What Game Theory Can Tell Us About Terrorism

Posted on October 18, 2005 by Team VCS

In my inaugural column, it’s appropriate to deal with one of last week’s big events in economics: the awarding of the Nobel prize. The prize in economics went to two men for their contributions to game theory: Robert Aumann of Israel and Thomas Schelling of the United States. Game theory is, in a nutshell, the rigorous thinking about how person A will act in a situation where his action affects person B, whose actions also affect person A. In other words, game theory is rigorous thinking about many of the situations in life.

I wrote the editorial about it in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription-only, “The Great Game,” Oct. 11, 2005.) I know little about Aumann except that his work is highly theoretical; but I know a lot about Schelling’s work, and that is what I devoted almost the whole Wall Street Journal article to.

How, you might ask, does this all relate to a column on Antiwar.com? Because Schelling, while not clearly definable as pro-war or antiwar, gave us a way of thinking about war that is very valuable and that, when carried through consistently, often leads to antiwar conclusions. Schelling made his reputation in the late 1950s and early 1960s by applying game theory to one of the most important issues of the day: the Cold War. He wanted to make sure it didn’t turn into a hot war. What distinguished Schelling early from most other game theorists was that he understood the importance of thinking clearly about how real humans act in complex interactive situations when faced with a wide range of strategies to choose from. That’s why Schelling ran various experiments: to see how real people would react.

The sine qua non of game theory is that because you’re in an interactive situation with at least one other person (thus the word “game”), to play the game well, you need to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. How would he react if I did this versus that? Would he understand my real intent or would I mistakenly signal something to him that would miscommunicate my intent? And so on. Although every game theorist knows this, Schelling really drove it home in the context of the Cold War. He often did so with analogies that everyone could understand. Here’s one from his book, The Strategy of Conflict:

“If I go downstairs to investigate a noise at night, with a gun in my hand, and find myself face to face with a burglar who has a gun in his hand, there is a danger of an outcome that neither of us desires. Even if he prefers to just leave quietly, and I wish him to, there is danger that he may think I want to shoot, and shoot first.”

The above is a perfect example of putting yourself in the other person’s shoes.

In December 1996, I took this other-person’s-shoes approach with a group of Defense Department officials when I commented on a paper by my Hoover colleague Henry Rowen, a former president of the RAND Corporation. I pointed out that, in his paper, Rowen had taken terrorism as a given, but that one should take a step back and ask why terrorism exists. I said:

“What leads the Irish Republican Army to put bombs in Britain? Why don’t they, for example, put bombs in Canada or Bangladesh? To ask the question is to answer it. They place the bomb where they think it will help influence the government that makes decisions most directly in the way of their goals, and the governments in the way of their goals are usually governments that intervene in their affairs.”

Then I concluded, “If you want to avoid acts of terrorism carried out against people in your country, avoid getting involved in the affairs of other countries.” In other words, don’t go around stirring up hornets’ nests. I also advocated completely abolishing U.S. immigration restrictions on nuclear engineers, bio-technicians, and the other technical professions whose practitioners could build weapons of mass destruction, as a carrot to entice them to settle in the United States.

One person in the audience, noted game theory economist Martin Shubik, sarcastically accused me of advocating that “we all love one another.” But he missed the point. A good game theorist puts himself in the shoes of the other person whether or not he loves him. Even if you hate your opponent, and especially if he hates you, it’s good to know what motivates him and what pushes his button. Schelling would agree. Note that in the Schelling quote above, Schelling doesn’t evince a lot of love for the burglar in his house: he just wants him to leave.

Although I mentioned earlier that Schelling cannot be categorized as clearly antiwar or pro-war, he does seem to be principled. In his book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, who had been a student of Schelling’s at Harvard, writes that Schelling was among the Harvard scholars who visited Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to urge him to resign over the secret bombing of Cambodia.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, available online. His latest book, co-authored with Charles L. Hooper, is Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (Chicago Park Press.) He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and C-SPAN. He has had over 100 articles published in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, Barron’s, National Review, Reason, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

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Close our torture loophole

Posted on October 18, 2005 by Team VCS

Picture this scene: Young prison guards in khaki uniforms and reflecting sunglasses herd a larger group of inmates down a hallway, each prisoner chained to the next by his ankle, each dressed in a shapeless smock that exposed his pale legs.

You cannot see the prisoners’ faces because paper-bag blindfolds cover their heads.

No, this is not a scene from the Abu Ghraib prison abuses that were committed under the authority of the American armed forces in Iraq in 2003. It is a scene from a makeshift prison in the basement of a Stanford University building in August, 1971.

The guards and their prisoners were college students and other young men who responded to a newspaper ad that offered $15 a day for an experiment on prison life. The study was funded by the Navy and conducted by psychology Prof. Philip Zimbardo to help explain conflict in military prison systems.

The famous and controversial Stanford prison experiment, which now has its own Web site (www.prisonexp.org), is worth remembering these days as the Bush administration publically condemns torture, yet balks at illegalizing its use.

Before it was over, the Stanford experiment showed how even a group of guards and prisoners handpicked as “most stable (physically and mentally), most mature, and least involved in anti-social behavior” can revert like George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” or William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” into guards-gone-wild in the fashion of Abu Ghraib.

