Rumsfeld questions abuse prevention

Posted on December 8, 2005 by Team VCS

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has questioned a policy that requires US military personnel who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody to take “all reasonable actions” to stop or prevent it, a spokesman said.

Mr Rumsfeld seemed taken aback last month when General Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, told him at a news conference that all US military personnel had a responsibility to try to stop abuse that they witness.

Mr Rumsfeld has since raised questions about the policy, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said today.

He indicated a key question is what happens when a permanent, sovereign government is formed in Iraq following elections on December 15.

“Our forces are in a sovereign nation and the law enforcement of that nation is the responsibility of that country,” Mr Whitman said.

At the same time, he said: “This is a new democracy. We know that this is tough stuff, and it’s a change, a dramatic change from the way things were done in the past.”

The problem came to the fore last month when US and Iraqi troops raided an Iraqi interior ministry jail in Baghdad and found about 170 detainees who had been abused and in some cases tortured.

A top commander in Iraq told reporters last week US military intelligence was drawing up a list of other suspected interior ministry jails for inspection by US-Iraqi teams.

Mr Whitman said US service members would be expected to try to persuade Iraqis abusing prisoners that their behaviour was “inappropriate” and to report it up their chain of command.

But General George Casey, the commander of the Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I), issued a policy directive earlier this year setting a higher standard of responsibility for US troops who witness abuse of detainees in Iraqi custody.

“It is the responsibility of all MNF-I units and personnel to take all reasonable actions in accordance with the rules of engagement to stop or prevent any observed or suspected instances of physical or mental abuse that could lead to serious injury or death of a detained person in Iraqi custody,” it said.

The directive said soldiers should “promptly report the details through the chain of command so that those acts can be appropriately addressed with Iraqi government officials”.

Asked whether Mr Rumsfeld was questioning what was meant by “all reasonable actions”, Mr Whitman said: “That would certainly be part of it.”

“The secretary, in the way that he typically does, asks questions to try and understand and ensure that the policies and procedures for our service members are well understood in a way that doesn’t conflict,” Mr Whitman said.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on Rumsfeld questions abuse prevention

US credibility gap in Europe

Posted on December 7, 2005 by Team VCS

Not again. Just when the deep freeze in US relations with some European countries is thawing, a cold front blows in. Once more, it originates in the war on terrorism, but this time it’s not about invading Iraq, but about CIA doings in Europe.

By now, it almost doesn’t matter whether secret CIA detention centers housing high-value terrorist suspects in Eastern Europe even exist, or if so, are legal; or whether the transport of detainees to and through Europe is in accord with international law, a question the European Union raises. The month-long controversy over the alleged centers and the transport policy, known as rendition, is once again sowing mistrust of Washington among some European governments, parliaments, and citizens – especially in Western Europe. This can hardly enhance valuable European assistance in the war on terrorism.

Questions about US treatment of terrorist suspects in Europe are meeting US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her trip to Germany, Romania, Ukraine, and Belgium this week. She’s vigorously defending US antiterrorist tactics, pointing out they’ve saved American – and European – lives, and that in carrying them out, the US is abiding by its own and international laws. Above all, she stresses, the US does not torture, nor send detainees via rendition to countries where the US believes they will be tortured.

But the Bush administration faces a credibility problem. After documented prisoner abuse cases in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere, Europeans have trouble believing that prisoners were not mistreated at the two supposed Eastern European sites (ABC reported Monday that the prisons were shut down last month, and the 11 detainees sent to a CIA site in north Africa). A newly reported case relating to a Lebanese-born German national wrongly detained by the US only reinforces their suspicions.

And, many Europeans wonder, what does the US mean when it denies using torture? Should there be an asterisk after every mention of that word? Because the CIA does allow “enhanced interrogation techniques” – including shaking, striking, subjecting detainees to cold, and making them believe they’re drowning – all of which sure sound like torture. It baffles Europeans (as it should Americans), that the White House has sought an exemption for the CIA from an approved Senate amendment that would ban “cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners.”

Secretary Rice also stretches credibility by refusing to confirm or deny the alleged network of overseas CIA detention centers. She says that would compromise intelligence.

The administration must go beyond this blanket phrase and explain how confirming these alleged facilities would actually hurt intelligence – so essential to fighting terrorism.

If the US is acting legally and humanely, why might it keep undercover a detention network where the Red Cross can’t visit and detainees have not even limited legal recourse?

Until the administration more thoroughly explains itself on this issue and also actively supports the Senate torture ban, its credibility problems will persist in Europe – and at home. It must have support on both fronts to win this war.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , , | Comments Off on US credibility gap in Europe

Torture Makes Justice Impossible

Posted on December 6, 2005 by Team VCS

When Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales announced shortly before Thanksgiving that Jose Padilla had been indicted, it came as some surprise that what he was actually charged with had virtually nothing to do with what the United States had been saying about Padilla for the more than three years that he was held in military custody as an “enemy combatant.” In news conferences, Gonzales’ predecessors had described Padilla as public enemy No. 1: an Al Qaeda operative accused of plotting to detonate a “dirty bomb” and to blow up apartment buildings.

But the indictment makes none of those claims. Instead, it charges Padilla only with playing an extremely marginal role helping a group of people who are alleged to have conspired to provide financial support to unspecified terrorists abroad. No one in the indictment is alleged to have engaged in or plotted any violence, and the allegations specific to Padilla do not even claim that he provided financial support to terrorists. Indeed, the government’s case against Padilla is so flimsy that there is a substantial chance that he will be acquitted — that is, if he can get a fair trial after the public image the Justice Department has painted of him.

