Rage Against Torture: Top Musicians Demand Records On How Bush Admin Used Their Songs Against Detainees
Rage Against Torture: Top Musicians Demand Records On How Bush Admin Used Their Songs Against Detainees
In 2004, documents were released showing that FBI agents witnessed abusive treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay that included “detainees being chained to the floor for extended periods of time and being subjected to extreme heat, extreme cold or ‘extremely loud rap music.’” In fact, the use of loud music as “torture lite” has been a common tool employed at not just Guantanamo, but also at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Last year, a coalition of musicians, along with British human rights charity Reprieve, created an anti-torture initiative called “Zero db” that sought to end the use of music in torture. Now, a new coalition of international musicians, including Trent Reznor, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, Rage Against the Machine, Rosanne Cash, Billy Bragg and the Roots, is launching a new protest against the use of music used during torture and are joining the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo.
As part of their protest, the musicians are supporting an effort seeking the declassification of all secret government records pertaining to how music was used in interrogations. From the group’s press release:
“At Guantanamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture,” said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, a freedom of information act organization that is assisting the musicians in seeking the documents. “The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an enhanced interrogation technique.” [...]
On behalf of the campaign, the National Security Archive is filing a series of FOIA requests today seeking still-secret documentation from CIA, U.S. Special Operations Command, and FBI, among other agencies, pertaining to how the music was chosen and the specific role it played in interrogations of detainees at the base.
For the musicians, Guantanamo is a symbol of the legacy of torture the Bush administration left behind. “As long as Guantanamo stays open, America’s legacy around the world will continue to be the torture that went on there,” said R.E.M. in a statement. “Guantanamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine,” said Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello. “The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me – we need to end torture and close Guantanamo now.”
“When we found out that music was being used as part of the torture going on at Guantanamo, shackling and beating people – we were angry,” said The Roots. “Just as we wouldn’t be caught dead allowing Dick Cheney to use our music for his campaigns, you can be damn sure, we wouldn’t allow him to use it to torture other human beings. Congress needs to shut Guantanamo down.”
- Comments
- 76
Rush Holt Wins Congressional Approval For Measure To Mandate Videorecording Of Interrogations
Rush Holt Wins Congressional Approval For Measure To Mandate Videorecording Of Interrogations
Earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization conference report a new requirement that would mandate the videorecording of all interrogations of anyone in a Defense Department facility:
Congress is moving to require videotaping of interrogations of detainees held by the military, a step proponents say will prevent abuse and create a valuable intelligence record.
The provision, which the House passed on Thursday as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act conference report, would apply to interrogations of anyone held at a Defense Department facility. Because the Central Intelligence Agency’s secret overseas prisons have been closed, it would most likely cover terrorism suspects whether they were questioned by a military or a C.I.A. officer.
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), who first proposed the videotaping measure, said that it will allow the government to “continue the process of putting our detainee policies back on a sound legal footing while maintaining our ability to get actionable intelligence.”
Indeed, Holt’s measure would do much to curb abuse in the interrogation system. The New York Times notes that although the Guantanamo Bay prison camp — the site of many human rights abuses — contained video recording equipment, “it was rarely used.”
Under the previous administration, officials simply destroyed recordings of abusive interrogations. Following an ACLU lawsuit earlier this year, the CIA admitted to destroying 92 videotaped recordings of abusive interrogations, prompting ACLU attorney Amrit Singh to accuse the agency of engaging in a “systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations.”
The measure is also incredibly important at a time when many civil liberties advocates are concerned that the detention camp at Bagram Airforce Base in Afghanistan has become the same sort of “legal black hole” that Guantanamo once was, with prisoners facing poor conditions and little in the way of due process.
Pataki uses 9/11 to claim Obama’s policy ‘jeopardizes our ability to continue to effectively protect our country.’
Pataki uses 9/11 to claim Obama’s policy ‘jeopardizes our ability to continue to effectively protect our country.’
Recently, the Guardian interviewed former New York governor George Pataki to discuss the eighth anniversary of 9/11. Pataki, who was in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit, used the opportunity to criticize the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate CIA interrogators who went beyond their legal guidance, saying it “jeopardizes” national security:
“Placing CIA officials who were acting in the aftermath of the worst attacks against our country and civilians in our history in possible criminal jeopardy years after the fact is in my mind a horrible decision.
“It jeopardizes our ability to continue to effectively protect our country against those who hate us and want to attack us again.”
