What will the US do about torture?
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| Tue, 06-08-2004 - 1:28pm |
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - A classified Pentagon report, providing a series of legal arguments apparently intended to justify abuses and torture against detainees, appears to undermine public assurances by senior US officials, including President George W Bush, that the military would never resort to such practices in the "war on terrorism".
Short excerpts of the report, which was drafted by Defense Department lawyers, were published in the Wall Street Journal on Monday. The text asserts, among other things, that the president, in his position as commander-in-chief, has virtually unlimited power to wage war, even in violation of US law and international treaties.
"The breadth of authority in the report is wholly unprecedented," says Avi Cover, a senior attorney with the US Law and Security program of Human Rights First, formerly known as Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "Until now, we've used the rhetoric of a president who is 'above the law', but this document makes that explicit; it's not a metaphor anymore," he added.
While it is unknown whether Bush himself ever saw or approved the report, it was classified "secret" by Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld on March 6, 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, according to the Journal.
A full copy of the report is expected to be published on the Internet soon, according to sources who declined to say on which website it would appear.
The report's partial publication comes amid growing charges that the Pentagon is engaged in a cover-up of the full extent of abuses committed by US forces in their anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan, Iraq, at the US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.
{snip, snip}
In its report, the working group took the position that neither the US Congress, the courts, nor international law could interfere with the president's powers to wage war. That means, according to the report, that the president himself is not bound by US law, such as the federal Torture Statute or the constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual" punishment.
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign ... must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority," the document stated, adding later that "without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority" to wage war.
"What's most terrifying about this is the argument that the administration has been making since September 11 - that the president has unlimited power to do whatever he deems necessary," said Cover. "It doesn't matter what Congress says, what the constitution says, or what international law says."
But the report also bolsters the growing belief that easing the rules governing interrogations was a top-level policy decision that better explains why reports of abuses are so widespread.
"If anyone still thinks that the only people who dreamt up the idea about torturing prisoners were just some privates and corporals at Abu Ghraib, this document should put that myth to rest," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch. "It's not hard to see how these abstract arguments made in Washington led to appalling and systematic abuses that ended up doing huge damage to US interests," he said.
"Effectively, what you've got here is a group of government attorneys trying to justify war crimes," Horton told Inter Press Service. "It makes a mockery of Haynes' statement about adhering to the CAT and Bush's assurances that the US would not torture or subject detainees to cruel or inhumane treatment.
"If we apply the same rules to ourselves as we have advocated in the international tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rumsfeld , then Donald Rumsfeld is in very serious trouble."

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For Security in Iraq, Corporate America Turns South
News Report, Louis E.V. Nevaer,
Pacific News Service, Jun 15, 2004
Editor's Note: When corporate America turns to Latin America to "outsource" protection services by tapping former military men from Chile and Argentina, they're picking up murderers and tortures from the region's "dirty war" past.
MIAMI--If José Miguel Pizarro has his way, he will recruit 30,000 Chileans as mercenaries to protect American companies under Pentagon contract to rebuild Iraq. And undoubtedly, within those ranks will be former members of death squads that tortured and murdered civilians when dictatorships ruled in Latin America.
"There is no comparison with what they can earn in the active military or working in civilian jobs, and what we offer," José Miguel Pizarro, Chile's leading recruiter for international security firms, says. "This is an opportunity that few in Chile can afford to pass up."
Pizarro's firm, Servicios Integrales, was contracted by Blackwater USA to recruit the first batch of Chileans in November 2003. By May 2004 he had placed 5,200 men who, after one week of training in Santiago, head to North Carolina for orientation with Blackwater, the private security firm that made headlines when four of its employees where killed in Falluja, their bodies mutilated and hung from a bridge. After training, Blackwater flies the men to Kuwait City to await their assignments in Iraq.
As democratic governments were voted into office throughout Latin America in the 1990s, Latin militaries were downsized. Thousands of military officers lost their jobs.
"This is a way of continuing our military careers," Carlos Wamgnet, 30, explained in a phone interview from Kuwait while awaiting his assignment in Iraq. "In civilian life in Chile I was making $1,800 a month. Here I can earn a year's pay in six weeks. It's worth the risks."
At 30, Wamgnet is too young to have participated in any crime of the Pinochet regime. But not all the Chileans in Iraq are guiltless. Newspapers in Chile have estimated that approximately 37 Chileans in Iraq are seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era. Government officials in Santiago are alarmed that men who enjoy amnesty in Chile -- provided they remain in "retirement" from their past military activities -- are now in Iraq.
In an interview with the Santiago-based daily newspaper La Tercera, Chilean Defense Michelle Bachelet stated that Chilean "mercenaries for American firms doing business in Iraq" may be subject to "arrest or detention in third countries," a reference to recent arrests in Spain and Mexico of South Americans with war-crimes pasts. South American media report that Chileans have requested travel from Chile to the United States and then directly to the Middle East, to bypass Mexico and the European Union.
