Bush: Critics Of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib And Rendition Are ‘Slandering America’»

During an interview with President Bush on Britain’s Sky News yesterday, Sky political editor Adam Boulton noted that while Bush talks “a lot about freedom,” there are many who say that some of the Bush administration’s torture and detention policies represent “the complete opposite of freedom.” But Bush quickly snapped back, saying those criticizing his policies are slandering America:

BOULTON: There are those who would say look, lets take Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, and rendition and all those things and to them that is the complete opposite of freedom.

BUSH: Of course, if you want to slander America.

So, according to Bush, below is a short — but by no means exhaustive — list of those who have suggested that Bush’s terrorism policies represent “the opposite of freedom” and thus have slandered America:

– The United States Supreme Court: The Court ruled last week that “terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have a right to seek their release in federal court” saying that Bush’s policy compromised “the Constitution’s guarantee of liberty.”

– The Federal Bureau of Investigation: An FBI report issued last month said that according to its agents, “[m]ilitary officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law.”

– McClatchy Newspapers: An eight month McClatchy investigation found that after the Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned “perhaps hundreds” of men “in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.”

Boulton told Bush that the Supreme Court “ruled against what you have been doing” at Guantanamo but Bush wouldn’t budge, arguing that the district court, appellate court and Congress agreed that Gitmo detainees do not have to right to challenge their detention.

Boulton, a Briton, then had to remind Bush of America’s checks and balances system: “But the Supreme Court is supreme isn’t it?”

Censors put limits on Guantánamo photos

Guards put on a mock war court conviction to test the $12 million expeditionary legal compound; censors put a three-tent limit on photos; a Sudanese detainee cracked wise.

 

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Pity the photographer who takes a picture of five tents in a row at “Camp Justice.”

Or two whole tents and slivers of two others.

Under the latest rules for ”operational security,” there’s now a three-tent rule for photos the public can see of the tents that house journalists and support staff at the expeditionary legal compound, where reputed al Qaeda kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged 9/11 co-conspirators are due to get their first taste of military commission justice June 5.

Censorship of news photos has evolved to show, well, less and less across the 6 ½-year Defense Department venture in detaining and at times interrogating war-on-terrorism suspects here.

And numbers do count.

At Camp Delta, the prison camps, photographers are forbidden from showing two guard towers — or, for that matter, any one detainee’s face, except in shadows that make him look like nobody in particular.

Broadly, the military explains the need for operational security, or OP-SEC, two different ways.

First, they seek to shield from public view any details of this remote base that might help al Qaeda or other enemies of the United States stage an attack.

Second, they want to shield from public view the faces of detainees because the Geneva Conventions prohibit the parade or humiliation of prisoners of war.

• Heard at the war court:

An Air Force judge, Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, at one point told defendant Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, that if he wanted to arrange a phone call home to Sudan through the International Committee of the Red Cross, “This is up to you.”

The slight, dark man with a salt-and-pepper beard looked stunned.

”Me?” he sputtered.

“What can I do? I’m a detainee. I cannot do anything about anything.”

The one thing he could do Thursday, for hours, was refuse an effort by his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier, to help orchestrate the call.

• Mindful that the audio broke, the video froze and the power went off earlier this month, military commissions staff spent much of Tuesday testing the technology at their two courtrooms at Camp Justice.

Guards played judge, lawyers and, sometimes detainees, while a technician posed as a witness and an Arabic language translator hired by the war court at one point sat in an alleged terrorist’s seat.

The goal is glitch-free simultaneous hearings at the old retrofitted courtroom as well as the $12 million state-of-the-art expeditionary legal compound, once the war crimes trials get rolling sometime after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in late June.

So Tuesday morning, U.S. forces were reading from a fake script of a trial of a fictional war on terror detainee named Abdul Khadr of Yemen during a daylong equipment check.

Declared one guard playing a presiding officer: ”Mr. Khadr, this commission has convicted you of conspiracy.” Next Khadr’s jury of military officers, called commissioners, were going into secret session to see the evidence against him.

So the presiding officer ordered the feed cut to the media’s press room.

But the feed kept going, and reporters at an adjacent media center got to watch the guard playing a detainee get convicted twice before lunch.

No one could explain who exactly wrote the fake script and why.