Oddly, Pataki claimed that his disapproval of the investigation sprung from a concern for the rule of law. “We must make sure we obey the rule of law and act in ways that are not just legal but moral,” said Pataki. “But now, years after the fact, to consider charges is wrong for our country, wrong for our security and wrong for the entire world that believes in the rule of law.”
Gonzales flip flops on torture investigation.
Gonzales flip flops on torture investigation.
On Tuesday, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales surprised everyone by defending Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation into interrogation abuses during the Bush administration:
We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.
Today, however, Gonzales is backpedaling. In a new interview with the Washington Times, he said that just because he thinks it’s “legitimate to question and examine” the interrogators’ conduct, he doesn’t endorse an investigation:
I don’t support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that’s a concern that’s shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision.
Inhofe: ‘There has never been a case of torture’ at Guantanamo Bay.
Inhofe: ‘There has never been a case of torture’ at Guantanamo Bay.
Yesterday, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) held a town hall meeting with his constituents in Grove, Oklahoma, where he unleashed a tirade of hyperbolic remarks against Obama administration policies. At one point he even suggested that Obama is “obsessed” with releasing terrorists into the United States, and claimed that there has “never been a case of torture” at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp:
He is also alarmed, he said, by the proposed closing of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Obama administration wants to shutter the camp because of its association with torture.
Inhofe said: “There has never been a case of torture there. The people there are treated better than in the federal prisons.”
He continued, “I don’t know why President Obama is obsessed with turning terrorists loose in America.”
As the Center for Constitutional Rights has documented, there have been countless cases of detainees being abused and tortured at the prison camp. Detainees have been beaten, deprived of sleep for weeks, sexually harrassed, and shackled to the floor for days at a time. Inhofe’s statement at the town hall is only the latest in his political broadsides. He has in the past suggested that Obama is “un-American,” that the mentality of Middle Easterners is “worse than Nazism,” and that the conditions at Guantanamo Bay are humane.
Rep. Nadler Says Holder’s Torture Investigation Should Examine Cheney
Rep. Nadler Says Holder’s Torture Investigation Should Examine Cheney
Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he will be appointing U.S. attorney John Durham as a special prosecutor to investigate possible crimes committed by CIA interrogators who “went beyond the legal guidelines” for interrogations set out by the Bush administration.
Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by imploring Holder to go further and investigate those who “planned, authorized, and facilitated the use of abusive methods.” As constitutional attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald has noted, Holder’s investigation would effectively immunize interrogators who complied with the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) interrogation memos, which authorized brutal torture, and ensure that White House officials who authorized torture “will never be held to account.”
In an appearance today on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom,” Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) echoed the concerns of these advocates. He told Fox’s Megyn Kelly that Holder should not “limit the investigation” to field interrogators and that he should also investigate the people who gave the orders that resulted in abuse and torture, including former Vice President Cheney:
NADLER: Now, the law says very clearly that it is the obligation of the Attorney General to investigate, to see whether crimes were committed, any time there was torture under American jurisdiction. He must do that. If he didn’t do that, he’d be breaking the law. My criticism of the Attorney General is that he should not limit the investigation to people in the field who may have committed the torture, but to people who may have ordered it, such as the Vice President, for example.
Watch it:
Nadler has been one of the most vociferous critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and its record on civil liberties. In the past, he has said that Bush officials “clearly committed war crimes” and that the Obama administration would be “breaking the law” if it did not fully investigate the Bush administration’s complicity in torture. Most recently, he responded to Cheney’s comments opposing a torture probe by saying that his objections show that he “still fails to understand the law.”
Gonzales backs Holder’s torture investigation.
Gonzales backs Holder’s torture investigation.
In an interview with the Washington Times today, former attorney general Alberto Gonzales defended Eric Holder’s decision to investigate CIA interrogation abuses, despite claims by Vice President Cheney that it is an “outrageous political act.” “As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House,” said Gonzales, whose tenure was marked by intense political meddling on the part of White House officials. More from the interview:
We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists. And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it’s action in prosecuting the war on terror.
Listen here:
Of course, Gonzales said he was reassured that Holder was interested the “one percent of actors” who went beyond the legal authorization and not the 99 percent who “are heroes and and should be treated like heroes for the most part.” No doubt that Gonzales puts himself in that 99-percent group.
Gibbs responds: Why is anyone still listening to Dick Cheney?
Gibbs responds: Why is anyone still listening to Dick Cheney?
