Tag Archives: Obama

Dear President Obama, When you meet with President Peres …

May 4, 2009 at 10:35 PM
Israeli President, Shimon Peres, speaking to AIPAC at annual conference today.

Israeli President, Shimon Peres, speaking to AIPAC at annual conference today.

Israeli President, Shimon Peres, flew to the United States to give a speech at the 2009 AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) annual conference in Washington DC Monday and to meet with President Obama Tuesday at the White House.  YouTube already has a video of his speech.

Although George Mitchell, Special Envoy to the Middle East who was appointed by President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has met with Israeli officials, this will be the first meeting between President Obama and a high ranking official from the newly established Israeli government under Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu which is considered ‘right-wing’.

 AIUSA asked President Obama to raise the issues of increasing settlement expansion in the West Bank and the eviction of Palestinian families and demolition of homes in east Jerusalem.  Despite repeated U.S. statements condemning the demolitions and settlement expansion in the Occupied Territories, settlement expansion and demolitions continue.  Settlement building/expansion, evictions and demolitions in occupied territory are also illegal under international law.

Demolitions in east Jerusalem have increased dramatically in the last two years with wide swathes of land slated for demolitions.  Settlement expansion which has been in the works for some time is now being given the green light by newly elected government officials. 

Obama has also been asked to follow up on recent events in Gaza.  Despite statements by Sec’y Clinton that goods and humanitarian aid is getting into the Gaza Strip, other sources such as the U.N. and other monitors on the ground continue to report excessive restrictions which continue to keep out spare parts for medical equipment or equipment needed to rebuild, such as bulldozers.

We’ve also asked that Obama urge Israel to cooperate with the investigation being conducted by the team created by the United Nations Human Rights Council and under the leadership of Justice Richard Goldstone, a highly respected war crimes prosecutor.  Justice Goldstone has stated that he will be investigating the allegations of human rights abuses by all parties involved in the conflict.  The team is currently meeting in Geneva to organize and outline their investigation into war crimes committed during the Gaza crisis.  The government of Israel has publicly stated that they do not plan to cooperate with the team.

Even though the two leaders will be focused on the peace process, human rights are directly linked to any workable resolution.  Both parties must respect the basic human rights of each other and the United States must play a key role in getting all the  parties involved to recognize this basic tenet.

UPDATE May 6, 2009: Video covering comments made at AIPAC conference and responses.

Obama salutes Tissainayagam

May 4, 2009 at 8:56 PM

In his May 1 statement in honor of World Press Freedom Day, President Obama singled out for recognition a few journalists unjustly imprisoned for their work:

In every corner of the globe, there are journalists in jail or being actively harassed:  from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, Burma to Uzbekistan, Cuba to Eritrea.  Emblematic examples of this distressing reality are figures like J.S. Tissainayagam in Sri Lanka, or Shi Tao and Hu Jia in China.

Tissainayagam remains in prison today, solely for the “crime”  of being a journalist.  Please write to the Sri Lankan government today and ask that he be released immediately and all charges against him dropped.

Amnesty Activists March to White House Today Calling for Accountability

April 30, 2009 at 4:36 PM
Amnesty International activists en route to White House, April 30, 2009 (c) Shawn Duffy

At last night’s press conference marking 100 days in office, President Obama said that over time a “short-cut” like torture “corrodes the character of a country.” And he has gotten a start on rebuilding U.S. character with his executive orders.  But another important step still has not been taken to ensure these abusive policies end permanently.  If the Obama administration does not uphold the law by investigating and if necessary, prosecuting torture, it will be taking its own damaging “short-cut” and undermining U.S. laws.

Amnesty International activists dressed in Guantanamo-like jumpsuits marched from the U.S. Capitol to the White House today to urge the Obama administration to hold accountable those who sanctioned and carried out torture and other inhumane counterterrorism policies.  The ACLU, Witness Against Torture and the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition partnered in the event.

Activists made their point loud and clear: accountability for torture is not petty “retribution.” It’s enforcing U.S. laws.  Looking forward to the next 100 days, the Obama administration must ask itself what kind of country it wants to lead–one characterized by impunity or by justice?  If you are for justice, take action with us by demanding an independent investigation into torture.

Govt Running Out the Clock on Torture

April 24, 2009 at 12:09 PM

(As originally posted on Daily Kos)

Let’s be clear, calls to allow the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to conduct its own investigation into the abuses committed in secret CIA detention centers are little more than an attempt to play out the clock by freezing judicial investigations in until the 8 year statute of limitations on Anti-Torture Act crimes starts to render them moot from the spring of 2010 onwards.

The Select Committee has had plenty of time to complete its own investigations. Indeed, senior members of the committee, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the adoption of new harsh interrogations as early as September 2002. Unlike their colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee they chose to look the other way. They have missed their chance, and in this arena it’s play or pass.

So where does that leave those who care about accountability? The White House continues to fail to show leadership on this issue. After equivocating all week the President seems to have returned to his earlier line that we need to turn the page on the past.

Even without the President’s leadership, pressure for accountability is growing day by day. The first step is to develop enabling legislation for a genuinely independent inquiry along the lines of the 9-11 Commission. This commission must possess three fundamental qualities: it must be bi-partisan and comprised of eminent Americans of unimpeachable integrity; it must be well funded and well staffed; and it must be possessed of the necessary legal powers to effectively discharge its functions. However, it should not grant immunity from prosecution in return for testimony.

Furthermore, as the majority staff of the House Committee on the Judiciary recommended in January, Congress should consider extending the statute of limitations for offenses under the torture statute and war crimes statute. This would give the Commission the time to complete its work without prejudicing the prosecution of those found responsible for commissioning and perpetrating acts of torture.

