FIRE JOHN YOO!

Judge Orders Guantanamo To Release Five Terror Suspects

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:28:25 -0800

Judge Leon who has been conducting Habeas hearings in DC just ordered that five of the six Bosnians held at Guantanamo these past 61/2 years must be released. For those not familiar with Judge Leon he is a very conservative Bush appointee and the "justice" department thought it had a friend in him that would just do what they asked. Fortunately he is a Judge first and foremost. - H. Candace Gorman

Ruling Comes After Landmark Supreme Court Ruling on Right to Habeas Corpus

By Del Quentin Wilber

WASHINGTON -- A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of five Algerians held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the continued detention of a sixth in a major blow to the Bush administration's strategy to keep terror suspects locked up without charges.

In the first case of its kind, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon said the government's evidence linking the five Algerians to al-Qaida was not credible as it came from a single, unidentified source. Therefore, he said, the five could not be held indefinitely as enemy combatants, and should be released immediately.

"To allow enemy combatancy to rest on so thin a reed would be inconsistent with this court's obligation," Leon told the crowded courtroom.

As a result, he said, "the court must and will grant their petitions and order their release."

As for the sixth Algerian, Belkacem Bensayah, Leon said there was enough reason to believe he was close to an al-Qaida operative and had sought to help others travel to Afghanistan to join the terrorists' fight against the United States and its allies.

One of the men to be released is Lakhdar Boumediene, whose landmark Supreme Court case last summer gave the Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment.

The Algerians' attorneys said they would appeal Bensayah's detention but hugged each other and colleagues in congratulations after Leon's ruling.

"It's a relief," said attorney Robert C. Kirsch.

What will Berkeley say in the future when someone asks: and what did you do during this time?

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:48:50 -0800

The answer, so far, is: we accepted and protected one of the criminals. - posted in response to "Philippe Sands Writes About the Torture Memo and Related Issues",

http://delong.typepad.com/the_torture_memo/2008/05/philippe-sand-1.html

Refuse to Tolerate Torture

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:41:14 -0800

Excerpts from Scott Horton's Justice After Bush: Prosecuting An Outlaw Administration in Harper's Magazine.

This administration did more than commit crimes. It waged war against the law itself. It transformed the Justice Department into a vehicle for voter suppression, and it also summarily dismissed the U.S. attorneys who attempted to investigate its wrongdoing. It issued wartime contracts to substandard vendors with inside connections, and it also defunded efforts to police their performance. It spied on church groups and political protestors, and it also introduced a sweeping surveillance program that was so clearly illegal that virtually the entire senior echelon of the Justice Department threatened to (but did not in fact) tender their resignations over it. It waged an illegal and disastrous war, and it did so by falsely representing to Congress and to the American public nearly every piece of intelligence it had on Iraq. And through it all, as if to underscore its contempt for any authority but its own, the administration issued more than a hundred carefully crafted "signing statements" that raised pervasive doubt about whether the president would even accede to bills that he himself had signed into law.

No prior administration has been so systematically or so brazenly lawless. [...] Indeed, in weighing the enormity of the administration's transgression against the realistic prospect of justice, it is possible to determine not only the crime that calls most clearly for prosecution but also the crime that is most likely to be successfully prosecuted. In both cases, that crime is torture.

There can be no doubt that torture is illegal. There is no wartime exception for torture, nor is there an exception for prisoners or "enemy combatants," nor is there an exception for "enhanced" methods. The authors of the Constitution forbade "cruel and unusual punishment," the details of that prohibition were made explicit in the Geneva Conventions ("No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever"), and that definition has in turn become subject to U.S. enforcement through the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the U.S. Criminal Code, and several acts of Congress. [...]

Nor can there be any doubt that this administration conspired to commit torture: Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Psychotropic drugs. Sexual humaliation. Secretly transporting prisoners to other countries that use even more brutal techniques. The administration has carefully documented these actions and, in many cases, proudly proclaimed them. [...]

Finally, there can be no doubt that the administration was aware of the potential criminality of these acts. In January 2002, White House lawyers began generating a series of memos outlining the administration's motivation for torturing. They claimed that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war" requiring an enhanced "ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists" and that "this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." [...]

Waterboarding is far from the worst that detainees have suffered under U.S. supervision. Its use is especially worthy of note, however, because it is universally understood that 1) the administration authorized waterboarding, and 2) waterboarding is a serious crime. [...]

Open criminality is a cancer on democracy. It implicates all who know of the conduct and fail to act. Such compliance presents a practical crisis, in that a government that is allowed to torture will inevitably transgress other legal limits. [...][This] ha[s] little to do with a perceived benefit from the use of torture in interrogation. To the contrary, the very criminality of the act ha[s] a talismanic difference. It assert[s] the primacy of the will of the torturer. It ma[kes] a claim, for all to accept or reject, that the ruler is the law. [...]

