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Bill-O with a bit of fear mongering on what the United States should be doing with terrorism suspects, which is trying them in civilian court and not military tribunals. I understand the objections to the trials being held in New York but there’s no reason they could not be moved to another court in the United States. Of course O’Reilly simplifies this to the point of fighting “bad guys” and claims that Gitmo hasn’t been a recruiting tool. His proof… they’d still hate us if we closed it.

Well, yeah since that’s not the only reason we’ve got a terrorism problem. Heaven forbid the likes of O’Reilly might recognize that our foreign policy in general and the extreme poverty of desperate people might just have something to do with people being willing to blow themselves up or kill themselves to make a political point.

The Obama administration is making a huge mistake with this decision and one result that’s already manifesting itself is giving this asshat this talking point when it didn’t have to happen.

O’Reilly: Politically speaking we can look at this two ways. On the positive side President Obama could reverse a bad policy and that is a good thing. On the negative side Holder’s civilian trial vision was so misguided it’s almost frightening. Apparently Holder thinks America is on trial here—that our anti-terrorism strategies need to be justified to the world. That is a dangerous point of view that would get Americans killed in the future.

If the Obama administration is going to back track and make themselves look like flip floppers while making deals with Lindsey Graham, I sure as hell hope they got something in return for it. Given their track record so far on how the health care debate went, I’m not optimistic about the prospect that they did. For now they’re giving Fox their talking points that the Attorney General hates America and that these military tribunals which don’t have good results are a better way to go than civilian trials. Bravo.

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March 01, 2010 FOX News

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Bill Kristol isn't happy that John Brennan accussed the Republicans of playing politics with national security so of course his response is to claim it's actually the Democrats playing politics and claim that the Repubicans would never do that. His proof, they support the president on Iraq and Afghanistan. If I had a dollar for every time the Republicans played the terrorist fear mongering card for political gain I'd be a rich person. As David noted they've been playing this game since 9-11 and don't like that they're finally being called out for it.

Gitmo - the gift that keeps on giving -- that is, if you're trying to inspire a new generation of jihadi terrorists. Via Raw Story:

Four members of a US military intelligence unit assigned to Guantanamo Bay are questioning the government's official version of the deaths of three detainees in the summer of 2006.

The soldiers are offering a very different version of events than the one provided by the official report carried out by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service. Their stories suggest the three inmates may not have killed themselves -- or, at least, not in the way the US military claims.

"All four soldiers say they were ordered by their commanding officer not to speak out, and all four soldiers provide evidence that authorities initiated a cover-up within hours of the prisoners’ deaths," reports Scott Horton at Harper's magazine.

According to the US Navy, Gitmo detainees Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani were found hanged in their cells on June 9. 2006. The US military initially described their deaths as "asymmetrical warfare" against the United States, before finally declaring that the deaths were suicides that the inmates coordinated among themselves.

But a report from Seton Hall University Law School, released last fall, cast doubt on almost every element of the US military's story. It questioned, for example, how it would have been possible for the three detainees to have stuffed rags down their throats and then, while choking, managed to raise themselves up to a noose and hang themselves.

The report (PDF) stated:

There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell—a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.

Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman told Harper's magazine that he was made aware of the existence of a secret detention center at Guantanamo, nicknamed by some of the guards "Camp No," because "No, it doesn't exist." According to Hickman, it was generally believed among camp guards that the facility was used by the CIA.

Hickman also said there was a van on site, referred to as the "paddy wagon," which was allowed to come in and out of the main detention area without going through the usual inspection. On the night of the three detainees' deaths, Hickman says he saw the paddy wagon leave the area where the three were being detained and head off in the direction of Camp No. The paddy wagon, which can carry only one prisoner at a time in a cage in the back, reportedly made the trip three times.

Hickman says he saw the paddy wagon return and go directly to the medical center. Shortly after, a senior non-commissioned officer, whose name Hickman didn't know, ordered him to convey a code word to a petty officer. When he did, the petty officer ran off in a panic.