The experiment, planned for two weeks, was shut down after only six days. By then, the civilized, well-educated guards had degenerated, despite frequent warnings to refrain from violence or humiliating tactics.

Among other abuses that ring with eerie familiarity these days, the volunteer prisoners were forced to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands, sleep on the concrete floor without clothing, go without food, endure forced nudity and engage in homosexually suggestive acts of humiliation.

The Stanford experiment came to many experts’ minds after photos revealed similar abuses in Abu Ghraib prison under the authority of American armed forces. Whether the guards at Abu Ghraib behaved out of individual character flaws or by direct orders from the Pentagon, as reporter Seymour Hersh alleged in The New Yorker, the Bush administration officially deplores such behavior.

Yet, curiously the President has threatened to veto a measure backed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed last week by the overwhelming vote of 90 to 9 in the Senate that would prohibit the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners in the custody of the U.S. military.

Current Bush administration policy puts the U.S. in that awkward situation. The binding Convention Against Torture, negotiated by the Reagan administration and ratified by the Senate, prohibits cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. But the Bush administration argues that the law against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment does not legally apply to foreigners that America holds outside of the United States.

Does that mean that foreigners held outside the country can be treated in a cruel, inhumane and degrading manner? Why, then, do we court-martial our guards-gone-wild at Abu Ghraib?

McCain proposed to close the loophole and end the confusion with an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that would prohibit the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of prisoners in U.S. military custody.

Having endured beatings and two years of solitary confinement during his five years in Vietnam’s infamous “Hanoi Hilton” prison camp after his Navy fighter jet was shot out from underneath him, McCain knows a thing or two about prisoner abuse.

Among other things, he learned that countries that allow torture during prisoner interrogation gain less in useful information than they lose in moral standing and popular support. This is especially true of countries that allow torture while telling the world that they don’t allow it.

Since Bush holds the record for having served longest in the White House without vetoing any legislation, breaking his streak on an anti-torture bill would send an awkward message to the world. It also sends a confusing message to our troops that maybe we’ll look the other way on torture, unless you get caught.

While the Senate debated McCain’s bill, by coincidence Prof. Zimbardo’s scientific work received an award in Prague from the Dagmar and Vaclav Havel Foundation for its contributions to cultural enrichment. The House and President Bush could further enrich humanity by passing and signing McCain’s bill.

Our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay certainly do not torture and kill with the blood lust that Saddam Hussein or our other terrorist enemies do. But a great nation should measure itself by higher standards than that.

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Judges liken terror laws to Nazi Germany

Posted on October 17, 2005 by Team VCS

A powerful coalition of judges, senior lawyers and politicians has warned that the Government is undermining freedoms citizens have taken for granted for centuries and that Britain risks drifting towards a police state. One of the country’s most eminent judges has said that undermining the independence of the courts has frightening parallels with Nazi Germany.

Senior legal figures are worried that “inalienable rights” could swiftly disappear unless Tony Blair ceases attacking the judiciary and freedoms enshrined in the Human Rights Act.

Lord Ackner, a former law lord, said there was a contradiction between the Government’s efforts to separate Parliament and the judiciary through the creation of a supreme court, and its instinct for directing judges how to behave. He cautioned against “meddling” by politicians in the way the courts operate.

“I think it is terribly important there should not be this apparent battle between the executive and the judiciary. The judiciary has been put there by Parliament in order to ensure that the executive acts lawfully. If we take that away from the judiciary we are really apeing what happened in Nazi Germany,” he said.

Lord Ackner added that the Government’s proposals to hold terrorist suspects for three months without charge were overblown. “The police have made a case for extending the two weeks but to extend it to three months is excessive.”

Lord Lester QC, a leading human rights lawyer, expressed concern that the Government was flouting human rights law and meddling with the courts.

“If the Prime Minister and other members of the Government continue to threaten to undermine the Human Rights Act and interfere with judicial independence we shall have to secure our basic human rights and freedoms with a written constitution,” he said.

Lord Carlile, a deputy High Court judge, warned against the whittling away of historic civil liberties. “We have to be acute about protecting what is taken for granted as inalienable rights. In the United States the Patriot Act included a system whereby a witness to a terrorist incident can be detained for up to a year. This is in the land of the free.”

The senior barrister remarked that judges had now replaced MPs as the defenders of basic human rights.

“People use d to look to their MPs as the first port of call to deal with any perceived injustice by the executive. Now there is an increasing tendency for people to look to the judges to protect their liberties,” he said.

Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said Tony Blair was transforming Britain into an authoritarian state. “In eight years he has dismantled centuries of judicial protection. Britain’s reputation as the world’s most tolerant nation is now under threat,” he said.

If Mr Blair’s proposed terror legislation was unamended, said Anthony Scrivener QC, “Britain would be a significant step closer to a police state”. The Prime Minister spoke of “summary justice”, said the lawyer: “It would be better named street justice.”

This week the Law Lords will consider whether evidence obtained under torture abroad should be admissible in British courts. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said admitting such evidence would undermine one of Britain’s basic freedoms.

