harikari.com

This is disappointing:

The Obama administration has decided not to seek new legislation from Congress authorizing the indefinite detention of about 50 terrorism suspects being held without charges at at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said Wednesday.

Instead, the administration will continue to hold the detainees without bringing them to trial based on the power it says it has under the Congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, authorizing the president to use force against forces of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In concluding that it does not need specific permission from Congress to hold detainees without charges, the Obama administration is adopting one of the arguments advanced by the Bush administration in years of debates about detention policies.

But President Obama’s advisers are not embracing the more disputed Bush contention that the president has inherent power under the Constitution to detain terrorism suspects indefinitely regardless of Congress.

The Justice Department said in a statement Wednesday night that “the administration would rely on authority already provided by Congress” under the use of force resolution. “The administration is not currently seeking additional authorization,” the statement said.

The department pointed out that courts would continue to review the cases of those held without charges through habeas corpus hearings. The Washington Post first reported the decision.

…

Sarah E. Mendelson, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who led a study about closing Guantánamo, said forgoing legislation was “overall a good step” because it prevented Congress from making things worse. “We don’t know if it closes the door definitively on efforts to institutionalize detention without charge,” she added, “since the White House might seek to do this by itself.”

That’s two steps back maybe one step forward.

A fear-mongering, power-grabbing president created the Guantánamo Bay detention camp without explicit congressional backing, so an emboldened, pragmatic president ought to be able to undo it in the same way.  It looks like Obama has backed away from being that president.

As far as the ridiculous politically charged fears of holding terrorists on American soil – it’s completely irrational.  We have hundreds, maybe even thousands of very despicable American people incarcerated in maximum security prisons on our soil already.  Are you scared?  I’m not, and I wouldn’t be scared if our government tried and convicted some despicable Middle Eastern people and held them in maximum security prisons on our soil.

Obama is a constitutional lawyer.  He knows the right thing to do, and he spoke about it last May.

There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law — a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.

So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.

… It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.

… In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.

Obama should just forget about the fickle congress and do what he said back in May:  Close Guantanamo, move the remaining prisoners to maximum security prisons on American soil, try those we can prove committed crimes, and develop a system consistent with our constitution and values that deals with those who are truly at war with us.

UPDATE:  A few hours after posting this, I read this column on Salon.com by Glenn Greewald, who is very thorough as always.  He is glad that Congress has been taken out of the loop.

…nothing good — and plenty of bad — could come from having Congress write a new detention law.  As bad as the Obama administration is on detention issues, the Congress is far worse.  Any time the words “Terrorism” or “Al Qaeda” are uttered, they leap to the most extreme and authoritarian measures.  Congress is intended to be a check on presidential powers, but each time Terrorism is the issue, the ironic opposite occurs:  when the Obama administration and Congress are at odds, it is Congress demanding greater powers of executive detention (as happened when Congress blocked Obama from transferring Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.).

In the 30 years I’ve lived in this country, I have never witnessed a more shameful and cowardly performance than that of Congress denying the Obama administration funds to move Guantanamo detainees to high security prisons  in the United States.

It’s not like the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) concept is alien to me; it’s just that I never thought I would see such irrational fear and illogic displayed to the world in a way that was so utterly brainless, gutless and weak-kneed.

America’s prisons house serial killers, rapists, sociopaths and psychopaths and other evil doers to compare with any country in the world. Yet our representatives and senators, not to mention their constituents, are scared shitless at the thought of having some of the prisoners at Guantanamo incarcerated even in US military prisons. It’s hard to know whether their fear is of the detainees escaping en masse to wreak havoc in their communities or the thought that al-Qaida might launch an invasion of, say, Fort Leavenworth to free them.

The city council of Hardin, Montana, hoping to boost a sagging economy, has stepped up to the plate by offering to house some of the detainees in a newly built prison that the state now says it no longer needs. “Over my dead health-care plan” says Senator Max Baucus (or words to that effect anyway), ever the study in political courage.

And then there’s the issue of where to put those detainees who have been determined not to be enemy combatants. These are the people whom we scooped up in the Bush administration’s panic-ridden response to 9/11, held for several years in conditions that most of us don’t want to know about, only to find that they were no threat to us after all. Many of them can’t go home because they would likely be imprisoned, tortured and killed by their own governments.

We had an opportunity to release one such group, Muslim Chinese called Uighurs, into the US. These have no axe to grind against the US but oppose the Chinese government’s policies towards the Muslim population. There are Uighurs in the US already, including a community in the Washington DC area. Had we been willing to bring them to the US we might have had more luck convincing European governments to take other detainees.

But no, jittery politicians and a frightened electorate don’t want to hear about it.  The gutsier souls of Bermuda and Palau have put us to shame and agreed to take in some of the Uighurs.

So my question is this: how is it that a country capable of fielding such valiant and dedicated men and women in its armed forces who serve their country so bravely, can be otherwise so bereft of courage?

Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, May 10, 2009:

The group that’s left, the 245 or so, these are the worst of the worst. This is the hard core. You’d have a recidivism rate out of this group of maybe 50 or 60 percent. They want to get out because they want to kill more Americans. And you’re just going to find it very difficult to send them any place. Now, as I say, there has been some talk on the part of the administration about putting them in the United States.

