Month: August 2013

From the Guardian’s letters section:

More than 150 civil society organisations from around the globe are asking President Barack Obama to end the prosecution of Edward Snowden (Activists stage second national day of protest against NSA’s domestic spying, 4 August).

Human rights, digital rights and media freedom campaigners from the UK to Uruguay and from the US to Uganda have joined together to call on the US administration to acknowledge Snowden as a whistleblower. All of us ask that he is protected and not persecuted.

Snowden’s disclosures have triggered a much-needed public debate about mass surveillance online everywhere. Thanks to him, we have learned the extent to which our online lives are systematically monitored by governments, without transparency, accountability or safeguards from abuse.

Rather than address this gross abuse, the US government has chosen to shoot the messenger. It has revoked his passport and obstructed his search for asylum. European governments have been quick to help.

The knock-on effect will be to encourage others to follow by example. States that have even less regard for their citizens will justify attacks on those who put themselves at significant risk to expose wrongdoing and corruption or raise matters of serious public concern.

Snowden has also been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. These kinds of public displays of support for Snowden-as-whistleblower instead Snowden-as-criminal are critical in continuing to embarrass the Obama administration for seeking to punish someone for revealing government wrongdoing and abuse.

“The U.S. authorities’ relentless campaign to hunt down and block whistleblower Edward Snowden’s attempts to seek asylum is a gross violation of his human rights,” Amnesty International said in a statement last month. “It is his unassailable right, enshrined in international law, to claim asylum and this should not be impeded.”

Still, what will ultimately hinder the administration’s pursuit of Snowden is not public outcry, it’s Snowden’s ability to evade the U.S. and maintain his protected asylum status. His temporary asylum status was granted in Russia for one year, although it is renewable without limit. Presumably he still aims to seek asylum in Latin America, which he has good chances of doing if he can manage to travel. Last time Washington thought he got on a plane, European governments were pressured to forcibly down Evo Morales’s plane in violation of international law. So, it doesn’t look like any punches will be pulled.

Last weekend, one need not have looked further than the Foreign Affairs homepage for a little bit of political humor. There readers will find a lengthy, circumspect article authoritatively titled, “The War of Law: How New International Law Undermines Democratic Sovereignty.”

The piece begins with applause for the Senate’s decision last December to reject the the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities, before critiquing a trend sustained by some legal scholars, called legal transnationalism, which favors enshrining articulated international norms of justice in national judiciaries.

The punchline can be found in the byline. The article was coauthored by Jon Kyl, John Fonte, and — prepare to laugh, those in the know — Douglas Feith. Not simply some sort of detached scholar, devoted professional, or principled activist, the latter author would appear to have a direct stake in the outcome of the global debate on legal transnationalism given the clear threat posed to him by potential criminal charges.

Former undersecretary of defense for policy in the Bush administration, Feith is often remembered for heading a group prior to the Iraq War which “developed, produced, and then disseminated” intelligence assessments contradicting the CIA’s conclusions. The group, called the Office of Special Plans, attempted to allege a nonexistent link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Defense Department’s inspector general subsequently issued a report on Feith’s group finding it to have engaged in “inappropriate” intelligence activities, although none were in violation of any DOD directives or American law.

But Feith the multitasker apparently found it difficult to shake an aura of criminality. Relevant to the Foreign Affairs article of interest, he also happens to be one of the Bush Six, a group of the aforementioned administration’s legal advisers subject to a criminal investigation initiated in 2009 by a court in Spain for their alleged role in enabling and abetting the torture of terrorism suspects.

The development certainly did not go unnoticed in the U.S., with Feith exclaiming "It’s not a happy thing for the Spanish court to think of prosecuting Americans for advice they gave to the president of the United States!"

Continue reading “Foreign Affairs Forgets To Mention Douglas Feith Was Investigated for Bush-Era Torture”

The news today is that Guantanamo Bay’s head jailor William Lietzau, “in charge of the indefinite detention of a lot of people long-since cleared for release,” writes Jason Ditz, has condemned the lack of due process, saying we should “have called them prisoners of war from the beginning,” charged them, and given them trials.

The debate about Gitmo hasn’t changed since the early years of the Bush administration. Despite it’s public pronouncements, the Obama administration seems to have settled on keeping the detention center open and upholding indefinite detention as a staple of the war on terror. But Gitmo isn’t the only issue here.

The U.S.-controlled prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan is nicknamed, according to The Washington Post, “The Second Guantanamo.”

The United States holds 67 non-Afghan prisoners there, including some described as hardened al-Qaeda operatives seized from around the world in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. More than a decade later, they’re still kept in the shadowy facility at Bagram air base outside Kabul.

In a 2011 interview, an attorney for Human Rights First Daphne Eviatar told CBS of Bagram: “It’s worse than Guantanamo, because there are fewer rights.”