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January 12, 2010 BBC World

New to Facebook, Brandon Neely was searching the site for acquaintances in 2008 when he typed in the names of some of the detainees he had guarded during his tenure as a prison guard at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Neely, an army veteran who spent six months at the prison in 2002, sent messages to one of the freed men, Shafiq Rasul, and was astonished when Rasul replied. Their exchanges sparked a face-to-face meeting, arranged by the BBC.

Neely, who has served as the president of the Houston chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, says his time at Guantanamo now haunts him, and has granted confessional-style interviews about the abuses he says he witnessed there. In a message to Rasul, Neely apologized for his role in the imprisonment.

Gavin Lee, a BBC correspondent, learned about the Facebook messages from Rasul, who lives in Britain. Lee tracked down Neely — on Facebook — and asked, “would you consider meeting face to face?”

“He thought about it and he said, ‘I would love to,’ ” Lee recalled last week.

The BBC paid for Neely’s flight to London last month, where a camera crew filmed him meeting Rasul and a second ex- detainee, Ruhal Ahmed. From India Times

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When asked about our policy of releasing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (DINO-CA) agrees with Rep. Pete Hoekstra that we should not be releasing anyone to a country with an al Qaeda presence.

SCHIEFFER: Dianne Feinstein , what about that, that we shouldn’t release anybody to a country where there’s an Al Qaida presence? Do you go along with that?

FEINSTEIN: Yes, I tend to agree with that, actually. And if you look at Yemen-- and we’re taking a good look at Yemen-- what you see is I think at least 24 or 28 are confirmed returns to the battlefield in Yemen. And there are a number of suspected.

If you combine the suspected and the confirmed, the number I have is 74 detainees have gone back into the fight. And I think that’s bad.

And here’s the reason. They come out of Gitmo and they are heroes in this world. This world is the only world that’s going to really be accepting of them. Therefore, the tendency is to go back. And I think the Gitmo experience is not one that leads itself to rehabilitation, candidly. I think it leads to....

SCHIEFFER: Let me -- let me ask, do you think that maybe we just ought to keep Gitmo open for a while and not release anybody that’s down there, or at least put them in some other place but not release them?

FEINSTEIN: Well, I agree with those that have said that Guantanamo has really been a recruiting tool for Al Qaida, that it has not been helpful to us. And I think that, you know, the Senate is now engaged in a huge study on the interrogation and detention of the some 33 high-value detainees. What happened to them, how were they treated? What success did the interrogation have? Were the laws followed? That kind of thing. And we should have the report completed within the next three months or so.

SCHIEFFER: All right.

FEINSTEIN: However, the problem is that this is very difficult. And I happen to know the prison system rather well, so I believe the safety of America is assured in the federal prison system. I don’t worry about the safety element.

SCHIEFFER: It sounds to me like what you’re saying here, Senator Feinstein, is that we ought to be very, very careful about releasing anybody right now. That seems to me your (inaudible).

FEINSTEIN: I think right now, until we sort this out, the answer is yes.

SCHIEFFER: All right. I want to thank both of you for being with us this morning. Very enlightening discussion.

Gee Senator, who would have ever thought torturing people would make them want to come back and kill us later? The Gitmo experience--isn't that lovely?

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Sen. Joe Lieberman believes that Guantanamo Bay's bad reputation isn't deserved. "You could not find a better, more humane facility for a detention center in the world," Lieberman told ABC's Terry Moran Sunday.

Lieberman thinks it's a mistake to close the detention center. "The president is in charge of what happens there now so some of the abuses of the past are not going to happen [in the future]," said Lieberman.

Heather: So this is Joe Lieberman's idea of humane?

Guantanamo: A Look Back at Six Years of Imprisonment, Torture and Suicide:

Over the past six years, Democracy Now! has closely followed the story of illegal detentions at Guantanamo Bay. We have interviewed former Guantanamo detainees and interrogators, dozens of attorneys, human rights activists and more. These are some their voices.

Continue reading...

Torture Continues at Guantánamo Bay:

The "Black Shirts" of Guantánamo routinely terrorize prisoners, breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and "dousing" them with chemicals.

As the Obama administration continues to fight the release of some 2,000 photos that graphically document U.S. military abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, an ongoing Spanish investigation is adding harrowing details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: "blows to [the] testicles;" "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;" being "inoculated ... through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts;'" the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred "under the authority of American military personnel" and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

Continue reading...

