Month: July 2013

July 1 marked the first day in office for Clifford Sloan, newly appointed Guantanamo closure envoy. Shortly after his May address on counterterrorism, President Obama appointed Sloan to the Office of Guantanamo Closure in the State Department, a position that had been vacant since January. The appointment and reopening of the office is the only concrete step the President has taken concerning Guantanamo since his May speech. With over 100 of the 166 remaining prisoners on a hunger strike and over 40 being brutally force-fed, great hopes are being placed on Mr. Sloan to break the impasse.

A key first step in closing Guantanamo is releasing the 86 prisoners who have already been cleared for release. This is something the President can do by invoking the waiver system that Congress put in place. The Secretary of Defense must determine that risk of the detainees returning to militant groups is low and that the transfer is in the interest of national security, then notify Congress of the release 30 days in advance. So far, the Obama administration has never exercised this authority.

A particular problem in the transfer of cleared prisoners is the case of Yemen. Of the 86 cleared prisoners, 56 are Yemeni. President Obama banned the release of Yemeni prisoners in 2010 after a man trained by militants in Yemen attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound plane in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his underwear.

In his May speech, President Obama announced that he was lifting this self-imposed ban. Congress immediately tried to block the President by passing an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Bill (NDAA) on June 14 that prohibits using Defense Department funds to transfer detainees to Yemen for one year. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana), passed 236 to 188.

But it is not law, since it has not been passed by the Senate.

Instead, the Senate is trying to ease the way for the President to not only release the cleared prisoners, but close the entire prison. The Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill on June 13 that would allow the Pentagon to send detainees to the United States for medical treatment, sustained detention, and prosecution. Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) inserted the provisions into the Senate version of the 2014 NDAA, and the Senate should be voting on it in the fall.

The senators most strongly opposed to the closure of Guantanamo include Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Bob Corker (R-TN), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Jeff Sessions (R-AL). In a press release, Senator Inhofe condemned the efforts to close Guantanamo as “letting the terrorists win.”

In a meeting with CODEPINK, Senator Levin’s chief of staff David Lyles suggested that activists focus on helping the bill pass the Senate. But he also emphasized that while all of these issues are being played out in Congress, we should not lose sight of the fact that the President still has the executive authority to transfer the detainees cleared for release and that we should pressure him to do so.

Activists throughout the US have been doing just that. Various petitions to the President have gathered more than 400,000 signatures.  The most prominent was signed by Lt. Colonel and former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo, Morris Davis, and promoted by Witness Against Torture.

People have rallied and held vigils in cities and towns, flooded the White House and Southern Command with phone calls and, by the hundreds, fasted in solidarity with the hunger strikers. The faith community has called Guantanamo a deep moral wound, and 38 senior religious leaders sent the President and Congress a letter calling for the closure of Guantanamo.

Most dramatically, several U.S. citizens — among them military veterans — are now deep into open-ended fasts, risking their health and even their lives in their effort to see Guantanamo closed.  In a dramatic action at the White House on June 26, Diane Wilson, 57 days into her hunger strike, jumped over the White House fence. Twenty-two others, all dressed in orange jumpsuits, were also arrested by refusing to leave the White House fence.

Amnesty International and other organizations are lobbying senators who are on the fence about closing Guantanamo. CODEPINK is collecting signatures to hand-deliver to the new envoy Clifford Sloan. Witness Against Torture is recruiting new people to join the US solidarity hunger strike. And CloseGitmo.net is keeping people up-to-date on activism around the country.

“Guantanamo has become a symbol around the world for an America that flouts the rule of law,” President Obama said. With the hunger strike reaching 150 days on July 6, the lives of these prisoners—along with our nation’s reputation, hangs in the balance.

There is a bit of déjà vu happening in Egypt right now: as mass protests against the Morsi regime continue to grow, the Egyptian army gave the regime a 48-hour ultimatum, threatening direct military involvement in the political process “if the demands of the people are not realized.” In other words, if Morsi doesn’t either step down or call for early elections, the army will move to unseat him, just as happened when the protest movement prompted the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

But, as the Guardian is reporting, the Morsi regime believes that is impossible unless Washington wants new leadership.