Last year, the U.S. gave in to demands from Afghan President Hamid Karzai to give full control of the approximately 3,000 inmates in Bagram detention center to the Afghan government as part of the transition to withdraw most U.S. troops from the country in 2014. The Obama administration ended up quibbling over a small portion of the detainees, insisting on continued U.S. control.

Many of the detainess kept there by the U.S. have not been charged or tried, and many have been severely abused. In 2012, an Afghan investigative commission accused the American military of abusing detainees in the Bagram prison facilities, prompting Karzai’s push on the issue.

“Contrary to the Obama administration’s stated goals of increasing Afghan sovereignty and strengthening the rule of law in Afghanistan,” said Tina M. Foster, Executive Director of the International Justice Network, “this aspect of the transition will leave a dangerous legacy of unchecked and limitless power in the hands of whoever takes control of the country long after coalition forces have withdrawn.”

“The power to detain perceived enemies of the state indefinitely and without trial will not only lead to more arbitrary arrests and human rights abuses,” Foster added, “but will continue to fuel the insurgency for years to come – it is a great victory for the Taliban and a great loss for the Afghan people.”

In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that denying the right of habeas corpus to Gitmo detainees was unconstitutional. In response, the U.S. government provided not actual trials but habeas corpus review. Despite many detainees being cleared for release in this process, Obama still insists on caging them. Now, scores of inmates are starving themselves in protest of their mistreatment, only to be force-fed by guards, which is a form of torture.

This sorry existence probably pales in comparison to that endured by detainees in U.S. custody in Bagram. Somehow, we hardly hear anything about the Obama administration’s policies in The Second Guantanamo.

Last week, in a piece I wrote for The Huffington Post on the hypocrisy in the Bradley Manning trial, I argued that “The law is for the powerful to defy with impunity, and for the weak to be punished with.” As evidence, I mentioned several high crimes committed by the Bush and Obama administration, crimes for which they will never be prosecuted.

And then in yesterday’s USA Today I saw this remarkable article reporting that government documents show that the FBI committed 5,658 crimes in 2011 alone. That amounts to 15 crimes a day, on average, that FBI agents explicitly authorized. And far from being part of a rogue, covert program kept hidden from a judge, this is standard operating procedure on which the Department of Justice provides oversight.

The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.

The U.S. Justice Department ordered the FBI to begin tracking crimes by its informants more than a decade ago, after the agency admitted that its agents had allowed Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger to operate a brutal crime ring in exchange for information about the Mafia. The FBI submits that tally to top Justice Department officials each year, but has never before made it public.

Agents authorized 15 crimes a day, on average, including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies. FBI officials have said in the past that permitting their informants — who are often criminals themselves — to break the law is an indispensable, if sometimes distasteful, part of investigating criminal organizations.

Let that last sentence sink in for a moment. The government must break the law in order to catch and punish lawbreakers. Does that not offend even the most superficial understanding of the rule of law this country was supposedly founded upon?

According to the USA Today report, this number of 5,658 crimes in one year barely scratches the surface:

USA TODAY obtained a copy of the FBI’s 2011 report under the Freedom of Information Act. The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.

Crimes authorized by the FBI almost certainly make up a tiny fraction of the total number of offenses committed by informants for local, state and federal agencies each year. The FBI was responsible for only about 10% of the criminal cases prosecuted in federal court in 2011, and federal prosecutions are, in turn, vastly outnumbered by criminal cases filed by state and local authorities, who often rely on their own networks of sources.

“The million-dollar question is: How much crime is the government tolerating from its informants?” said Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles who has studied such issues. “I’m sure that if we really knew that number, we would all be shocked.”

If you read Trevor Aaronson’s meticulously reported book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, you’ll get a glimpse into how the thuggery at the FBI works in the war on terror. Aaronson thoroughly documents all those “terror plots” that the FBI has “foiled.” By and large, the FBI uses untrustworthy delinquents as informants in order to entrap unsuspecting halfwits that never would have been able to carry out a terror attack without  FBI encouragement and facilitation.

Far be it from me to prejudge, but Antiwar.com has been requesting FBI documents on this website through the Freedom of Information Act since 2011, to no avail. Thankfully, the ACLU is suing on our behalf. Requesting surveillance of this website and its founders, as the FBI did, and suspecting we may be an agent of a foreign power – all for exercising our First Amendment rights- seems like it fits perfectly within the Bureau’s modus operandi.

I’m shocked — shocked! — that there is gambling going on in this casino:

“A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

“Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.”

Oh, but don’t worry, it’s all “legal”:

“But two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to ‘recreate’ an investigative trail is not only legal but a technique that is used almost daily.”

Feel better now? Move along, nothing to see here…. But not everyone is taking it as calmly as I am:

“‘I have never heard of anything like this at all,’ said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011.”

Really? I have ….