The disconnect between the allegations aired in news conferences and the charges lodged in court are disturbing. If Padilla was in fact plotting with Al Qaeda to detonate a dirty bomb, shouldn’t he be tried for that crime, and punished accordingly? Why proceed instead on a paper-thin set of charges that might lead to his acquittal and release?

The answer is, in a word, torture. Administration sources explained to New York Times reporters Douglas Jehl and Eric Lichtblau that the reason they did not charge Padilla with more serious crimes is that the evidence allegedly supporting those charges was extracted from high-level Al Qaeda detainees — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubeida — through questionable means. They are being held in undisclosed locations and reportedly have been interrogated with such tactics as “waterboarding,” in which the suspect is made to think he will drown if he doesn’t talk.

Evidence obtained through waterboarding would never be admissible in a court of law. The Supreme Court has long made clear that evidence obtained through any physical coercion is per se inadmissible. And this is no technicality. Such measures are said to produce inherently unreliable evidence and “shock the conscience.”

The Padilla case illustrates one of the oft-overlooked costs of torture and other means of coercive interrogation — the very tactics the administration is seeking to preserve in its fight against an amendment offered by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would prohibit all such methods. Because evidence obtained through coercion is universally viewed as inadmissible in court, the tactics effectively immunize suspects and those they implicate from prosecution.

This problem not only infects the Padilla case but virtually everyone held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret CIA “black sites.” The U.S. is holding about 500 “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo and reportedly another 30 or more in undisclosed locations. Many of these are alleged to be Al Qaeda fighters, some very high level. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, for example, is said to be the mastermind of the 9/11 attack.

Anyone who fights for Al Qaeda is guilty of war crimes, as Al Qaeda has no right to engage in war and has adopted a policy and practice of targeting civilians. In theory, we should be able to try them, convict them and imprison them.

But more than four years after President Bush created military tribunals, not a single case has gone to trial. Only a handful of the hundreds of detainees have even been charged. One probable reason for the military’s reluctance is the real risk that any trial will turn into a trial of the United States’ own interrogation practices. Although the military tribunal rules do not exclude the use of testimony extracted by torture, no trial will ever be viewed as legitimate if it allows such testimony, and defense lawyers are certain to make this a central issue in any proceeding.

In short, by electing early on to violate the universal prohibition on torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, the administration has not only inflicted unconscionable harm on detainees from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, and done incalculable damage to the U.S. image abroad, it has painted itself into a corner. It is becoming increasingly unacceptable to hold so-called enemy combatants indefinitely without trial. But we have shielded the vast majority of them from being tried for the wrongs they may well have committed.

President Bush vowed shortly after 9/11 that he would capture the terrorists and bring them to justice. But his own tactics have made that promise impossible to deliver.

David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University, is author of “Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism” (New Press, 2005).

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Torture Makes Justice Impossible

Ban Torture or Protect Torturers?

Posted on December 6, 2005 by Team VCS

Thousands of well-meaning people are mobilizing to pressure Congress to pass legislation banning torture. But the Bush Administration is maneuvering to turn it into legislation that would instead protect the torturers by eliminating a basic legal right. To stop them, torture opponents will need to be not just as innocent as doves but also as cunning as foxes.

When Congress returns to Washington on Monday, a campaign will unfold in support of Senator John McCain’s legislation banning torture, which is attached to a defense bill. But McCain’s amendment is accompanied by one from Senator Lindsey Graham that bans the appeals that prisoners at Guantánamo have used to take their cases to civilian courts.

In the 2004 case Rasul v. Bush, brought on behalf of Guantánamo captives, the Supreme Court established the right of foreigners held by the United States to habeas corpus, the 800-year-old legal procedure grounded in the Magna Carta and enshrined in the US Constitution, which requires government officials to explain to a court why they are holding someone in captivity. Graham’s amendment strips courts of the power to hear such cases. Graham sprang his amendment on the Senate in the closing days of the session with no hearings and little debate. A firestorm of criticism forced Graham to accept a compromise–negotiated with Democratic Senator Carl Levin–that allows captives limited appeals to civilian courts. (Newsweek has reported that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House Counsel Harriet Miers were also in on the negotiations.) But the Graham compromise still strips federal courts of jurisdiction to hear applications for habeas corpus brought by Guantánamo prisoners.

The Senate passed the compromise amendment 84 to 14. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, described it as “a sophisticated, blatant attempt at court-stripping.”

Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the first habeas corpus cases for Guantánamo captives, says the Graham amendment “will formalize the lawless policies of the Bush Administration that allow the Department of Defense to hold prisoners indefinitely without any requirement that it show any reason for doing so.” That has and will continue to result in “torture of US prisoners.”

The Graham amendment bans habeas corpus appeals against conditions of confinement. The consequence, according to Michael Dorf, the Sovern Professor of Law at Columbia University, is that “a prisoner cannot get into federal court by claiming (or presenting evidence) that he is being subject to torture or otherwise degrading treatment.”

Deviously, the Graham amendment has been packaged with McCain’s anti-torture amendment. But the package will make things worse, not better, for Guantánamo captives unless Graham’s amendment banning habeas corpus is removed. As Bill Goodman points out, while the pair of amendments “profess to ban torture,” without the right to judicial oversight, they are “defanged.” They are “a right without a remedy and, as such, meaningless.”

The Bush Administration is now negotiating with Graham and others to make the legislation even more restrictive. A Justice Department spokesperson says, “We definitely agree with the principle behind the current bill, though there are still some concerns that the language may need to be improved.” White House spokesman Trent Duffy says that the White House is positive about the Graham bill and is “working with Senator Graham on technical aspects” of the legislation.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has talked with Senator Graham about the bill at least twice. The Justice Department spokesperson says Gonzales was “particularly focused on thwarting some of the 160 habeas lawsuits filed by Gitmo detainees.” (Gonzales was the author of the notorious 2002 memo advising the President that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in order to provide “a solid defense to any future prosecution” of US officials under the War Crimes Act. Gonzales’s personal role in laying the groundwork for torture is sufficient for professor Marjorie Cohn, now president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, to have drafted an indictment of Gonzales for violating the War Crimes Act.)

