here's one I've got to get in now -- folks, please follow along through this one very carefully, keeping close track of just who is doing what to whom, and how -- I'll forego any highlighting and just present this one to you straight up -- the true meaning of this, once fully appreciated, pretty much speaks for itself, I'd say -- I'll be most interested to see what you all make of this:
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U.S. Citizen Sentenced To Death In Iraq
Federal Court Asked To Block Transfer
By Josh White Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, October 14, 2006; Page A17
A U.S. citizen who allegedly orchestrated the kidnapping of three Romanian journalists near Baghdad last year was sentenced to death in an Iraqi court Thursday, prompting his lawyers to ask a federal judge in Washington to block the U.S. military from transferring him to the Iraqi government.
Mohammad Munaf, 53, has been in U.S. custody since May 23, 2005, when he was arrested during a military raid to rescue the Romanian journalists nearly two months after they were snatched. Authorities have alleged that Munaf -- who had ushered the journalists into Iraq and was acting as their guide and translator -- posed as a kidnap victim but was actually involved in a conspiracy for ransom and led them into a trap.
Military officials have said in sworn statements that Munaf confessed to elements of the crime and helped arrange the kidnapping. Munaf has been held at Camp Cropper, where the U.S. military keeps high-value detainees on behalf of Multinational Force-Iraq.
Officials said yesterday that they could not recall another U.S. citizen receiving a death sentence from the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. Munaf was born in Baghdad, received U.S. citizenship in 2000, and moved to Romania in 2001 with his wife and three children, according to court papers. Munaf's attorneys and a spokesman for the Justice Department yesterday confirmed Munaf's sentence.
Lawyers representing Munaf in the United States said that his conviction in the Iraqi court is a farce and that he was not allowed to present evidence or witnesses in his defense. In an emergency motion filed yesterday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Munaf's attorneys asked the U.S. government to intervene and argued that Munaf made incriminating statements only after "threats of violence and sexual assault against him and his family."
Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, has filed a habeas corpus petition on Munaf's behalf and said U.S. authorities have failed to properly ensure that Munaf's trial in Iraq was fair. He said handing Munaf over to the Iraqi government would mean certain execution without appropriate review of his case.
"The implications are that no matter where a U.S. citizen is taken into custody, there would be no review of their detention," Hafetz said. "If the U.S. is going to hand over a citizen, it must ensure that the trial comports to fundamental fairness."
Justice Department lawyers have argued in court documents that the United States should not step in because the Iraqi government has a right to try people for crimes and that the U.S. military is merely holding Munaf on Iraq's behalf and acting as a multinational force. A Justice Department spokesman said there has been no change in that position.
Munaf's Iraqi attorneys reported that the Central Criminal Court judge was prepared to dismiss the charges at a hearing on Thursday but that two American officials -- including an unnamed general -- stepped into the courtroom and requested a private meeting. The judge returned 15 minutes later and sentenced Munaf and four other defendants to death without hearing additional evidence, according to a sworn statement by Sean Riordan, a legal intern at the Brennan Center who spoke with Munaf's attorney in Baghdad.
"In 36 years practicing law in Iraq, [the lawyer] had never before seen or heard of a death sentence being handed down without deliberation or consideration of the merits," Riordan said in the statement filed in Washington yesterday.
Romanian officials had indicated previously that they did not want to push ahead with charges, according to Munaf's attorneys. They said no Romanian representatives were present at Thursday's hearing.
"The unfairness of Mohammad's trial in Iraq is horrifying, but I am thankful an American court has the ability to protect an American citizen like him," said one of Munaf's family members, who asked not to be identified because of safety concerns. "I have hope and faith that the court will do something to end this nightmare."
SEATTLE--Students of historical hysteria immediately saw 9/11 as America's version of the Reichstag Fire. Both incidents were organic acts of terrorism (contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis didn't set the 1933 fire) seized upon by power-hungry government officials to justify the crushing of political dissent and the rolling back of civil liberties. Hitler began marching his people into the abyss immediately upon seizing power in 1933, but Nazi Germany's fate as a rogue nation wasn't sealed until two years later, in the late summer of 1935.