In an interview with Fox News Sunday yesterday, Vice President Cheney aggressively attacked Attorney General Eric Holder for opening preliminary investigation into CIA interrogation abuses. He called it an “outrageous political act,” “intensely partisan,” and “politicized.” He said that the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques were directly responsible for keeping the country safe and by abandoning them, the Obama administration was putting Americans at risk. Today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded to these accusations, wondering whether it’s really useful to listen to anything Cheney has to say on foreign policy:
I’m not entirely sure that Dick Cheney’s predictions on foreign policy have borne a whole lot of fruit over the last eight years in a way that have been either positive or, to the best of my recollection, very correct.
Watch it:
Kerry: Holder is ‘not pursuing a political agenda’; he’s ‘doing what he believes the law requires him to do.’
Kerry: Holder is ‘not pursuing a political agenda’; he’s ‘doing what he believes the law requires him to do.’
Today on Fox News Sunday, Vice President Cheney attacked Attorney General Eric Holder for opening a “preliminary investigation into whether some CIA operatives broke the law in their coercive interrogations of suspected terrorists.” Cheney called it an “outrageous political act,” “intensely partisan,” and “politicized.” But on ABC’s This Week, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) pointed out that President Obama has been a bit more reluctant to open an investigation. Holder’s decision to nevertheless move forward is actually a welcome break from the days of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who made all his decisions based on political guidance from the White House:
KERRY: I think there is a little bit of a tension between the White House itself and the lawyers in the Justice Department as they see the law and as what their obligation is. In a sense, that’s good. That’s appropriate, because it shows that we have an attorney general who is not pursuing a political agenda, but who is doing what he believes the law requires him to do. And we have an administration, on the other hand, that is balancing some of those other issues.
Watch it:
The only reason Cheney thinks the investigation is partisan is because he disagrees with it. Holder is doing what an attorney general is supposed to do — following the law, not political considerations.
Wallace defends torture, snidely says it’s ‘purely coincidental’ U.S. hasn’t been attacked since 9/11.
Wallace defends torture, snidely says it’s ‘purely coincidental’ U.S. hasn’t been attacked since 9/11.
In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace that aired on Fox News Sunday this morning, Vice President Cheney adamantly defended the Bush administration’s torture policies. “The thing I keep coming back to, time and time again Chris, is the fact that we’ve gone for eight years without another attack,” Cheney argued. During the panel discussion later in the program, NPR’s Juan Williams ridiculed the entire debate. “In a democracy, you don’t torture people. It’s against the law! We’re having this discussion here, like, ‘Oh well you know if it works, it’s ok.’ No! It’s not ok! You don’t torture people!” Williams said. Seeming to take Cheney’s side on the issue, Wallace then looked straight into the camera and responded sarcastically:
WALLACE: Alirght, we have to take a break here but I just want to point out to the audience that it is purely coincidental that this country has not been attacked since 9/11.
Watch it:
Wallace said last week that on the issue of waterboarding, “I’m with Jack Bauer on this.”
Cheney Endorses CIA Interrogators Going ‘Beyond The Specific Legal Authorization’
Cheney Endorses CIA Interrogators Going ‘Beyond The Specific Legal Authorization’
The recently released 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on the Bush administration’s interrogation policies revealed a program that was poorly supervised and resulted in “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented” tactics. This unauthorized coercion included menacing “a detainee with a handgun and a power drill,” staging a mock execution, saying that they were “going to kill your children,” and aggressive waterboarding.
Today on Fox News Sunday, Cheney said that he had no problem with these interrogation tactics — even though they went “beyond the specific legal authorization.” In fact, Cheney said these tactics were “absolutely essential” to keeping the United States safe:
WALLACE: Do you think what they did, now that you’ve heard about it, do you think what they did was wrong?
CHENEY: Chris, my sort of overwhelming view is that the enhanced interrogation techniques were absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives, in preventing further attacks against the United States, in giving us the intelligence we needed to go find al Qaeda, to find their camps, to find out how they were being financed. … It was good policy. It was properly carried out. it worked very, very well.
WALLACE: So even these cases where they went beyond the specific legal authorization, you’re okay with it.
CHENEY: I am.
Watch it:
There have been no documents supporting Cheney’s claim that torture was essential to saving American lives. Even CIA memos from 2004 and 2005, which Cheney claimed would back him up, have been released and have no evidence linking torture to valuable intelligence. In fact, these memos show that “non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information.”