The Bush Administration is apparently divided. Despite the role of the White House in preparing the Graham compromise amendment, Vice President Cheney opposed it. Indeed, Cheney has fought any legislation that would eliminate the government’s right to torture, though he seems willing to compromise on language that leaves the CIA, but not the military, free to torture. In the past, President Bush has threatened to veto the entire defense bill if McCain’s anti-torture amendment is included.

Both the Graham and McCain amendments are attached to a defense bill that now goes to a Senate-House conference. Graham and Levin plan to demand that the final legislation include both.

The conference committee will undoubtedly be the focus of pressure from those who want to preserve the right of habeas corpus. A statement by Habeas Counsel, the coalition of prestigious attorneys representing Guantánamo captives, says, “To legislate this way is disgraceful. It is also completely unnecessary. This is not an emergency situation. The Graham-Levin amendment should be stripped out in conference. The genuine deliberation required by the gravity of the issue can then begin.”

Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, a member of the Progressive Caucus and an outspoken opponent of torture and “extraordinary rendition” (a k a government-run kidnapping), describes the task facing cunning progressive foxes:
“If the US wants to demonstrate that we are a nation committed to justice and the rule of law, we should adopt the McCain amendment barring torture and drop the Graham amendment suspending habeas corpus rights for those detained at Guantánamo Bay. If persons held by the US lack the right to challenge their detention or their treatment, the McCain amendment’s protections against torture and other forms of cruel or humiliating treatment may turn out to be illusory.”

Only nine of the more than 500 Guantánamo captives have even been charged with crimes, and their trials are being prolonged year after year. This is exactly the situation habeas corpus is designed to remedy. And without it, the captives can rot in prison forever and possibly be subject to torture and inhumane treatment that the courts are unable even to learn about.

Graham and the Bush Administration oppose rights for Guantánamo detainees in part on the grounds that they are terrorists who deserve no better. They refuse to face the very real possibility of innocent people caught up in the system, acknowledged by the military’s own commanders at Guantánamo. According to the Wall Street Journal:
“American commanders acknowledge that many prisoners shouldn’t have been locked up here in the first place because they weren’t dangerous and didn’t know anything of value. ‘Sometimes, we just didn’t get the right folks,’ says Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, Guantánamo’s current commander.”

Graham’s original proposal to eliminate habeas corpus for foreign captives was met by extraordinary condemnation. Ten retired military leaders endorsed a letter from Rear Adm. John Hutson calling the restriction on habeas corpus a “momentous” change. “The practical effects of such a bill would be sweeping and negative.” Signers included Army Lieut. Gen. Robert Gard, Marine Maj. Gen. Fred Haynes and other senior officers.

Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, the organization of military lawyers, said the Graham amendment would sanction “unreviewable executive detention that cannot be harmonized with the nation’s longstanding adherence to the rule of law.”

The American Bar Association has urged the Senate to reconsider and defeat the original Graham amendment. Michael Greco, president of the association, gave a stirring defense of habeas corpus, which “cannot and should not” be replaced by the “extremely limited review” provided by the Graham amendment, which “would undermine the very principles that distinguish us from our enemies.”

Does Congress have the power to tell the Supreme Court what cases it can or cannot hear? In American law, courts have the power to review the constitutionality of legislation passed by Congress, but they tend to defer to the other branches of government, especially where national security issues are involved.

Both Graham’s original amendment and his compromise amendment directly conflict with the Supreme Court’s decision in Rasul v. Bush that Guantánamo captives have the right to habeas corpus. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a challenge to the constitutionality of the Bush Administration’s military tribunals for Guantánamo captives.

No one knows how the Court would respond to an instruction from Congress to reverse its interpretation of the Constitution. Indeed, the conflict over the power of courts to hear prisoners’ appeals is plunging the country into an ongoing constitutional crisis in which all three branches of government are involved.

Since treatment of captives held by the United States has included well-documented cases of torture, brutality and even treatment leading to death, the Graham amendment would erect a screen behind which such crimes may be conducted with impunity. Opponents of torture need to make sure they are not inadvertently helping to pass an amendment that would protect torturers.

Jeremy Brecher is a historian whose books include Strike!, Globalization from Below, and, most recently, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond, published by Metropolitan/Holt. He has received five regional Emmy Awards for his documentary film work.

Brendan Smith is a legal scholar and former congressional staff member whose books include Globalization From Below and, most recently, In the Name of Democracy: American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond. His commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and the Baltimore Sun.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged , | Comments Off on Ban Torture or Protect Torturers?

Rice ‘to talk tough on CIA claim’

Posted on December 5, 2005 by Team VCS

According to media reports in both the US and UK, Ms Rice will tell European allies to “back off” over the issue.

Last month the EU wrote to Ms Rice expressing misgivings over the alleged jails and reports CIA planes carrying detainees had stopped in EU countries.

Ms Rice said she would respond to the EU before a visit to Europe on Monday.

Change of tack

The Washington Post newspaper first reported on 2 November that the CIA had been using Soviet-era camps in eastern Europe to detain and interrogate terror suspects.

In response to that and further media reports of possible violations of international law Britain formally wrote to the US, on behalf the EU, to ask for “clarification”.

