Author Archives: Tom Parker

About Tom Parker

Tom Parker is the former Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights at Amnesty International USA. He was previously Executive Director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center in New Haven, Connecticut and has worked extensively during the past five years as a consultant on post-conflict justice issues for clients such as USAID, the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Open Society Institute on projects in Darfur, Iraq and Georgia. Tom has also served as a war crimes investigator with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and as a counterterrorist official with the British government. Tom has held adjunct positions with both Yale University’s Residential College Seminar Program and Bard University’s Globalization and International Affairs Program teaching courses on trends in international terrorism and counter-terrorism. He has also been a member of the adjunct faculty of the Defense Institute for International Legal Studies (DIILS) serving as an instructor on counterterrorism training programs in countries as diverse as Latvia, Rwanda, Nepal, Albania, Thailand, Lebanon and Sri Lanka. He is a graduate of the London School of Economics, the University of Leiden and Brown.
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McCain Puts Torture Debate To Rest, But Flunks Accountability

May 13, 2011 at 1:27 PM

© Mark Wilson/Getty Images

In an op-ed published yesterday in the Washington Post former Republican Presidential candidate and current senior Senator from Arizona, John McCain, effectively put the efficacy of torture debate to bed.

McCain, who was tortured repeatedly by the North Vietnamese as a Prisoner of War, compellingly referenced his own experience of undergoing coercive interrogation noting that:

“the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence but often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — true or false — if he believes it will relieve his suffering.”

It is pretty hard to argue the toss with someone who has actually been through it for real.

Moreover, unlike Messers Thiessen, Hayden and Mukasey, rather than rushing into print, Senator McCain also took the time to establish the facts about the discovery of bin Laden’s hideout – indeed, in doing so, he all but called the former Bush administration Attorney General a liar:

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Asking The Wrong Question About Torture

May 11, 2011 at 9:00 AM

In 1958 a communist French newspaper editor sympathetic to the cause of Algerian independence called Henri Alleg published “The Question”, a short account of his interrogation under torture by French paratroopers:

“The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. But for a while I could still breathe in some small gulps of air. I tried, by contracting my throat, to take in as little water as possible and to resist suffocation by keeping air in my lungs for as long as I could. But I couldn’t hold on for more than a few moments.

I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. In spite of myself, all the muscles of my body struggled uselessly to save me from suffocation… three times I again experienced this insupportable agony. In extremis, they let me get my breath back while I threw up the water. That last time, I lost consciousness.”

Despite being water-boarded, subjected to electric shocks, burned, beaten, and drugged with pentothal, Henri Alleg did not give his captors the information they were after – the name of the individual who had hidden him from the authorities.

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Doubling Down On Failure At Guantanamo

April 27, 2011 at 12:51 PM

There are still 172 detainees held at the Guantánamo Bay detention centre © Amnesty International

Released just as President Obama seems to have washed his hands of closing Guantanamo, a new batch of leaked government documents provide fresh insight into just how inadequate, iniquitous and ultimately counterproductive, the US foray into indefinite detention has been.

The new document cache consists of Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) – essentially case summaries – produced by intelligence analysts at Guantanamo between 2002 and 2009 that were first leaked to Wikileaks and then by someone in the Wikileaks community to the press.

The picture of Guantanamo that emerges from these new documents is of an arbitrary review process, operating from a presumption of guilt not innocence, thrown together on the fly, and overseen by individuals with so little understanding of cultural nuance that they might as well have been drafted in from Mars.

The New York Times points out that the qualification “possibly” appears 387 times about intelligence used in the files, with the qualifiers “unknown” and “deceptive” appearing 188 times and 85 times respectively. Further proof that the intelligence business is anything but a precise science.

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New Survey Finds Tolerance Of Torture In The US

April 20, 2011 at 8:24 AM

Simulated waterboarding torture © Amnesty International

Last week to mark the 150 anniversary of the American Civil War the American Red Cross released a survey of US attitudes to international humanitarian law which revealed a shocking tolerance of torture across American society.

The Red Cross survey found that 59% of the 502 teenagers and 51% of the 1,019 adults polled believed that it was sometimes acceptable to torture enemy fighters to obtain important military information.

41% of teenagers and 30% of adults also accepted the logical corollary that it might therefore sometimes be acceptable for enemy forces to torture captured American POWs. The survey powerfully suggests just how far the norm against torture in American public life has been eroded.

Giants of American public life like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have spoken out against torture but the evidence seems to suggest that, for now at least, the ants have carried the day.