The thousands of Chileans in Iraq have been nicknamed "the penguins" by American and South African soldiers for hire, a reference both to Chile's proximity to the South Pole and the fact that many Chilean mercenaries are of mixed race.
Not everyone in Chile is opposed to the presence in Iraq of former Chilean army members. "It is true that the majority see this as an opportunity to earn money," La Tercera columnist Mauricio Aguirre wrote."But it is also an opportunity for our soldiers to prove themselves on the ground, and to put to use the skills for which they trained in the Armed Forces over the years."
"Blackwater USA has sent recruiters to Chile, Peru, Argentina, Colombia and Guatemala for one specific reason alone," said an intelligence officer in Kuwait who requested anonymity. "All these countries experienced dirty wars‚ and they have military men well-trained in dealing with internal subversives. They are well-versed in extracting confessions from prisoners."
As the security situation in Iraq deteriorated in the spring of 2004, more "dedicated recruiting" began.
Though Chile is in vigorous debate about the role of military servicemen becoming hired guns in Iraq, in Argentina there is virtual silence. Several Argentine mercenaries have made their way to the United States to meet with American security firms before heading to Iraq.
"No one wants to discuss what is becoming clear," says Mario Podestá, 51, an independent Argentine journalist. "I know of seven military officers responsible for disappearing opponents of the dictatorship" who are now in Iraq.
During Argentina's "Dirty Wars," opponents of the military regime were "disappeared" (abducted), tortured and then killed.
Podesta spoke to this reporter in early April. He was in Jordan preparing to travel by road to Baghdad, along with Mariana Verónica Cabrera, 28, an Argentine camerawoman.
"I want to find these men," he said of the Argentine Dirty War criminals he had identified as being mercenaries in Iraq.
It was not to be. Podestá and Cabrera were killed, along with their Iraqi driver, in an automobile accident before reaching Baghdad.
PNS contributor Louis Nevaer (nevaer1@hotmail.com) is an author and economist whose most recent book, "NAFTA'S Second Decade" (South-Western Educational Publishing, 2004), examines the political economy of international development and trade.
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=a929b507890cca245693a89efbaa52de
>"South African soldiers for hire"<
Hired Guns with War Crimes Past.
http://www.alternet.org/story/18588
Due to the Coalition Provisional Authority's 'outsourcing' of privatized security services, South African ex-hit men and Serbian mercenaries find gainful employment in Iraq.
When a suicide bomber parked a van disguised as an ambulance in front of the Shaheen Hotel in the Karadah neighborhood of Baghdad on Jan. 28 and blew himself up, he killed four people and wounded scores of others.
He also blew the lid off a dirty little secret of the Coalition Provisional Authority: Due to its "outsourcing" of privatized security services, the CPA has put terrorists, mercenaries and war criminals on the payrolls of companies contracted by the Pentagon.
After the Shaheen Hotel blast, departmental spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa at South Africa's Foreign Ministry confirmed that one of the Westerners killed was South African Frans Strydom. Four of the wounded were also South African nationals, including Deon Gouws, who sustained serious injuries.
News that Strydom and Gouws were in Iraq sent shockwaves throughout South Africa: In front of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, both men were granted amnesty after confessing to killing blacks and terrorizing anti-apartheid activists, acts that can only be called crimes against humanity.
In Iraq, Strydom and Gouws were employed by Erinys International, a security firm based in the United Kingdom. Erinys Iraq, the subsidiary of Erinys International, was awarded a two-year, $80 million contract in August 2003 to protect 140 Iraqi oil installations. Erinys has been awarded subcontracts to protect American construction contractors, including Halliburton's subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root.
"It is just a horrible thought that such people are working for the Americans," said Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, speaking to European reporters last month.
Strydom was a member in the Koevoet, Afrikaner for "Crowbar," an outlaw group that paid bounty for the bodies of blacks seeking independence during the 1980s. The Koevoet terrorized blacks in Namibia and northern South Africa for more than a decade. Hundreds of deaths are attributed to its members.
More notorious is Gouws' past. A former police officer, Gouws was a member of the notorious Vlakplaas death squad that terrorized blacks under apartheid. Only after South Africa established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and Col. Eugene de Kock, a former death-squad leader who supervised Gouws, applied for amnesty, did the activities of the Vlakplaas come to light. Gouws faced a choice: repent by confessing, or be charged with crimes. He applied for amnesty, confessing on his application for absolution to killing 15 blacks and firebombing the homes of "between 40 and 60 anti-apartheid activists."
There are an estimated 1,500 South Africans employed by security contractors in Iraq, according to the South African foreign ministry. Many used their backgrounds as mercenaries during Apartheid to bolster their credentials.