But by afternoon the war court script was gone and guards were back in their places, reciting lines from the 1988 Hollywood hit Big — the Tom Hanks tale of a boy who makes a wish and suddenly finds himself living the life of a man.

Terror suspect phones Sudan to hire own lawyer

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — Within hours of a judge’s order, an accused al Qaeda conspirator from Sudan got a call from home Thursday to consult with his family on how they might hire him a lawyer, at their own expense.

Ibrahim al Qosi, 47, had earlier fired his U.S. military lawyer and threatened to boycott his war crimes trial. He said he wanted to talk by telephone with his brother, presumably in Khartoum, to get the Sudanese Bar Association to line him up a defense lawyer instead.

In response, Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, a military judge, ordered lawyers to arrange the call through the International Committee of the Red Cross. She gave them until July 1.

But commanders at the prison camp, ringed by barbed wire and overlooking the Caribbean, accomplished the assignment soon after the judge gaveled the court to a closure.

”It’s done,” said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, spokeswoman for the detention center.

The call lasted about one hour, Storum said, unaware of what was discussed or who was on the other end.

Just hours earlier, Qosi had sat placidly at the war court, miles from the prison camp, wearing the crisp white tunic and trousers of a cooperative captive — and politely insisted that he would not accept the services of his Pentagon-appointed defense attorney.

”I would like you to allow me to contact my family in Sudan so I can get a legal advisor through the bar in my country,” Qosi told the judge.

It was a stark contrast to a tense hearing a day earlier for an alleged al Qaeda foot soldier from Afghanistan, who bit and spat on guards ordered by another judge to force him into his arraignment.

Qosi is accused of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism for allegedly working as Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard and driver and as a member of an al Qaeda mortar crew. Conviction carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Earlier allegations that he worked as an al Qaeda payroll clerk in Khartoum, Sudan, and ran bin Laden’s kitchen in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, are omitted from his current charge sheet.

At his arraignment in April, Qosi threatened to boycott his trial. He said he would not accept any U.S.-appointed lawyer, military or civilian, and called the war crimes court illegitimate.

Thursday, his Air Force judge spent a chunk of the morning session trying to get Qosi to let Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier help him hire his own lawyer. He refused.

”I’ve been imprisoned here for 6 ½ years. I have no contact with the outside world,” he said. “If you allow me to call my family, I will ask them to do that.”

The prison camps launched the Red Cross telephone call program two months ago. It lets cooperative captives get a once-a-year hour-long phone call from home.

So far, approximately 35 of the 270 detainees have received calls, Storum said.

Next will come the more delicate issue of what role a lawyer lined up by Sudan’s Bar Association might play at Qosi’s trial.

War court rules largely require that U.S military attorneys act as defense counsel, in part because of national security concerns at Guantánamo itself and involving evidence at trial.

A clause in the war court manual lets a detainee defend himself or hire his own attorney, so long as there is no U.S. government expense. But the lawyer must be a U.S. citizen and get a Defense Department security clearance that lets the lawyer travel to this remote base.

The war court rules also permit an alleged terrorist to have a foreign attorney consultant on his defense team. But they say the detainee’s U.S. military-appointed defense counsel — whom Qosi rejects — must apply to have the foreign lawyer join the team.

After that, it is up to a Bush administration political appointee, or the trial judge, to approve that foreigner’s role.

Sands: Bush’s Architects Of Torture Are ‘Weaseling Out’ Of Responsibility For ‘Crimes’

In his new book, Torture Team, renowned international lawyer Philippe Sands documents the fact that Bush’s torture program was approved at the highest levels of the administration.

Speaking with PBS’s Bill Moyers on Friday, Sands noted that these architects of torture refuse to acknowledge they were “complicit in the commission of a crime.” “There was not a hint of recognition that anything had gone wrong, nor a hint of recognition of individual responsibility,” he said of his interviews with key torture advocates.

Sands cited former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who was instrumental in shredding the Geneva Conventions, as an example:

When you read my account with Doug Feith and with others, you will see the sort of weaseling out of individual responsibility, the total and abject failure to accept involvement. Read Mr. Feith’s book. on how to fight the so-called war on terror. And it’s as though the man had no involvement in the decisions relating to interrogation of detainees. And yet, as I describe in the book, the man was deeply involved in the decision making from step one. So it’s about individual responsibility. And there’s been an abject failure on that account.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently argued that torture is not unconstitutional. Speaking with Moyers, Sands slammed Scalia for being “foolish” and not considering the implications of his words:

I’ve listened, for example, to Justice Antonin Scalia saying, if the president wants to authorize torture, there’s nothing in our constitution which stops it. Now, pause for a moment. That is such a foolish thing to say. If the United States president can do that, then why can’t the Iranian president do that, or the British prime minister do that, or the Egyptian president do that?