The head of Egypt’s armed forces, General Abdel Fattah Sisi, threatened direct military involvement in the political process “if the demands of the people are not realised”, in a statement implying that Morsi should either step down or at least call early elections.

The presidency indicated that it viewed the statement as a coup d’etat, and implied that Morsi was safe as long as his administration still had US support.

“Obviously we feel this is a military coup,” a presidential aide said. “But the conviction within the presidency is that [the coup] won’t be able to move forward without American approval.”

This should serve as a much-needed corrective to claims that the Obama administration relinquished America’s imperial holdings in Egypt and allowed the democratic process post-Mubarak to take hold unencumbered. As Egypt’s rulers see it, so long as the overlords in Washington want them to stay in power, then stay in power they will – regardless of what the public desires.

“[T]he U.S. strategy in the region is to prefer a managed transition to civilian rule and democratic governance as long as the American major strategic objectives are not challenged,” wrote Esam Al-Amin last year. Namely, to “keep the Americans in, the Chinese and Russians out, the Iranians down, and the Israelis safe.”

And as The New York Times reported last year, US aid to Egypt helps keep the pockets of defense corporations nice and full.

Granted, the Egyptian military is no benevolent savior in all this. They continue to have entrenched interests within Egypt’s power structure and have a record of serious abuse. Their gripe with Morsi is probably not about fulfilling their commitment to national self-determination. But when the military finally turned on Mubarak in 2011, demonstrators in Tahrir Square held up Egyptian soldiers on their shoulders and handed babies to tank operators rolling through the streets.

It’s hard to argue that the U.S., who has propped up a dictatorship in Egypt for decades in order to serve its own geo-political interests of control and domination, should have more of a say in Egyptian politics than the protesters and anyone who apparently speaks on their behalf.

I’ve noted the work of Webb and Murphy before here. They also claim, according to their sources, that Petraeus was intentionally ousted from the CIA through the deliberate public disclosure of his affair with Paula Broadwell.

Those defending the NSA’s surveillance activities in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks swear the program is lawful, transparent, and checked by oversight in other branches of government.

Many are even appalled at the suggestion that the NSA could ever overstep its bounds or intentionally violate the privacy of hundreds of millions of Americans. “The notion that we are trolling through everyone’s emails and voyeuristically reading them or listening to everyone’s phone calls is, on its face, absurd,” Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told NBC.

At best, this is terribly ignorant; at worst, deliberately misleading. A simple glance at America’s very recent history shows we’d be naive to expect the NSA to adhere to their legal and constitutional limits. Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News:

“After World War II, the National Security Agency (NSA) established and directed three programs that deliberately targeted American citizens’ private communications,” wrote Army signals intelligence officer Major Dave Owen in a paper published late last year in an Army intelligence journal.

The three programs were Project SHAMROCK (1945 to 1975), which collected telegraph communications; Project MINARET (1960 to 1973), which functioned as a watch list for terms, names and references of interest; and Drug Watch Lists (1970 to 1973), which focused on communications of individuals and organizations believed to be associated with illegal drug traffic. Information about these programs first became public in the 1970s upon investigation by the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee.

Without the Church Committee, we might still have been unaware of the extent of the illegal domestic spying operations that occurred. These abuses were exposed only when the rampant political corruption of the 1970s prompted leaks to the press and an unprecedented Senate investigation aimed at uncovering them and reining them in.

In the latest case, we have a whistleblower, Edward Snowden, and a journalist committed to transparency, Glenn Greenwald. The material that has been leaked to the public about NSA surveillance is clear and straightforward: not only does NSA fail to get individualized warrants, it collects the call data of virtually all Americans in bulk and stores the content of our Internet activities. For officials to go on denying these programs are what the leaked documents reveal them to be is an exercise in futility. They are hoping Americans don’t read the leaked documents and only listen to their official denials (something the mainstream media has been dutifully helping them out with).

In order for Americans to believe the official denials, they either have to not read the leaked documents or be completely ignorant of the NSA’s not-too-distant history in which civil liberties were the last thing on anyone’s mind.