Eight years ago today, a Department of Defense C-141 transport plane carrying 20 prisoners arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On that day, January 11, 2002, the naval base began operating as a detention center for men captured in President Bush's so-called "war on terror."

Since that day, nearly 800 prisoners, men as old as 98 and boys as young as 13, have passed through Gitmo. The notorious prison camp has seared into the mind of the world images of hooded, goggled, orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners shackled in cages. Guantánamo has become synonymous with torture and abuse. Its very existence is a symbol of disregard for the rule of law.

In this video, "Justice Denied," a few of the former detainees tell their stories. They tell of their capture, detention — some for several years — and abuse inside the facility, and their eventual release without explanation or apology.

On his second day in office, President Obama ordered the closure of the prison at Guantánamo by January 22, 2010.

But last Wednesday, the Obama administration announced it will try a sixth Guantánamo detainee in the unconstitutional military commissions system. Congress has stymied plans to move some of the 198 remaining detainees to a prison in Thomson, Illinois, by refusing to fund an upgrade of the prison's facilities. It now seems clear that the president's deadline will pass without any meaningful change in policy for those still held there.

It's been a shameful eight years. It's time to close Guantánamo.

They gave us a republic: The Nightowl Newswrap

Prairie Weather: Fraud

The Brad Blog: TN GOP fights against the rule of law and paper ballots

The Sideshow: Health Care Roulette

Pensito Review: Carl Hiaasen's letter to Sarah Palin from her publisher

Happy Blogiversary to bark bark woof woof!

(John Amato: I'd like to welcome Big Tent Democrat onto the pages of C&L. He'll be handling our new Supreme Court Blog: Third Branch for the hearing. He's a regular on Jeralyn's most awesome site Talk Left and a former Daily Kos front pager. He also is a man of the law.)

After being introduced by New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kristen Gillibrand, Judge Sonia Sotomayor presented her opening statement. The key part from Judge Sotomayor's opening statement:

In the past month, many Senators have asked me about my judicial philosophy. It is simple: fidelity to the law. The task of a judge is not to make the law – it is to apply the law. And it is clear, I believe, that my record in two courts reflects my rigorous commitment to interpreting the Constitution according to its terms; interpreting statutes according to their terms and Congress’s intent; and hewing faithfully to precedents established by the Supreme Court and my Circuit Court. In each case I have heard, I have applied the law to the facts at hand.

The process of judging is enhanced when the arguments and concerns of the parties to the litigation are understood and acknowledged. That is why I generally structure my opinions by setting out what the law requires and then by explaining why a contrary position, sympathetic or not, is accepted or rejected. That is how I seek to strengthen both the rule of law and faith in the impartiality of our justice system. My personal and professional experiences help me listen and understand, with the law always commanding the result in every case.

The complete statement on the flip.

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The Villagers were up in arms Sunday morning over on the set of ABC's This Week about the possibility that Eric Holder might appoint a special someone to look into the Bush/Cheney torture practices. Watch in awe and see how the Villagers feel about trying to get accountability from the Bush years.

Why, an investigation would just trash the place. Oh, the bitterness in D.C. would be too much to handle, all because those other people (that is, non-Villagers) would like to get to the truth.

Bob Woodward, who's trying to be the next David Broder by living off his long-degraded rep as the man who uncovered Watergate, wonders how we will ever be able to keep secrets again if there is some inspection. Um, isn't that what the Bob Woodwardses are supposed to do? Uncover stuff? Nope, not anymore. He's appalled that there might be a frakking investigation.

And he was all a-giggle with the thought that the CIA could actually lie. What a joke. I didn't hear him open his mouth when Newt Gingrich went all whiggy on Nancy Pelosi.

Cokie goes "Cokie" on us for a while and then after much trepidation comes down on the rule of law. Good for her, but she better take some R&R if it happens.

ROBERTS: I must say, I have very mixed minds about this. Because on the one hand, the whole idea of a prosecution gets Washington into that kind of horrible slog where everybody hates each other and the poison just gets very thick.

DONALDSON: Unlike at the moment, right?