“You open the door in that way, to all sorts of abuses, and you expose the American military to real dangers,” Sands concluded.

Addington, Gonzales Witnessed Gitmo Interrogations In 2002; Approved Of ‘Whatever Needs To Be Done’»

Last month, ABC News revealed that President Bush’s most senior advisers approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush confirmed to ABC he “approved” of the tactics.

In a forthcoming book, British international law professor Phillippe Sands further documents how the most extreme interrogation techniques — including stress, hooding, noise, nudity, and “dogs” — came directly from the White House and Pentagon.
Sands reveals that Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s lawyer Jim Haynes traveled to Guantanamo in 2002, witnessed an interrogation, and sent approval back to Washington. The “driving individual was Mr. Addington, who was obviously the man in control,” Sands said:

There was an extraordinary meeting held in September 2002, just before the techniques were to go up the chain of command, so to speak. [Gonzales, Addington, and Haynes] descended on Guantanamo, met with the combatant commander there Mike Dunlavey, watched some interrogations, and as I was told by Dunlavey and by his lawyer Diane Beaver, basically sent out the signal ‘do whatever needs to be done.’

Sands also explained how Gen. Richard Myers, then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, was cut out of the loop by Rumsfeld. Myers did not know the administration ditched the Geneva Conventions and made use of techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual.
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, explained the implications of these revelations:

Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and — at the apex — Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.
Sands also notes that the interrogation records of al Qaeda suspect Mohammed al-Qahtani — the subject of the 2002 meeting at Guantanamo with Gonzales, Addington, and Haynes — were “mysteriously lost.” Cameras that “run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents, the US military admitted in court papers.”
Beaver added that the TV show 24, specifically Jack Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” “We saw [24] on cable. … It was hugely popular.” “She believed the series contributed to an environment in which those at Guantánamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline – and to go further than they otherwise might,” Sands writes

‘Extraordinary-rendition’ procedure unreliable, says CIA vet who created it

DURHAM, N.C. — The creator of the CIA’s “extraordinary-rendition” program says he has always distrusted interrogation intelligence flowing from the controversial practice, given that the admissions it produced were usually “very tainted” by foreign agencies who jailed suspects at the behest of the United States.

Michael Scheuer, an outspoken anti-terrorism crusader, took part in a Duke University law-school panel on Friday. There, experts debated the future of the highly controversial snatch, jail and interrogate program that he created, and whether it should survive beyond the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, which has often justified rendition as an intelligence gold mine.

In Canada, rendition has become synonymous with the process that resulted in Ottawa’s Maher Arar spending a year in a Syrian jail, where he was beaten with electric cables during the first phases of his captivity. Canadian officials have apologized to the telecommunications engineer and compensated him with $10-million (U.S.), upholding that he was wrongly smeared in intelligence exchanges emanating from Canada, prior to the U.S. decision to render him.

The Bush administration has proven far less contrite in the Arar affair and similar cases, blocking lawsuits on the grounds that probing rendition would illegally spill state secrets.

An estimated 100 to 150 people have been rendered to foreign prisons by the U.S. program, of which Mr. Scheuer remains a big booster. Now retired, he created the program when he was a Central Intelligence Agency analyst tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden. He said the program has been enormously valuable, at least in terms of taking high-level terrorists off the streets and seeing what documents they carried.

But he added that resulting interrogations proved dubious once suspects were sent to third-country prisons, such as Syria or Egypt. “You could bet on the testimony given to you, it was altered in a way that would serve the interests of the country that was giving it,” he said. “So, it was very tainted, in the sense that if Country X or Country Y interrogated these people, you would really have some information, but it would be far from coupled with what was actually being said.”

Mr. Scheuer didn’t dispute that torture has occurred in foreign jails where the United States sent suspects – “You’d have to assume that 80 per cent [of prisoners rendered to Egypt] are not going to have a good time,” he said – but said simply that he didn’t particularly care. “I’m perfectly happy to do anything to defend the United States, so long as the lawyers sign off on it,” he said.