“The Prime Minister is trying in his own words to try to tear up the rules of the game,” she said. “The rules of liberal democracy are about no torture, free speech and fair trials. Every time he denigrates these he undermines the fabric of our society.”

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Sunni group disputes reports of constitution’s likely passage

Posted on October 17, 2005 by Team VCS

As the ballots in Iraq’s landmark referendum on a new constitution were dispatched Sunday to Baghdad for an official tally, disputes erupted over the likely result and the U.S. military reported the deaths of six troops on the day of what was otherwise a relatively peaceful vote.

In London, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that early indications suggested that the constitution had “probably passed,” provoking a storm of outrage from Sunni Arab leaders who seized on her words as evidence that the result had been fixed.

“We think that this statement by Condoleezza Rice is astonishing because it is trying to mask the big rejection that this draft has faced all over Iraq,” said a statement by the National Dialogue Council, a Sunni group that was a leading campaigner for a “no” vote.

Election officials said the official count of the ballots won’t begin until Monday, and that an official result is still days away. “There is no result, and the figures you see reported in the media are wrong,” said Farid Ayar, spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission for Iraq.

The minority Sunni Arabs swarmed to the polls Saturday, mostly to vote against a constitution they believe does not represent their interests. Their boycott of January’s election left them with little representation in the National Assembly, which wrote the document.

President Bush hailed the participation of Sunnis in the referendum as “good news” for the future of democracy in Iraq. “This is a very positive day for Iraqi people and as well for world peace,” he told reporters in Washington.

But the disputes that are already emerging over the outcome of the poll underscore the deep sectarian tensions that underlie this second exercise in democracy since January. While most Sunnis are fiercely opposed to the constitution, Shiites and Kurds largely support it, and they account jointly for about 80 percent of the population.

Addressing reporters in Baghdad, Saleh Mutlaq, a leader of the National Dialogue Council, said he suspected Rice’s remarks were intended as a “signal” to Iraqi election officials to declare a favorable outcome of the voting, in which Iraqis voted “yes” or “no” on the question: Do you approve of the draft constitution?

“We would like to warn of the dangers of fixing these results and passing this constitution by force,” he said. “This would create a backlash that cannot be contained, including civil disobedience.”

U.S. officials are hoping that Sunni engagement in the political process will weaken support for the insurgency, thereby reducing the level of violence and enabling U.S. forces to start pulling out. But if the constitution is passed and Sunnis refuse to accept the result, there is a danger that they will turn their backs on politics and embrace the insurgency.

Shiite officials said their tallies suggested that the “yes” votes had prevailed.

Early returns indicated that the constitution was rejected by a big margin in two provinces where Sunnis dominate – Anbar and Salahuddin – but that it was passed by a “good majority” in all the other 16 provinces, said Saad Jawad, an official with the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the leading Shiite party in the National Assembly.

“I am confident that it has been accepted,” he said.

For the constitution to fail, it would have to be rejected either by a simple majority of all voters or by a two-thirds majority in three provinces, but Sunnis account for more than two-thirds of the population in only two provinces, Anbar and Salahuddin.

Nonetheless, the National Dialogue Council issued what it claimed were figures showing that two-thirds of the voters had rejected the poll in five provinces, giving them the numbers they need to block the constitution. The provinces of Anbar, Ninevah, Diyala, Salahuddin and Kirkuk all rejected the constitution with more than 70 percent voting “no,” the Council said.

Although there is still no official count of the ballots, political parties are entitled to post monitors in polling stations and they dispatch their own tally of the results to their party leaders. Ballots are first counted at the polling stations, the results are recorded, and then the boxes are dispatched to Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone for an official tally, which will begin Monday.

It took three weeks for the election commission to tally the results of January’s election, and the final outcome turned out to be considerably different than some of the earlier estimates given by the political parties.

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who campaigned tirelessly to persuade Sunnis to accept the constitution, cautioned that it was too early to predict the result, but he said the apparently high turnout in Sunni areas meant that the political process was making progress.

“I think it’s too soon to tell whether the constitution will pass or not. Either way, there is a path forward,” he told ABC News’ “This Week.” “What it also indicates is that violence is not the way to deal with problems, that violence is a dead-end street.”

Little violence was reported during Saturday’s balloting, except in the troubled Sunni province of Anbar. Turnout was high in the former insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, which is now firmly under U.S. control, but elsewhere in Anbar either the threat of violence or calls for a boycott by local leaders appeared to have kept voters away. More than 60 polling places did not open.

Fierce clashes were reported Sunday between U.S. Marines and insurgents in the troubled town of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, where only 2,000 people voted, according to a report from Ramadi in the Marine Corps Times.

Five of the Americans killed on Saturday were in Ramadi, where their vehicle was hit a roadside bomb, the military said. Also in Anbar, a Marine died in a roadside bombing in Saqlawiyah.

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One victim’s story

Posted on October 16, 2005 by Team VCS

ON each stage of his journey, as he descended further and further into the gulags and torture chambers of the war on terror, Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi was shadowed by British intelligence. The British were there in Karachi when Americans interrogated him and Pakistanis tortured him; they were feeding questions to the Moroccan torturers who took a scalpel to his penis; they stood back and watched as he was dragged to an American torture chamber in Afghanistan and then to the gulag of Guantanamo, where he languishes to this day.