Transcript: More »
Cheney Biographer Cherry-Picks CIA Report To Claim There Is ‘No Debate’ On Whether Torture Is ‘Effective’
Cheney Biographer Cherry-Picks CIA Report To Claim There Is ‘No Debate’ On Whether Torture Is ‘Effective’
In April, Vice President Cheney insisted that then-classified CIA memos prove that the torture program he helped authorize saved lives. At the time, President Obama said he had read the documents, and they don’t “answer the core question which is, could we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques?” The Obama administration released the memos this week, along with a 2004 CIA inspector general (IG) report, and indeed, none provide any evidence to back up Cheney’s claim.
But last night on Fox News, Weekly Standard writer and Cheney biographer Steve Hayes refused to accept the truth. Obama was “simply misrepresenting what is in the report,” Hayes said. He then read a quote from the report claiming that it proves torture was “effective”:
HAYES: And forgive me, indulge me for reading one of these about Al Nashiri, who was the plotter of the USS Cole attack, “Following the use of EITs (techniques), he provided information about his most current operational planning as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of the EITs.” It doesn’t get clearer to that.
So we can debate the morality, we can debate whether this was torture. We can’t debate any longer about whether this was effective.
Watch it:
Hayes is to be commended for the strong effort. The quote he picked out of the 2004 CIA IG report does indeed make it seem like it says torture worked. However, looking back at the actual report, the sentence just before what he quoted on Fox expressly states that it is unclear why Al-Nashiri gave up information:
Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify exactly why Al-Nashiri became more willing to provide information. However, following the use of EITs, he provided information about his most current operational planning and REDACTED as opposed to the historical information he provided before the use of EITs.
So who is “misrepresenting” the report? Certainly not President Obama.
Townsend Admits CIA Documents Don’t Back Up Cheney’s Claims About Torture
Townsend Admits CIA Documents Don’t Back Up Cheney’s Claims About Torture
On Monday, the CIA released two memos from 2004 and 2005, which Vice President Cheney said would “show specifically what we gained” from the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. As people like Spencer Ackerman noted, those documents didn’t end up showing that at all, however:
Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.
Despite the fact that they devoted heavy coverage to Cheney’s initial claims, major media outlets have largely buried these new facts. But as Greg Sargent notes, last night on CNN, even former Bush homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend had to admit that Cheney still hasn’t been vindicated:
It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied vs. when that information was received. It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got the — the — the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.
Watch it:
Cheney, of course, refuses to back down from his initial claims. Earlier this week he put out a statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, there is still no evidence that the torture techniques were responsible and necessary for producing the intelligence.
Gonzales Offers Tortured Defense Of His Pro-Torture Past
Gonzales Offers Tortured Defense Of His Pro-Torture Past
In an interview with Law.com, disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales attempts to walk back pro-torture arguments he made to President Bush, claiming that he was only criticizing isolated provisions such as “a requirement that you provide athletic uniforms, commissary privileges, scientific instruments, [and] a monthly allowance” to detainees. According to Gonzales, “I didn’t mean to say that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions requiring basic humane treatment were outdated. No, I didn’t say that.”
Gonzales’ attempt to whitewash his previous statement, however, does not jibe with the facts. Here’s what Gonzales actually wrote in a 2002 memo to President Bush:
The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.
So while Gonzales did indeed criticize provisions which supposedly require the United States to provide detainees with athletic uniforms and scientific instruments, he also clearly rejects the Geneva Conventions’ limits on torture and other abusive interrogation techniques as “obsolete.”
Moreover even if Gonzales’ defense of his prior views could be taken at face value, they, at best, reveal him to be a completely incompetent attorney. Many of the provisions Gonzales labels as “quaint” simply do not exist. For example, nothing in the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War requires a detaining power to provide detainees with “athletic uniforms” or “scientific instruments.” The only provisions which even vaguely resemble such a requirement are Article 27, which mandates that detainees must be given appropriate “[c]lothing, underwear and footwear,” and Article 72, which provides that detention guards cannot seize mail sent to detainees which contains harmless items such as “scientific instruments” and “sports outfits.”
Similarly, while the Geneva Convention does include provisions requiring that detainees be given access to a kind of store, such provisions exist solely to ensure that the detainees most basic needs are met. Under the heading of “QUARTERS FOOD AND CLOTHING OF PRISONERS OF WAR,” Article 28 provides that a “canteen” must be set up in prisoner of war camps which provides necessities such as “foodstuffs” and “soap” (possibly because many prisoners of war are addicted to cigarettes when they are captured, the convention also provides for access to tobacco). To enable detainees to obtain food and soap from the canteen, Article 60 provides for prisoners to receive a modest “advance of pay.”