“It’s very clear they want European governments to stop pushing on this,” a European diplomat, who has been speaking to the US officials drafting Ms Rice’s response, told the New York Times. “They were stuck on the defensive for weeks, but suddenly the line has toughened up incredibly.”

Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern told the New York Times that Ms Rice told him in Washington that she expected allies to trust that America does not allow rights abuses.

The US has refused to confirm or deny the reports and according to the Washington Post, Ms Rice has no plans to acknowledge the prisons.

Solidarity call

According to the daily, Ms Rice will insist that intelligence co-operation between the US and Europe is necessary to prevent future terror attacks and call upon European governments to do more to emphasise this to their citizens.

“The key point will be ‘We’re all in this together and you need to look at yourselves as much as us,’ ” one official said to the Washington Post, on condition of anonymity. “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

A day after news of the alleged prisons emerged Human Rights Watch said it had evidence indicating that the CIA transported terror suspects captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.

Poland and Romania have denied ever playing host to the alleged prisons.

A US rights group, the American Civil Liberties Union, announced on Friday that it was taking the CIA to court over what it said was the violation of both US and international law.

The highly secretive process is known as “extraordinary rendition” whereby intelligence agencies move and interrogate terrorism suspects outside the US, where they have no American legal protection.

Some individuals have claimed they were flown by the CIA to countries like Syria and Egypt, where they were tortured.

German claims

On Friday White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the US does not violate human rights.

“When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America, and we show that by holding people accountable when they break the law or violate human rights,” he said.

On Saturday, Germany emerged as the latest country suspected of being used as a landing spot for secret CIA flights.

The German government has a list of at least 437 flights suspected of being operated by the CIA in German airspace, according to a German magazine.

Der Spiegel said the aircraft had made landings in Berlin, Frankfurt and the US airbase at Ramstein.

Two planes alone accounted for 137 and 146 uses of airspace or landings in 2002 and 2003, the magazine reported.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on Rice ‘to talk tough on CIA claim’

America: the capital of punishment

Posted on December 4, 2005 by Team VCS

GEORGE Bush, as is the custom here, saved a couple of turkeys from Thanksgiving death last week and the turkeys ended up leading the Thanksgiving Day parade at Disneyland.

Saving two turkeys may not be a big deal when many millions of the birds are slaughtered for Thanksgiving feasts that mark the Pilgrims’ first harvest in North America after their arrival at Plymouth in Massachusetts in 1620.

Still, those two turkeys got a reprieve from Bush, which is two more acts of mercy than he was prepared to offer the 152 people who were executed when he was governor of Texas. Even those who support capital punishment would, you’d think, have been given pause by Bush’s apparent absolute certainty that not a single one of these 152 souls deserved to be spared death by lethal injection, which replaced the hangman’s noose in Texas a couple of decades ago as the preferred execution technique.

For all the commercial excess that surrounds Thanksgiving — it has surpassed Christmas as the most lucrative retail sales holiday period of the year in the US — it remains a time of reflection for many Americans, though it is doubtful that many of them remember that it was proclaimed a national holiday by Abraham Lincoln in 1863 at the height of the Civil War, America’s bloodiest war.

It is not clear whether the reprieve of the turkeys is a custom that is somehow meant to reaffirm the sanctity of life in the midst of death — perhaps that’s how Lincoln saw Thanksgiving — but if this holiday is about reflecting on American values, the value of state-sanctioned executions is one that deserves urgent reflection.

America is fast approaching what should be a shameful milestone: the thousandth execution since 1976 when the US Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling and decided that capital punishment did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

That honour could well go to Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the founder of the notorious California-based Crips street gang who is scheduled to die on December 13.

Williams was convicted in 1981 of murdering four people in the space of several days in February 1979 and has been on death row for more than two decades.

He was, by all accounts, a bad and violent man and a cold-blooded killer. According to the coalition of religious leaders and opponents of the death penalty who are working desperately hard for Williams not to become a significant statistic, he is not the man he was almost a quarter of a century ago.

Williams, 51, has written several award-winning children’s books warning young people off joining gangs and has made a dozen or more videos that have been widely distributed in the run-down crime and gang-infested inner city areas of America’s big cities.

Only Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stands between Williams and his quick death by lethal injection. Officials in Schwarzenegger’s office have given no sign that Williams should be optimistic about being alive in a couple of weeks’ time.

There were 120 men and five women sentenced to death in America last year, with 59 executions in 12 states. The keepers of these grim statistics expect about the same number of death sentences and executions this year.

These executions rate a few paragraphs in the newspapers and 15 seconds on the television news and perhaps a candlelight vigil outside the jails by the usual anti-death penalty suspects. This is despite the fact that improved DNA testing has led to the release of more than 100 death-row inmates and the decision in 2003 by George Ryan, Governor of Illinois, to remove all 167 inmates on death row and declare a moratorium on death sentences.

Last week, the Houston Chronicle, after a lengthy investigation, published a story that cast serious doubt on the guilt of a man executed a decade ago for a murder he was accused of committing when he was 17.

The details are not important here but the fact is that Ruben Canto professed his innocence even as he was being strapped onto the gurney and even as the poison was being injected into his arm.

Canto had been denied the jelly beans he had asked for as his last meal and what was shocking about that was not so much the refusal of his last wish, but that Canto would ask for jelly beans, as if he had been frozen in childhood during his decade-long incarceration on death row.

This story was a one-day wonder in Houston and was not picked up by any of the major television networks or the great liberal newspapers like The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times. It seems that state-sanctioned life-taking no longer excites debate and is no longer seen as a sort of litmus test of American values, even by liberal Democrats.