ROBERTS: Well, no, it hasn’t been as bad lately as it was in the last 16 years.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And it seems like they’re trying to avoid at least in the design of this, criminalizing of policy.

ROBERTS: And just the whole atmosphere of getting that way again. On the other hand, the rule of law is terribly important. And we have to have it -- you know, we cannot operate in this country without the rule of law.

DONALDSON: So which hand do you come down on?

ROBERTS: I’d probably come down on the rule of law.

Digby writes much more:

Stephanopoulos reported on This Week that the possible Holder investigation is going to be very narrow and will not pursue policy makers or anyone who took orders directly from the policymakers. He's going after "rogue interrogators" who inflicted more torture than was strictly allowed.

The Village roundtable all gasped in horror anyway because who knows where such an investigation might lead and as Cokie complained, it would mean that the whole town would be mad at each other again and nobody wants that! "Everybody hates each other and the poison gets very thick." She did finally come down on the side of following the rule of law even though it would make her uncomfortable at cocktail parties, but it was a close thing.

Bob Woodward was very upset at the idea that the government can't keep secrets because "we need them!" Besides, Holder shouldn't be like Janet Reno and just initiate investigations willy nilly. (He seems to think that Reno authorizing independent counsels to investigate her own president for trivial political reasons is the same thing as investigating whether the previous administration tortured prisoners.) They all chuckled at the notion that Holder was really independent and if he is, that means he's a rogue interrogator himself.

George Will thought it was all just a bunch of balderdash because nothing bad ever happened during the Bush administration. Sam Donaldson said that reporters should probably pursue stories and Donna Brazile added that these things were coming out anyway so they might as well be investigated.

They all snorted and giggled and laughed throughout the whole segment about how silly it was to be upset that the CIA lied because well, that's what it does. And they all thought it was a ripping good joke that Cheney kept everything secret because well, everyone knows that's what he does. Hahahahaha.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Jesse Ventura's been making the rounds lately by taking on all comers on the issue of torture, which has left little quivering wingnuts like Joe Scarborough having to resort to attacking him out of his immediate presence.

Because as Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends found out this morning, doing so in person can be extremely unpleasant. Especially if you try pulling the lamestain right-wing crap we've gotten accustomed to, namely, accusing their interlocutors of not wanting to keep us safe, you're not patriotic enough, blah blah blah.

That's what Kilmeade tries pulling right off the bat, and it makes for possibly the best of the Ventura smackdowns yet:

Ventura: I have been waterboarded. It is torture. I can speak from experience. It was part of SERE training that I went through as a Navy SEAL.

Kilmeade: And are you OK now?

Ventura: I'm fine.

Kilmeade: So is Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He's about 60 pounds overweight, having a great time --

Ventura: It doesn't matter. If it was OK, then why don't we do it to criminals? Like, if we've got gang members in L.A., OK? We know that their gangs are gonna do bad things. When we arrest them, why don't we waterboard them so we can get information out of them? Because it's against the law.

Kilmeade: Do you want us not to be safe from attack?

Ventura: Don't come after me with that nonsense.

[Debate over its efficacy -- "ticking time bomb"]

Ventura: OK, why didn't we waterboard McVeigh and Nichols, then? There were more people that they thought involved at Oklahoma City. Why weren't they waterboarded to get more information? Because it's against the law.

Wait -- and if we're not going to be a country that goes by the rule of law when it's convenient or not convenient, then what do we stand for?

...

But what about the difference -- you bring up Timothy McVeigh and maybe gang members, and maybe those threats weren't as imminent as the threats --

Ventura: I don't think these threats are imminent.

You didn't think after 9/11, that America felt threats were imminent, that more could be coming?

Ventura: Maybe. But I think our behavior has caused us to be in more trouble. Now they won't release these photos. Why? Because they know the Muslim world will go irate. They're all after Nancy Pelosi -- when did she know? When dah dah dah -- Well, if we hadn't of tortured, it would be a dead issue, wouldn't it?

Let's go to the real issue: It's called torture.