Reasserting the rule of law is no simple matter. A new administration may--or may not-- bring an end to open torture in the United States, but it will not bring an end to our knowledge and acceptance of what has already taken place. If the people wish to maintain sovereignty, they must also reclaim responsibility for the actions taken in their name. As of yet, they have not. Pursuing the Bush Administration for crimes long known to the public may amount to a kind of hypocrisy, but it is a necessary hypocrisy. The alternative, simply doing nothing, not only ratifies torture; it ratifies the failure of the people to control the actions of their government. [...]

Obama advisers: No charges likely vs interrogators

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:17:57 -0800

BUSH OFFICIALS that authorized war crimes will walk, claim Obama advisers.

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama's incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and human rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush administration.

Two Obama advisers said there's little -- if any -- chance that the incoming president's Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.

New report details shattered lives of released Guantanamo detainees

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:19:14 -0800

From UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and International Human Rights Law Clinic | 12 November 2008

Guantanamo and Its Aftermath
Press conference video from C-SPAN

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the war on terror, according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley.

U.S. troops at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. (Louie Palu/ZUMA photo)

The report, "Guantanamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Detainees," based on a two-year study, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of Bush Administration policies on the lives of 62 released detainees. Many of the prisoners were sold into captivity and subjected to brutal treatment in U.S. prison camps in Afghanistan. Once in Guantanamo, prisoners were denied access to civilian courts to challenge the legality of their detention. Almost two-thirds of the former detainees interviewed reported having psychological problems since leaving Guantanamo.

"The nightmare of Guantanamo did not end with the detainees' release. Men never convicted of crimes or given the opportunity to clear their names are suffering from a lasting 'Guantanamo stigma,' and are unable to find work,'" said Laurel Fletcher, Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law and co-author of the report.

Researchers conducted interviews with released detainees in nine countries. The comprehensive study also includes in-depth interviews with key government officials, military experts, former guards, interrogators and other camp personnel.

"Guantanamo, like Abu Ghraib, has become a stain on the reputation of the United States," said Eric Stover, director of the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center and co-author of "Guantanamo and Its Aftermath."

The authors call for an independent, nonpartisan commission to lift the shroud of secrecy from Guantanamo and other detention sites. They further argue that the commission should have subpoena power and, if applicable, recommend further investigations of those allegedly responsible for any crimes committed at all levels of the civilian and military chain of command.

The authors warn that such a commission should not be undercut by the issuance of pardons, amnesties, or other measures that would protect those culpable from accountability. President-Elect Barack Obama has called for the closure of Guantanamo. The UC Berkeley report asks for even broader remedies.

"We cannot sweep this dark chapter in our nation's history under the rug by simply closing the Guantanamo prison camp," Stover said."The new administration must investigate what went wrong and who should be held accountable."

Released in partnership with the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, Guantanamo and Its Aftermath (PDF) opens a window onto the plight of detainees, from arrest and imprisonment to the return home.

"There is no doubt that these men and their families have suffered the gravest consequences of the Bush Administration's so-called war on terror," said CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren. "Overturning the legal atrocities at Guantanamo and the countless warrantless infringements of basic rights of detainees is only one step in undoing the damage done to these men and their families."

Over half of the study respondents who discussed their interrogation sessions at Guantanamo (31 of 55) characterized them as "abusive." Detainees reported being subjected to short shackling, stress positions, prolonged solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures, loud music, and strobe lights for extended periods-often simultaneously. The authors conclude that the cumulative impact of these methods, especially over time, constitutes cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment and, in some cases, rises to the level of torture.

"Carefully researched and devoid of rhetoric, the UC Berkeley report adds a new chapter to America's dismal descent into the netherworld of prisoner abuse since the tragic events of 9/11," said the Honorable Patricia Wald, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. "It provides new insights into the lingering consequences of unjust detention," Wald added.

Most detainees interviewed for the study were not vengeful toward America, but simply expressed a desire for justice and an opportunity to clear their names.

Of the more than 770 detainees who have endured Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, more than 500 have been released without formal criminal charges or trial. So far, of the 250 or more who remain in detention, only 23 have been charged with a crime. Two have been convicted and one has pled guilty.

The Human Rights Center investigates war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. HRC's empirical studies recommend specific policy measures to hold perpetrators accountable, protect vulnerable populations, and help rebuild war-torn societies.

The International Human Rights Law Clinic designs and implements innovative human rights projects to advance the struggle for justice on behalf of individuals and marginalized communities through advocacy, research, and policy development.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

UC Berkeley's Human Rights Law Clinic and Human Rights Center along with the Center for Constitutional Rights Demand an Investigation of "War on Terror" Policies

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:57:33 -0800

Detainees released from U.S. detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and Afghanistan live shattered lives as a result of U.S. policies in the "war on terror," according to a new report by human rights experts at the University of California, Berkeley.

