Another socialist blog

The Bush government is fond of giving lip service to the rule of law. And when they give something lip service, they really give it lip service. These are people who know how to stick to the script. Just today we have comments in support of the rule of law from Bush himself, from Condoleeza Rice, and from State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey, to pick just a few low-hanging examples. There could hardly be a better example of doublespeak. These people who claim to love the rule of law hold it in utter contempt. There are so many examples, but the atrocity of the detainee tribunals in Guantanamo, the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, will be the example of the day.

NPR reports on a study of 393 tribunal transcripts. The study reveals the tribunals to be empty of actual due process.

• In 100% of the cases the detainee was eventually found to be an enemy combatant.
• In 100% of the cases the government presented no witnesses at all.
• In 96% of the cases the government presented no evidence at all, relying instead on secret evidence that detainees were not allowed to see.
• In three cases there was a unanimous finding that the defendant was not an enemy combatant. The Defense Department ordered re-hearings in each case. In two of the three re-hearings the defendant was found to be enemy combatants. In the third, the tribunal again found unanimously that the detainee was not an enemy combatant, so the Defense Department orded a re-re-hearing for that prisoner. At this point the tribunal apparently got the message and found that, by golly, he is an enemy combatant after all.
• Detainees have a nominal right to call witnesses, but the only witnesses actually available to them are their fellow detainees. The U.S. State Department, which is responsible for producing witnesses from other countries on request, have produced none since the tribunals started.

It’s Kafkaesque. The government’s secret evidence is presumed to be reliable. The defendant, who has the burden to prove he is not an enemy combatant, has the right to rebut the government’s evidence. But without being able to see the evidence, he cannot know what there is to rebut, and cannot even get access to witnesses who might be able to take a stab at it. And finally, even if the prisoner is found not to be an enemy combatant, the result of the tribunal is simply vetoed by the Pentagon.

Americans should be deeply ashamed to be associated with this kind of injustice, and doubly ashamed and the hypocrisy of their leaders.

The Bush administration line on torture is now “We want clarity.” They claim to fear that well-intentioned U.S. interrogators would run afoul of the “nebulous language” in the Geneva Conventions. The President called on Congress to pass a law giving “clear guidelines”.

This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article III of the Geneva Convention. And that Common Article III says that there will be no outrages upon human dignity. It’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation. And what I’m proposing is that there be clarity in the law so that our professionals will have no doubt that that which they are doing is legal.

Well, if you can’t figure out what an outrage upon human dignity is, perhaps you would recognize one when you saw it? Perhaps you would agree that throwing a prisoner’s Koran in the shit bucket would be an example. Maybe we could all agree that summarily executing bound prisoners would be covered. Maybe, just maybe, decent civilized people could agree that keeping a prisoner suspended by the arms until he died, or suffocating him with a plastic bag, would be an outrage against human dignity. How much debate could there be?

Yeah, right.

The problem is not that they don’t understand the rules. The problem is that everybody in the world understands the rules. The problem is that they want to ignore the rules and torture prisoners, but they know they might go to prison if they do. Their solution is to get rid of the Geneva Conventions by “clarifying” them.

When they’re done, the word “torture” will be like the word “terrorism”—it won’t mean what it did before, rather, it will refer only to what our enemies do, never to what we do. And the word “clarify” will be entirely meaningless.

Having admitted to running secret prisons outside the reach of U.S. law and public scrutiny, the Bush administration has chosen to brazen it out. Yes, as a matter of fact we ARE running secret prisons, and now that it’s politically expedient we’ll brag about it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel made the obvious point in her low-key way:

“The existence of such prisons is incompatible with my idea of the rule of law. Even in the fight against terrorism… the ends do not justify the means.”

Ouch. The U.S. claims at all times to uphold the rule of law, and here’s a foreigner pointing out that we do the opposite. And then she reviews an elementary moral principle for a head of state who claims not only to be a moral leader but claims to be on a mission from God. I guess she’s not his girlfriend any more.

Of course they haven’t bothered to explain why the secret prisons were secret in the first place. They like secrets, and they don’t like explaining. I’ve said it before, official secrets are to protect official liars. If they are keeping their European and Asian prisons secret, it’s because there’s something going on there that they don’t want American voters to know about. Even if I didn’t cynically assume that means the prisoners are tortured we have the accounts of some of the victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen grabbed in New York:

After three consecutive days of beating and interrogation, he said, “I could not take the pain any more and I falsely confessed of having been to Afghanistan.” After the Canadian government intervened, Syrian authorities released him in October 2003 — more than one year after his ill-fated attempt to change planes in New York City — with an acknowledgment that there was no evidence that he was ever involved in terrorism.

Do you feel safer yet?

Molly Ivins has written one of the most sensible comments on George W. Bush’s torture policy I’ve yet seen.

A string of prisons in Eastern Europe in which suspects are held and tortured indefinitely, without trial, without lawyers, without the right to confront their accusers, without knowing the evidence or the charges against them, if any. Forever. It’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” Another secret prison in the midst of a military camp on an island run by an infamous dictator. Prisoner without a name, cell without a number.