Indeed: As we pointed out the other day, the fact that we find it necessary not to release these photos is proof that not only did torture not keep us safe, it made us manifestly less safe.

At this point, however, Kilmeade goes all-out Smug Right-Wing Punk on Ventura and finds himself confronting the reality that he's all for having someone else do his dirty work but Kilmeade himself -- of prime fighting age -- is too big of a spoiled, snotty rich kid to ever have to put himself on the line in a serious way. The resulting piledriver through the canvas is a sight to behold.

After all, it's easy to root for torture when you're not going to be one of the soldiers in the field who has to deal with the consequences. Right, Brian Kilmeade?

There's a new poll out from Gallup and USA Today which one is headlining as showing there's "no mandate for criminal prosecutions" and the other is headlining as showing that "most want an enquiry" into whether Bush's anti-terror policies broke the law.

Those headlines aren't mutually incompatible. There's a hard core of around 30% of Americans who still cleave to Bush as a hero, an unsung genius who can do no wrong and think that a president can just declare actions legal and be done with it. There's a slightly larger core of those who want America to return to the fold of the rule of law, presidential accountability and humanity. They've done some homework and realise that anti-terror tactics during the Bush Years were built upon the kind of deliberately twisted legal reasoning that got Nazi lawyers hanged at Nuremberg. And there's a group - the undecideds - who want to know more before they make their minds up, and would understandably prefer the evidence to come from official governmental sources rather than liberal blogs and human rights groups. They want to trust their government and want that government to bring the facts out in the open. That's just human nature and trying to spin the two different headlines about results of this poll as some liberal conspiracy is just being dishonest.

So give the people a Truth Commission. Let the evidence be made public in official hearings rather than tucked away in little-read reports from human rights groups about the Defense Department's co-operation in running CIA secret prisons or in obscure blog posts citing studies showing the military have "disappeared over 24,000 video tapes of detainee interrogations. Let's not rely on whether foreign officials and judges bow to blackmail in hoping to get details of why someone had his penis repeatedly sliced because he once read a satirical article online. Let's get those Bush officials who have admitted their administration engaged in torture up on the witness stand, under oath.

We need to send an overwhelming and clear message to Obama and those among his cabinet who don't want to see justice served. Two thirds of America want this. Give it to them if that's the people's will - that's called "moving forward". Then as the evidence unfolds we'll see how America feels about prosecutions, and about making sure such inhuman acts can never again by perpetrated wholesale by a White House under cover of blanket secrecy and legal lies. I'm betting that America will overwhelmingly want to see those guilty have their day in court.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

April 2008: BBC's Newsnight interviews US Judge Advocate Diane Beaver about the Bush administration's legallese cover-story for war crimes.

I truly loathe the notion of torturers and those who ordered torture getting away with it.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, called for the commission as way to heal what he called sharp political divides and to prevent future abuses.

He compared it to other truth commissions, such as one in South Africa that investigated the apartheid era.

"We need to come to a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past," Leahy said in a speech to the Georgetown University law school.

"Rather than vengeance, we need a fair-minded pursuit of what actually happened," he said. "And we do that to make sure it never happens again," Leahy said.

I'm unclear on how just saying "now we know" will stop any of it happening again. Trials and prison sentences would surely accomplish far more as a deterrent to possible future copycats - that's partly why we don't just slap the wrists of abusers or rapists and say "we know what you did!"

Leahy said he had not yet begun to promote the idea with the administration of President Barack Obama or with the Democratically controlled Congress. But he suggested it could be formed by both Congress and the White House, and said the panel must have credibility across the political spectrum.

Issues to investigate would include the Justice Department's firings of several U.S. attorneys, which Leahy said may have been motivated by a White House aim to influence elections, policies on the treatment of terrorism suspects and other areas "where (congressional) committees were lied to."

This included the war in Iraq, he said. "There were lies told to the American people all the way through."