Before then there had been heinous violations of human rights. Nazi authorities detained thousands of socialists and communists in concentration camps (death camps weren't built until 1941). Many were tortured; some died in custody. Stormtroopers enforced state-sanctioned boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses. Brownshirts beat Jews in the streets as the police stood by and watched. Ignoring Germany's treaty obligations, Hitler poured millions into the armed forces and threatened to use them against Germany's neighbors. No one could doubt that Germany was in the hands of militaristic right-wing thugs.
Until 1935, however, the home of Goethe and Beethoven had not entirely abandoned the universal values accepted by civilized states. True, top German officials and street-level Nazi Party members were breaking all sorts of laws, including constitutional protections against racial and religious discrimination. That's precisely the point: the law endured. Pre-Nazi legal infrastructure and laws, including the 1920s-era "Weimar" Constitution--still the Western world's gold standard for protecting individual rights and privileges--remained in force. Technically, anyway.
Had there been the political will, Hitler and his goons could have been arrested and tried under German law. The German government was a lost cause, but the German nation still had a (slim) chance. Until 1935.
That's when Germany officially codified the Nazis' uncivilized anti-Semitism by passing the Nuremberg Laws. Jews were stripped of citizenship and banned from marrying or dating non-Jews. The laws were a form of legalized harassment, prohibiting Jews from displaying German flags or shopping in stores at certain times. Turning Jews into legal pariahs paved the way for the Holocaust. More immediately, the barbaric ipso facto policies of the Nazi government had corrupted Germany's lofty and admirable system of legal guarantees. Even though German law hadn't been of much help to Jews before--well, there had been the occasional arrest and prosecution of a brownshirt who had gone "too far"--now there was every reason for them to succumb to hopelessness. Germany was no longer a civilized nation in the clutches of gangsters. It had become a gangster nation.
Similarly, the recently passed Military Commissions Act removes the United States from the ranks of civilized nations. It codifies racial and political discrimination, legalizes kidnapping and torture of those the government deems its political enemies, and eliminates habeas corpus--the ancient precept that prevents the police from arresting and holding you without cause--a basic protection common to all (other) modern legal systems, and one that dates to the Magna Carta.
Between 2001 and 2006, George W. Bush worked tirelessly to eliminate freedoms and liberties Americans have long taken for granted. The Bush Administration's CIA, mercenary and military state terrorists kidnapped thousands of innocent people and held them at secret prisons around the world for months and years at a time. These people were never charged with a crime. (There was good reason for that. As the government itself admitted, fewer than ten had actually done anything wrong.) Yet hundreds, maybe even thousands, were tortured.
Under American law these despicable acts were illegal. They were, by definition, un-American. Although it didn't help the dozens of Bush torture victims who died from beatings and drowning, the pre-Bush American judicial system worked. The Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court handed down one decision after another ordering the White House to give its "detainees" trials or let them go. For a brief, shining moment, it looked like there was hope for the U.S. to find its way back to the light.
Now, thanks to a gullible passel of Republican senators and an unhinged leader who is banking that Americans are just as passive as the Germans of the mid-1930s, we have our own Nuremberg Laws.
Under the terrifying terms of the radical new Military Commissions Act, Bush can declare anyone--including you--an "unlawful enemy combatant," a term that doesn't exist in U.S. or international law. All he has to do is sign a piece of paper claiming that you "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." The law's language is brilliantly vague, allowing the president to imprison--for the rest of his or her life--anyone, including a U.S. citizen, from someone who makes a contribution to a group he disapproves of to a journalist who criticizes the government.
Although Bush and his top officials ordered and endorsed torture, the courts had found that it was illegal under U.S. law and treaty obligations. Now torture is, for the first time, legal.
"Over all," reports The New York Times, "the legislation reallocates power among the three branches of government, taking authority away from the judiciary and handing it to the president." Bruce Ackerman, professor of law and political science at Yale, notes that the MCA trashes the centuries-old right of a prisoner to petition to the courts: "If Congress can strip courts of jurisdiction over cases because it fears their outcome, judicial independence is threatened."
How did we get here? Good Germans--and many of them were decent, moral people--asked themselves the same thing. The answer is incrementalism, the tendency of radical change to manifest itself in bits and pieces. People who should have known better--journalists, Democrats, and Republicans who are more loyal to their country than their party--allowed Bush and his neofascist gangsters to hijack our republic and its values. They weren't as bad as Bush. They just couldn't see the big picture.