In other words, the “commissary” and “scrip” provided for under the Convention are really just a way of ensuring that the detainees basic needs are provided for. It is a mechanism to feed and clean detainees, not a requirement that detainee camps house their very own Wal-Mart.
Despite his attempts to whitewash the past, the meaning of Gonzales’ 2002 memo is clear. Gonzales believed that Geneva’s ban on detainee mistreatment is “render[ed] obsolete” by modern day terrorism; and he affirmatively misrepesented the contents of the Geneva Convention in a memo to the President of the United States.
Major Media Outlets Ignore News That CIA Documents Fail To Back-Up Cheney’s Torture Claims
Major Media Outlets Ignore News That CIA Documents Fail To Back-Up Cheney’s Torture Claims
In April, Vice President Cheney received extensive media coverage when he called on the Obama administration to release two CIA memos allegedly showing evidence that the Bush-era interrogation policies saved lives. His request came in response to critics who lambasted the Bush administration’s program and said it actually hurt U.S. efforts. From Cheney’s interview with Sean Hannity on April 20:
HANNITY: And secondly, why is it important that those interrogations took place? I mean, the ones they were talking about were sleep deprivation, waterboarding, putting insects into small, confined areas and telling them they were deadly insects. [...]
CHENEY: It worked. It’s been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives, preventing another mass casualty attack against the United States. … And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.
Yesterday, the CIA released two of those memos from 2004 and 2005, which had been secret until now. As Spencer Ackerman notes, these memos do nothing to back up Cheney’s claims:
Strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the “enhanced interrogation” program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.
This finding is big news. You’d think that since the media reported so much on Cheney’s claims about the documents, they would also rush to report that Cheney was wrong. Not so. Greg Sargent notes that in the major newspapers, this fact was “either not covered at all, buried deep in stories, or described in highly hedged language.”
ThinkProgress went through the coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC and found that television outlets are performing as poorly as their print counterparts. Most of the networks’ reports omitted the Cheney angle. When they did address it, they tended to give Cheney the benefit of the doubt by saying that it was “not clear” from the heavily-redacted documents. The only individuals to note Cheney’s lie were guest commentators. Watch a few of the segments here:
Cheney has since put out a carefully worded statement saying that “individuals subjected to Enhanced Interrogation Techniques provided the bulk of intelligence we gained about al Qaeda.” However, the fact remains that there is still no public evidence that those techniques actually saved lives.
CIA report reveals interrogator threatened to kill detainee’s children.
CIA report reveals interrogator threatened to kill detainee’s children.
A 2004 CIA Inspector General report reveals that interrogators threatened to kill the children and sexually assault the mother of a key terror suspect. The report, which examined the CIA’s treatment of terror detainees, has now been partly declassified as a result of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union:
The document, released Monday by the Justice Department, says one interrogator said a colleague had told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, “We’re going to kill your children.”
Another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a different terror suspect detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him – though the interrogator in question denied making such a threat.
Attorney General Eric Holder will appoint a prosecutor to decide whether anti-torture laws were broken in prisoner abuse cases involving CIA interrogators and contractors. Holder will reportedly name John Durham to lead the inquiry. Durham is a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut.
CIA staged ‘mock execution’ of detainees, then destroyed the video tape evidence.
CIA staged ‘mock execution’ of detainees, then destroyed the video tape evidence.
Newsweek reports that a forthcoming CIA Inspector General report that will be released next week “reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency’s post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects.” CIA interrogators used a handgun and an electric drill to try to frighten captured al-Qaeda detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri into giving up information:
Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”
Marcy Wheeler notes that the torture of Nashiri compelled him to falsely confess that al Qaeda was working on a nuclear bomb. Conveniently, the Bush administration destroyed tapes of Nashiri’s interrogations in 2005.
Human Rights Watch documents ‘campaign of systematic killings’ against Iraqi gays.
Human Rights Watch documents ‘campaign of systematic killings’ against Iraqi gays.