Screw bipartisanship and "credibility across the political spectrum". When one party's senior leadership for eight years has deliberately broken international and US laws while their supporters make excuses for them, they should be treated as having given up any right to respect or to having a voice in how their crimes are handled. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party's leadership seems divided into two camps. One cannot shake off its fear of the GOP's noise machine and its fear of losing elections to do what is right. The other apparently has no intention of looking too hard into crimes they might want to commit themselves.

I firmly believe America can handle the truth - my experience as an ex-pat living here is that Americans are mainly good and just and I believe that if all the secrets are revealed in courts of law then Americans will be outraged and demand justice - but its political leadership either cannot or will not.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Graphic via Caribdude at The Agonist.

As I wrote over the weekend, progressives who really hoped the Obama administration would roll back the Bush years' secrecy over illegal renditions and torture were waiting with intense interest to see what would happen in a key court case today. Five men were suing Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.

One of those men is Binyam Mohamed, who was illegally kidnapped and had his penis sliced to bits because he read a spoof online about how to make an H-bomb and who is now still held at Gitmo, where he is on hunger-strike, even though he is no longer accused of any crime. He made headlines at the end of last week because two British judges accused the Bush and Obama administrations of threatening the British government to keep evidence of torture supressed. Two other plaintiffs are in jail in Egypt and Morocco, both countries known to practise torture, after being sent there by the US and the other two are free after being held for years.

Last year, the case went nowhere because the Bush administration invoked a special defense of state secrets, as it always did to prevent any cases brought by victims of illegal rendition and torture from even getting to word one. But the ACLU had filed an appeal which was held today.

The Obama administration announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration:

A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

...Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU said of the decision: “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”

Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU, who argued the case for the plaintiffs said, “We are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has chosen to continue the Bush administration’s practice of dodging judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture. This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course. Now we must hope that the court will assert its independence by rejecting the government’s false claims of state secrets and allowing the victims of torture and rendition their day in court.”

A spokesman for Holden says the AG is going to conduct a "review" of state secrets defense to ensure that "the privilege is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations". How much of a review is needed to decide that invoking state secrets to bury Binyam Mohamed's attempts to seek justice is "appropriate" ferchrissake?

Many progressives are going to be upset by this. Glen Greenwald, for example, writes that "Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability -- resoundingly and disgracefully". Based on his conversation after the case with the ACLU's Ben Wizner, Glenn continues:

This was an active, conscious decision made by the Obama DOJ to retain the same abusive, expansive view of "state secrets" as Bush adopted, and to do so for exactly the same purpose: to prevent there from being any judicial accountability of any kind.

You can forget the notion that those who ordered torture and those who wrote legal opinions for them will ever see the inside of a US court on those charges. If Holden is continuing to invoke state secrets in cases such as today, no prosecution of Bush administration criminals will ever get to the satge of even hearing evidence. Thus, the Obama administration collectively become accessories to the Bush administration's crimes. In my opinion, any cabinet member who had an ounce of spine and an ounce of belief in the rule of law for all would resign over this travesty of justice. Watch for an utter lack of that.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

The AP reports that CIA Director-nominee Leon Panetta has stated categorically that there will be no prosecutions for torturers.

Asked by The Associated Press if that was official policy, Panetta said, "That is the case."

It was the clearest statement yet on what Panetta and other Democratic officials had only strongly suggested: CIA officers who acted on legal orders from the Bush administration would not be held responsible for those policies. On Thursday, he told senators that the Obama administration had no intention of seeking prosecutions for that reason.

Panetta, in an interview with the AP after a second day of confirmation hearings with the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that he arrived at that conclusion even before he began meeting with CIA officials.

"It was my opinion we just can't operate if people feel even if they are following the legal opinions of the Justice Department" they could be in danger of prosecution, he said.

Panetta demurred on saying whether the Obama administration would take legal action against those who authorized or wrote the legal opinions that, for a time, set an extremely high legal bar for an action to constitute torture.

"I'll leave that for others," Panetta said.

...Panetta formally retracted a statement he made Thursday that the Bush administration transferred prisoners for the purpose of torture.

"I am not aware of the validity of those claims," he said.

As I've written before - and Scott Horton in particular has done a great job in pointing to the correct legal precedents for - being told torture and other war crimes were legally justified (especially when they cannot be) is no excuse. International law which was in part established by American prosecutors and judges at Nuremberg is that it is up to each individual to act his conscience and to bear the consequences of so doing.

Worse, not prosecuting the torturers sets up a malicious feedback that fatally undermines prosecutions for ordering torture. If there's no prosecution for commission of a crime, how can someone be prosecuted for ordering what is apparently admitted isn't a crime? No defense lawyer is going to pass up such a gift argument and the Obama administration knows it. Not prosecuting those who tortured is a "get out of jail free card" not only for the torturers but for those who ordered torture and those who falsely said torture could ever be legal. It's a travesty of justice and one that Chris Dodd has sadly admitted Democratic leaders have looked the other way on for purely political reasons.

And with the news that Panetta wants to reserve the possibility of using "enhanced interrogation" techniques which go beyond the US military code - which in turn is simply a retelling of the Geneva Conventions and binding treaties on torture - along with the Obama administration's complicity in shielding Bush officials from revelations of torture...well, my Newshoggers colleague Jay McDonough is correct. "We cannot, despite assurances otherwise, trust our government not to render and torture detainees."

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Top international lawyer Philippe Sands QC speaks before the House Judiciary Constitution, Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Subcmte. in May last year, states without reservation that war crimes were committed by the most senior members of the Bush administration.

Via AlterNet comes a remarkable piece from John W. Dean, fomer White House counsel to Nixon, who writes that Obama must prosecute bush administration officials and that, if he doesn't, other nations are very likely too. Read the whole thing, but he concludes:

My question is how can the Obama Administration not investigate, and, if appropriate, prosecute given the world is watching, because if they do not, other may do so? How could there be "change we can believe in" if the new administration harbors war criminals – which is the way that Philippe Sands and the rest of the world, familiar with the facts which have surfaced even without an investigation, view those who facilitated or engaged in torture?

One would think that people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, Haynes and others, who claim to have done nothing wrong, would call for investigations to clear themselves if they really believed that to be the case. Only they, however, seem to believe in their innocence – the entire gutless and cowardly group of them, who have shamed themselves and the nation by committing crimes against humanity in the name of the United States.

We must all hope that the Obama Administration does the right thing, rather than forcing another country to clean up the mess and seek to erase the dangerous precedent these people have created for our country.

Great stuff.

The Washington Post today reports that clearing up Bush's Gitmo mess is complicated by the fact that case files on detainees there are incomplete, disorganised and in many instances don't exist at all. One "senior official" from the Bush administration says that's not true and Obama's people "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. The senior former official also admitted that "he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself."

That anonymous, secondhand, self-exoneration of the Bush administration is apparently good enough for the those who have always been glad to march in step with the Fourth Branch. Boston Herald editor and Pajamas media columnist Jules Crittenden believes it, for one, and launches into an apologia for the Bush administration involving a claim that any and all confusion is entirely due to intelligence agencies being unwilling to share with each other. But Hilzoy brings us an actual named eyewitness: LTC Darrel Vandeveld was lead prosecutor against a detainee, Mohammed Jawad, until he resigned last September. The following is from his statement in support of Jawad's habeas petition.

"7. It is important to understand that the "case files" compiled at OMC-P or developed by CITF are nothing like the investigation and case files assembled by civilian police agencies and prosecution offices, which typically follow a standardized format, include initial reports of investigation, subsequent reports compiled by investigators, and the like. Similarly, neither OMC-P nor CITF maintained any central repository for case files, any method for cataloguing and storing physical evidence, or any other system for assembling a potential case into a readily intelligible format that is the sine qua non of a successful prosecution. While no experienced prosecutor, much less one who had performed his or her duties in the fog of war, would expect that potential war crimes would be presented, at least initially, in "tidy little packages," at the time I inherited the Jawad case, Mr. Jawad had been in U.S. custody for approximately five years. It seemed reasonable to expect at the very least that after such a lengthy period of time, all available evidence would have been collected, catalogued, systemized, and evaluated thoroughly -- particularly since the suspect had been imprisoned throughout the entire time the case should have been undergoing preparation.

8. Instead, to the shock of my professional sensibilities, I discovered that the evidence, such as it was, remained scattered throughout an incomprehensible labyrinth of databases primarily under the control of CITF, or strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks vacated by prosecutors who had departed the Commissions for other assignments. I further discovered that most physical evidence that had been collected had either disappeared or had been stored in locations that no one with any tenure at, or institutional knowledge of, the Commissions could identify with any degree of specificity or certainty. The state of disarray was so extensive that I later learned, as described below, that crucial physical evidence and other documents relevant to both the prosecution and the defense had been tossed into a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten. Although it took me a number of months -- so extensive was the lack of any discernable organization, and so difficult was it for me to accept that the US military could have failed so miserably in six years of effort -- I began to entertain my first, developing doubts about the propriety of attempting to prosecute Mr. Jawad without any assurance that through the exercise of due diligence I could collect and organize the evidence in a manner that would meet our common professional obligations."

It seems obvious that the Bush administration as a whole simply didn't care - it expected prosecutors in what it believed to be a tame tribunal process to hand down convictions anyway and was more than a little surprised when many military lawyers refused to be complicit in the scam.

Crittenden also mentions the "61 detainees who returned to terror" stuff which has been debunked too. It's twelve at most - all released by political decisions made by Bush appointees, quite possibly including the "senior former official" Crittenden trusts so much as to believe his second-hand excuses. Every single one was released because the Bush administration's malfeasance meant charges wouldn't stick, were entirely false or were undermined by illegal methods such as torture and false confessions. That will be true of any other detainees released too - which would be simply sad, if it weren't so very tragic that some will go on to kill innocents. If only the Bush administration's legal hacks had considered that earlier...or indeed at all.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Iraqi elections: Elites to fight for power and oil.
(RealNews.Net talks to Leila Fadel, McClatchy's Baghdad Bureau Chief. Dec 15)

I really hope the Iraqi provincial elections today NEXT WEEK (I misread the link) go well - free, fair and non-violent. Both the vote itself and the way it is conducted will be important indicators of the way that nation is going, whether towards reconcilliation or towards entrenched factional splits and thus eventual outbreaks of violence again. There's already a huge fly in the ointment - elections in Kurdish Iraq won't happen today because of power-sharing turf fights. That such massive security measures are required just so that "the people" can exercise their democratic voice isn't a great sign either.

A credible election without significant violence would show that the security improvements of the past 18 months are taking hold. The outcome will also show which parties stand the best chance of success in parliamentary elections expected by the end of the year.

However, a deeply flawed election, marred by violence and allegations of widespread fraud, would cast doubt over Iraq's future and could influence President Barack Obama's decision on how fast to remove the 142,000 American troops.

Obama pledged during the presidential campaign to end America's role in the unpopular war and has ordered his national security team to prepare plans for a responsible withdrawal. U.S. officials warn that a hasty pullout could threaten Iraq's fragile security.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, says the Pentagon is closely watching the elections because their outcome "will, I think, be a big indicator for 2009, which is a big year."

U.S. and Iraqi officials have warned extremists may try to disrupt Saturday's vote and are planning heightened security, including banning vehicles on election day and closing airports and land borders. But officials expect a strong turnout — possibly more than 70 percent of the 15 million eligible voters.

We're not going to know who the "winners" are for months, as deals and coalitions come and go. A lot of those fractures in Iraqi society are going to be stressed. By the end of it all, we'll know far more about how well "we broke it, we should fix it" is going.

Eli Lake says Republicans intend questioning CIA director-designate Leon Panetta nomination on the basis of his possible involvement in the Clinton administration's illegal rendition activities.

Put aside the glaring hypocrisy of right-wingers suddenly deciding such renditions might be a bad thing after protesting vigorously for eight years that they were an essential and excusable tool in the War On Some Terror. Put aside the hypocrisy of leftwing pundits who are suddenly using the term "extraordinary rendition" where before they had no problem calling an illegal spade a spade.