An American public weaned on a diet of hard-charging maverick cop shows like 24, video games like Modern Warfare, and the obfuscating legal maneuvers of Bush’s torture team has drunk the kool aid and, despite all evidence to the contrary, concluded torture works.

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Back to Basics: A Military Commissions Primer

April 13, 2011 at 10:47 AM

The announcement that the Obama administration plans to refer more cases to the Military Commissions process rather than federal court has set off another round of debate about the nature of threat posed by Al Qaeda and its surrogates, and it is worth reiterating some of the positions that Amnesty takes on the Global War on Terror paradigm.

First and foremost, international humanitarian law conceives of just two categories of armed conflict: international and non-international. International armed conflicts are fought exclusively between sovereign states, not between states and non-state actors. Osama bin Laden can no more declare war on the United States than you or I can.

Non-international armed conflicts — for example, civil wars, rebellions, insurgencies — involve fighting between regular state armed forces and identifiable armed groups, or between armed groups fighting one another, but only within the territory of a single State. There are rules that govern both international and internal armed conflict but they differ in certain important respects. Some basic rules — like Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — apply across the board.

When the law of international armed conflict or the law pertaining to internal armed conflict applies can differ from one case to the next. The legal standing of Al Qaeda as an entity in Afghanistan may differ to its standing in Pakistan, which in turn may be different to its standing in Yemen, Europe or even the United States.

Confused? You should be. In law, this is all a matter of argument as much as fact. It is complicated and often uncertain.

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Obama Surrenders on Military Commission Trials

April 4, 2011 at 6:04 PM

Attorney General Eric Holder announced earlier this afternoon that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-conspirators in the 9/11 attacks will face trial before military commissions rather than in federal court.

This announcement represents yet another disappointing political compromise by the Obama administration. The President came into office pledging to restore the United States’ global reputation by closing the detention facility at Guantanamo and doing away with the widely discredited kangaroo court system cobbled together by the Bush administration. That pledge died today.

The Attorney General said he would continue to push back against Congressional interference in the judicial process but, given the spineless performance of the government to date, I wouldn’t bet against Congress having the last word.

Military commissions have proved to be a colossal failure. They started off hopelessly weighted in favor of the prosecution. Constant revisions have addressed some but certainly not all such concerns; they have also generated a great deal of cynicism and confusion about the process.

In nine years the commissions have only heard six cases, four of which ended in plea deals. That represents less than 1% of the total detainee population that has passed through Guantanamo. So, in addition to lacking credibility, military commissions are neither tried nor tested.

By way of contrast, in roughly the same period, more than 800 individuals charged in terrorism-related cases have passed through the federal court system where the conviction rate is close to 90%.

In his press conference, Attorney General Holder described the federal courts as “an unparalleled instrument for bringing terrorists to justice.” This rather begs the question: Why has the administration not fought harder to win this battle?

The President and his administration should have been out in public fighting for federal court as the proper venue for these trials. Instead there has been a deafening silence from the White House over the past year. The President clearly decided to use his political capital elsewhere.

Coming, as it did, on the same day that President Obama announced his 2012 reelection bid, today’s announcement provided a timely reminder of just how little campaign promises are worth.

Peter King's Hearings Part of a Long, Ignoble Tradition

March 10, 2011 at 2:17 PM

Originally posted on the Huffington Post

Committee Chairman U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-NY) listens during a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Rep. Peter King’s decision to hold a hearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security on “radicalization in the American Muslim community” embraces the grand political tradition of demonizing a minority community in times of perceived national crisis for apparent personal advantage.

In 1919 an anarchist letter-bombing campaign prompted the Attorney General and aspirant President candidate Alexander Palmer to unleash a series of raids on predominantly Russian immigrant and labor groups that flouted due process and often resulted in what even J. Edgar Hoover admitted were “clear cases of brutality.” More than 500 Eastern European immigrants were summarily deported.

The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 led to the internment of 110,000 American citizens of Japanese origin in complete disregard for their constitutional protections. Many white Californians benefited materially as a result, especially in the farming community. FDR’s Assistant Secretary of War, John Jay McCloy, famously remarked at the time: “If it is a question of safety of the country, [or] the Constitution of the United States, why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.”

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CSRTs Come Back From The Dead

March 7, 2011 at 6:35 PM

With a stroke of his pen, President Obama today extinguished any last lingering hopes that his administration would eventually do the right thing on Guantanamo and restore due process rights to all the detainees held there.

