Since 2001, the United States has been carrying out "targeted killings" in connection with what the Bush administration called the "war on terror" and the Obama administration calls the "war against al-Qaeda." While many of these killings have been carried out on battlefields in Afghanistan or Iraq, our government has increasingly been employing lethal force in places far removed from any zone of armed conflict, effectively carrying out executions without trial or conviction. Some of the individuals on the government's kill lists are U.S. citizens.
On Monday, our organizations filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of targeted killings that take place outside zones of armed conflict.… Seguir leyendo »
En los días que siguieron a los atentados del 11-S algunas voces sensatas pidieron prudencia para no caer en una respuesta de venganza ciega e indiscriminada como pretendían los responsables de las masacres de las Torres Gemelas y el Pentágono. Por desgracia, no fueron escuchadas y el presidente George Bush y los neocons, que vieron la oportunidad de aplicar sus políticas unilaterales y de fuerza, reaccionaron con la invasión de Afganistán. A la vez, se adoptaron toda una serie de medidas destinadas a restringir las libertades fundamentales con el pretexto de garantizar la seguridad. La primera fue la directiva secreta del 17 de septiembre que instaba a la CIA a «perseguir, capturar, encarcelar e interrogar a sospechosos de terrorismo en todo el mundo».… Seguir leyendo »
Actually, Majid Khan -- whom I represent in my work as a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights-- is still very much alive. Yet his legal status as a person entitled to basic rights is under grave assault. You see, Majid is one of dozens of people who have been held in secret CIA detention centers around the world. They are known as "ghost detainees" because our government hid them away from everyone, even the Red Cross. Their existence is an enduring reminder of the shocking abuse of power taking place in this nation.
By Sidney Bluementhal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton (THE GUARDIAN, 21/09/06):
President Bush's torture policy has provoked perhaps the greatest schism between a president and the military in American history. From the outside, this battle royal over his abrogation of the Geneva conventions appears as a shadow war. But since the supreme court's ruling in Hamdan v Rumsfeld in June, deciding that Bush's kangaroo court commissions for detainees "violate both the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and the four Geneva conventions", the struggle has been forced into the open.
On September 6 Bush made his case for torture, offering as validity the interrogation under what he called an "alternative set of procedures" of an al-Qaida operative named Abu Zubaydah.… Seguir leyendo »
By Eugene Robinson (THE WASHINGTON POST, 19/09/06):
I wish I could turn to cheerier matters, but I just can't get past this torture issue -- the fact that George W. Bush, the president of the United States of America, persists in demanding that Congress give him the right to torture anyone he considers a "high-value" terrorist suspect. The president of the United States. Interrogation by torture. This just can't be happening.
It's past time to stop mincing words. The Decider, or maybe we should now call him the Inquisitor, sticks to anodyne euphemisms. He speaks of "alternative" questioning techniques, and his umbrella term for the whole shop of horrors is "the program."… Seguir leyendo »
By Dan Froomkin. Special to washingtonpost.com (THE WASHINGTON POST, 18/09/06):
President Bush was at his most pugnacious and disingenuous Friday in a Rose Garden press conference, refusing to give reporters a direct answer about where he stands on torture.
Here's the transcript . Bush's repeated refrain -- that all he wants is for Congress to bring "clarity" to the Geneva Conventions -- was so far from the truth that straight news reporting simply wasn't up to the task of conveying the real meaning of the day.
So let's go right to the editorials.
Editorial Watch
The Washington Post editorial board explains what Bush meant when he said his "one test" for legislation was whether Congress would authorize "the program."… Seguir leyendo »
By Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch (THE WASHINGTON POST, 18/09/06):
President Bush is urging Congress to let the CIA keep using "alternative" interrogation procedures -- which include, according to published accounts, forcing prisoners to stand for 40 hours, depriving them of sleep and use of the "cold cell," in which the prisoner is left naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees and doused with cold water.
Bush insists that these techniques are not torture -- after all, they don't involve pulling out fingernails or applying electric shocks. He even says that he "would hope" the standards he's proposing are adopted by other countries.… Seguir leyendo »
When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp -- not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.
The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That's what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S.… Seguir leyendo »
Mourad Benchellali has written a book about his experience in a Qaeda camp andat Guantánamo Bay, with Antoine Audouard, who assisted in the writing of this article and translated it from the French. (NEW YORK TIMES, 14/06/06):
I was released from the United States military's prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in July 2004. As I was about to board a plane that would take me home to France, the last detainee I saw was a young Yemeni. He was overwhelmed by emotion.