No major American politician has taken up the anti-capital punishment cause. Not Hillary Clinton, not Howard Dean, not any of the north-eastern Democrats who represent states where, according to opinion polls, a majority of people support the repeal of the death penalty. And certainly not those conservative Republicans who are constantly on about the sanctity of life, which surely can only mean — if sanctity has any meaning — that life is God-given and only God’s to take.

It is not just a coincidence that while there is no political support for the repeal of the death penalty, the powerful National Rifle Association recently scored a major victory when Congress voted overwhelmingly to outlaw lawsuits against gun manufacturers brought by victims of gun violence.

From the distance of Washington, it seems that a majority of Australians are appalled at the Singapore Government’s determination to hang Nguyen Tuong Van. In part, this must reflect a widespread revulsion of capital punishment. It is certainly unimaginable that Australia would ever again turn to capital punishment, even for the worst offences.

Imagine if America wasn’t hooked on the death penalty, wasn’t up there in fourth place behind China, Iran and Vietnam on the ladder of state-sanctioned killing.

Imagine if America, having outlawed the death penalty, used its enormous influence to plead with the Singapore Government for the life of Nguyen Tuong Van.

Michael Gawenda is United States correspondent.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on America: the capital of punishment

KBR workers in Iraq paid 50 cents an hour

Posted on December 4, 2005 by Team VCS

While the United States spends billions on troop support in Iraq, the people serving the meals, scooping the ice cream, and washing the dishes make as little as 50 cents an hour.

The U.S. military has paid Halliburton subsidiary KBR about $12 billion so far for so-called logistics support to U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the largest contract of its kind ever. Around 80,000 troops are served meals at dining facilities every day under the contract — the other 60,000 or so fend for themselves in field kitchens or by eating military issue “Meals Ready to Eat.”

KBR in turn hires that work out entirely to subcontractors whose job it is to recruit, transport, house, feed and pay “third-country” nationals to stock, prepare, serve and clean up at the dining facilities at 43 bases across Iraq.

Those workers are recruited from countries with already low wages, where jobs are scarce. And as pressure to keep the logistics contract cost down has increased, subcontractors have moved from country to country in search of cheaper labor markets.

That is what brought around 770 workers from Sierra Leone, Africa, to Iraq in July to work for ESS Support Services Worldwide, A British-based food service company specializing, according to its Web site, in “remote site, defense and off-shore locations.”

Most of the workers are deemed unskilled and work seven days a week for 12 hours a day, according to their contracts, one of which was obtained by United Press International. In practice, workers said in interviews, most only work six days a week.

There is no provision for sick leave. Any employee who threatens a strike or attempts to organize is subject to immediate dismissal and the employee required to pay for his return plane ticket.

For this they are paid $150 a month, roughly 45 cents an hour.

Salaries are deposited in bank accounts in Africa so the money is available to the workers’ families.

The workers also get a $40 a month cash allowance on top of that, but the contract states the money is a gift, and the amount discretionary and may be eliminated. Their housing — three to a standard size trailer — laundry, food and uniforms are provided free.

Employees are prohibited from discussing the contract and “ESS internal issues or complaints” with anyone outside the company, including the military and media. A copy of the contract was provided to UPI by an ESS employee via e-mail, with the assistance of a U.S. military officer. The worker quit Iraq and has now returned to Sierra Leone.

Neither the U.S. military nor prime contractor KBR sets a minimum wage standard for workers employed by any sub-contractor under the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program — known as LOGCAP. Jana Weston, the deputy program director of LOGCAP, told UPI in September she was unaware that some workers were being paid $150 a month.

“KBR’s subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions in the country in which they work. KBR’s non-U.S. subcontractors operate within industries and geographic regions that are highly competitive in regard to recruiting and retaining employees. As such, the subcontractors are driven to pay market wages and benefits,” said Melissa Norcross, a spokeswoman for Halliburton in Houston, Texas.

The dining services subcontracts, like LOGCAP overall, are cost-plus arrangements, meaning the contractor is reimbursed for its costs and then paid a percentage on top of that for profit.

As a result, the sub-contractors’ costs are closely guarded propriety information and no details of wages and contract arrangements for other LOGCAP sub-contractors could be obtained to compare them to those paid by ESS.

Previous to the Sierra Leone contract, ESS employed workers from Sri Lanka who were paid about $400 a month for the same work, according to a U.S. military officer who oversees the logistics contract at one of the bases where ESS provides dining services.

Paul Kelly, ESS group corporate affairs director, acknowledged previous workers were paid more in an interview in October with UPI. He tagged the higher wages to less competition for the LOGCAP subcontract. When more companies entered the fray, ESS found cheaper labor to improve its pricing to the government.

“Initially wage rates were higher because there were fewer companies bidding (on the subcontract),” said Kelly, declining to confirm the old wage. “As more companies competed for contracts — labor is one of those areas companies have been targeting” to drive down the bids.

The switch to cheaper labor came as Gen. George Casey, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, launched an effort to drive down the costs of LOGCAP.

“Increasing expenditures in theater … jeopardize our ability to maintain public support as the costs associated with our operations continue to rise,” he wrote in a memo issued to commanders this summer, and exclusively reported by UPI. “Our spending in theater not only affects us directly, it has a ripple effect throughout all of the services.”

“When we started there were a handful of companies competing. Now there are probably 20 or 30, which does drive price down, and of course that’s what LOGCAP wants,” said Kelly.

Kelly said the monthly wage offered to the Sierra Leoneans is far higher than what they would earn at home. According to the Sierra Leone worker, some 7,000 candidates showed up to apply for the 750 jobs ESS offered in June 2005.

“The important thing to bear in mind here is that it is a little bit too simplistic to compare pay scales as we might look at them from a U.S. or U.K. perspective,” Kelly said. “You have to look at job type and how does this compare with what an employee would earn it in its own country.”