In an Executive Order and accompanying fact sheet and press release, the White House formally announced the resumption of Military Commission hearings – memorably denounced as “an enormous failure” by candidate Obama – and outlined the new review process that will accompany the indefinite detention of individuals deemed to dangerous to release and to hard to prosecute.

The decision to resume Military Commissions has been a long time coming. Despite the fact that the most recent Commission cases all ended in a series of shady backroom plea deals which have done nothing to improve their reputation, the administration has now all but abandoned its halfhearted attempts to bring Guantanamo cases to federal court despite the inclusion of some lofty (and entirely unpersuasive) rhetoric to the contrary in today’s announcement.

For detainees slated for indefinite detention the administration has to all intents and purposes resurrected the widely discredited Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used at Guantanamo by the Bush administration.

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Pulp Fiction

February 8, 2011 at 6:02 PM

Today former Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld launched his autobiography Known and Unknown: A Memoir with a tour of the usual media outlets.

Even judged by the standard of political memoirs Rumsfeld has mounted an epic display of denial that puts reggae bad boy Shaggy to shame. Bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora? Wasn’t me. Misleading intelligence about WMDs in Iraq? Wasn’t me. Iraq’s collapse into chaos? Wasn’t me. The Pat Tillman affair? Not even mentioned.

Rumsfeld really outdoes himself when he tries to wash his hands of the systemic abuse of detainees held in military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Discussing the Abu Ghraib scandal with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, Rummy commented:

“That was such a stain on our country. To think that people in our custody were treated in that disgusting and perverted and ghastly way — unacceptable way.”

Fine sentiments indeed, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the incident had nothing to do with the former Secretary of Defense, until you recall that it occurred in a detention facility under his command and grew out of a permissive attitude to detainee abuse that he himself was responsible for creating.

But don’t just take my word for it – here is an excerpt from the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody adopted unanimously in November 2008 by Republican and Democrat members alike:

“The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply a result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at [Guantánamo]… Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officers conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody. What followed was an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely.”

In December 2002 Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of “mild, non-injurious physical contact” as well as stress positions, stripping naked and even dogs to break detainees. Rumsfeld famously even questioned why the use of stress positions was limited to just 4 hours noting that he was used to standing for 8-10 hours a day.

In fact, Donald Rumsfeld’s fingerprints are all over the Bush administration’s torture program and you don’t need to be CSI’s Gil Grissom to find them. The last category Rumsfeld’s autobiography belongs in is “Non-fiction”.

That is why we are calling on all good bookshops to take a long hard look at the content of Known and Unknown and then move it straight to the “True Crime” section of their stores.

The Long Arm of the Law

February 6, 2011 at 11:34 PM

Yesterday a spokesman for former US President George W. Bush announced that he was abandoning a planned visit to Switzerland because of “security concerns”.

Although President Bush’s team officially played down the possibility, it seems likely that the decision was taken in part because of fears that he might be arrested by the Swiss authorities. In 2005 former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld cancelled a visit to Munich, Germany, for the same reason.

Last Friday Amnesty International wrote to Genevoise and Swiss federal prosecutors outlining a lengthy and detailed case calling for the local authorities to investigate President Bush for authorizing the use of torture during the ‘war on terror’.

Since President Bush admitted in his memoir Decision Points that he personally ordered the water-boarding of terrorism suspects and water-boarding comfortably falls within the spectrum of acts prohibited by the Convention against Torture (and for that matter domestic US law) this frankly wasn’t a hard case to make.

Switzerland has an obligation under international law arising from the Convention against Torture to investigate these allegations. Switzerland ratified the Torture Convention in 1986 but even if it had not the prohibition of torture, and the duty to investigate suspects, is considered customary international law.

Furthermore, the Bush administration seized on the law of war as the framework within which it pursued Osama bin Laden and there is no statute of limitations on war crimes. Water-boarding, walling and learned compliance all amount to war crimes.

To borrow a turn of phrase used by General Petraeus, President’s Bush’s criminal liability for these abuses is non bio-degradable.

The reports that have emerged from Cairo this past week about the torture and abuse of pro-democracy activists by Egyptian security forces remind us of the company we keep if we allow the use of torture to go unpunished.

Ending impunity for human rights abuses is not a cause we can only pursue overseas. If our values are to have any meaning we must first put our house in order at home.  We can’t just ‘turn the page’.

It can be easy to get discouraged fighting against impunity when progress is most often measured not in years but in decades. However, this weekend we have been reminded that the law has a long arm and that even Presidents can’t ignore its reach.