Al-Habashi is a perfect example of what happens to a person who has been subjected to “extraordinary rendition”. This process sees someone suspected of involvement in terrorism snatched off the streets, usually in a third world country, then flown around the world by the CIA to regimes which indulge in torture, to be questioned on behalf of the US.

Hundreds of these “rendition flights” come through the UK, and the payback for the UK is that British intelligence gets to question some of the suspects by proxy – the proxy usually being a Middle Eastern torturer.

If al-Habashi was anything, he was naive, according to Clive Stafford Smith, his internationally acclaimed campaigning lawyer, who has been awarded the OBE for his human rights work. An Ethiopian by birth, al-Habashi came to the UK when he was just 16, seeking political asylum. He soon became a popular young teenager in the Kensington area of London, but got mixed up with a bad crowd and wound up on drugs.

In a bid to kick his habit, he decided to take a trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan to get himself together and to see what life under Islamic law was like. Stafford Smith says: “He wanted to see the Taliban with his own eyes to decide whether it was a good Islamic country.”

September 11 happened, and al-Hab ashi was on his way back to the UK when he was seized at Karachi airport. The authorities said his passport was invalid. Many young Muslims from around the world, who had been foolish enough to take a voyeuristic trip to the Taliban’s regime around the time of the attacks on the twin towers, were seized in Pakistan and Afghanistan in follow-up anti-terror swoops. A lot of them, like al-Habashi, claim they were just curious civilians and devout Muslims, with no links to terrorism.

Al-Habashi was seeking refugee status in the UK and thought of himself as British, so he was surprised when the American FBI arrived at the Pakistani jail to interrogate him. They told him he was a top al-Qaeda operative. Al-Habashi pointed out that he couldn’t even speak Arabic.

He laughed at them, and the Americans told him that if he didn’t start talking, he’d be taken to an Arabic country and tortured. When they left, angry at his refusal to talk, the Pakistanis came into his cell. He was beaten with a belt and had a gun stuck in his chest. In comparison to what he was to go through later, this was nothing.

After his beating, two MI6 officers came into the room. In a statement taken by Stafford Smith in Guantanamo Bay, Habashi says: “They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I initially only took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you are going, you need a lot of sugar,’ they said.

“I didn’t know exactly what [the MI6 officer] meant by this, but I figured he meant some poor country in Arabia. One of them did tell me that I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”

This is the first time evidence has come forward to show British intelligence directly co-operating with torture – in this case the torture of a man claiming political asylum in the UK. Previously, the UK was thought only to have offered logistical support in the torture of terror suspects, allowing planes ferrying captives held by the Americans to regimes such as Egypt and Syria where they would be tortured, to refuel at airports such as Glasgow International.

The Pakistanis then gave al-Habashi to masked American soldiers. A report by Stafford Smith reads: “They stripped him naked, took photos, put fingers up his anus and dressed him in a tracksuit. He was shackled, had earphones put on, and was blindfolded. He was put into a plane.” He landed in Morocco eight hours later.

The Americans told al-Habashi that they wanted him to give evidence against Jose Padilla, an American who has been in custody awaiting trial for three and a half years, accused of planning to plant a “dirty bomb” in the US. They also wanted him to give evidence against senior al-Qaeda figures in captivity, including Abu Zubaydah, the number three in the terror organisation, and Khalid Sheikh Moh ammed, the mastermind of 9/11. The Americans told him they believed he was al-Qaeda’s “ideas man” – an accusation that Stafford Smith says is “beyond absurd”.

Al-Habashi was then confronted with the Moroccan torture team. With a macabre flourish, some even wore bondage-type masks to give the torment an added mediaeval flavour. Stafford Smith says: “The British government was complicit in some of the abuse that took place against Benyam, at least to the extent that the government told the Moroccans information that they would then use against him in the torture sessions.” The Moroccans knew about his personal fitness trainer, what grades he got at school, where he studied and where he lived.

Until now, it has never been alleged that British intelligence aided and abetted torture by passing information to interrogators, which was then used to question suspects. Lying in his cell, al-Habashi says in his statement: “I was not of this world. I did not believe this was real, that this was happening to me. It never, never crossed my mind that I’d end up being hauled half-way across the world by the Americans to face torture in a place I had never been – Morocco.”

One guard told him how the torture would happen, saying: “They’ll come in wearing masks and beat you up. They’ll beat you with sticks. They’ll rape you first, then they’ll take a glass bottle, they break the top off and they make you sit on it.”

When he was hit with questions that could only have come from British intelligence, he told his interrogators that the British should ask him the questions themselves. The lead interrogator then said: “Why do you think the Brits sold you out to us so cheaply? Why do you think they sent you here?” An interrogator added: “We have been working with the British, and we have photos of people given to us by MI5”. He was later shown pictures of people suspected by the British of being in al-Qaeda and questioned about them.

Al-Habashi’s statement says: “I realised that the British were sending questions to the Moroccans … I sought asylum in Britain rather than America because it’s known as one country that has laws that it follows. To say that I was disappointed at this moment would be an understatement.”

