor legal in any circumstance. It is essential to be clear, specific and unambiguous about this fact - as in fact we have been throughout America’s history, at least until the last few years.…

[snip]

The Rule of Law is fundamental to our existence as a civilized nation. The Rule of Law is not a goal which we merely aspire to achieve; it is the floor below which we must not sink. For the Rule of Law to function effectively, however, it must provide actual rules that can be followed. In this instance, the relevant rule - the law - has long been clear: Waterboarding detainees amounts to illegal torture in all circumstances. To suggest otherwise - or even to give credence to such a suggestion - represents both an affront to the law and to the core values of our nation. Source

Sidestepping and skirting government and usurping the functions of government. Creating unaccountable private cadres for sale to the highest bidder.

The Prince Group, the holding company that owns Blackwater Worldwide, has been building an operation that will sniff out intelligence about natural disasters, business-friendly governments, overseas regulations and global political developments for clients in industry and government.

The operation, Total Intelligence Solutions, has assembled a roster of former spooks — high-ranking figures from agencies such as the CIA and defense intelligence — that mirrors the slate of former military officials who run Blackwater. Its chairman is Cofer Black, the former head of counterterrorism at CIA known for his leading role in many of the agency’s more controversial programs, including the rendition and interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects and the detention of some of them in secret prisons overseas.

Its chief executive is Robert Richer, a former CIA associate deputy director of operations who was heavily involved in running the agency’s role in the Iraq war.

[snip]

Total Intel, as the company is known, is bringing “the skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room,” Black said. Black had a 28-year career with the CIA.

“They have the skills and background to do anything anyone wants,” said RJ Hillhouse, who writes a national security blog called The Spy Who Billed Me. “There’s no oversight. They’re an independent company offering freelance espionage services. They’re rent-a-spies.”

[snip]

To Black and Richer, one of the most surprising things about being in the private sector is finding that much of the information they once considered top secret is publicly available. The trick, Richer said, is knowing where to look.

“In a classified area, there’s an assumption that if it is open, it can’t be as good as if you stole it,” Richer said. “I’m seeing that at least 80 percent of what we stole was open.” Article

Contemplating an eternity of imperialism by iron.

US troops could be in the Middle East for another 50 years, according to the longest serving commander of the Qatar-based US Central Command.

General John Abazaid, who retired in May, said the “strategic situation” in the region - the rise of extremism and the global dependence on oil - would necessitate a long-term presence.

[snip]

“…we shouldn’t assume for even a minute that in the next 25 to 50 years the American military might be able to come home, relax and take it easy.” Article

Yuppers and yuppers again.

Shorter version: institutionalizing fear, repression, paranoia and the police state.

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

This isn’t the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it’s happening everywhere. It’s a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they’re the front line of terrorism defense. “If you see something, say something” is how the ads read in the New York City subways. “If you suspect something, report it” urges another ad campaign in Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video. Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any suspicious activity.

The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.

Even worse: after someone reports a “terrorist threat,” the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more realistic threat assessment.

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.

[snip]

For some reason, governments are encouraging this kind of behavior. It’s not just the publicity campaigns asking people to come forward and snitch on their neighbors; they’re asking certain professions to pay particular attention: truckers to watch the highways, students to watch campuses, and scuba instructors to watch their students. The U.S. wanted meter readers and telephone repairmen to snoop around houses. There’s even a new law protecting people who turn in their travel mates based on some undefined “objectively reasonable suspicion,” whatever that is.

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn’t be surprised when you get amateur security.

[snip]

Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun, or stray backpacks, is not evidence of doing a good job: it’s evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future. We need to spend our resources on things that actually make us safer, not on chasing down and trumpeting every paranoid threat anyone can come up with. Article

Simultaneously walking out on a limb and expressing refreshing bluntness.

A campaign to free a journalist imprisoned at Guantanamo gained support Thursday from the first Muslim member of Congress, who urged authorities to prosecute or release him after more than five years without charges.

Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was captured in 2002 as he tried to enter Afghanistan to cover the war. His lawyer says he denies any connection to terrorism and has been on a hunger strike since January to protest his indefinite confinement.

In a rare show of public support from a U.S. official, Rep. Keith Ellison, a first-term Democrat from Minnesota, called for a hearing to determine whether the military has legitimate reason to hold al-Haj with about 330 other men at the prison on a Navy base in Cuba.

“If he’s a bad actor, prove it. If not, let him out,” the congressman told The Associated Press.

Ellison said he believes all Guantanamo prisoners should be allowed to challenge their confinement in the courts. But he said he is particularly concerned about the detention of a journalist who, as far as he can tell, was “detained for taking pictures.” He made the public statement at the request of Al-Jazeera.

Representatives of Qatar-based Al-Jazeera have been meeting with political and business leaders and media groups in the United States in recent weeks to draw publicity to al-Haj’s detention while simultaneously trying to jump-start U.S. distribution of Al-Jazeera’s English language channel.