The report, "Guantánamo and Its Aftermath: U.S. Detention and Interrogation Practices and Their Impact on Detainees," based on a two-year study, reveals in graphic detail the cumulative effect of Bush Administration policies on the lives of 62 released detainees. Many of the prisoners were sold into captivity and subjected to brutal treatment in U.S. prison camps. Once in Guantánamo, prisoners were denied access to civilian courts to challenge the legality of their detention. Almost two-thirds of the former detainees interviewed reported having psychological problems since leaving Guantánamo.

"The nightmare of Guantánamo did not end with the detainees' release. Men never convicted of crimes or given the opportunity to clear their names are suffering from a lasting 'Guantánamo stigma,' and are unable to find work,'" said Laurel Fletcher, Director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law and co-author of the report.

Download the report here and read the full press release here.

Obama ideas floating around the media

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:17:14 -0800

photo by AP

"I really hate it when smart people have bone-headed ideas. The very thought of setting up yet another structure to deal with something that our courts were designed to deal with makes my skin crawl. If that idea makes its way up the chain we will be looking at least at another year before our innocent clients get the hell out of our gulag." -

H. Candace Gorman, http://gtmoblog.blogspot.com/

The Responsibility of John Yoo

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:14:57 -0800

Whether one defends such dangerous radicalism with sober, polite academic discourse (as Kerr, John Yoo and Bill Kristol do) or with shrill, invective-driven bombast (as, say, Rush Limbaugh, John Bolton, Andy McCarthy and Sean Hannity do) doesn't alter the fact that one is legitimizing, defending and serving as an apologist for anti-constitutional extremism. [...]

As the Bush administration comes to a close, one overarching question is this: how were the transgressions and abuses of the last eight years allowed to be unleashed with so little backlash and resistance? Just consider -- with no hyperbole -- what our Government, our country, has done. We systematically tortured people in our custody using techniques approved at the highest levels, many of whom died as a result. We created secret prisons -- "black site" gulags -- beyond the reach of international monitoring groups. We abducted and imprisoned even U.S. citizens and legal residents without any trial, holding them incommunicado and without even the right to access lawyers for years, while we tortured them to the point of insanity. We disappeared innocent people off the streets, sent them to countries where we knew they'd be tortured, and then closed off our courts to them once it was clear they had done nothing wrong. We adopted the very policies and techniques long considered to be the very definition of "war crimes".

For the full text of Glenn Greenwald's "Orin Kerr and the responsibility of elites for the past eight years."

Close GITMO...

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:23:59 -0800

ACLU launches Close Guantanamo campaign

but not with third-tier justice:

President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but could require creation of a controversial new system of justice...

A third group of detainees -- the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information -- might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks...

The plan drew criticism from some detainee lawyers shortly after it surfaced Monday.

"I think that creating a new alternative court system in response to the abject failure of Guantanamo would be a profound mistake," said Jonathan Hafetz, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents detainees. "We do not need a new court system. The last eight years are a testament to the problems of trying to create new systems."

Lies to Legalize Torture

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:36:16 -0800

"Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code." -Carl Jung

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbols for hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern." -C.S. Lewis

"torture exhaustion"? Try that excuse on the tortured

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 11:33:19 -0800

excerpted from Yoo Two By Scott Horton, April 3, 2008:

I'm still haunted by a question a student put to me following a presentation I made at Columbia University on Tuesday evening. "If the bar is so serious about this," the student said, "then explain to me how it's possible that John Yoo and his confederates haven't been disbarred." I started to answer about the complexity of the disbarrment process, but I stopped. The student was right. If the bar were serious about this, it should have used its disciplinary tools to deal with it. This is not a case of an eccentric academic mouthing some cock-eyed theories. It is about a government official using the power of a government office to induce people to commit serious crimes...

I was amazed speaking with colleagues today who expressed their "torture exhaustion." "But we already knew all this," one said to me. "But how can you know about it, know that the nightmare still hasn't stopped, and not be infuriated?" I answered. "Have you abandoned all sense of ownership, or at least of participation, in the American idea?"...

Silence will buy us a continuation of this corruption of our nation. But isn't it worth raising your voice and articulating your anger to get our country back? It should start with insisting that Congress use the tools it has-oversight and the budget-to force changes. Say "no" to torture; it's an easy first step on the road back to decency.

Manadel al-Jamadi, dubbed the "Iceman," tortured to death in November 2003, using techniques that John Yoo approved in his torture memoranda.

British Government Initiates Criminal Inquiry into CIA Actions

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:55:09 -0800

By Daphne Eviatar 11/7/08 10:47 AM

The British government has initiated a criminal inquiry of the potential responsibility of CIA and British intelligence officials for detainee interrogation abuse, says Phillipe Sands in an interview with The American Lawyer posted today.

