Evidence

International Justice Group Takes Aim at Bush Officials
By Daphne Evitar | Washington Independent

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.

So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation to prosecute the leaders in the U.S. government responsible for the “torture, cruel and inhuman treatment” of detainees during its own “war on terror.”

“Investigations and prosecutions should focus on the engineers of official policies that were the basis of illegal abuses, to send a clear signal that the absolute prohibition of torture and the ban on cruel and inhuman treatment will be respected by the United States,” the report said, adding that if the U.S. government fails to initiate prosecutions, then other countries will take up the cause. Italy, for example, recently convicted 23 Americans for their involvement in “extraordinary renditions.”

“Failing to hold accountable the architects and overseers of a policy of abuse undermines the U.S. justice system and the fundamental idea that law provides a check on power,” Alex Boraine, acting president of ICTJ, said in a statement today. “As we have seen in countless examples around the world, abuse of power by allowing torture and cruel treatment can tear down what the law and democracy have built.” Read more.

Iran Began Preparing for U.S. Bombing in 2002
By Gareth Porter | IPS

WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published new evidence Monday that Iran had been building "contingency centres" in the event of a U.S. bombing attack as early as 2002, years before it began building the second enrichment facility at Qom.

But the latest report on Iran's nuclear programme by the agency appeared to reject Iran's account of how and when it had decided to build the Qom enrichment plant and implied that it believed Iran was hiding the construction of other facilities.

The report provides new evidence that the Qom enrichment facility was constructed on one of many sites where tunneling had been prepared as early as 2002 to protect various kinds of facilities from a possible U.S. air attack.

The apparent Iranian decision to begin preparations for a U.S. attack on Iran in 2002 came after President George W. Bush had declared in his Sep. 20, 2001 speech to a joint session of Congress that any nation that "continues to harbor or support terrorism" would be regarded as a "hostile regime" and then named Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil" with Iraq and North Korea in January 2002.

The new evidence contradicts the U.S. charge that Iran had been working on constructing a covert enrichment plant for several years – well before March 2007, when Iran announced that it would no longer inform the agency of new facilities as soon as the decision had been made to construct them.

Dozens of Gitmo detainees finally get day in court
By Pete Yost, AP | Yahoo! News

In courtrooms barred to the public, dozens of terror suspects are pleading for their freedom from the Guantanamo Bay prison, sometimes even testifying on their own behalf by video from the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

Complying with a Supreme Court ruling last year, 15 federal judges in the U.S. courthouse here are giving detainees their day in court after years behind bars half a world away from their homelands.

The judges have found the government's evidence against 30 detainees wanting and ordered their release. That number could rise significantly because the judges are on track to hear challenges from dozens more prisoners.

Scooped up along with hard-core terrorist suspects in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, these 30 detainees stand in stark contrast to the 10 prisoners whom the Obama administration targeted for prosecution Friday for plotting the Sept. 11 and other terrorist attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the professed mastermind of 9/11, and four of his alleged henchmen are headed for a federal civilian trial in New York; five others, including a top suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole, will be tried by a military commission.

More detainees are expected to soon be added to the prosecution list. But there will still be plenty of cases left among the 215 detainees now at Guantanamo to keep the judges here busy as they work to clear a legal morass the Bush administration created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Bush administration Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once promised Guantanamo held "the worst of the worst." The judges here have rejected pleas for release from eight detainees, but they have concluded the government doesn't even have enough evidence to keep 30 other detainees behind bars. Read more.

Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja
Iraqi former battle zone sees abnormal clusters of infant tumours and deformities
Martin Chulov | Guardian.co.UK

Link to video: The Babies of Falluja

Doctors in Iraq's war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja's over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems - are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

A group of Iraqi and British officials, including the former Iraqi minister for women's affairs, Dr Nawal Majeed a-Sammarai, and the British doctors David Halpin and Chris Burns-Cox, have petitioned the UN general assembly to ask that an independent committee fully investigate the defects and help clean up toxic materials left over decades of war – including the six years since Saddam Hussein was ousted. Read more.

ACLU Lawsuit Charges American Citizen Illegally Detained And Mistreated By U.S. Officials | Press Release
New Jersey Man Held For Four Months Overseas And Threatened With Torture And Disappearance

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit on behalf of a New Jersey man who was illegally detained and mistreated by U.S. officials in Kenya and Ethiopia. After fleeing hostilities in Somalia in 2006, Amir Meshal was arrested, secretly imprisoned in inhumane conditions and subjected to harsh interrogations by U.S. officials over 30 times in three different countries before ultimately being released four months later without charge.

In a landmark case, twenty-three Americans, mostly CIA operatives, have been convicted in Italy for kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003. They were all tried in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The convictions turn them into international fugitives who risk arrest abroad. The case marks the first time any American has been convicted for taking part in a so-called “extraordinary rendition.” We go to Rome to speak with the Italian prosecutor who brought the case, Armando Spataro, and get comment from international law and human rights attorney Scott Horton. [Includes rush transcript].

Justice Denied After Seven Years of Pain and Struggle
By Stephen Rohde | Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Imagine it’s September 2002 and you are at JFK Airport changing planes on your way home to Canada, after a vacation in Tunisia. To your surprise, you are detained by U.S. authorities and interrogated for…13 days. The Bush administration labels you a suspected member of Al Qaeda and sends you against your will to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture. You are tortured, interrogated and detained in a tiny underground cell for nearly a year before the Syrian government releases you, stating they had found no connection to any criminal or terrorist organization or activity. An exhaustive investigation by the Canadian government finds you innocent of terrorism or other wrongdoing and that government apologizes for its minor role. Arar v. Ashcroft, No 06-4216-cv. Wouldn’t you expect American law to afford you due process and a judicial forum in which to hold those who committed these outrageous violations of your constitutional rights fully accountable?