Just as no single rollback led marked the transition from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich, no event is individually responsible for America's shocking five-year transformation from beacon of freedom to autocratic torture state. It wasn't just letting Bush get away with his 2000 coup d'état. It wasn't just us standing by as he deliberately allowed his family friend Osama bin Laden to escape, or as he invaded Afghanistan, or as he built the concentration camps at Guantánamo and elsewhere, or even Iraq. It was all of those things collectively.
The Military Commissions Act signals that our traditional system of beliefs and government has irrevocably devolved into moral bankruptcy. Memo to Senator McCain: You don't negotiate with terrorists, and you don't compromise with torturers.
It doesn't matter how much food aid we ship to the victims of the next global natural disaster, or how diplomatic our next president is, or whether we come to regret what we have done in the name of law and order. Our laws permit kidnapping, torture and murder. Our laws deny access to the courts. The United States has ceded the moral high ground to its enemies.
We are done.
(Ted Rall is the author of the new graphic travelogue "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?")
The Bush Administration recently admitted that, over the past several years, the CIA has run a system of secret overseas prisons. It is believed that more than 100 terrorism suspects have been held in this covert system, at one point or another, over the last five years.
With the Supreme Court's landmark decision in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [ http://laws.findlaw.com/us/000/05-184.html ] this June, the illegality of the CIA detention program became unmistakably clear. The Court ruled that al Qaeda suspects were protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the protections of which do not allow the "disappearance" and torture of detainees.
The Hamdan decision reportedly scared CIA and high-level Administration officials, who feared possible criminal prosecution. It was one of the main factors leading to the Administration's recent decision to announce the suspension of the CIA detention program and the transfer of 14 CIA detainees to Guantanamo.
Detainees held in CIA facilities were effectively "disappeared." The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had no access to them; neither did any court or other independent monitoring authority, and their families had no idea where they were or even whether they were dead or alive.
According to the testimony of former detainees, as well as numerous intelligence sources, the detainees in the program were subject to serious abuses. In a recent book, author Ron Suskind claimed that CIA personnel threatened Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, thought to be the architect of the 9/11 attacks, by telling him they would harm his seven- and nine-year-old children. The United States had sunk, Suskind said, "into the darkest of ethical abysses."
The CIA also subjected Mohammed and a number of others to water-boarding, a form of torture that makes the victim feel like he is drowning.
While CIA director Porter Goss last year defended water-boarding as a "professional interrogation technique," few outside observers agree. Indeed, more than 100 law professors sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez earlier this year stating unequivocally that waterboarding constitutes torture, a felony punishable under U.S. law.
According to former CIA detainee Khalid el-Masri, the CIA also beat detainees, hung them up by their arms, stuffed them into suitcases so that they felt they were suffocating, and kept them for long periods of time in the dark.
Speaking on national television in early September, President Bush gave a full-throated defense of the CIA program, and of the so-called "alternative procedures" that the CIA had used to extract information from detainees. Despite the euphemisms Bush employed, his speech amounted to thinly-veiled justification of torture and "disappearance." (We heard more of the same, put even more bluntly, when Vice-President Dick Cheney said two weeks ago that subjecting prisoners to a "dunk in water" is a "no-brainer" if it saves lives.)
Bush also used his speech to unveil the Administration's proposed military commissions bill. The bill, which passed in late September in marginally improved form, contains a number of provisions that were crafted with the CIA detention program specifically in mind.
First, the MCA amends the War Crimes Act to decriminalize certain past abuses against detainees. The goal here was to immunize the CIA from domestic prosecution for the crimes it committed in interrogating the prisoners in its custody.
Second, the law allows military commission defendants to be tried and executed on the basis of coerced testimony, hearsay, and classified evidence that they have no meaningful way to confront. These provisions make it very likely that defendants will be prosecuted on the basis of statements taken from detainees previously held in the CIA program. And, although the law bars the admission of evidence obtained under torture, one can be certain that the Administration will continue to argue that water-boarding and other "alternative techniques" are not torturous.
Already, a precedent for this approach exists in the administrative tribunals used on Guantanamo to assess whether a detainee is an enemy combatant. It has been reported that testimony obtained from CIA detainees, as well as from Guantanamo detainees who have been abused, has been widely used as the basis for these tribunals' decisions.