Later, the men in masks arrived. First, they just beat him until he vomited. “I awoke on the floor,” he wrote. “I’d pissed on myself.” He was refused access to the lavatory and his food was stopped. The beatings became regular.

One day, he was taken into a room with meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. He was shackled and tied up and beaten again. When he awoke from unconsciousness he could hear screams in the rooms nearby. Soon he worked out why his neighbouring prisoners were crying out.

During his next torture session he was tied up again. His clothes were cut off with a scalpel and he was left naked in front of his captors. His torturer-in-chief told one of the guards: “Show him who’s a man.” The interrogator then began to slice his own chest with the scalpel.

“One of them,” al-Habashi’s statement says, “took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming … They must have done this 20 or 30 times in maybe two hours. There was blood all over … They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better to just cut it off as I would only breed terrorists … there were even worse things. Too horrible to rem ember, let alone talk about.”

In total, al-Habashi spent 18 months in Moroccan detention. He was tortured with the scalpel once a month. He once asked a guard why they were doing this to him and was told: “It’s just to degrade you, so when you leave here you’ll have these scars and you’ll never forget. So you’ll always fear doing anything but what the US wants.”

It didn’t take long for al-Habashi to start confessing to anything his torturers accused him of: that he’d met Osama bin Laden six times; that he’d suggested targets to bin Laden; that he was close to 25 leading al-Qaeda figures; that he was the al-Qaeda “ideas man”.

The other forms of torture he was subjected to included prolonged sleep deprivation; being drugged; forced to listen to music by Meatloaf and Aerosmith non-stop; being made to watch pornographic films; having naked women paraded in front of him. He says thinking of Jesus and the prophet Mohammed kept him going.

In January 2004, his guards told him he was going home. He was handed over to the Americans and one female soldier was horrified at his physical state. She took pictures of him, she said, in order “to show Washington it’s healing”.

He wasn’t going home, though. He was off to a US-controlled holding centre in Kabul, Afghanistan. There, he was beaten by the Americans and dumped in a cell with a bucket for a lavatory. Urine and excrement were all over his bedding. The cell was pitch black most of the time.

He was hung up from a pole and allowed to sleep only every second day. His legs swelled and his hands became numb. Again he was exposed to loud music, this time Eminem and Dr Dre, and horror-movie soundtracks were also played to him 24 hours a day for two full weeks.

“The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night,” he says. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.” Al-Habashi says he met a fellow prisoner in Guantanamo Bay who was in the same Kabul jail and has now “totally lost his head”.

Initially, al-Habashi was threatened with torture, but he just asked the Americans to tell him what they wanted to know. “From then on,” he wrote, “they would give me the name and the story behind each picture [of a suspect].”

They then coached him in how to make a statement against himself and Jose Padilla, the “dirty bomber”.

“They said ‘this is the story that Washington wants’. It was about a ‘dirty bomb’. I was meant to steal the parts and build it with Padilla in New York. I didn’t even know what a dirty bomb was … I could not understand and got it wrong. They hung me up for 10 days, almost non-stop.”

He was transferred after about four months to the US prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. While the prisoners showered, GIs talked about which of them “was worth penetrating”. In May 2004, he was finally shown to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The Americans then helped him compose his confession. “The story was like this,” al-Habashi says. “First, Jose Padilla and I were meant to have good connections because we both spoke English. We were meant to have been hanging out together. Second, I was meant to have come to Afghanistan with him … third, I was meant to say that he and I were going to go to the US to explode a dirty bomb … By then, I just did what they told me.”

In September 2004 he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay. There he was threatened with rape by soldiers. Stafford Smith is now to sue the British government for its part in al-Habashi torture.

“I never thought the British government would allow me to be slashed with a razor blade for a year,” al-Habashi wrote in his statement. “I never thought they would let me be hauled to Kabul for further abuse before my trip to Guantanamo. I want out of this hellish cell [in Guantanamo] and back to my home on the Goldborne Road in London.”

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Iran accused over nuclear plans

Posted on October 16, 2005 by Team VCS

John Bolton told the BBC that Iran wanted nuclear arms to intimidate the rest of the Middle East and possibly supply them to terrorists.

He said Iran had violated its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Iran has denied US allegations about its nuclear programme.

Tehran says it is intended solely for civilian use.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has gone to Moscow to discuss the Iranian nuclear issue with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

‘Concealment and deception’

Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Mr Bolton said: “I think that the Iranians have been pursuing a nuclear weapons programme for up to 18 years.

“They have engaged in concealment and deception and they’ve engaged in threats before.

“The real issue is whether an international community is going to accept an Iran that violates its treaty commitments under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, that lies about its programme and is determined to get nuclear weapons deliverable on ballistic missiles that it can then use to intimidate not only its own region but possibly to supply to terrorists.”
Earlier, Ms Rice urged Iran to resume talks with the European Union or risk referral to the UN Security Council.

In August, Tehran walked away from talks aimed at halting its plans to enrich uranium.

Speaking in Paris, Ms Rice warned Iran: “There is always the course of negotiation… but there is also the course of the Security Council.

“It is therefore important that Iran negotiate in good faith.”

France previously argued in favour of a diplomatic approach, but after talks with Ms Rice on Friday, Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said referring the matter to the UN was a real option.