Who are we? What have we become? The shining city on a hill, the beacon and bastion of refuge and freedom, a country born amidst the most magnificent ideals of freedom and justice, the greatest political heritage ever given to any people anywhere.

The last month’s news has been surreal indeed, even by the standards of this Presidency. The Senate has passed the McCain amendment outlawing torture of prisoners. I don’t know what’s more bizarre, the fact that some Senators voted against it, or the fact that the Senators think international law against torture needs to be fleshed out.

Then we have the President brazenly claiming, against mountains of evidence, that we simply don’t torture—but simultaneously threatening to veto the bill containing the McCain amendment, and refusing to say what the bill would require him to do differently.

The justification goes like this. We want the terrorists (read: anyone we take prisoner) to think we’ll torture them. So we can’t make it illegal to torture them. But trust us, we’re bluffing. We don’t torture. Never mind the childishness of this argument, as if the 300 million Americans were somehow keeping a big secret from the rest of the world. It reminds me of the goofball logic of nuclear deterrence, in which we have to believe the enemy is rational, and they have to believe we’re crazy. Here we are, self-appointed moral leaders of the world, deliberately broadcasting the message that we are amoral savages. No wonder terrorism is up.

When they say Saddam will be brought to justice, apparently they mean frontier justice. Human Rights Watch has released a report indicating that when Saddam and other former Iraqi officials go on trial October 19, they will likely be deprived of a fair trial.

Saddam has yet to be charged officially. His attorneys cannot get a written copy of the rules of the tribunal that will try him. These flaws alone suggest that his defense cannot possibly be ready any time soon, but there are more and more serious problems. The prosecution is not required to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. If the tribunal issues a death sentence, it is illegal for any Iraqi official to commute the sentence, and the sentence must be carried out with 30 days.

That the U.S. is no friend of international law goes without saying, but it’s clear that as George Galloway says, standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington. The so-called liberation of Iraq will culminate in a trial that would never be allowed to take place in a civilian court in this country. It is a pretense at a trial. Saddam is to be summarily executed.

Why not just dispatch a death squad and be done with it?

NPR has an interview with the Army chaplain who served at Guantanamo, and who was wrongly accused of espionage. Former Capt. James Yee has written a book about his ordeal, which included 76 days in solitary confinement. He was released and given an honorable discharge, but no apology.

Yee gives further confirmation to the Koran desecration story that got Newsweek in so much trouble. You will recall how conservatives insisted that the story of the Koran being flushed down toilets was obviously false, because you can’t get a big fat book to flush down a toilet. Yee, an eyewitness to the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, explains that if you were at Camp Xray, you didn’t have a flush toilet, you had a bucket. Throwing the Koran in the shit bucket isn’t particularly difficult, if you’re already disposed to torture people. I guess conservatives don’t think much about what it’s really like to be a prisoner of the United States government.

George W. Bush marked the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide by urging all states to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. This is a painless gesture for Bush, whose cronies presumably don’t include any Rwandan genocidists, or indeed any Rwandans.

You might think that this means Bush and the Republicans want to bring all genocide perpetrators to justice, but you’d be wrong. There is a long history of Republican involvement with Nazi war criminals, including a high-ranking member of George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign who was let go when his fascist connections were exposed. For G. W. Bush to claim that he wants to bring international criminals to justice, is deepest hypocrisy.

Having said that, there’s one complaint about the Bush family that is not justified. George H. W. Bush is widely misquoted as having said “Lets forgive the Nazi war criminals.” According to the New York Times article from April 14, 1990, usually used as a citation for the quote, the elder Bush actually said that the German people should be forgiven for the Holocaust.

Invoking the spirit of Good Friday and Easter, President Bush said today that people “ought to forgive” Germans for the Holocaust but should not forget history’s lessons.

“I’m one who believes in forgiveness,” Mr. Bush said aboard Air Force One….

“Most of the teachings have ample room for forgiveness and moving on,” he said, adding that people should “not forget, necessarily, because I think you learn from history, learn what not to do wrong.”

“But,” he sid, “I think, I’m a Christian and I think forgiveness is something that I feel very strongly about.”

He may indeed favor amnesty for his Nazi associates, but he wasn’t foolish enough to say it in public.

The U.S. has officially discontinued any pretense of interest in an international treaty to create the first permanent tribunal for war crimes. The United States signed the International Criminal Court treaty during the Clinton Administration but never ratified it. The Bush Administration claims, as did Clinton, that the Court would be a violation of U.S. sovereignty: by which they mean, of course, that Americans might find themselves in the dock.

The United States has long viewed international tribunals as, at best, imperfect tools of U.S. imperial policy. When the United States was found by the International Court of Justice to be engaging in war crimes against Nicaragua, President Bush (the elder) simply ignored the Court. American leaders cheer, however, when the same court goes after Slobodan Milosevic. Our interest in international courts depends entirely on whose ox is being gored.

Liberals are being blamed for the presumed defeat of Charles Pickering’s nomination to the Court of Appeals. Orrin Hatch has called the outcry against Pickering a “lynching,” which is awfully ironic coming from a man who helped the Judiciary Committee beat up on Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings.