Friends, Here's the summarizing sentence from the article below: The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. In other words, concentration camps are to become ordinary and routine, a permanent part of American life. One wonders if the government has any evidence at all regarding its prisoners. Given the current climate of fear in America, and all the right-wing judge appointments, why would the government fear prosecuting at least some of the prisoners? What court would release them if there was even a shred of evidence they had been involved in terrorism? Methinks that the excuse being offered here is rather shallow, barely the size of a fig leaf. The real issue is of course the trustworthiness of the government. They are the ones to decide who is and isn't a terrorist suspect, and whether or not there's enough evidence to go to court. Ironically, the less evidence against you, the more likely that you'll be a permanent detainee! Perhaps the smart people will go out and establish a rap sheet, so that the government might be tempted to prosecute them and give them a hearing. As regards trustworthiness, one can only laugh. Consider the record of this ruling regime. They've told us exactly what their long-range plans are, just as Hitler did before them. His Mein Kampf called for a super-power Reich, based on the 'Slavic hinterlands'; their PNAC agenda calls for a super-power USA based on the entire globe. He boasted before he became Chancellor that once he got in, there would be no more elections in Germany; they have found their own path (Diebold) to the same end. He cemented his program with the Reichstag fire and demonized the Jews; they cemented their program with 9/11 and demonize the Muslims. They, like him before, launched into their pre-planned aggressive wars using whatever lies or excuses seemed to be expedient at the time. These are only a few of the parallels, some obvious highlights. Taken altogether, it goes beyond mere parallelism. One cannot help thinking that the specific Nazi blueprint is being followed consciously. The grandson, in some sense, continuing the mission of Grandpa Prescott Bush, eager supporter of the Nazis, and employer of slave labor from Auschwitz. But one should not over-personalize such things. The real source of continuity is the American corporate elite, directly descended as they are from those who financed and armed the Nazis and then collaborated with them extensively throughout the course of the war. That plus the CIA, which was from the beginning dependent on the Nazi intelligence network which stayed behind the Iron Curtain, operating still under a German chain of command - and motivated to exaggerate the "Soviet threat" through the ensuing decades (in collaboration with Rumsfeld and Cheney, as we saw in the last posting). If we can 'trust' the Rumsfeld-Cheney regime to do anything, we can 'trust' it to continue down its fascist path. There were several kinds of concentration camps under the Nazis. Some, like Auschwitz, were slave labor camps. Krupp convinced Hitler, after considerable argument, that it made more sense to work the Jews to death than to simply gas them. These were also death camps, as those who arrived unfit for work (such as the elderly and children) were immediately gassed. Many of the other concentration camps were simply places to store away dissidents and troublemakers. These probably included Jews as well, but the selection criteria had to do with political attitudes, and led to the inclusion of socialists, communists, labor leaders, etc. Many died in these kind of camps (or were experimented upon), but they don't appear to have been 'death camps' as such. Some said that "It can never happen here" but they were wrong. It is true that a gesticulating, hysterical Hitler-type leader would not go over well with the American public, but there are many ways to skin the same cat. We already have our slave labor camps, only we put blacks and latinos into them instead of Jews. The CIA supplies them with drugs, the police arrest them for using or selling the drugs, and then corporations exploit their slave labor. That's the American way, and it's probably more profitable than the Nazi's approach. The CIA pockets the drug profits, for a start. Why should we assume that these legalized, institutionalized concentration camps in the USA will have any purpose other than to store away dissidents and troublemakers? So far, while the torture camps have been operating on a temporary basis, they've been inhabited almost exclusively by Muslims. Indeed, that may be their only crime. By having a bunch of Muslims behind bars, that provides some kind of "visible reality" to the threat of terrorism. When you consider the great propaganda victory it would be to have a show trial of a real terrorist, you can only suspect that there aren't any real terrorists at all. If there were even one, why don't they put him on TV and rub the case in our faces, as with OJ? What are they waiting for? In any case, during this experimental trial phase, the prisoners are mostly Muslims and thus everyone goes along with the fiction that they must therefore have some connection to terrorism - i.e., it's not primarily a civil liberties issue. If Guantanamo already held a bunch of white middle-class protestors swept off the streets of New York or Boston, the neocons would have a more difficult time with their current project of "normalizing" the existence of concentration camps. But once they're normalized, the whole context changes. Once it's established for-keeps that "terrorist suspects" can be locked away indefinitely with no recourse to hearing, then we can expect the definition of "terrorist" to be rapidly expanded. In the Patriot Act, and in the language of "anti-terrorist" statutes around the world, the definition of "terrorist" is already sufficiently broad to include almost anyone a government might want to silence. If you forward an email announcing a protest event, and later someone at the event breaks a window, then you have "conspired" to support a "terrorist activity". That may sound far-fetched, but that's about the state of things as regards the written law - throughout most of the West. We've already had a case where some Indymedia servers were seized, my guess is as a test precedent, and were then returned as mysteriously as they were taken, with no account given and no charges filed. The message: "Get used to it; there's nothing you can do about it." With the legal language already in place, defining just about anyone as a terrorist, and with fully legitimized concentration camps, the next step will be to demonize protestors. We've