Russian ties

Last month, Russia abstained in a crucial vote held by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

However, a resolution was still passed threatening Iran with UN Security Council referral unless it abandoned its plans to process and enrich uranium – the first stages in developing nuclear weapons.

The IAEA will meet again next month, but it is still not clear if there is enough backing to refer Iran to the UN Security Council.

President Putin has made clear that he does not want Iran to have a weapons programme, but Iran and Russia have close energy ties, and Moscow has shown little appetite to punish Iran.

The US wants to include Russia in efforts being led by Britain, France and Germany to persuade Iran to return to negotiations aimed at preventing Iran from having access to the nuclear fuel cycle.

This week, Tehran said it would welcome the resumption of talks with the Europeans without preconditions.

Later on Saturday, the US Secretary of State will fly to London for talks with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Minister Jack Straw.

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Our Broken Constitution

Posted on October 16, 2005 by Team VCS

Our Broken Constitution

by Nat Hentoff, Village Voice, October 16, 2005 

    The outlook of Richard Nixon was that he was above the law. Watergate disabused him of the notion. The position of George W. Bush is that he is a law unto himself. – Lincoln Caplan, editor of Legal Affairs (associated with Yale Law School), September 2005

 

    Have we ever had a situation like this, where presumably this warlike status could last for 25 years, 50 years, whatever it is? – Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, during oral arguments, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004

 

    The torture of detainees was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers. Soldiers said they felt welcome to come to the PUC [Person Under Control] tent on their off hours to ‘Fuck a PUC’ or ‘Smoke a PUC.’ ‘Fucking a PUC’ referred to beating a detainee, while ‘Smoking a PUC’ referred to forced physical exertion sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. – “Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division,” Human Rights Watch, September 2005

 

Since 9-11, I’ve been covering the steadily increasing dislocation of our system of government—most vividly demonstrated by the Bush administration’s systematic abuses of detainees (a/k/a prisoners), including torture. But despite the huge amount of documented evidence, only low-level soldiers have been disciplined. The top of the chain of command—Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al.—is untouched by the Defense Department’s “investigations” of itself.

During the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, there was a continuing, fractious debate on how to prevent one branch of government (the executive) from overpowering the other (the legislative). The Supreme Court had yet to realize its full identity until John Marshall became chief justice in 1801. (Earlier, Alexander Hamilton erroneously called it “the least dangerous branch.”)

There have been times in our history when the presidency did overpower the other two branches. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended “the Great Writ,” habeas corpus—by which a person imprisoned can go to a court and make the government prove he or she is being held legally. With Lincoln supreme, around 38,000 Americans suspected of espionage or just disloyalty were arrested by military officers, and were imprisoned—without charges—indefinitely, even though the civilian courts were still open. (George W. Bush has followed suit with “enemy combatants.” And the Republican leadership in Congress is now working on bills to “streamline” habeas corpus into a corpse. More on that in a later column.)

In 1866, Lincoln, dead by then, was sternly rebuked by the Supreme Court (Ex Parte Milligan) for the unconstitutional powers he had taken during the Civil War. Said the Court:

“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances.” (Emphasis added.)

But George W. Bush, as commander in chief, ignores that ruling in the forbidding name of national security as he keeps declaring that this nation is an example to the world—of freedom and the moral values of a constitutional democracy.

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Recently, at least some of the press has given considerable space to the newest in a series of reports by Human Rights Watch, an invaluable watchdog of this administration’s making up the rule of law as it goes along. However, another hurricane or another disappeared young woman will take the place of Human Rights Watch’s “Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division.”

As National Public Radio’s excellent national security correspondent Jackie Northam said during her September 25 report on this Human Rights Watch exposé: “There’s just too many reports like this from captains, sergeants, officers, non-commissioned officers, that we can’t keep ignoring it.”

I have large files of such reports from Amnesty International, Human Rights First, the Center for Constitutional Rights, The New England Journal of Medicine (about military doctors’ complicity in these often savage abuses of prisoners), and New York University law school’s Center on Law and Security. But with Republican control of Congress, and an opposition Democratic Party that doesn’t focus nearly enough on this continually broken rule of law (including the evisceration of the Fourth Amendment at home), all the protectors of the Constitution can do is keep hanging on. (Next week: How John McCain is insistently staying on the case of brutalized detainees.)

From the Human Rights Watch report: “Residents of Fallujah called them ‘the Murderous Maniacs’ because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 82 nd Airborne Division . . . stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury in Iraq. The soldiers considered this [description of them] a badge of honor.”

The report discloses that two non-commissioned officers and a captain, Ian Fishback, in multiple interviews with Human Rights Watch investigators, say that “torture of detainees took place almost daily . . . from September 2003 to April 2004. . . . The acts of torture and other cruel or inhuman treatment . . . include severe beatings (in one incident, a soldier reportedly broke a detainee’s leg with a baseball bat); the application of chemical substances to exposed skin and eyes; forced stress positions . . . sometimes to the point of unconsciousness; sleep deprivation [for days on end]; the stacking of detainees into human pyramids; and, the withholding of food (beyond crackers) and water.”