After 9/11, the Bush administration decided to enhance Mr. Scheuer’s pre-existing rendition program with international “black-site” prisons where U.S. officials would lead interrogations in secret CIA jails. “I am much less experienced in the Bush administration,” Mr. Scheuer conceded. “I ran rendition operations from July ‘95 until June of ‘99.”

Speaking at Duke, Mr. Scheuer did put some distance between the program he hatched in 1995 and events that occurred after 2001. “The bar was lowered after 9/11,” he said.

In addition to Mr. Arar’s case in Canada, high-profile renditions controversies have arisen in Germany and Italy. Mr. Scheuer made a point of saying he would personally put the German suspect back on a rendition plane, but did not say the same that about the other two cases. The program he conceived was restricted to targeting only the highest level terrorism suspects, he said.

Questioned about the Arar affair, Mr. Scheuer asserted that that rendition was not technically a CIA job, but rather an FBI initiative, by agents working in cahoots with unspecified agencies north of the border.

That prompted a response from Canadian lawyer Ron Atkey, who was in attendance to give a speech about the years he spent inside the Arar Commission battling government secrecy to reveal what Canada knew about the CIA rendition program.

Mr. Atkey pointed out Canadian agencies were found to have had no foreknowledge of the U.S. decision to put Mr. Arar on a Gulfstream jet and fly him to the Middle East, after his 2002 arrest in a New York airport.

“The biggest piece of baloney,” Mr. Scheuer said. “They [the Canadians] were totally surprised like Captain Renault in Casablanca,” he quipped.

The allusion referred to a scene in the 1942 film, where a duplicitous French gendarme shuts down an illegal casino operation in Morocco – saying “I’m shocked, shocked to find out that gambling is going on in here!” even as he is handed a big win from the roulette wheel.

Mr. Scheuer went on to describe certain U.S. newspaper reporters as “scurrilous” traitors for revealing details of the rendition program.

After the panel, however, he said he wasn’t necessarily familiar with the domestic investigations that led to the Arar affair.

Feith: Only ‘assholes’ are concerned about torture.

In his new Vanity Fair piece on torture, international lawyer Phillippe Sands interviews former Pentagon official Doug Feith, who “played a major role in developing the interrogation policy for Guantanamo Bay.” Feith tells Sands that he shouldn’t be concerned with torture and America’s “moral authority,” because then he is “siding with the assholes“:

“This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

Does Feith therefore think Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is an “asshole”?

DOJ investigates whether Goodling forced out gay attorney

NPR reports that the Justice Department Inspector General is investigating whether Monica Goodling, a key administration figure in the U.S. Attorney scandal, dismissed a career DOJ attorney “because of rumors that she is a lesbian“:

Justice Department e-mails obtained by NPR show that Gonzales’s senior counsel Monica Goodling had a particular interest in Hagen’s duties. A few months before Hagen was let go, according to one e-mail, Goodling removed part of Hagen’s job portfolio — the part dealing with child exploitation and abuse.

DOJ officials “said they came away with the impression that the Attorney General’s office decided not to renew Leslie Hagen’s contract because of the talk about her sexual orientation,” despite her receiving strong performance reviews.

Embassy bombings widow calls for civilian trial for detainee

An American college professor whose Kenyan husband was killed in the 1998 al Qaida suicide bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania said Tuesday that a Guantanamo detainee accused in the attack should be tried in a civilian federal court, not by a military commission.

“These commissions have been fraught with challenges … from coerced evidence to secret evidence,” said Susan Hirsch, a professor at George Mason University outside Washington D.C.

She called the Guantanamo war court, established after the 9/11 attacks, “an unprecedented newly created procedure” that has been “roundly condemned worldwide.”

Hirsch, 48, spoke a day after the Pentagon prosecutor filed proposed charges against Ahmad Ghailani in the embassy bombing that killed her husband. Ghailani was accused of helping gather up the parts for truck bomb that blew through the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998.

Ghailani already was indicted in New York 10 years ago for his involvement in the attack, an indictment that possibly could have seen him already tried and sentenced, had he been turned over to civilian prosecutors for trial when he was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004.

Instead, he was held secretly by the CIA until September 2006, then turned over to military authorities, who transferred him to Guantanamo.