So are they really the “worst of the worst?”

Hardly…

ST. GEORGE, Bermuda — Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

…

The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled, apparently unarmed, when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here, like 13 other Uighurs still at Guantánamo but expected to depart soon to other destinations, had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism.

But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate. On Sunday, these four expressed a surprising lack of bitterness toward the United States, saying — as they had during interrogations years ago in Guantánamo — that they had never been anti-American and just wanted to get on with their lives.

…

From the men’s own statements, it is clear that their presence in Afghanistan was linked to their animosity toward China. Whatever they might have wished in 2001, there is no evidence they sought to become part of a global jihad.

Now, over Chinese objections, the men are being released to third countries.

Around a dozen of the Uighurs will be going to Palau, an island nation of about 20,000 people just east of The Phillipines.  A New Zealand paper reports:

Palau is one of a handful of countries that does not recognise China and maintains diplomatic relations with Taiwan.

President Johnson Toribiong said Palau was accepting the detainees “as a humanitarian gesture” intended to help them restart their lives.

And today’s Los Angeles Times quotes President Toribiong, a former defense attorney who earned his law degree at the University of Washington:

“These people are not monsters,” said Toribiong, who, with graying hair and glasses, looks pensive, even professorial. “They should be presumed innocent because no one has proven them guilty.”

That sounds perfectly reasonable to anyone with basic knowledge of Western laws and the concept of habeus corpus, but it sounds crazy to people like Dick Cheney who think the Executive Office has the power to detain and torture suspects indefinitely without ever even charging or convicting them of crimes.

Just last week Cheney said the only other option besides imprisoning “combatants” at Guantánamo was ”to kill them, and we don’t operate that way.”

Worst of the worst?  That would be Dick Cheney and his gang.

UPDATE:  or more like “backdate”  on this story…  N.J. Barnes wrote about the plight of the imprisoned Uighurs way back in 2007.  This post is about some of them being released to Albania.

Today is Freedom of Information Day.  It’s “an annual event on or near March 16, the birthday of James Madison, who is widely regarded as the Father of the Constitution and as the foremost advocate for openness in government.”

And today, thanks to Mark Danner’s story for The New York Review of Books, we have learned that the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote a report that documented how the United States of America did indeed torture its prisoners at black sites around the world and at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post reports:

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

…

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

…

Often using the detainee’s own words, the report offers a harrowing view of conditions at the secret prisons, where prisoners were told they were being taken “to the verge of death and back,” according to one excerpt. During interrogations, the captives were routinely beaten, doused with cold water and slammed head-first into walls. Between sessions, they were stripped of clothing, bombarded with loud music, exposed to cold temperatures, and deprived of sleep and solid food for days on end. Some detainees described being forced to stand for days, with their arms shackled above them, wearing only diapers.

“On a daily basis . . . a collar was looped around my neck and then used to slam me against the walls of the interrogation room,” the report quotes detainee Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as Walid Muhammad bin Attash, as saying. Later, he said, he was wrapped in a plastic sheet while cold water was “poured onto my body with buckets.” He added: “I would be wrapped inside the sheet with cold water for several minutes. Then I would be taken for interrogation.”

ICRC officials did not dispute the authenticity of the excerpts, but a spokesman expressed dismay over the leak of the material. “

There should be no dismay over the leak of this material.  In a truly free society, this material would have been made public in 2007 when ICRC presented it to the Bush Administration.  If it had, maybe an American public, that at the time was not so distracted by financial news, would have taken notice and demanded accountability.  Maybe then Bush and his gang would have had to answer some difficult questions about how our nation, that he often claimed “does not torture,” was found by the ICRC to be doing just that.

Maybe even some ballsy reporter at a press conference would ask about a public statement he made in 2006 [via Harper's]:

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.” At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

What kind of “Justice Department” finds the interrogation tactics described in the ICRC report as “constituting torture” to be lawful?

This is just another example of how Bush willingly directed agents of the U.S. Government to break international laws of war that prevent the inhumane treatment of prisoners and then ordered up some bogus legal opinions from his minions in the DOJ to say that whatever he decided to do was okay because he was president, and all those bothersome laws didn’t apply to him.

It’s great that he’s no longer president, and it’s great that these stories are finally seeing the light of day.  It will really be great if some day he is held accountable for his crimes and convicted to a long prison term where in his cell he won’t find a Bible, but does find a copy of the U.S. Constitution and a Geneva Conventions handbook.

The Washington Post has confirmed that the United States has used torture at Guantanamo Bay. 

From the Reuters article:

The Pentagon official overseeing the tribunals for Guantanamo Bay detainees has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

“We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani,” Susan Crawford said in an interview with the newspaper. “His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for prosecution.

I can only hope that once Obama gets into office he will look into the activities and punish all who were involved, up to and including George W. Bush.

But, we will need to hold Obama accountable for investigating the former administration.  I am concerned about the possibility that he will attempt to downplay the crimes of the past administration.

From his recent TV interview, Think Progress reports:

Q: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, ‘Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.’

OBAMA:We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … My orientation is going to be moving foward.

As a nation, we need to watch this closely over the next year and let our representatives in Congress know how we feel about the United States committing War Crimes.