“We just want to raise awareness and give support for someone we feel is being totally mistreated,” said Satnam Matharu, the network’s head of international media relations.

At least two other members of Congress have expressed concern about the cameraman but were not yet ready to make a public statement, Matharu said.

As part of its campaign, the network plans a series of new video spots for its Arabic and English language channels and will revamp an Internet site devoted to the campaign to free al-Haj.

“We’re standing behind him and we vouch for his innocence,” he said.

[snip]

Ellison, who supports restoring habeas rights to detainees, said he has conducted research into the case and has not seen anything solid linking al-Haj to any crimes. The congressman said he may seek a meeting with military officials or use his seat on the Judiciary Committee to press for more information.

“The evidence that I have found is that this guy is a cameraman who is being detained for taking pictures and that is a concern to me,” he said. Article

Op-ed du jour:

It is regrettable that so often when our courts are evaluated for their ability to handle terrorism cases, the Constitution is conceived as mere solicitude for criminals. Implicit in this misguided notion is that society’s somehow charitable view toward “ordinary” crimes of murder or rape ought not to extend to terrorists. In fact, the criminal procedure required under our Constitution reflects the reality that law enforcement is not perfect, and that questions of guilt necessarily precede questions of mercy.

[snip]

The distinction between the roles of judge and law enforcement officer should not be lost…. Our courts ensure an independent process; they do not enforce the prerogatives of law enforcement. Any proposal that would blur this distinction would compromise a bedrock principle of government that has defined this country from its inception. This is a price too high to pay. Article

Patriot of conscience.

By all accounts, Colby Vokey is a model officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, at one point helping command an artillery unit in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991. For the past four years, Vokey has served as chief of all the Corps’ defense lawyers in the western United States – and he’s played a key role in some of the military’s most sensitive legal issues, including the murder investigation in Haditha, Iraq, and in the debate about detainees at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. “Colby Vokey?” muses retired Col. Jane Siegel “Integrity almost seems like a word too small to describe him.” Says Lt. Col. Matthew Cord, “He’s just one of the best.”

So when Vokey announced recently that he wanted to leave the Corps, it said something troubling about the military system of justice that he’s served for almost 20 years. Vokey charges that some commanders and officials in the Bush administration have abused the system of justice, and he’s going to retire from the Corps May 1, 2008. People who know him say that privately, Vokey has acknowledged he is “angry” and “bitter.” Publicly, Vokey describes himself as “fed up.” “I think changes to the system are well-overdue,” he told NPR. “And it’s a little frustrating when you see problems are highlighted time and time and again.”

[snip]

The U.S. has imprisoned hundreds of “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay in a military legal system that Vokey denounces as “horrific.” Vokey saw the system first-hand when he agreed two years ago to defend a teenager there who had been charged with murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Vokey said he knew the case would be difficult, but he discovered that the legal system at Guantanamo is a “sham.” Vokey said the military staff constantly harassed him and interfered with his defense work by making it difficult even to meet with his client or show his client the government’s evidence against him. The teenager confessed to killing the soldier, but he told Vokey he confessed after being shackled for hours in excruciating positions and bombarded by screeching music and flashing lights. FBI agents have reported seeing detainees treated in similar ways and investigators at human rights groups have reported evidence suggesting that detainees are routinely abused. Vokey calls the system “disgraceful.”

“Anytime you want to subvert the rule of law to the power of a government, you’ve got a very bad thing brewing,” Vokey told NPR. “As an officer in the Marine Corps I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And now we are perpetrating something that if any other country in the world was doing, we would likely step in and stop it.” Hemingway, who until recently was the top lawyer advising U.S. officials on how to handle detainees at Guantanamo, dismisses those charges. Hemingway said he has asked the staff to investigate complaints by detainees, including Vokey’s client, and “we have found absolutely nothing to substantiate that.” He added, “I know of no one in uniform who signed up to embarrass the United States of America by running a system that doesn’t meet what we consider to be appropriate standards.” Vokey, undeterred, said the legal system at Guantanamo has left him feeling “disgusted.”

When asked to identify exactly which officials in the military and the Bush administration he believes have abused the system of justice, Vokey avoids giving an answer. When pressed, Vokey went to his bookshelf, pulled out the Manual for Courts-Martial, and read from Article 88: “‘Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the president, vice president, Congress’” and a list of other officials, he said, “’shall be punished as a court martial may direct.’” “I need to be careful,” Vokey said. Article

So much for tortured claims of an ‘open’ proceeding.

A civilian lawyer for the only Canadian terrorism suspect held at Guantanamo said on Wednesday he had been barred from his client’s hearing at the U.S. base next week because of a dispute with military defense lawyers.

The Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney, said he was prevented from visiting Toronto-born Omar Khadr, who is accused by a U.S. military war crimes tribunal of throwing a grenade that killed one American soldier and wounded another during a firefight at an alleged al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

Edney said the ban came after he disagreed with and publicly criticized the U.S. military lawyers appointed to defend Khadr, who was 15 years old and severely wounded when he was captured. He is now 21.