NOTE: Philippe Sands will visit UCBerkeley on November 18. See calendar in right hand column of this page for details.

Sands, a professor of international law at University College London and author of "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values," has strongly criticized the Bush administration's use of torture and extraordinary rendition and general flouting of the rule of law. While insisting that he's not calling on the new Obama administration to initiate any immediate criminal investigations or indictments of Bush administration officials, Sands said, "the first thing that needs to happen is establishing the facts. But if the facts are as they appear, then something is going to have to happen to allow the country to move on."

Sands also insists the Obama administration and the new Congress should revoke the The Military Commissions Act of 2006, which "purports to provide immunity for any person associated with criminal wrongdoing in relation to the treatment of detainees. All of these [laws] send out a signal that this administration is willing to tolerate wrongdoing and criminality. That needs to be reversed."

He would also like to see the new president "go into a little more detail and make explicit the U.S.'s reengagement with the rule of law domestically and internationally. The specifics of that mean no more torture, no more rendition, no more unilateral acts that blatantly violate rules and developing timetables for shutting down Guantanamo and ending the 'assault' on the International Criminal Court. [The U.S.] doesn't need to ratify the ICC but they need to stop demonizing it."

Read the full interview here.

"I will marvel....

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:43:39 -0800

at today's election results... when my innocent clients are freed from Guantanamo.
I head there tomorrow." - H. Candace Gorman, The Guantánamo Blog, November 4, 2008 http://gtmoblog.blogspot.com/

Dean Edley Defends War Criminal John Yoo

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 11:16:42 -0800

UPDATE: Edley said he does not intend to return to the White House and has removed his name from consideration for positions requiring relocation. - The Daily Californian, November 10

Today the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Berkeley Law Dean Christopher Edley may be on Obama's shortlist for a position at the Department of Justice. Which caused me to recall an article by Bob Fertik, April 14, 2008 http://www.democrats.com/dean-edley-defends-war-criminal-john-yoo :

After former White House lawyer John Yoo's memos authorizing torture were finally made publicly, the American Freedom Campaign launched a petition drive urging his boss, U.C. Berkeley law school dean Christopher Edley Jr. (left), to fire him.

[T]he American Freedom Campaign is 100 percent supportive of the First Amendment and respects the academic freedom that tenure is designed to protect and encourage. It cannot be stated strongly enough that we are not opposed to "Professor" Yoo stating an opinion; we are opposed to "government lawyer" John Yoo violating his obligation to defend the Constitution and serve the American people. He was asked to provide a legal justification for torture and ignored every possible ethical -- and perhaps legal -- obligation in existence to give his superiors exactly what they wanted.

Today Dean Edley replied:

I believe the crucial questions in view of our university mission are these: Was there clear professional misconduct - that is, some breach of the professional ethics applicable to a government attorney - material to Professor Yoo's academic position? Did the writing of the memoranda, and his related conduct, violate a criminal or comparable statute?

Absent very substantial evidence on these questions, no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member. That standard has not been met.

Of course there is no statute that specifically prohibits government lawyers from writing memos justifying torture and other war crimes - who would imagine the need to write one?

There's no doubt it would be a crime for a government lawyer to administer torture directly.

Yoo's memos authorized other government officials to administer torture. At a minimum, that makes him an accessory to their crimes.

And under the Nuremberg case of United States v. Josef Altstoetter et al, using the legal system to "legalize" war crimes is itself a war crime:

If the party knowingly aided and abetted in the execution of the plan and became connected with plans or enterprises involving the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he thereby became a co-conspirator with those who conceived the plan.

If Yoo were charged in a court of law with these crimes, would Edley defend keeping him on the Berkeley faculty? Of course not.

So the matter hinges on the fact that Yoo remains unindicted for his crimes, for the obvious reason that Attorney General Michael Mukasey, like Yoo and Bush, believes waterboarding is not torture. They are all wrong, but they are in power.

If John Yoo is a war criminal under Altstoetter, he belongs in prison - not on a law school faculty.

Write Dean Edley, politely of course: edley@law.berkeley.edu

. . .

I have to ask myself: would appointment of a torture apologist to a position at the Justice Department indicate any serious determination to close Guantanamo?

The Sounds of Silence and Equivocation

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:27:46 -0800

This is not the time to "wait and see" what Obama will do after January 20, or after 6 months or a year... let's remember that

There are real people who are suffering excruciating torments without any legal process as a result of the legal opinions and arguments of Yoo and his allies. They are languishing at Guantanamo, in Abu Ghurayb, in Afghani prisons and possibly other secret prisons throughout the world. - David Sylvester, "LIVING IN THE PARALLEL POLIS", http://bydavidsylvester.blogspot.com/