In a new report released today, Human Rights Watch documents a “spreading campaign of torture and murder” against gay men. HRW says “hundreds of gay men” have been targeted and killed since 2004,” and nearly 90 gay men have been killed in Iraq since the beginning of January. “A campaign of systematic killings gathered gradually in strength through the early months of 2009,” the report states. “Murders are committed with impunity, admonitory in intent, with corpses dumped in garbage or hung as warnings on the street.” The report continues:
Iraqi police and security forces have done little to investigate or halt the killings. Authorities have announced no arrests or prosecutions; it is unlikely that any have occurred. … Most disturbingly, Human Rights Watch heard accounts of police complicity in abuse—ranging from harassing “effeminate” men at checkpoints, to possible abduction and extrajudicial killing.
The campaign has been largely blamed on Shiite extremists affiliated with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia who are targeting behavior deemed un-Islamic.
Sunday Show Panelists Claim That Obama Has Never ‘Opposed His Liberals’
Sunday Show Panelists Claim That Obama Has Never ‘Opposed His Liberals’
Yesterday, panelists on both ABC’s This Week and Fox News Sunday uniformly asserted that President Obama never does anything to upset “his liberals.” (Amusingly, ABC and Fox both forgot to include an actual liberal on their panels.) ThinkProgress has compiled a brief montage of their claims. Watch it:
Such claims that Obama never defies progressives may accurately reflect the views of right-wing activists and Beltway pundits, but they have no basis in reality:
- Stimulus: Progressive economists — including at least one Nobel Prize winner — warned that the President’s stimulus package was too small to lift the sinking economy. Similarly, progressives consistently warned the President not to replace highly-stimulative spending with ineffectual tax cuts. Nevertheless, the President rejected progressive pleas for a more substantial package and brokered a deal with made tax cuts almost one-third of the stimulus. Obama allowed much of its final form to be dictated by a handful of Senate Republicans.
- Bank Nationalization: Many progressives unsuccessfully urged Obama to nationalize the failing banks, rather than risk making future bailout payments to an industry whose recklessness nearly destroyed the nation’s economy.
- Cap and Trade: Many of President Obama’s campaign promises for a robust cap-and-trade system have been watered down by a coalition of so-called “Brown Dog” Democrats loyal to Big Coal.
- Single-Payer: The House Progressive Caucus prefers a single-payer system to the almost-exclusively private insurance-driven system proposed by the President.
- Judicial Nominations: President Bush stacked the federal courts with young right-wing ideologues — one of whom even compared Social Security to “cannibalism.” President Obama’s nominees, however, have been older and far more moderate than President Bush’s, and at least one has been actively opposed by disability rights advocates.
- Executive Power: President Obama embraced several Bush-era assertions of power, including signing statements and aggressive use of the state secrets doctrine to avoid disclosing information in court.
- Torture: President Obama initially opposed a commission to investigate Bush-era torture policies. His Administration also opposes prosecuting Bush Administration officials guilty of torture.
- GLBT Rights: Despite campaign promises to repeal bigoted laws like DOMA and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, President Obama is “moving slowly” in carrying out this promise. This, despite the fact that Obama has the power to unilaterally suspend DADT.
None of this means that Obama is a bad president. To the contrary, his economic policies are beginning to pull the nation away from the brink of an economic collapse caused by decades of right-wing policy, and his health care plan will protect millions of Americans from the insurance industry’s tactics.
If anything, the Obama Administration teaches that even an effective President must constantly be pressured to keep his promises. Although Obama has yet to make a big push on GLBT rights, pressure from gay rights groups convinced him to grant benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees and to pledge to overturn DADT by the end of his first term. Similarly, under pressure from progressives, President Obama tacitly endorsed a torture commission and agreed that Attorney General Holder should have discretion to confront past abuses. And the President backed off plans to nominate a CIA Director opposed by many progressives because of concerns about his views on torture.
Simply put, these Sunday show pundits have an axe to grind against “liberals.” But the reality of the Obama Administration’s actions thus far is one that defies such simple-minded criticisms.
Holder ‘leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate’ Bush admin’s torture policies.
Holder ‘leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate’ Bush admin’s torture policies.
In April, President Obama revised his position on whether to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s use of torture. After initially stating “that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” Obama said “that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that.” Yesterday, Newsweek’s Daniel Klaidman reported that Attorney General Eric Holder “is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices”:
These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama’s domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. “I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president’s agenda,” he says. “But that can’t be a part of my decision.”
The AP’s Nedra Pickler confirms that Holder is considering appointing a special prosecutor and that he “will make a final decision within the next few weeks.”
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog Roll