For 17 months, Captain Fishback raised his concerns within the army chain of command, and the army agreed to conduct an investigation “only after he had contacted members of Congress [including Senator John McCain] and considered going public with the story.” Days before the Human Rights Watch report was released, the captain was told he couldn’t leave the base to meet with members of McCain’s staff “without approval and that approval was being denied because his commanding officer felt [he] was being naive and would do irreparable harm to his career.”

The captain, however, refuses to be muzzled.

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Night And Fog Revisited

Posted on October 15, 2005 by Team VCS

Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, supreme chief of the German armed forces, explained the thinking behind the Nazis’ “Night and Fog” (the term comes from Goethe) decree: “Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved…by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminals…These measures will have a deterrent effect because the prisoners will vanish without a trace and no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Anyone who doubts the extravagant pain of not knowing what happened to a loved one should talk to Natalee Holloway’s parents.

Night and Fog came to the United States when federal agencies built and filled a global, ad hoc network of prisons and concentration camps during the months following 9/11, and began filling it with Muslims of varying status. Officials promising to update lapsed visas lured foreign-born residents to immigration offices and arrested them when they showed up. Captured Taliban soldiers, stripped of their rights under the Geneva Conventions, were thrown together with civilian shopkeepers sold by local warlords for bounties to the CIA in Afghanistan, to whom were added anti-communist rebels from China and democracy activists from Pakistan. Some were shipped to Cuba, where many were tortured, some to death. Others were delivered for “extraordinary rendition” via covert CIA jets to countries reputed for their pain-inflicting expertise, including Syria, Yemen and Uzbekistan. No one knows what happened to them.

Four years after 9/11, the U.S. government still refuses to release information about the disappeared. We do not know how many there are, where they are being held, how many are dead and alive, or even their names. The vanished have access to neither their families nor legal representation. They cannot send or receive mail or packages. Because there was no evidence against them, none have been charged with a crime. But catching terrorists was never the purpose of America’s new Night and Fog policy. The goal was to instill fear, particularly among Muslims. It has also worked with other “enemies of the state”: since 9/11, “See you in Gitmo” has become a standard joke among activists on the left.

The legal cover for the Bush Administration’s updating of Night and Fog comes courtesy of then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, since promoted to attorney general. In his January 22, 2002 memo, for example, Gonzales repeatedly twisted the facts in order to obtain the result Bush desired.

Gonzales’ contradictory linguistic contortions, here to argue that the Taliban were not covered by Geneva and could thus be vanished into thin air because they were not a viable government, would be comical if not for the man’s chilling willingness to suspend intellectual honesty along with fundamental human rights: “It is unclear whether the Taliban militia ever fully controlled most of the territory of Afghanistan. At the time the United States air strikes began, at least ten percent of the country, and the population within those areas, was governed by the Northern Alliance.”

Since when does 90 percent, or nearly 90 percent, fail to qualify as “most”?

Harriet Miers, Bush’s nominee to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, replaced Gonzales in November 2004. Has she ever questioned Gonzales’ extreme and bizarre legal opinions justifying the torture, indefinite detention and disappearing of countless innocent people? We don’t know. Her legal opinions have yet to be released and Senate Republicans, in keeping with the Bush Administration’s obsession with keeping the people’s business secret from the people, say they’ll fight to keep them shrouded by the night and fog.

We know that Miers has chosen not to issue a full-fledged rebuttal of Gonzales’ disappear-’em-and-torture-’em philosophy, which remains in full force at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantánamo, Camp Mercury and other giant memory holes. Reports continue to emerge, most recently from a former Muslim chaplain at Gitmo, that top officials encourage soldiers to abuse inmates.

This comes as little surprise, given that Miers’ reluctance to rock the boat appears to be more highly developed than the average striver. “In [a] White House that hero-worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met,” right-winger David Frum writes in the National Review.

Senate Democrats and patriotic Republicans should insist on a full review of Miers’ advice to Bush on torture and disappearances before voting on confirmation to the Supreme Court. No one who agrees with Alberto Gonzales’ monstrous contempt for human rights ought to be elevated to such a powerful post–even if her consent is expressed through tacit silence.

Ted Rall, is America’s hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Visit his website www.tedrall.com

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Guantanamo Process as a Public Danger

Posted on October 13, 2005 by Team VCS

The prevailing belief that the procedures at Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) protect us because they make it easy to keep “enemy combatants” locked away is misguided. When legal process is not rigorous and convictions are easy to win, the danger is not only to the accused. Public safety is compromised: under the existing rules, cursory investigations are sufficient for convictions. This is far too likely to lead to false convictions that will lull us into the sense that we’re reducing the threat of terrorism when we’re not.

It’s beyond argument that the rules the tribunals at GTMO use are weak and that, as an epistemological matter, we can’t trust their determinations. The “Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT),” which decide whether a prisoner is an “enemy combatant,” use a low standard of proof — a preponderance of the evidence, with a “rebuttable presumption” in favor of the government’s evidence. The government can use notoriously unreliable evidence: hearsay, evidence coerced out of prisoners, and “classified” evidence kept secret from the prisoner. Access to lawyers is forbidden, and only one of the military “judges” is required to have a law degree.