There literally is no end to the extent by which Republican politicians will lie, distort, and manufacture statements in their efforts to disrupt, deny, and destroy the Obama administration's attempts to govern. At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on 9/11 trial, the Fort Hood shooter, and terrorism, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) decided to flip-flop on the designation of the Gitmo detainees. Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war"?

SESSIONS: The enemy, who could of been obliterated on the battlefield on one day, but was captured instead does not then become a common American criminal. They are first a prisoner of war, once they're captured. The laws of war say, as did Lincoln and Grant, that the prisoners will not be released when the war - until the war ends. How absurb is it to say that we will release people who plan to attack us again?

Sessions seems to be saying that because these detainees were captured by the military, they have become prisoners of war and should not be released - even if found not guilty or after serving a prison term (assuming less than a life sentence) - until the "war on terror" is over (which, under a Republican point of view, will never be over). But on the other hand, SecDef Don Rumsfeld and the other fun-loving bunch of Bushites were very firm about NOT calling them "prisoners of war" because they were not supposed to get rights under the Geneva Convention (or any other form of legal writs - see waterboarding, justification of).

In fact, as one of the commenters at the TPM post notes, there was public law developed to explicitly designate any non-US citizen who was accused of supporting terrorism or acting against the United States as a terrorist as being eligible for military commissions.

I thought like you until I read this, from the Military Commissions Act: "‘(e) Geneva Conventions Not Establishing Private Right of Action- No alien unprivileged enemy belligerent subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a basis for a private right of action."
See: here.

This discussion becomes quickly complex with legal passages as a debate over whether the military tribunals should take KSM or if the federal court system has adequate jurisdiction. But it's just so interesting how Republican politicians adroitly jump back and forth as to the question of the detainees' status to how it best fits their argument of the day - are we talking about Geneva convention rights, or are we talking about the process of legal courts?

And because I want to give credit to the interesting comments over at TPM, I will close with the following observations by the commenters:

"I guess when the Right/GOP can say, print (Palin's myth filled book), promote anything without any accountability by the Beltway Press, the GOP has no need for intellectually honest consistency in their claims."

"When did Sessions stop playing the banjo?"

UPDATE: Clarified the guilt point.

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October 20, 2009 PBS News Hour

The tenure of Berkeley law professor John Yoo has come under fire amid a backlash over the role he played in the Bush administration, advising on the legalities of now-controversial interrogation tactics used on terror suspects. Spencer Michels reports.

SPENCER MICHELS: Since the beginning of the school year, protesters dressed as prisoners or detainees have dogged law professor John Yoo at the University of California at Berkeley. They want the university to fire him for advising the Bush administration, as an attorney in the Justice Department, that it could legally torture suspected terrorists to get information.

PROTESTER: This is a not just a question of academic opinions. This is a question of war crimes. People like John Yoo, these people should be fired.

SPENCER MICHELS: Forty-two-year-old John Yoo has taught here since 1993, except for 2001 to 2003, when he worked for the Justice Department in the Office of Legal Counsel.

During those years, after 9/11, the U.S. was interrogating prisoners, suspected terrorists, at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Yoo wrote several memos on how far the interrogators could go in pressuring prisoners to reveal information. Those memos argued that techniques such as water- boarding, sleep deprivation, and exploiting a detainee's fear of insects were, in fact, legal.

Yoo's actions have reverberated throughout Boalt Hall, the Berkeley law school where Yoo teaches. Students and faculty are debating the bounds of academic freedom, and whether a professor should be held responsible for controversial work done outside the university.

DAVID ARABELLA, law student: I believe that he does have a right to teach here, because people can have controversial views. But, personally, I'm not going to enroll in his class.

SPENCER MICHELS: The law school dean, Christopher Edley, who has served in several Democratic administrations, has been besieged by messages, the majority against Professor Yoo.

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September 08, 2009 News Corp

Dave N.: Bill O'Reilly sent out one of his ambush news crews, led by a young shaved-head punk named Dan Bank, to attack Nina Ginsberg, who is a legal counsel for the ACLU's John Adams Project, as she walked out of a drugstore.