already had a foretaste, as far back as the Seattle protests of 1999. All those images of police and violent protestors - the feared "anarchists". We could expect documentaries, revealing that protest leaders want to "smash the system", "get rid of capitalism"...they're a bunch of closet communists! I can see it now on Fox News. And then there will be tours of websites, including ones the FBI has covertly set up describing how to make dirty bombs, and others that support "revolutionary programs", display "anti-American propaganda", and call for protestors to "fill up the streets" and "create havoc" My scenario may be a bit simplistic, as I'm not a professional propagandist. The point is that it would not be difficult to make a case in the media that anti-establishment activists and organizers generally present a "credible terrorist threat". "Intelligence sources" could easily "reveal" that messages have been "decrypted" that include plans to disrupt major infrastructures. Of course no such evidence would ever be made available, as "our sources must be protected." It would be easy to create a climate in which any major protest event could be followed by a sweep of the streets and there would be hundreds of "disappeared", destined to fates similar to the fates of Latin America's "disappeared". And of course there would be a major shut-down of websites and discussion forums, with selective but widespread seizures of servers. you don't need a weather man to tell which way the wind blows, rkm -------------------------------------------------------- http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010305Y.shtml Long-Term Plan Sought for Terror Suspects By Dana Priest The Washington Post Sunday 02 January 2005 Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials. The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations. "We've been operating in the moment because that's what has been required," said a senior administration official involved in the discussions, who said the current detention system has strained relations between the United States and other countries. "Now we can take a breath. We have the ability and need to look at long-term solutions." One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, detention center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights standards and would monitor compliance, the senior administration official said. As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials. The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates. "Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to be looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?' " The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001, to find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate captives without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access to legal proceedings. Little is known about the CIA's captives, the conditions under which they are kept - or the procedures used to decide how long they are held or when they may be freed. That has prompted criticism from human rights groups, and from some in Congress and the administration, who say the lack of scrutiny or oversight creates an unacceptable risk of abuse. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence committee who has received classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and interrogation methods, said that given the long-term nature of the detention situation, "I think there should be a public debate about whether the entire system should be secret. "The details about the system may need to remain secret," Harman said. At the least, she said, detainees should be registered so that their treatment can be tracked and monitored within the government. "This is complicated. We don't want to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it impossible to protect sources and informants who operate within the groups we want to penetrate." The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than three dozen al Qaeda leaders in prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top captured al Qaeda leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and the lead Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali. CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. The Washington Post reported last month that the CIA has also maintained a facility within the Pentagon's Guantánamo Bay complex, though it is unclear whether it is still in use. In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and declassified hundreds of pages of documents about its detention and interrogation procedures after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And the military detainees are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. But no public hearings in Congress have been held on CIA detention practices, and congressional officials say CIA briefings on the subject have been too superficial and were limited to the chairman and vice chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The CIA had floated a proposal to build an isolated prison with the intent of keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed immediately as impractical. One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives it picks up abroad to third countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without public proceedings. The transfers, called "renditions," depend on arrangements between the United States and other countries, such as Egypt, Jordan and Afghanistan, that agree to have local security services hold certain terror suspects in their facilities for interrogation by CIA and foreign liaison officers. The practice has been criticized by civil liberties groups and others, who point out that some of the countries have human rights records that are criticized by the State Department in annual reports. Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of picking up criminals abroad, such as drug kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the United States or other countries. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make certain detainees do not go to court or go back on the streets, officials said. "The whole idea has become a corruption of renditions," said one CIA officer who has been involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to justice, it's kidnapping." But top intelligence officials and other experts, including former CIA director George J. Tenet in his testimony before Congress, say renditions are an effective method of disrupting terrorist cells and persuading detainees to reveal information. "Renditions are the most effective way to hold people," said Rohan Gunaratna, author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The threat of sending someone to one of these countries is very important. In Europe, the custodial interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because they do not use the threat of sending detainees to a country where they are likely to be tortured. _______________________________ Behind the 'Torture Memos' By John Yoo The San Jose Mercury News Sunday 02 January 2005 As confirmation hearings near, lawyer defends wartime policy. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general. It comes as no surprise that he is likely to face hard questions. As counsel to the president for the past four years, Gonzales helped develop the United States' policies in the war on terror. He demonstrated leadership and, as is often the case in perilous times, generated controversy. He will encounter questions about the decision to deny prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions to Al-Qaida and Taliban fighters and about his role in what have come to be known as "torture memos." As a Justice Department lawyer, I dealt with both issues - I worked on and signed the department's memo on the Geneva Conventions and helped draft the main memo defining torture. I can explain why the administration decided that aggressive measures, though sometimes unpopular, are necessary to protect America from another terrorist attack. Sept. 11, 2001, proved that the war against Al-Qaida cannot be won solely within the framework of the criminal law. The attacks were more than crimes - they were acts of war. Responding to the attacks and protecting the United States from another requires a military approach to the conflict. But Al-Qaida, without regular armed forces, territory or citizens to defend, also presents unprecedented military challenges. One of the first policy decisions in this new war concerned the Geneva Conventions - four 1949 treaties ratified by the United States that codify many of the rules for war. After seeking the views of the Justice, State, and Defense departments, Gonzales concluded in a draft January 2002 memo to the president that Al-Qaida and the Taliban were not legally entitled to POW status. He also advised that following every provision of the conventions could hurt the United States' ability to protect itself against ruthless enemies. Gonzales' memo agreed with the Justice Department and disagreed with the State Department, which felt the Taliban (though not Al-Qaida) qualified as POWs. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel - where I worked at the time - determined that the Geneva Conventions legally do not apply to the war on terrorism because Al-Qaida is not a nation-state and has not signed the treaties. Al-Qaida members also do not qualify as legal combatants because they hide among peaceful populations and launch surprise attacks on civilians - violating the fundamental principle that war is waged only against combatants. Consistent American policy since at least the Reagan administration has denied terrorists the legal privileges reserved for regular armed forces. The Taliban raised different questions because Afghanistan is a party to the Geneva Conventions, and the Taliban arguably operated as its de facto government. But the Justice Department found that the president had reasonable grounds to deny Taliban members POW status because they did not meet the conventions' requirements that lawful combatants operate under responsible command, wear distinctive insignia, and obey the laws of war. The Taliban flagrantly violated those rules, at times deliberately using civilians as human shields. According to Gonzales' memo, the State Department argued that denying POW status to the Taliban would damage U.S. standing in the world and could undermine the standards of treatment for captured American soldiers. Gonzales also passed on the department's worry that denying POW status "could undermine U.S. military culture which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries." The press has consistently misrepresented Gonzales' views and latched onto a sexy sound bite used out of context. When Gonzales said in the memo that this new war made some provisions of the Geneva Conventions "quaint," he referred to the requirement that POWs be given commissary privileges, monthly pay, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Many stories cut the quotation short, making it seem as if he had deemed the conventions themselves "quaint." 'Obsolete' Limitations Gonzales' memo did, however, say that the terrorist threat rendered "obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." Why? Because the United States needed to be able "to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians." Information remains the primary weapon to prevent a future Al-Qaida attack on the United States. Gonzales also observed that denying POW status would limit the prosecution of U.S. officials under a federal law criminalizing a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions. He was concerned that some of the conventions' terms were so vague (prohibiting, for example, "outrages upon personal dignity") that officials would be wary of taking actions necessary to respond to unpredictable developments in this new war. The president took Gonzales' advice and denied POW status to suspected Al-Qaida and Taliban members. Gonzales' advice raised legal and policy questions. Legally, could the president determine by himself that Al-Qaida or the Taliban were not entitled to POW status? No one doubted that he had the constitutional authority. Presidents have long been the primary interpreters of treaties on behalf of the United States, especially in the area of warfare. Federal judges have since split on the POW issue. The other question was what standards the United States should follow as a matter of policy if the Geneva Conventions did not legally apply. Gonzales recommended that the United States should continue "its commitment to treat the detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles" of the Geneva Conventions. Prisoners would receive adequate food, housing and medical care, and could practice their religion. Gonzales advised that as long as the president ordered humane treatment, the military would follow his orders. Gonzales has also received criticism for a memo he requested from the Justice Department to provide the legal definition of torture. According to press reports, Gonzales made the request after the CIA had captured high-level Al-Qaida leaders and wanted clarification of the standards for interrogation under U.S. law. Congress' Role While the definition of torture