The shameful torture at Guantánamo continues

You can disregard Dear Leader's promise from January '09. Jeff Kaye/Fire Dog Lake reports that a US military spokesman has confirmed that the military currently tortures prisoners at Guantánamo under policies explicitly approved by President Obama and to which "the politicians dutifilly saluted," even "liberal pragmatists" like Sen. Diane Feinstein. How can these people live with themselves?

TIMES ARGUS: Vermont senators split on funds for Gitmo closing

By Louis Porter VERMONT PRESS BUREAU - Published: May 21, 2009

MONTPELIER — A vote on funding to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center requested by President Barack Obama resulted in the $80 million being stripped out of a war funding bill in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday.

Vermont's two U.S. senators, Democrat Patrick Leahy and Bernard Sanders, an Independent, split on the spending provision. Leahy was one of six senators voting in support of funding the closure; Sanders voted against the money needed to shut down the prison.

The New York Times called the Senate vote a "strong rebuke of the Obama White House."

Sanders said he voted against funding to close the facility in Cuba — despite voting differently on a related measure in 2007 — because he wants a clear and thorough examination of why the roughly 240 prisoners there are being held and an accounting of what will happen to them.

"A couple of years ago I was one of the few to vote against a resolution dealing with Guantanamo because I wanted to make it very clear that I believed that (President) Bush's decision to keep Guantanamo open was a disaster for the image of the United States and for our entire foreign policy," Sanders said.

"I agree with President Obama that Guantanamo must be shut down," he added, "and in my view should be shut down as soon as possible. I want to make absolutely certain that torture is never again part of America's interrogation practices and all detainees are treated under the rules of the Geneva Convention."

But before funding the closure of Guantanamo is approved, a commission examining issues such as why the detainees of the camp were taken there, whether their status as enemy combatants is legitimate and what will happen to them should complete its work, Sanders said.

"I think it is prudent to review the plan they develop before we spend $80 million of taxpayers' money," he said. "A number of important questions remain unanswered about the rather complicated issue of not only how you close down the facility — you can close down a facility in five minutes — but what you do with the prisoners."

For similar reasons he will likely vote against the underlying war funding bill when it comes before the Senate, perhaps as early as today, Sanders said.

"I don't believe we are seeing the kind of exit strategy we need for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said.

"Whether it is George Bush or Barack Obama, my job is to take a hard look at the plans that an administration brings forth," Sanders said. "I happen to be a strong supporter of Barack Obama, but that doesn't mean he is right on every issue."

Leahy was one of the six senators voting with Obama on the matter.

Leahy "believes it would be a mistake to start negating options before we know what the options are," said David Carle, a Leahy spokesman. [Continue reading the Porter article here.]

H/T to Blurt/Shay Totten, who also reports the Sanders - Leahy split.

Guantanomo inmate to appear before NY court

From Radio Netherlands Worldwide International News

Published Thursday 21 May 2009

For the first time, a suspected terrorist held at the Guantanamo detention centre will be brought before a US civil court. US media report that President Barack Obama will announce on Thursday that Tanzanian Ahmed Ghailani will have to stand trial in New York. He was allegedly involved in the attacks on the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. Ahmed Ghailani was detained in Pakistan in 2004 and later transferred to Guantánamo.

The president will today give a speech in which he will provide further details of his plans to close the infamous detention centre. On Wednesday, the Senate refused to provide funds for closing down Guantanamo. A majority fears some suspected terrorists may be released into the United States or possible escape from US prisons.

According to The New York Times [JayV edit: NYT blatant fear mongering], an undisclosed Pentagon report shows that 74 of the 534 suspected terrorists released from Guantanamo have joined terrorists or other militants. Two hundred-and-forty prisoners are still being held at Guantanamo.

Awaiting a refugee

From The Lead

The Diocese of Montreal in the Anglican Church of Canada has sponsored more than 1,000 refugees in the last 25 years but one Algerian who is still in custody at Guantanamo has an offer from the diocese to sponsor him to come to Canada as a refugee.

The Anglican Journal reports:

Janet Dench, executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, said Canadian officials would have to have access to interview Mr. Djamel Ameziane first. The current hold-up, she said, seems to be that the Americans are waiting until they have reviewed all the prisoners’ cases. “No one has formally and officially said that it is waiting for the U.S. to do their internal review but … all signs seem to point to” that cause for the delay, Ms. Dench said. “Once they’ve done the reviews, then they’ll be starting to think about ‘how do we find solutions for all of the people in Guantánamo and how do we involve these different other countries that might play a role?'”