“What we don’t do is pay them less than what they earn in their own country,” Kelly said. “We take employee welfare very seriously.”

Sierra Leone is an extremely poor country, with a market-based economy and a per capita income of less than $100 per year. For the last decade a violent insurgency has destroyed the local economy. The government approved a minimum wage of about $4 a week for a 40-hour work week, according to the State Department’s 2004 human rights report.

Kelly added that even mid-level government officials in the country earn only about $40 a month, although that would be a for a 40 hour week.

Kelly said, however, that ESS’ recruiting of workers in Sierra Leone does not only have to do with competition under LOGCAP and low labor costs. Geo-politics has played a role as well.

“The catalyst for having to go to Sierra Leone to recruit in the first was that the respective governments of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines have all put an official ban on their nationals working or traveling in Iraq,” states an e-mail sent to Kelly from the Sierra Leone recruiter.

According to Kelly, the Iraq LOGCAP subcontract is not profitable enough to warrant the risk and difficulty of fulfilling it, especially given the fact the company must insure its workers in a very hazardous war zone.

“We’ve already flagged that we are very heavily scaling down our presence in the Middle East simply because the margin we can earn does not justify the logistical complexities and the risk,” Kelly said. “The question is do you want to put employees into a position where it’s still very dangerous out there and logistically very complicated?”

Acknowledging the Sierra Leonean workers agreed to work for the advertised pay, military personnel interviewed in Iraq still expressed surprise and discomfort at the wages paid to those feeding and cleaning up after them every day, with whom many say they are quite friendly. Two Army officers alerted UPI to the issue and arranged the first meeting with the Sierra Leone worker.

Workers’ living conditions on bases with dining facilities in Iraq are inherently hazardous, owing to the violent insurgency, but materially good — most have hot showers, electricity and air-conditioned sleeping quarters.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Comments Off on KBR workers in Iraq paid 50 cents an hour

If America Left Iraq

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Team VCS

At some point—whether sooner or later—U.S. troops will leave Iraq. I have spent much of the occupation reporting from Baghdad, Kirkuk, Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere in the country, and I can tell you that a growing majority of Iraqis would like it to be sooner. As the occupation wears on, more and more Iraqis chafe at its failure to provide stability or even electricity, and they have grown to hate the explosions, gunfire, and constant war, and also the daily annoyances: having to wait hours in traffic because the Americans have closed off half the city; having to sit in that traffic behind a U.S. military vehicle pointing its weapons at them; having to endure constant searches and arrests. Before the January 30 elections this year the Association of Muslim Scholars—Iraq’s most important Sunni Arab body, and one closely tied to the indigenous majority of the insurgency—called for a commitment to a timely U.S. withdrawal as a condition for its participation in the vote. (In exchange the association promised to rein in the resistance.) It’s not just Sunnis who have demanded a withdrawal: the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is immensely popular among the young and the poor, has made a similar demand. So has the mainstream leader of the Shiites’ Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, who made his first call for U.S. withdrawal as early as April 23, 2003.

If the people the U.S. military is ostensibly protecting want it to go, why do the soldiers stay? The most common answer is that it would be irresponsible for the United States to depart before some measure of peace has been assured. The American presence, this argument goes, is the only thing keeping Iraq from an all-out civil war that could take millions of lives and would profoundly destabilize the region. But is that really the case? Let’s consider the key questions surrounding the prospect of an imminent American withdrawal.

Would the withdrawal of U.S. troops ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites?

No. That civil war is already under way—in large part because of the American presence. The longer the United States stays, the more it fuels Sunni hostility toward Shiite “collaborators.” Were America not in Iraq, Sunni leaders could negotiate and participate without fear that they themselves would be branded traitors and collaborators by their constituents. Sunni leaders have said this in official public statements; leaders of the resistance have told me the same thing in private. The Iraqi government, which is currently dominated by Shiites, would lose its quisling stigma. Iraq’s security forces, also primarily Shiite, would no longer be working on behalf of foreign infidels against fellow Iraqis, but would be able to function independently and recruit Sunnis to a truly national force. The mere announcement of an intended U.S. withdrawal would allow Sunnis to come to the table and participate in defining the new Iraq.

But if American troops aren’t in Baghdad, what’s to stop the Sunnis from launching an assault and seizing control of the city?

Sunni forces could not mount such an assault. The preponderance of power now lies with the majority Shiites and the Kurds, and the Sunnis know this. Sunni fighters wield only small arms and explosives, not Saddam’s tanks and helicopters, and are very weak compared with the cohesive, better armed, and numerically superior Shiite and Kurdish militias. Most important, Iraqi nationalism—not intramural rivalry—is the chief motivator for both Shiites and Sunnis. Most insurgency groups view themselves as waging a muqawama—a resistance—rather than a jihad. This is evident in their names and in their propaganda. For instance, the units commanded by the Association of Muslim Scholars are named after the 1920 revolt against the British. Others have names such as Iraqi Islamic Army and Flame of Iraq. They display the Iraqi flag rather than a flag of jihad. Insurgent attacks are meant primarily to punish those who have collaborated with the Americans and to deter future collaboration.

Wouldn’t a U.S. withdrawal embolden the insurgency?

No. If the occupation were to end, so, too, would the insurgency. After all, what the resistance movement has been resisting is the occupation. Who would the insurgents fight if the enemy left? When I asked Sunni Arab fighters and the clerics who support them why they were fighting, they all gave me the same one-word answer: intiqaam—revenge. Revenge for the destruction of their homes, for the shame they felt when Americans forced them to the ground and stepped on them, for the killing of their friends and relatives by U.S. soldiers either in combat or during raids.