"In your country, Mourad, there are rights, human rights, and they mean something," he said. "In mine they mean nothing, and no one cares.… Seguir leyendo »
‘This is not America.” Those words were President George W Bush’s attempt to explain the horrors of Abu Ghraib prison on the Arabic-language network Alhurra in 2004. He spoke the words as if they were an empirical matter, but a cognitive dissonance could be sensed through them.
If the men and women who tortured and abused and murdered at Abu Ghraib did not represent America, what did they represent? They wore the uniforms of the United States military. They were under the command of the American military. In the grotesque, grinning photographs they clearly seemed to believe that what they were doing was routine and approved.… Seguir leyendo »
By Michael Gove, a Conservative MP for Surrey Heath (THE TIMES, 17/05/06):
There is something strangely affecting about prison memoirs. From Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol to Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom, there is a pathos in the writing of those who have been denied their liberty yet retain the composure to make some sense of their ordeal.
With Wilde the pathos rests partly in the inherent injustice of incarcerating a man for the nature of his love, and partly in the sympathy he evokes for his fellow inmates. In Boyle’s memoir we are left in no doubt of his guilt, but we learn how trust and compassion can bring redemption.… Seguir leyendo »
By P. Sabin Willet, a Boston lawyer with Bingham McCutchen, represents Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani, who is about to begin his fifth year of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay (THE WASHINGTON POST, 27/04/06):
I brought flowers to the isolation cell when I visited Saddiq this month. He likes to draw roses and often asks for gardening magazines.
Saddiq is one of the many mistakes at Guantanamo Bay. In 2005 our military admitted that he was not an enemy combatant, but the government hasn't been able to repatriate him. (By a curious irony, Saddiq's opposition to Osama bin Laden makes him too hot to handle in his native Saudi Arabia.)… Seguir leyendo »
By Colleen Graffy, the United States' deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy. Response of Trial by spin machine (THE GUARDIAN, 22/03/06):
Victoria Brittain rose to defend the innocence of Moazzam Begg from her unbiased position as co-author of Begg's book, Enemy Combatant (Trial by Spin Machine, March 14). She laid out her case on how three different journalists in three different papers were wrong to question his innocence by attacking the integrity of the journalists. Those who wondered why, for example, Begg and his bookshop were under surveillance by MI5 before he went to Afghanistan are dismissed as "spin machines".… Seguir leyendo »
By Victoria Brittain, co-author, with Moazzam Begg, of 'Enemy Combatant' (THE GUARDIAN, 14/03/06):
The coincidental release of Michael Winterbottom's prize-winning film about the young men from Tipton, Road to Guantánamo, and Moazzam Begg's book, Enemy Combatant, predictably brought the US and British spin machines into full swing last week - so that anyone reading the book or seeing the film would have got the idea that these men may have been badly treated, but they certainly were not innocent.Last week the Daily Telegraph flagged an exclusive on its front page. "Begg told FBI he trained with al-Qaeda," was the headline over a full-page article by Con Coughlin, the paper's security correspondent, using an FBI report which, as Begg's book explains, was written by two FBI agents.… Seguir leyendo »
By Eric Umansky. He writes the Today's Papers column for Slate (THE WASHINGTON POST, 05/03/06):
Walid al-Qadasi should have been thrilled he was finally leaving Guantanamo Bay. Al-Qadasi, a Yemeni man in his mid-twenties, had been held at the prison about two years. He was first arrested in late 2001 by Iranian authorities who, al-Qadasi later recalled, "sold" him to U.S.-allied Afghan forces for a bounty. With little evidence against him -- and no tribunal having established his guilt or innocence -- al-Qadasi was sent home from Guantanamo in April 2004.
In an affidavit taken by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit organization that leads a team of 450 pro-bono attorneys representing Guantanamo detainees, al-Qadasi says that he remembers almost nothing of the unexpected move.… Seguir leyendo »
Mariano Aguirre, Codirector y Coordinador, Programas de Paz y Seguridad y de Derechos Humanos, FRIDE (El Correo, 11/12/05).
Poco antes de partir hacia Europa el pasado 5 de diciembre, la secretaria de Estado de EE UU, Condoleezza Rice, aceptó que su Gobierno ha trasladado a prisioneros entre diferentes partes del mundo pero negó que fuesen llevados a países donde se les tortura. Indicó también que esas «entregas» de prisioneros se hacen respetando la soberanía de los Estados aliados. Los prisioneros son muy peligrosos, dijo, y las informaciones que se obtienen de ellos «han evitado atentados terroristas y salvado vidas inocentes en Europa y en EE UU».… Seguir leyendo »
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