It's still a good question.

Panetta should face questions like these, and he shouldn’t do what CIA director-designates often do when receiving them, which is offering answers in closed sessions. The public is owed a reckoning about the torture that was done in its name, no matter who was president when it occurred. Just because committee Republicans are being selective and obnoxious about this doesn’t invalidate the principle.

Illegal is illegal, and I for one am heartily sick of those who change their stance on that depending on whether or not "their" guy did it. It's not simply all about closing Gitmo.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Via Larisa, yet another detainee ordered released after the real judicial system, rather than Bush's kangaroo courts, examines the evidence against him.

It is the second time that U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon has ordered the release of a detainee after examining government evidence, most of it classified. Leon said that the Justice Department failed to prove that Mohammed El Gharani, 21, is an enemy combatant because it relied heavily on statements made by two other detainees whose credibility is questionable.

A mosaic of tiles this murky reveals nothing about this petitioner with sufficient clarity" to justify his detention, Leon ruled.

Gharani, a citizen of Chad, was picked up in Pakistan and turned over to the United States in 2002. Since then, he has been held at Guantanamo Bay.

Among the ridiculous claims made was that Gharani had been a member of a London al Qaida cell. At the time, he was aged 11 and living in Saudi Arabia - an accusation based entirely upon statements made by other camp detainees which were not proven true by US investigators, just believed.

He was illegally seized in Pakistan aged 14 and is now 21.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

The pro-Gitmo, pro-torture camp are getting all excited about a Pentagon statement that 61 former detainees from the Guantanamo Bay facility "appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody." But that bald figure is very misleading.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed as "returning to the fight" and 43 are suspected of having done in a report issued late in December by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Morrell declined to provide details such as the identity of the former detainees, why and where they were released or what actions they have taken since leaving U.S. custody.
"This is acts of terrorism. It could be Iraq, Afghanistan, it could be acts of terrorism around the world," he told reporters.

Morrell said the latest figures, current through December 24, showed an 11 percent recidivism rate, up from 7 percent in a March 2008 report that counted 37 former detainees as suspected or confirmed active militants.

Only "suspects"? That's pretty thin gruel when no details are given. That March figure is itself up from a 2007 claim of 30 "returning to terror" after their release from Gitmo - but that claim was firmly debunked by reports from the hard-working Seton Hall School of Law.

Just as the Government's claims that the Guantanamo detainees "were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces," do not comport with the Department of Defense's own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have "returned to the fight." The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that at least thirty (30) former Guantanamo detainees have "returned" to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed. To date, however, the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. More strikingly, data provided by the Department of Defense reveals that:

- at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals identified alleged by the Government to have "returned to the fight" are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government's detention policies;

- ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;

- and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, two (2) of the individuals' names do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantanamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantanamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.

It seems clear the people being referred to in this new statement aren't a different set of Gitmo detainess and include that spurious 30 and doubtless a bunch more too.

Moreover, not one of those named in that earlier claim had attacked Americans after his release from Gitmo and all had been released "by political appointees of the Department of Defense, sometimes over the objection of the military" rather than through the tribunals process. Seton Hall's studies also found that a bare 55% of Gitmo detainess had ever taken up arms against the US and only 8% were suspected of being members of Al Qaida. The vast bulk of Gitmo detainees had been turned in by local warlords for bounty payments with no US witnesses to their alleged involvement in terrorism at all. No wonder their recidivist rate is so low, at a Pentagon figure of 11%. That compares with "an estimated 67.5%" in the general prison population.

With Obama seemingly set on closing Gitmo down, and Susan J. Crawford, convening authority of military commissions, coming forward to say that some cases cannot be prosecuted because the evidence is indelibly stained by torture, the timing of this Pentagon "just believe us" statement is a little too pat. It is undoubtably true that some dangerous people will likely be freed because of the Bush administration's arrogant belief in its own ability to re-write law to suit itself, although the number is far lower than the Pentagon is trying to suggest. Even so, any failure to keep the public safe should be blamed on Bush and his coterie.

Crossposted from Newshoggers