That’s what Maher Arar, a 39-year old Canadian citizen, expected when he was subjected to these outrages. But as of this week, the doors of American justice have been slammed in Arar’s face.

On Monday, a sharply divided federal Court of Appeals, by a vote of 7 to 4, dismissed Arar’s case, concluding that it raised too many sensitive foreign policy and secrecy issues to permit any relief. Read more.

EXCLUSIVE: Convicted CIA Spy Says "We Broke the Law"
Sabrina deSousa Says U.S. "Betrayed" Her and Others Found Guilty in Kidnapping of Muslim Cleric in Italy
By Matthew Cole, Avni Patel, and Brian Ross | ABC News

"Everything I did was approved back in Washington," she said. deSousa says she was on a ski trip on the actual day of the kidnapping....A State Department spokesman said the Obama administration was "disappointed" by the verdict.

One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States "broke the law" in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.

"And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this," said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson.

DeSousa says the U.S. "abandoned and betrayed" her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a member of the House Intelligence Committee told ABC News that the trial was a disaster for CIA officers like DeSousa on the frontline.

"I think these people have been put out there. They've been hung out to dry. They're taking the fall potentially for a decision that was made by their superiors in our agencies. It's the wrong place to go." Read more.

Italian court convicts 23 Americans in CIA rendition case
By Craig Whitlock | Washington Post

An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was later tortured.

The judge in the case, Oscar Magi, said three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, were covered by diplomatic immunity.

The Americans were all tried in absentia. A Milan prosecutor said his office would seek to have them extradited from the United States, but a formal decision will be made later by the Italian Justice Ministry.

The case is the only instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are seized in one country and forcibly transported to another without judicial oversight. Read more.

Cheney Failed to Answer 72 FBI Questions | CBS
Documents from Interview in Valerie Plame Case Show Vice President was Unclear on Many Points, Big and Small

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way.

On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.

The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks of Plame's CIA identity were orchestrated at the highest level of the White House and carried out by, among others, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Among the most basic questions for Cheney in the Plame probe: How did Libby find out that the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA? Read more.

By Sherwood Ross

Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s still illegal.

Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar, 45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria, Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a Lebanese outfit that did work for the U.S. military, Azar said he was tortured by his abductors. He might just as well have been flow to Egypt under the Bushies.

Interestingly, Azar was never charged as a dangerous terrorist, only with conspiracy to commit bribery for wiring $106,000 in kickbacks to a U.S. employee’s bank account in hopes of getting $13 million in unpaid bills okayed.

Posted here.

Nobody who works for our government had the decency to leak this. Remember that.

Cheney was represented (at our expense) by the same law firm that Obama's White House Counsel worked for, the same one that defended Clinton. But Cheney consulted or pretended to consult his own staff lawyer David Addington when he wanted to avoid incriminating Bush.

22 things Cheney said he could not recall.

How did Cheney's lawyer remember falsehoods to leak to the press on a topic Cheney refused to address?

Cheney hung Libby out to dry.

Summarized here.

Dissected here.

Posted here.

Reviewed by NY Times here.

Raw Story has this raw story.

BBC

The US has been warned that its use of drones to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan may violate international law.

UN human rights investigator Philip Alston said the US should explain the legal basis for attacking individuals with the remote-controlled aircraft.

He said the CIA had to show accountability to international laws which ban arbitrary executions.

Drones have killed about 600 people in north-west Pakistan since August 2008.

Mr Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, told the BBC: "My concern is that these drones, these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

"The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons."

Increased use

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

By Ann Wright

Journalists Pascale Bourgaux and Mercedes Gallego in their trips to Iraq as war correspondents were stunned to hear from military women in Iraq that they should be very careful working in military units due to sexual assault and rape.

When they left Iraq they decided to investigate the issue of rape in the U.S. military. In 2007, they filmed the stories of four military women who had been raped and made a documentary, “Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within.” The documentary was shown for the first time in the United States on October 26 at the New York Independent Film Festival.

It's happening here.

Cheney falsely accuses Obama of ‘libel’ against CIA over torture
By Ron Brynaert | Raw Story

Torture is not torture, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and to refer it to as such should be considered libelous. Even if it doesn't actually qualify as libel.

The Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter reports, "Maintaining his stature as one of the most forceful defenders of the Bush Administration's defense policies former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of committing 'libel' against CIA interrogators on Wednesday" during a speech at the Center for Security Policy.

"In the speech, Mr. Cheney charged that President Obama has 'filled the air with vague and useless platitude' when talking about torture and by calling enhanced interrogation techniques 'torture" he has committed 'libel' against CIA interrogators whom Mr. Cheney described as 'dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause,'" Carpenter adds.

Cheney's full comments Wednesday:

"In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed."

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald noted last June, "The U.S. has prosecuted those acts as torture in the past. Multiple media outlets and even the U.S. Government have routinely described those acts as “torture” when used against Americans, rather than by Americans. The tactics are ones we copied from manuals designed to inure our own troops to the torture techniques used by some of the world’s worst tyrants. They resulted in numerous deaths. Until the Bush administration decided to call it something other than 'torture' so that they could do it, nobody had any questions about whether this was 'torture.'" Read more.