in the August 2002 memo is narrow, that was Congress' choice. When the Senate approved the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, it stated its understanding of torture as an act "specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering." The Senate defined mental pain and suffering as "prolonged mental harm" caused by threats of severe physical harm or death to a detainee or third person, the administration of mind-altering drugs or other procedures "calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality." Congress adopted this definition in a 1994 law criminalizing torture committed abroad. The Senate also made clear that it believed the treaty's requirement that nations undertake to prevent "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" was too vague. The Senate declared its understanding that the United States would follow only the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The Senate and Congress' decisions provided the basis for the Justice Department's definition of torture: "Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death. For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture (under U.S. law), it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years. . . . We conclude that the statute, taken as a whole, makes plain that it prohibits only extreme acts." Under this definition, interrogation methods that go beyond polite questioning but fall short of torture could include shouted questions, reduced sleep, stress positions (like standing for long periods of time), and isolation from other prisoners. The purpose of these techniques is not to inflict pain or harm, but simply to disorient. On Thursday, the Justice Department responded to criticism from the summer, when the opinion leaked to the press. The department issued a new memo that superseded the August 2002 memo. Among other things, the new memo withdrew the statement that only pain equivalent to such harm as serious physical injury or organ failure constitutes torture and said, instead, that torture may consist of acts that fall short of provoking excruciating and agonizing pain. Although some have called this a repudiation, the Justice Department's new opinion still generally relies on Congress' restrictive reasoning on what constitutes torture. Among other things, it reiterates that there is a difference between "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" and torture - a distinction that many critics of the administration have ignored or misunderstood. For example, according to press reports, the International Committee for the Red Cross has charged that interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, which included solitary confinement and exposing prisoners to temperature extremes and loud music, were "tantamount to torture." This expands torture beyond the United States' understanding when it ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture and enacted the 1994 statute. Not only does the very text of the convention recognize the difference between cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture, but the United States clearly chose to criminalize only torture. Abu Ghurayb Abuses Criticism of the Bush administration's legal approach to interrogation first arose in the summer after the Abu Ghurayb prison scandal, and has continued with more recent stories of FBI memos showing concern about abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. No one condones the abuses witnessed in the Abu Ghurayb photos that are being properly handled through the military justice system. But those abuses had nothing to do with the memos defining torture - which did not discuss the pros and cons of any interrogation tactic - nor the decision to deny POW protections to Al-Qaida and the Taliban. Gonzales, among others, has made clear that the administration never ordered the torture of any prisoner. And as multiple investigatory commissions have now found, these incidents did not result from any official orders. At the urging of human rights groups and other opponents of the administration's policies in the war on terrorism, Senate Democrats have promised to closely question Gonzales on these issues. I believe the hearings will show that Gonzales, who never sought to pressure or influence the Justice Department's work, appropriately sought answers to ensure compliance with the applicable law. Asking those questions is important because we are in the midst of an unconventional war. Our only means for preventing future terrorist attacks, which could someday involve weapons of mass destruction, is to rely on intelligence that permits pre-emptive action. An American leader would be derelict if he did not seek to understand all available options in such perilous circumstances. John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the Justice Department from 2001 to '03. He wrote this article for Perspective. © Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org -- ============================================================ If you find this material useful, you might want to check out our website (http://cyberjournal.org) or try out our low-traffic, moderated email list by sending a message to: •••@••.••• You are encouraged to forward any material from the lists or the website, provided it is for non-commercial use and you include the source and this disclaimer. Richard Moore (rkm) Wexford, Ireland "Escaping The Matrix - Global Transformation: WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", current draft: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html _____________________________ "...the Patriot Act followed 9-11 as smoothly as the suspension of the Weimar constitution followed the Reichstag fire." - Srdja Trifkovic There is not a problem with the system. The system is the problem. Faith in ourselves - not gods, ideologies, leaders, or programs. _____________________________ "Zen of Global Transformation" home page: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ QuayLargo discussion forum: http://www.QuayLargo.com/Transformation/ShowChat/?ScreenName=ShowThreads cj list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=cj newslog list archives: http://cyberjournal.org/cj/show_archives/?lists=newslog _____________________________ Informative links: http://www.indymedia.org/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.MiddleEast.org http://www.rachel.org http://www.truthout.org http://www.williambowles.info/monthly_index/ http://www.zmag.org http://www.co-intelligence.org ============================================================
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