But what about the foreign jihadi element of the resistance? Wouldn’t it be empowered by a U.S. withdrawal?

The foreign jihadi element—commanded by the likes of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—is numerically insignificant; the bulk of the resistance has no connection to al-Qaeda or its offshoots. (Zarqawi and his followers have benefited greatly from U.S. propaganda blaming him for all attacks in Iraq, because he is now seen by Arabs around the world as more powerful than he is; we have been his best recruiting tool.) It is true that the Sunni resistance welcomed the foreign fighters (and to some extent still do), because they were far more willing to die than indigenous Iraqis were. But what Zarqawi wants fundamentally conflicts with what Iraqi Sunnis want: Zarqawi seeks re-establishment of the Muslim caliphate and a Manichean confrontation with infidels around the world, to last until Judgment Day; the mainstream Iraqi resistance just wants the Americans out. If U.S. forces were to leave, the foreigners in Zarqawi’s movement would find little support—and perhaps significant animosity—among Iraqi Sunnis, who want wealth and power, not jihad until death. They have already lost much of their support: many Iraqis have begun turning on them. In the heavily Shia Sadr City foreign jihadis had burning tires placed around their necks. The foreigners have not managed to establish themselves decisively in any large cities. Even at the height of their power in Fallujah they could control only one neighborhood, the Julan, and they were hated by the city’s resistance council. Today foreign fighters hide in small villages and are used opportunistically by the nationalist resistance.

When the Americans depart and Sunnis join the Iraqi government, some of the foreign jihadis in Iraq may try to continue the struggle—but they will have committed enemies in both Baghdad and the Shiite south, and the entire Sunni triangle will be against them. They will have nowhere to hide. Nor can they merely take their battle to the West. The jihadis need a failed state like Iraq in which to operate. When they leave Iraq, they will be hounded by Arab and Western security agencies.

What about the Kurds? Won’t they secede if the United States leaves?

Yes, but that’s going to happen anyway. All Iraqi Kurds want an independent Kurdistan. They do not feel Iraqi. They’ve effectively had more than a decade of autonomy, thanks to the UN-imposed no-fly zone; they want nothing to do with the chaos that is Iraq. Kurdish independence is inevitable—and positive. (Few peoples on earth deserve a state more than the Kurds.) For the moment the Kurdish government in the north is officially participating in the federalist plan—but the Kurds are preparing for secession. They have their own troops, the peshmerga, thought to contain 50,000 to 100,000 fighters. They essentially control the oil city of Kirkuk. They also happen to be the most America-loving people I have ever met; their leaders openly seek to become, like Israel, a proxy for American interests. If what the United States wants is long-term bases in the region, the Kurds are its partners.

Would Turkey invade in response to a Kurdish secession?

For the moment Turkey is more concerned with EU membership than with Iraq’s Kurds—who in any event have expressed no ambitions to expand into Turkey. Iraq’s Kurds speak a dialect different from Turkey’s, and, in fact, have a history of animosity toward Turkish Kurds. Besides, Turkey, as a member of NATO, would be reluctant to attack in defiance of the United States. Turkey would be satisfied with guarantees that it would have continued access to Kurdish oil and trade and that Iraqi Kurds would not incite rebellion in Turkey.

Would Iran effectively take over Iraq?

No. Iraqis are fiercely nationalist—even the country’s Shiites resent Iranian meddling. (It is true that some Iraqi Shiites view Iran as an ally, because many of their leaders found safe haven there when exiled by Saddam—but thousands of other Iraqi Shiites experienced years of misery as prisoners of war in Iran.) Even in southeastern towns near the border I encountered only hostility toward Iran.

What about the goal of creating a secular democracy in Iraq that respects the rights of women and non-Muslims?

Give it up. It’s not going to happen. Apart from the Kurds, who revel in their secularism, Iraqis overwhelmingly seek a Muslim state. Although Iraq may have been officially secular during the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam encouraged Islamism during the 1990s, and the difficulties of the past decades have strengthened the resurgence of Islam. In the absence of any other social institutions, the mosques and the clergy assumed the dominant role in Iraq following the invasion. Even Baathist resistance leaders told me they have returned to Islam to atone for their sins under Saddam. Most Shiites, too, follow one cleric or another. Ayatollah al-Sistani—supposedly a moderate—wants Islam to be the source of law. The invasion of Iraq has led to a theocracy, which can only grow more hostile to America as long as U.S. soldiers are present. Does Iraqi history offer any lessons?

The British occupation of Iraq, in the first half of the twentieth century, may be instructive. The British faced several uprisings and coups. The Iraqi government, then as now, was unable to suppress the rebels on its own and relied on the occupying military. In 1958, when the government the British helped install finally fell, those who had collaborated with them could find no popular support; some, including the former prime minister Nuri Said, were murdered and mutilated. Said had once been a respected figure, but he became tainted by his collaboration with the British. That year, when revolutionary officers overthrew the government, Said disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape. He was discovered, shot in the head, and buried. The next day a mob dug up his corpse and dragged it through the street—an act that would be repeated so often in Iraq that it earned its own word: sahil. With the British-sponsored government gone, both Sunni and Shiite Arabs embraced the Iraqi identity. The Kurds still resent the British perfidy that made them part of Iraq.

What can the United States do to repair Iraq?

There is no panacea. Iraq is a destroyed and fissiparous country. Iranians and Saudis I’ve spoken to worry that it might be impossible to keep Iraq from disintegrating. But they agree that the best hope of avoiding this scenario is if the United States leaves; perhaps then Iraqi nationalism will keep at least the Arabs united. The sooner America withdraws and allows Iraqis to assume control of their own country, the better the chances that Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari won’t face sahil. It may be decades before Iraq recovers from the current maelstrom. By then its borders may be different, its vaunted secularism a distant relic. But a continued U.S. occupation can only get in the way.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on If America Left Iraq

US civil rights group to sue CIA over secret prisons

Posted on December 3, 2005 by Team VCS

US civil rights group to sue CIA over secret prisons

A US civil rights groups says it is taking the CIA to court to stop the transportation of terror suspects to countries outside US legal authority.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says the intelligence agency has broken both US and international law.