She managed to ask him (without it being edited out) why he was confronting her while she was out doing her shopping. It's also clear that a substantial part of the conversation was cut, since it resumes when she is out at her car.

Mostly, she keeps pointing out that Bank's questions are based on factual falsehoods -- lies. Yet he keeps asking them anyway. Like a good Fox right-wing propaganda attack dog.

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August 25, 2009 World Focus News

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August 25, 2009 ABC News--Deaths, Missing Detainees Still Blacked Out in New CIA Report:

The CIA and the Obama Administration continue to keep secret some of the most shocking allegations involving the spy agency's interrogation program: three deaths and several other detainees whose whereabouts could not be determined, according to a former senior intelligence official who has read the full, unredacted version.

Of the 109 pages in the 2004 report, 36 were completely blacked out in the version made public Monday, and another 30 were substantially redacted for "national security" reasons.

The blacked-out portions hide the Inspector General's findings on the circumstances that led to the deaths of at least three of the detainees in the CIA's program, the official said. Two of the men reportedly died in CIA in Iraq and the third died in Afghanistan.

The Inspector General's findings about a fourth death involving a prisoner in Afghanistan were made public in the report. A CIA contract employee was convicted of assault in that case and is now in prison.

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August 24, 2009 News Corp

VAN SUSTEREN: Well, an ugly battle just got a little bit worse today. Today, the White House released parts of a classified, now declassified, CIA report on detainee interrogation, new allegations of prisoner abuse, a detainee allegedly threatened with an unloaded gun and a power drill. The report also states that the detention and interrogation programs prevented terrorist activity.

Meanwhile, across the Potomac at the Justice Department, the attorney general launched a preliminary investigation to see if crimes were committed by interrogators. As you might imagine, lines are being drawn in the sand here in Washington.

Joining us live is Congressman Pete Hoekstra. He is the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. Congressman, this certainly is the talk of the nation today, or the talk of Washington, at least. Your thoughts on the -- it's actually sort of a -- it's a preliminary investigation to see whether or not there should be an investigation or even a prosecution.

REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R), MICHIGAN: Well, I -- you know, this is really a time for the president to start showing some leadership. You know, the attorney general is now freelancing. The president for months has been saying, We need to look forward, we need to look ahead, I don't want to look back. Today there were press reports that his director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, supposedly has threatened to quit. You have Nancy Pelosi saying that the CIA lied, that they lie all the time.

And the most important thing is we still have men and women in combat. Things in Afghanistan aren't going that well. Just when we need a very, very strong CIA to give our men and women in the field the kind of intelligence that they need to stay safe and to defeat our enemy, it appears that different parts of the administration are attacking the very organization that we need to keep America safe!

These aren't new allegations. Our intelligence committee -- we had these reports in 2004, 2005. Eric Holder wants to go over old ground. This ground has been gone over before. It's not time to reopen the book on this.

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From Newsweek: Report Reveals CIA Conducted Mock Executions:

A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency's inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency's post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

The report also says, according to the sources, that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general's report alludes to more than one mock execution.

Continue Reading.....

Transcript:

MADDOW: But we are beginning tonight with some breaking news. NBC News has learned that as early as Monday, the Obama administration plans to release what we on this show have been calling the big kahuna. It`s the report on the Bush administration`s torture program that was made while the program was still going on in 2004. This is the report that supposedly stopped the torture program in its tracks when the report circulated inside the administration.

The CIA inspector general`s report has been described as sickening by some who have seen it. The only version of it that`s been publicly released so far looks like this -- it was released last year, and as you can see, it`s almost completely redacted.

In her book, "The Dark Side," Jane Mayer quotes a source who read the report as saying, quote, "You couldn`t read the documents without wondering why didn`t someone say, `Stop.`"

Well, on Monday, we`ll get a chance to read this report, although we don`t yet know how much of it is going to be redacted this time. Michael Isikoff of "Newsweek" magazine has sources who have both read a version of the report and who have been briefed on it. He has just posted an account at Newsweek.com based on those sources, which says that we`re about to learn from this report that in CIA interrogations, at least one prisoner "was threatened with a gun and a power drill" was fired up next to his head to terrify him that he was going to be killed.

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July 29, 2009 ABC Nightline