Bush admits to CIA secret prisons

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Velociryx
In any case, it should be seen as a DIRE warning when a largely indifferent moderate like me starts thinking positively revolutionary thoughts to ward off another disaster like this one.

COMRADE!!!!!!

[Barnabas]

Che, is that story true? I feel bad for the tortured guy but it is hilarious, the tortured guy with multiple personalities inventing stories, it sounds like from a movie

[GePap]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/washington/08detain.html?hp&ex=1157688000&en=0c26649f53b989ef&ei=5094&partner=homepage

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — The Bush administration’s proposal to bring leading terrorism suspects before military tribunals met stiff resistance Thursday from key Republicans and top military lawyers who said some provisions would not withstand legal scrutiny or do enough to repair the nation’s tarnished reputation internationally.

Democrats, meanwhile, said they were inclined to go along with Senate Republicans drafting an alternative to the White House plan, one that would allow defendants more rights. That left Republicans to argue among themselves about what the tribunals would look like and threatened to rob the issue of the political momentum the White House hoped it would provide going into the closely fought midterm elections.

A day after President Bush unveiled the plan at the White House, senior administration officials said Mr. Bush was willing to negotiate with Congress about the shape of legislation to establish tribunals, which would replace those struck down in June by the Supreme Court.

The administration officials, who agreed to discuss internal administration deliberations in exchange for anonymity, said the decision to transfer high-level terror suspects from Central Intelligence Agency prisons to military custody had been the result of months of secret debate at the highest levels of government.

The officials said the change had been most vigorously championed by the State Department, under Condoleezza Rice, against some resistance from a range of officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, who had defended the status quo, in which high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, including the man identified as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, have been held in secret C.I.A custody.

The 14 terror suspects recently transferred to the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, under the administration plan would face war-crimes trials if Congress approves the proposed tribunals. On Thursday, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the commander of the American detention facility, said the 14 prisoners had been registered for the first time with the International Committee of the Red Cross, but he would not say when they had arrived, whether they had arrived together or how long he had known in advance that they were coming.

In Congress, Republican leaders said the House would vote on the president’s proposal the week after next, and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Representative Duncan Hunter of California, argued in favor of the administration’s approach in a hearing on Thursday morning with military lawyers.

But the military lawyers argued back. And the Senate Republicans said there were still several areas of contention between them and the administration, chiefly, a proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence shown to the jury.

Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.”

Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the judge advocate general of the Army, made the same point, and Rear Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the judge advocate general of the Navy, said military law provided rules for using classified evidence, whereby a judge could prepare an unclassified version of the evidence to share with the jury and the accused and his lawyer.

Senate Republicans said the proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence was one of the main points of contention remaining between them and the administration.

“It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. “ ‘Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why’? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.”

President Bush announced his proposal for bringing terror suspects to trial on Wednesday as part of a round of speeches on national security aimed at drawing a sharp distinction between the two parties: Democrats as weak on terror, Republicans strong. The administration created its system of tribunals shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but the Supreme Court struck down those tribunals in June, saying they violated the Constitution and international law.

Senior administration officials said the decision to acknowledge the C.I.A. program, to move the 14 “high value’’ detainees to Guantánamo and to set up a new system for putting them on trial emerged from a committee President Bush established in January, six months before a Supreme Court decision forced his hand on some of those issues.

The committee, run by J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, held more than 20 meetings in secret at the White House and a half-dozen higher-level sessions with Mr. Bush’s national security team, which included Mr. Cheney, Ms. Rice, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte.

While the White House described those meetings today as a largely harmonious effort to remake a detainee system that had raised objections around the world, other officials said Ms. Rice’s State Department was often pitted against Mr. Cheney’s staff.

“There were a range of opinions on a number of issues, but it’s pretty fair to say that the State Department had been arguing for 18 months that we needed to put this whole thing on a strong legislative footing, and end the dispute with the allies,’’ said one official who was part of the process. “And there were others, from the vice president’s office to some in the Justice Department and the White House, who wanted to maintain the status quo.’’

The standoff was broken by the Supreme Court’s decision in June in the tribunal case, which took many in the White House by surprise, the officials said.

Administration lawyers on Capitol Hill said Thursday that the military trials now proposed by the administration were markedly different from the previous system and would pass court scrutiny. Among other changes, the proposal sets up tribunals overseen by a judge who could not also serve as part of the jury. Defendants would be given two appeals, and could not be tried twice.

But Senate Republicans remained divided over the White House proposal.