It is acting for a man allegedly flown to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she’ll comment on recent reports of alleged CIA prisons abroad before starting a visit to Europe on Monday.

Ms Rice has said she will provide an answer to a EU letter expressing concern over reports last month alleging the US intelligence agency was using secret jails – particularly in eastern Europe.

‘Extraordinary rendition’

“The lawsuit will charge that CIA officials at the highest level violated US and universal human rights laws when they authorised agents to abduct an innocent man, detain him incommunicado, beat him, drug and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan,” the ACLU said in a news release.

The release identified the jail as the “Salt Pit”.

The group did not provide the name or nationality of the plaintiff, saying only that he would appear at a news conference next week to reveal details of the lawsuit.

The ACLU also wants to name corporations which it accuses of owning and operating the aircraft used to transport detainees secretly from country to country.

The highly secretive process is known as “extraordinary rendition” whereby intelligence agencies move and interrogate terrorism suspects outside the US, where they have no American legal protection.

It has become extremely controversial, the BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington reports.

Some individuals have claimed they were flown by the CIA to countries like Syria and Egypt, where they were tortured.

The US government and its intelligence agencies maintain that all their operations are conducted within the law and they will no doubt fight this case vigorously, our correspondent says.

He says they will not want to see US intelligence officers forced publicly to defend their actions and they will not want to see one of their most secret procedures laid bare in open court.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on US civil rights group to sue CIA over secret prisons

In the End, Torture Hurts Us

Posted on December 1, 2005 by Team VCS

Each time I write anything objecting to the Bush administration’s use of torture, I get dozens of e-mails from self-styled “realists.” Some of my correspondents offer unprintable suggestions on punishments that should be meted out to people — like me, presumably — who just “don’t get it” about terrorism. But my more polite correspondents make some variant of the following argument:

“Ms. Brooks: It’s easy for you armchair critics to condemn torture as immoral. But though torture is not pretty, we need to get the information necessary to save American lives, and sometimes torture is the only way to make hardened terrorists talk.”

Here’s my answer: You’re right, torture can make even hardened terrorists talk. But before you decide that it’s a worthy interrogation tool, study the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi.

Libi was an alleged high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was captured in late 2001 in Pakistan. Initially, the FBI was in charge of interrogating him, and it did so by the book, reportedly even reading Libi his rights before questioning him. FBI interrogators soon felt they were establishing a good rapport with him, but he wasn’t giving up the information that administration hawks wanted, so CIA officials proposed that interrogators up the ante by threatening to kill Libi and his family. When the FBI refused, CIA Director George Tenet got White House permission for the CIA to take over Libi’s interrogation.

Libi subsequently disappeared, becoming one of the “ghost detainees” whose whereabouts and status U.S. officials refuse to discuss. Most likely, he was “rendered” to Egypt: A former FBI official told Newsweek that CIA agents cuffed Libi’s wrists and ankles, covered his mouth with duct tape and hustled him toward a waiting plane. “At the airport, the CIA case officer goes up to [Libi] and says, ‘You’re going to Cairo, you know. Before you get there, I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to [rape] her.’ “

We don’t know exactly where Libi was sent, or exactly who interrogated him when he got there. According to ABC News, CIA sources said Libi was subjected to progressively harsher interrogation techniques, but still refused to give his interrogators the information they wanted. Finally, he was “waterboarded” (a technique designed to make a detainee think he’s being suffocated or drowned) then forced to remain standing overnight in a cold cell, where he was repeatedly soaked with icy water.

After that, well, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news? Under torture, Libi finally broke and started to talk.

The bad news? What he told his interrogators wasn’t true.

It was Libi who was the “senior terrorist operative” cited by former Secretary of State Colin Powell in his crucial February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council, making the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Fortunately,” Powell said, “this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. He says … Iraq offer[ed] chemical or biological weapons training for two Al Qaeda associates … [and] a militant known as Abu Abdula al Iraqi had been sent to Iraq several times … for help in acquiring poisons and gases…. With this track record, Iraqi denials of supporting terrorism take their place alongside the other Iraqi denials of weapons of mass destruction. It is all a web of lies.”

In fact, it was the evidence cited by Powell, derived from torturing Libi, that turned out to be a web of lies. A full year before Powell’s U.N. speech, a Defense Intelligence Agency memo had warned that Libi’s information was probably “misleading”: Libi “has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.”

In January 2003, before Powell’s U.N. speech, the CIA acknowledged similar doubts in an internal document. The administration ignored this, and relied on Libi’s assertions to build the case for war in Iraq. In 2004, Libi recanted his earlier statements.

Recently, CIA sources told ABC News that they doubted that Libi had intentionally misled his interrogators. Most likely, they say, he was just desperate to stop the torture. “You can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture’s bad enough,” Bob Baer, a former CIA officer, told ABC.

And that’s the problem with torture. Sure, it can make even the most hardened terrorist talk, but it won’t necessarily produce the truth, or save lives. When U.S. officials decided to allow the torture of Libi, they made a pact with the devil. And by my reckoning, that pact has not only cost us our national soul, but has contributed, indirectly but surely, to the loss of more than 2,100 American soldiers in Iraq.

Posted in Veterans for Common Sense News | Tagged | Comments Off on In the End, Torture Hurts Us