Four other men were tried in New York for the East Africa bombings, which struck in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, killing more than 220 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring more than 4,000.

Each of the men, who were captured in East Africa and brought to the United States for trial, was convicted and is serving a sentence of life in prison.

Hirsch, whose husband, Abdurahman Abdalla, was waiting outside the embassy while she was inside, cashing a check, both attended and testified as a victim at the trial, which was held in New York City.

“In my view, when Ghailani was picked up in Pakistan in 2004, he could’ve been brought to federal court. That’s the kind of justice I would support,” said Hirsch, a cultural anthropology professor who was teaching at Dar es Salaam University as a Fulbright lecturer in 1998.

What faces Ghailani now is uncertain. The Bush administration established military commissions following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to prosecute al Qaida and other war-on-terror captives scooped up abroad.

But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the first format unconstitutional. The current formula, authorized by the 2006 Military Commissions Act, has been attacked by legal advocates and others for allowing evidence obtained through coercion, holding closed sessions and being overseen by White House appointees subject to political pressure.

Hirsch, who wrote a book, “In The Moment of Greatest Calamity: Terrorism, Grief and a Victim’s Quest for Justice,” about her loss and the subsequent trial, said she’d been notified in advance that the Pentagon was preparing charges against Ghailani.

But she said that she had not been invited to observe proceedings at Guantanamo, as she had been for the New York trials.

If invited, she said, she would consider attending.

A professor of cultural anthropology at George Mason, Hirsch runs the suburban Washington D.C.’s Undergraduate Program Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Hirsch testified in the sentencing phase of the 2001 trial of the four men charged in the bombings — a Lebanese-born naturalized American, a Saudi, a Tanzanian and a Jordanian.

All four got life sentences without possibility of parole.

Monday, the New York U.S. Attorneys office as well as the Department of Justice declined to comment on whether they would seek to prosecute Ghailani in civilian court. The Pentagon’s military commissions legal advisor said Monday there is nothing to prevent both a civilian and a military commission trial.

Hamdan’s lawyer says advisor is exerting illegal sway for political ends

In a motion to dismiss the case against Bin Laden’s ex-driver, he says his Navy superior is pursuing election-year convictions when he is supposed to be impartial.

MIAMI — The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, on Thursday accused U.S. officials of trying to orchestrate war-crimes convictions for election-year political gain.

In his motion for dismissal of the case against Hamdan, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer accused Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann — legal advisor to the White House official overseeing terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — of exercising “unlawful command influence” over both the prosecution and defense. Lawyers participating in the tribunals are members of the U.S. military, and all are subordinate in rank to Hartmann.

More than a dozen suspected senior Al Qaeda figures are among the 280 prisoners currently at Guantanamo, including self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

In his 97-page motion, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer cited what he said were inappropriate comments and actions by Hartmann and political appointees in the Guantanamo process — including its top official, Susan J. Crawford, the convening authority.

Hartmann “has so closely aligned himself with the prosecutorial function that he cannot continue to provide the requisite impartial advice to the convening authority,” Mizer said.

Hartmann did not return messages seeking comment. But a spokesman for the tribunals, Army Maj. Robert D. Gifford, said the general had not seen the motion and would have nothing to say immediately about its allegations.

“While the Office of Military Commissions receives notice of court filings, we are not aware if such a motion has even been filed with the trial court,” Gifford said. “Regardless, the proper place for the resolution of any legal matter is in the courtroom.”

In the last six years, only one case against a detainee at Guantanamo Bay has reached its conclusion. Crawford, who served as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was Defense secretary, in early 2007 facilitated the plea bargain that freed Australian David Hicks.

The move was seen by many as a favor by the Bush administration to Australian Prime Minister John Howard, whose failure to free Hicks was hampering his reelection battle — which he eventually lost.

The former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, quit in October after complaining that Hartmann was bringing political pressure to bear on the legal process.

The motion filed Thursday said that Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II had effectively ordered Davis to ensure that the terrorism suspects all were found guilty. “We can’t hold these men for six years and have acquittals. We have to have convictions,” Haynes is quoted as saying when Davis mentioned that some defendants at the World War II Nuremberg trials were acquitted.

Hartmann took over as legal advisor in July and immediately began acting as “de facto chief prosecutor,” Mizer wrote in his motion.