On one side, Mr. Graham and Senators John McCain of Arizona and John Warner of Virginia have argued that the system must provide enough fairness guarantees that the nation would feel comfortable having American troops tried under it. This is important, they argue, to repair a national reputation that has been damaged internationally by revelations of abuse at Guantánamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and to set a model for how other countries might try American troops.

On the other side, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Jeff Sessions of Alabama have shown more inclination to endorse the president’s proposal. Mr. Cornyn said after a round of meetings Thursday that he still supported the president’s approach on classified evidence, but that he hoped the differences could be bridged. “We’re trying,” he said.

Democrats have essentially said they would back Senators Warner, Graham and McCain, leaving the Republicans to lead the fight against the administration, and allowing the Democrats to avoid political fallout from challenging the administration while maintaining their criticism of the administration’s handling of the war in Iraq.

“I think you’re looking for a fight that doesn’t exist,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, told reporters.

In testimony on the Hill, an administration lawyer stood firm on the importance of denying suspects the right to know the classified evidence against them.

“In the midst of the current conflict, we simply cannot consider sharing with captured terrorists the highly sensitive intelligence that may be relevant to military-commission prosecutions,” said the lawyer, Steven G. Bradbury, the acting assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel.

This administration's legal views are disgusting.

[GePap]

The Legal Debate
Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: September 8, 2006

Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.

The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.

But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon — including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.

“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration’s dual approaches.

In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time.

So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world. More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses.

The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators. The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques.

John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.

“When you’re fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven’t faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.”

In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.

“There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.”

Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The Act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.”

Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law, most legal experts said Congress probably had the power to restrict the courts’ jurisdiction in this way.

The proposed legislation would provide retroactive immunity from prosecution to government agents who used harsh methods after the Sept. 11 attacks. And, as President Bush suggested on Wednesday, it would ensure that those techniques remain lawful.

“As more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical,” Mr. Bush said. “And having a C.I.A. program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.”

Mr. Bush said he had never authorized torture but indicated that aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture remained important tools in the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.

“I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why,” he said. “If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.”

A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret locations would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices both in the past and in the future would not face prosecution. But the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not discuss the techniques the agency had used or was prepared to use.

Other senior administration officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said there was no intention to undercut the interrogation rules in the new Army Field Manual, which does not include some of the most extreme techniques used on some suspected terrorists in American custody. The intent of the legislation, they said, was to prevent the prosecution of interrogators under amendments to the War Crimes Act that were passed in the 1990’s.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The administration says that language is too vague.

That is nonsense, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.”

But the new legislation would interpret “outrages upon personal dignity” relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which “shocks the conscience.”

There is substantial room for interpretation, legal experts said, between Common Article 3’s strict prohibition of, for instance, humiliating treatment and the McCain amendment’s ban only on conduct that “shocks the conscience.”

The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The net effect of the new legislation in the interrogation context, Professor Yoo said, is to allow the C.I.A. flexibility of the sort that the revisions to the Army Field Manual have denied to the Pentagon. The bill lets the C.I.A. “operate with a freer hand” than the Defense Department “in that space between the Army Field Manual and the McCain amendment,” he said.

Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.

“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”

The bill proposed by the White House would also amend the War Crimes Act, which makes violations of Common Article 3 a felony. Those amendments are needed, the administration said, to provide guidance to American personnel.

The new legislation makes a list of nine “serious violations” of Common Article 3 federal crimes. The prohibited conduct includes torture, murder, rape, and the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. By implication, some legal experts said, the bill endorses the use of those interrogation techniques that are not mentioned.

The proposed legislation in any event represents a further retreat from international legal standards by an administration already hostile to them, some scholars said. “It’s strong evidence that this administration doesn’t accept international legal processes,’’ said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University.

A pox on the chicken**** chickenhawks who runs this administration.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Brachy-Pride
Che, is that story true? I feel bad for the tortured guy but it is hilarious, the tortured guy with multiple personalities inventing stories, it sounds like from a movie

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/8400.html

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/09/07/suskind/

[Kuciwalker]

GePap: wtldr

[GePap]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
GePap: wtldr

[Kuciwalker]

way too long didn't read

[GePap]

Summary:

Bush admin. wants legal standards the military itself finds unacceptable.

[Velociryx]

It just never ends.

Like I said....Shrub is the best friend the terrorists have. With him in office pushing for crap like this, the terrorists have already won.



-=Vel=-

And Che....I'm not sure you'd like what shape my 'revolution' took as it would most definitely embrace market principles, but no matter...viva!