“It’s certainly not in Khadr’s best interest,” Edney said by telephone. “It’s a violation of the accepted right to counsel. They obviously don’t want me speaking to Khadr before the arraignment.”

Military defense lawyers did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

[snip]

Edney, who was at the June hearing, battled for years before winning U.S. permission to visit Khadr. He said he was barred from seeing him in September and that military defense lawyers recently told him in a phone call that he could not attend Khadr’s arraignment.

Under revised trial rules, defendants can represent themselves or have U.S. military defense lawyers appointed. Foreign and civilian lawyers can join the defense but only as advisors, if they obtain U.S. security clearances and if someone other than the U.S. government pays the bill.

Khadr fired his American civilian lawyers and has repeatedly said he only wants Canadian attorneys. Article

One lawyer caught in the dismal machine, and what it is doing to her client.

Mr. Al-Ghizzawi wanted to share something else with me before he died. He wanted to share with me some of the torture that he has been subjected to over his now almost six years of captivity. He handed me a letter that he had been working on since July… it was a six page letter… he asked me to mark each page so that when I received it I would know if I was receiving the correct pages. I put my initials on the pages and I handed the letter over to my escort so that the military could send it to me… after “reviewing” it first for “secret information.”

I have only had one letter held over these more than two years because it contained “secret” information. On that occasion I flew to DC, hired an interpreter with the “secret clearance” and went to the “secret place” to read the mysterious letter. As you might have suspected there was nothing mysterious in the letter… the interpreter first read the letter to me and after I expressed my dismay he typed out the translation… I resubmitted the letter in English and it was approved without so much as a mention of the previous “secret” designation… It was an expensive letter.

So now I have had a second letter withheld… well actually only half of a second letter…The government has designated three pages of Mr. Al-Ghizzawi’s six page letter as “secret.” It seems that the three pages that discuss recent issues that Mr. Al-Ghizzawi experienced while at Gitmo are ok …. It is the three pages that talk about what happened at the hands of the US while he was still in Afghanistan and his early days at Guantanamo that needs to be kept secret… and I don’t blame them one bit for trying…it is ugly. … really ugly. So there you have it, the ugliest facts are classified as “secret” to protect… I’m sorry, what is it again that we are protecting here? Article

Political theater of the most dreadful sort from the woebegone G. Walker administration? Like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanc, we’re “shocked — shocked.”

…the former chief prosecutor at the Guantanamo military commission in Cuba for suspected terrorists says in an interview that the Hicks case was the beginning of political interference in the offshore justice system. Col. Morris Davis resigned earlier this month to protest new rules he says will ensure that political officials have similar control over future war-crimes prosecutions.

Until recently, there was a dispute over who had control over prosecutions at the commission. Under the new structure approved by the Defense Department early this month, the chief prosecutor will report ultimately to the Pentagon general counsel, who is appointed by the Bush administration.

The system “takes the ‘military’ out of military commissions and makes them political commissions,” says Col. Davis, a career Air Force lawyer.

Col. Davis added that other political considerations surfaced in recent months, including a push to get trials sufficiently advanced to prevent the next president — “particularly Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, if they win” — from changing the policy.

[snip]

“To say that the military commissions are devoid of politics is naive,” says retired Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, who negotiated the Hicks plea deal before stepping down in April as a legal adviser to the administrator of the Guantanamo commission. “But was it done in an untoward way? I don’t think so.”

[snip]

In a September 2006 meeting, Col. Davis said in a written complaint to the Pentagon inspector general, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England discussed the “strategic political value” in charging terrorists before the U.S. midterm elections. At that meeting, Col. Davis wrote, Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II “corrected” Mr. England to say that the chief prosecutor must be free of “coercion and unlawful influence.”

In December, Prime Minister Howard, facing problems at home caused by the Hicks detention, said he would put “increasing pressure on the Americans to stick to the timetable they have given us.”

The next month, Col. Davis said, Mr. Haynes telephoned him to ask how quickly Mr. Hicks could be charged. Col. Davis told Mr. Haynes he would need at least two weeks. “Two weeks is too long. There’s a lot of pressure to get this done as soon as possible,” Col. Davis said Mr. Haynes replied. On Jan. 31, Mr. Haynes called again asking about the charges, adding, “Who else are we charging? Appearances would be better if it was more than just Hicks,’ ” Col. Davis said.

[snip]

Gen. Hemingway’s successor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, arrived in July and asserted direct control of the prosecution effort, prompting conflict with Col. Davis over the office’s leadership. Gen. Hartmann is neither a judge nor a prosecutor. He is appointed by the Pentagon general counsel to advise the administrator of the military commission — a position that has no exact analogy in civilian courts.

An internal review ultimately sided with Gen. Hartmann, rejecting Col. Davis’s view that federal law insulated the chief prosecutor from the legal adviser’s direct control. Earlier this month, Deputy Secretary England issued memorandums that essentially put the prosecutions under the control of the Pentagon’s general counsel. Article