Bishop Barry Clarke decided to sponsor Mr. Ameziane as a part of an ecumenical partnership with the Presbyterian Church in Montreal. “There’s an injustice here,” he said, noting that one the Five Marks of Mission in the Anglican Communion is changing unjust structures in society.

The Anglican Journal says that Mr. Ameziane has been imprisoned in Guantánamo since 2002, but has never been charged with a crime. According to information from the Center for Constitutional rights in New York where lawyers have taken on his case, he is an ethnic Berber who fled Algeria 17 years ago. He came to Canada but was denied refugee status and then traveled to Afghanistan. “As a foreigner in a land soon torn apart by conflict, he was an easy target for corrupt local police who captured him while he was trying to cross the border into Pakistan. Mr. Ameziane was then sold to U.S. military forces for a bounty,” his lawyers say.

Mr. Ameziane fears his life would be in danger returning Algeria with the stigma of having been accused of terrorist-related activities and would like to come to Canada because he has family in Quebec, said Bishop Clarke.

“People say to me ‘Can you really guarantee that he wasn’t a terrorist?' Well, there’s no guarantees in any thing, but on the other hand I keep telling people ‘We’ve done our homework. It’s not something that is just a nice thing to do,” said Bishop Clarke, commending Presbyterian pastor Glynis Williams for all her work on the matter. He added that the Canadian Council for Refugees and Amnesty International are also working hard to help Mr. Ameziane. “They’re not going to come and present something to me that they haven’t done their homework on.”

TORTURED FOR READING SATIRE

"I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares. Before this ordeal, 'torture' was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim. It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways – all orchestrated by the United States government." - Binyam Mohamed in his statement after his release

"Binyam Mohamed was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and locked up in Kabul, Bagram, and Guantanamo Bay for almost seven years because he read a satirical article on the internet."

And that satirical piece was written in 1979 by Barbara Ehrenreich, who writes in the Guardian,

With such stringent journalistic ethics in place, I was shocked to read online a Mail on Sunday article headed "Food writer's online guide to building an H-bomb ... the 'evidence' that put this man in Guantánamo." The "food writer" was identified as me, and the story began: "A British 'resident' held at Guantánamo Bay was identified as a terrorist after confessing he had visited a 'joke' website on how to build a nuclear weapon, it was revealed last night.

While I am not, and have never been, a "food writer", other details about the "joke" rang true, such as the names of my co-authors, Peter Biskind and physicist Michio Kaku. Rewind to 1979, when Peter and I were working for a now-defunct leftwing magazine named Seven Days. The government had just suppressed the publication of another magazine, the Progressive, for attempting to print an article called "The H-Bomb Secret". I don't remember that article and the current editor of the Progressive recalls only that it contained a lot of physics and was "Greek to me". Both in solidarity with The Progressive and in defence of free speech, we at Seven Days decided to do a satirical article entitled "How to Make Your Own H-Bomb," offering step-by-step instructions for assembling a bomb using equipment available in one's own home.

As if that were not enough for a satirist to have on her conscience, the US seems to have attributed Mohamed's presumed nuclear ambitions to a second man, an American citizen named Jose Padilla, aka the "dirty bomber". The apparent evidence? Padilla had been scheduled to fly on the same flight out of Karachi that Mohamed had a ticket for, so obviously they must have been confederates. Commenting on Padilla's apprehension in 2002, the Chicago Sun-Times editorialised: "We castigate ourselves for failing to grasp the reality of what [the alleged terrorists] are trying to do, but perhaps that is a good thing. We should have difficulty staring evil in the face."

I am not histrionic enough to imagine myself in any way responsible for the torments suffered by Mohamed and Padilla - at least no more responsible than any other American who failed to rise up in revolutionary anger against the Bush terror regime. No, I'm too busy seething over another irony: whenever I've complained about my country's torturings, renderings, detentions, etc, there's always been some smug bastard ready to respond that these measures are what guarantee smart-alecky writers like myself our freedom of speech. Well, we had a government so vicious and impenetrably stupid that it managed to take my freedom of speech and turn it into someone else's living hell.

And please note, despite what Obama has said, the administration has not undertaken measures to prevent these horrors from continuing.