After being pardoned but ostracized in South Africa, "Where are these men expected to go?" asked Judge Goldstone.
Erinys International refused to comment on the matter.
The role of civilians contracted to work in Iraq was relatively unknown to most in the United States until four American security contractors met grisly deaths in Fallujah in March. While the vast majority of individuals contracted for security work may be honest, hardworking professionals, the desperate search for manpower is allowing criminals to join their ranks.
"At what point do we start scraping the barrel?" Simon Faulkner, the CEO of Hart, a respected British security company, asked recently in the New York Times. "Where are these guys coming from?"
Not only apartheid-era terrorists are finding opportunities in Iraq. Prior to the U.S.-led war, Saddam Hussein hired over a dozen Serb air-defense specialists -- at the reported cost of $100,000 a month -- to devise a mobile radar system that would protect Iraq's air defenses from attack. Many were wanted for their paramilitary activities during the Balkan Wars in Europe.
Upon the American takeover of Iraq, some of these Serbs remained behind, selling their services to the highest bidders, including security firms under contract to provide protection for employees of Blackwater USA and Titan Corporation of San Diego. They have now been joined by some of their compatriots, who had been working for the Pentagon for several years in Afghanistan. "The Bush administration is so eager to avoid responsibility for order in Afghanistan that they've outsourced to mercenaries the work of protecting Afghan President Hamid Karzai," Dave Marash reported in the Washington Monthly in March 2003.
Karl Alberts, a South African pilot, recently prepared to travel to Iraq. Before he left he was arrested and charged with mercenary activities in Ivory Coast in 2002 and 2003.
But for every Alberts who fails to make it to Baghdad, others succeed. Though their numbers are relatively few, the harm these men can do to an occupation government desperately seeking support from the Iraqi people is enormous.
Do you think the administration looks the other way, or encourages the leniency in hiring. Weeding out the criminals should be routine practice.
>"Do you think the administration looks the other way, or encourages the leniency in hiring."<
To be honest I am nonplussed by what's happening in Iraq
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/06/16/ghost.prisoner/index.html
An Iraqi prisoner was held at a secret prison near Baghdad for about nine months, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last October ordered the high-value Iraqi prisoner held in secret at the request of CIA Director George Tenet, Pentagon officials disclosed.
But the officials insist their motivation was to protect U.S. troops, not hide the prisoner from the Red Cross, and that his so-called secret status was supposed to be temporary.
Some soldiers dubbed the prisoner "Triple X."
Officials say the Pentagon was asked by the CIA to take custody of the prisoner and to hold him incognito because he had been involved in ongoing military operations against the United States and the disclosure of his capture would compromise his intelligence value.
The prisoner was not assigned a number, nor was his presence disclosed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, but officials say his secret status was supposed to be temporary and deny he was a "ghost detainee."
A senior defense official admitted that both the CIA and the Pentagon "dropped the ball" by failing to review his status for more than eight months despite two requests by low-level military personnel to reclassify the prisoner, and integrate him into the general prison population.
Pentagon officials deny they were trying to hide the prisoner from the Red Cross, but concede he was classified as a type of enemy combatant that, under the Geneva Conventions, does not have to be immediately disclosed to the Red Cross.
The prisoner has been identified only as a "high official" and "paramilitary leader" of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist group and remains at the U.S.-run "Camp Cropper" detention facility.
The Pentagon said after a third request -- the latest one by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller -- the prisoner is in the process of being reclassified assigned internee security number.
"It was assumed the CIA would want him back at some point," an official told CNN, but the official said while the prisoner was questioned by military interrogators, he was never interrogated again by the CIA.
Pentagon officials insist that the prisoner "Triple X" was never held at the Abu Ghraib prison, where an Army investigator found that some detainees were hidden from Red Cross inspectors.
In Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, he criticized the 800th Military Police Brigade for allowing "other government agencies" -- a euphemism that includes the CIA -- to hide "ghost" detainees at Abu Ghraib.
"They moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross," Taguba wrote, calling the practice "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
The Pentagon says the prisoner known as Triple X was never given the status that would entitle him to Red Cross visits.
Pentagon officials said while it was Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, who issued the order to hold the prisoner in secret detention, he was only carrying orders from Rumsfeld, who in turn was acting at the behest of the CIA.
Actions that I though beneath Americans. The US has really been shamed by this fiasco. I can only conclude that this administration believed that 9/11 placed them above the law. We have lost what little honor we had. I don't know what a new administration can do to try to restore our dignity. :-(
The Geneve Conventions do NOT apply to terrorists.
According to Bush! It may be true that the GC doesn't mention terrorist, but terrorist is just a label. A label that hasn't been internationally defined.
You're correct.
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