Third, the MCA contains several provisions that are meant to bar the public from ever hearing direct testimony about the CIA's abusive methods. These provisions allow the government to protect the "sources, methods or activities by which the United States acquired evidence" if those practices are classified. Because the government has said that all "alternative" interrogation procedures are classified―indeed, in a recent court filing in a case filed on behalf of one of the former CIA detainees, it said that they are "Top Secret," the government's highest classification level―these provisions are likely to prevent military commission defendants from publicly revealing any information about their torture or mistreatment.
Nor will the defendants' attorneys be able to report these abuses on their behalf. Attorneys who represent Guantanamo detainees are required to sign agreements that restrict their ability to speak publicly. They must turn over all their notes and documents before they leave Guantanamo, and they can only speak about the information they have obtained from their clients after it undergoes classification review.
Only if the information is declassified can it be disseminated. But rest assured, information about CIA abuses will not be declassified. Moreover, with the new group of just-transferred CIA detainees, the Administration has already indicated in court filings that it wants to tighten the existing rules.
Crime and Cover-up
Everyone knows that after the crime, comes the cover-up. In this case, the government is not only taking aggressive steps to prevent its crimes from coming to light, it has also tried to ensure that when and if these crimes come to public attention, the perpetrators are protected from punishment.
Joanne Mariner is a human rights attorney. Her previous columns on the detainee cases and the "war on terrorism" are available in FindLaw's archive.
Guantanamo detainees routinely denied witnesses, evidence in hearings, report finds
The Associated Press Published: November 16, 2006
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico: The U.S. military called no witnesses, withheld evidence from detainees and usually reached a decision within a day as it determined that hundreds of men detained at Guantanamo Bay were "enemy combatants," according to a new report.
The analysis of transcripts and records by two lawyers for Guantanamo detainees, aided by more than two dozen law students, found that hearings that determined whether a prisoner should remain in custody gave the accused little opportunity to contest allegations against him.
"These were not hearings. These were shams," said Mark Denbeaux, an attorney and Seton Hall University law professor who along with his son, Joshua, is the author of the report. They provided an advance copy of the report to The Associated Press late Thursday and planned to release it on Friday on the Internet.
Their report, based on an analysis of records of military hearings of 393 detainees, comes as the U.S. government seeks to severely restrict detainee access to civilian courts, arguing that the Combatant Status Review Tribunals should be their main legal recourse.
Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, dismissed the findings as "recycled allegations," and noted the tribunals gave each detainee an opportunity to contest their designation as an enemy combatant.
"It is not a criminal trial and is not intended to determine guilt or innocence," Gordon said. "Rather, it is an administrative process ... to confirm the status of enemy combatants detained at Guantanamo as part of the Global War on Terrorism."
The military held Combatant Status Review Tribunals for 558 detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in southeast Cuba between July 2004 and January 2005 and found all but 38 were enemy combatants. Handcuffed detainees appeared before a panel of three officers with no defense attorney, only a military "personal representative."
According to the report, the representatives said nothing in the hearings 14 percent of the time and made no "substantive" comments in 30 percent. In some cases, the representative even appeared to advocate the government's position, the report said.
The report is based on transcripts of tribunals that the government first released earlier this year in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press as well additional records provided by lawyers for 102 Guantanamo detainees.
Twenty-one first-year law students at Seton Hall University in Newark, N.J., analyzed the documents to create a database analyzed by eight second- and third-year students.
Among their findings:
-- The government did not produce any witnesses in any hearing.
-- The military denied all detainee requests to inspect the classified evidence against them.
-- The military refused all requests for defense witnesses who were not detained at Guantanamo.
-- In 74 percent of the cases, the government denied requests to call witnesses who were detained at the prison.
-- In 91 percent of the hearings, the detainees did not present any evidence.
-- In three cases, the panel found that the detainee was "no longer an enemy combatant," but the military convened new tribunals that later found them to be enemy combatants.
"No American would ever consider this to be a hearing," Denbeaux said. "This is a show trial."
The U.S. military now holds about 430 men at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban and holds Administrative Review Boards for them once a year to determine whether they should still be held, released or transferred to another country.
The Military Commissions Act, which U.S. President George W. Bush signed on Oct. 17, strips all non-U.S. citizens held under suspicion of being an enemy combatant of their right to challenge their detention in civilian courts with petitions of habeas corpus.
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