The “military commissions” that President Bush announced two months after 9/11 to try enemy combatants suspected of particular crimes are equally unreliable. Although there is a presumption of innocence and the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt and the prisoner can have a lawyer (with restrictions), only one of the “judges” has to be a lawyer, and convictions can be based on hearsay, coerced testimony, and secret evidence.

One purpose of having rigorous rules of evidence, high burdens of proof, and trained counsel to help an accused mount a defense is to improve public safety. Rigorous rules put the government to its proofs when it carries out its crime-fighting and national security duties. Rigorous rules protect us all by helping ensure that the government is truly ferreting out crime and not just putting on a show.

But when winning is easy, there’s no incentive to conduct rigorous investigations. Why sift through evidence or pound the pavement to chase down leads, when it’s so much easier to pound a prisoner instead? Why track down an important witness when you can just use what another prisoner says he heard that witness say, as hearsay?

Forcing the government to meet a high burden of proof with reliable evidence would promote vigorous anti-terrorism action. We would have to roll up our sleeves and thoroughly investigate suspects. We would have to work with foreign intelligence and police. We would have to hunt down and investigate suspects’ family, friends and acquaintances, which could lead to extensive knowledge about terrorists and their shadowy networks.

The rules at GTMO let us shirk these duties.

Weak rules also make it hard to hold the government accountable. We can’t measure our progress in this war, because, logically, we can’t tell if the CSRT determinations of enemy combatant status are accurate. About 246 of the more than 751 prisoners have been released. How do we know – given that there was no requirement to investigate thoroughly – these men pose no danger? Dangerous prisoners may have been released as a reward for providing evidence (accurate or not) against other prisoners.

Take the example of Yasir Hamdi, a US-Saudi citizen jailed at GTMO who challenged his imprisonment all the way up to the US Supreme Court last year. After the Court held that Hamdi must be given legal process to challenge his imprisonment as an “enemy combatant,” the government released him, deporting him to Saudi Arabia and forcing him to renounce his US citizenship. Did it turn out, after all, that he wasn’t dangerous – a conclusion that contradicts every government pronouncement about him up to then? Did the government want to avoid the Court-ordered evidentiary hearing, which might have revealed that our politicians were lying about Hamdi’s guilt? Or did the government release this man for some other reason, such as a backroom deal with the House of Saud?

For all we know, actual terrorists are delivering innocent people to US authorities and convincing them that these people are “enemy combatants.” Under the existing GTMO rules, a real terrorist could easily provide enough information to make such a claim look plausible, if not dead-accurate. The evidence that would lead to a conviction could be kept secret from the suspect.

Some people believe that the processes at GTMO keep us safe because they seem to err on the side of caution, by “casting a wide net.” Each radical Muslim swept off the international street is one less possible terrorist, right? Wrong. This “wide net” feeds the fires that motivate terrorism. A narrower, more accurate net would be less likely to feed these fires. For example, if my brother were a terrorist and was captured and convicted, I would mourn his fate, but I probably would not feel it was unjust. But if my brother were not a terrorist and the US captured him, subjected him to a sham trial and locked him away incommunicado at GTMO, and I knew that he was actually innocent, I might declare my own war against the US. The anger associated with rounding up the wrong people does not stop with their families. I recall how, when I was a teenager (prime terrorist recruiting age), Iranian militants stormed the US embassy in Teheran and took Americans hostage. I had no relatives among the hostages, but I wanted to invade Iran myself. I agreed with the widespread sentiment, “Bomb Iran.”

“Wide nets” and easy convictions don’t make us safer. They actually increase our risk. The CSRTs should require more rigorous process. The military commissions should use the Uniform Code of Military Justice (which applies to POWs). Better, we should try suspected terrorists in federal district courts, which provide more process.

There’s no rule of law that requires the US to deny rights at GTMO: it is a policy decision. It was a bad decision. The loose procedures do not protect national security, but political interests and ambitions.

Such procedures are a feel-good measure that we can’t afford.

Brian J. Foley is an assistant professor of law at Florida Coastal School of Law.

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Americans Favor Impeachment of Bush If He Lied about Iraq War

Posted on October 12, 2005 by Team VCS

Poll: Americans Favor Bush’s Impeachment If He Lied about Iraq

By a margin of 50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} to 44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he lied about the war in Iraq, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The poll was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,001 U.S. adults on October 6-9.

The poll found that 50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} agreed with the statement:

“If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him.”

44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} disagreed, and 6{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} said they didn’t know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 3.1{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} margin of error.

Among those who felt strongly either way, 39{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} strongly agreed, while 30{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} strongly disagreed.

“The results of this poll are truly astonishing,” said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik. “Bush’s record-low approval ratings tell just half of the story, which is how much Americans oppose Bush’s policies on Iraq and other issues. But this poll tells the other half of the story – that a solid plurality of Americans want Congress to consider removing Bush from the White House.”

Impeachment Supported by Majorities of Many Groups

Responses varied by political party affiliation: 72{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Democrats favored impeachment, compared to 56{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Independents and 20{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Republicans.

Responses also varied by age and income. Solid majorities of those under age 55 (54{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), as well as those with household incomes below $50,000 (57{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), support impeachment.

Majorities favored impeachment in the Northeast (53{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), West (51{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}), and even the South (50{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d}).

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