What are the other key takeaways from the past week’s revelations? First, the 2002 Bybee memo represents the very best case scenario for the regime of abuse inflicted on detainees in U.S. custody. Amnesty International knows well that abuse escalates in a permissive environment and, within days of the memo’s release, confirmation emerged that waterboarding had been used greatly in excess of even what the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel considered permissible limits.

Second, the Bush administration did not seek advice from the best-qualified experts on how to effectively gain intelligence from captured members of Al Qaeda, it chose to get tough rather than smart. To this end, the General Counsel’s Office in the DoD sought advice not from experienced criminal investigators or military intelligence officers but from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which runs the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program.

Even the JPRA’s Commander noted, in newly declassified memos published this week by the Senate Armed Services Committee, that his organization was “not in the business of strategic debriefing (interrogation).” Inevitably, it wasn’t long before SERE instructors were warning their superiors: “this is getting out of control.”

Finally, claims that vital intelligence was gained using such techniques have been roundly discredited. Former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan who led the law enforcement interrogation of Abu Zubayda broke seven years of silence to go on the record in The New York Times to refute the “false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.”

His words were echoed by CIA Director Admiral Dennis Blair who said publicly:

“The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

A CIA officer who spoke to President Obama’s transition team on intelligence matters also admitted that some foreign intelligence agencies were now refusing to share intelligence about the location of terrorism suspects for concern at being implicated any resulting abuses or other internationally wrongful acts. Surely, the canard that these techniques were a vital tool in our counterterrorism arsenal can now be laid to rest.

It has been a momentous week for human rights campaigners. After long years in the wilderness, there is now a sense that the balance is reasserting itself. Human rights and the rule of law are finally edging back to where they belong – at the very heart of American democracy.

Obama Drops Resistance to Investigating Torture

April 22, 2009 at 9:22 PM

President Obama gingerly retreated Tuesday from his resistance to a Congressionally-authorized commission of inquiry to investigate US detention and interrogation practices.  During a photo-op with the King of Jordan, he acknowledged that it is up to Congress and the Attorney General, respectively, to decide whether to authorize a special investigatory commission, or initiate a criminal investigation of torture allegations.  The President moved closer to what Amnesty and other NGOs have long been advocating — namely, not a commission composed of members of Congress, but a truly independent body consisting of internationally-recognized experts with no partisan affiliation.

Amnesty has called for a commission to be composed of “credible experts, who will be seen to be independent, impartial and objective, who command public confidence, and whose expertise includes international human rights and humanitarian law.”  There are other criteria in Amnesty’s recommendations that are designed to ensure that the commission will be truly independent and nonpartisan and that it is properly resourced.   These are vital ingredients to ensuring that the commission is seen as above reproach, thereby giving it a real chance of helping to heal rather than exacerbating political divisions.  The President recognized this concern when he ruminated about the danger of a Congressional investigation dissolving into partisan backbiting.

Another reason the commission should be composed of nonpartisan experts is that Congress itself has arguably been complicit in the abuses that have come to light, or at the very least, has failed to conduct effective oversight.  Members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, for example, don’t even have the same recollections about the extent to which they were briefed or the content of their briefings on interrogation of terror suspects.  All the more reason for us to let our US Representatives and Senators know that we want them to support a nonpartisan commission of inquiry that meets Amnesty’s criteria.

Only by getting the whole truth out can we move forward by identifying how to prevent a future administration from violating our laws and treaty obligations barring torture.

Those torture memos

April 17, 2009 at 12:47 PM

It’s clear to us that the torture memos released yesterday, as gruesome and repugnant the details are within, are only the tip of the iceberg.

As far as we currently know, the interrogation regime spelled out in the Bybee memo is the best case scenario for how detainees were treated. Amnesty International has been interviewing the victims of torture for almost fifty years and our experience teaches us that abuse nearly always escalates over time. It starts with roughing people up at 3am and ends with naked people piled up in pyramids.

All that we know is based on leaked reports, on a handful of interviews, and some pictures no one wanted us to see. What about the hundreds of other detainees, civilian and military staff who worked at these torture facilities? What other files and images exist? Why would the CIA destroy mountains of tapes and who knows what else?

Because as awful as the images from Abu Ghraib, as vile as the techniques outlined in the torture memos, there is so much more that we still do not know.

That’s why we were relieved that at least President Obama made good on his promise for a more transparent government by releasing the memos. This is an important distinction from other nations who practice torture. If what Bush and Cheney did was immeasurably damage our nation’s system of values and credibility, Obama took the first, critical step to repairing that damage by releasing the memos.

But we will not know the truth of what has been done in our name until a thorough, independent investigation has been conducted. It is clear from the Attorney General’s comments that the government cannot be trusted to do this alone. We’ve done plenty of reflecting, and it’s now time to act like a true democracy, built on the rule of law. Laws mean nothing if they are not enforced.

Go to any prison or jail in the United States, and you will find countless unsympathetic criminals: rapists, murderers, even domestic terrorists. Imagine telling an American police officer to treat these criminals in the manner outlined by the torture memos. What would they do? Would they blindly follow the command to do what they knew was wrong, both morally but also legally? The vast majority would not. Our agents in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other black sites knew better too.

The CIA officers in the field knew what they wanted to do was wrong which is precisely why they sought legal cover from the Office of Legal Council. They lawyered up. Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury knew they were ignoring decades of jurisprudence in drafting their memos. This is not a good faith misunderstanding, this was a coldblooded decision to torture prisoners in American custody.

Laws have been broken and fundamental human rights have been abused. We have a responsibility to ourselves, to our nation and to the international community to show that this was wrong and that such a deviation from the values on which America was built shall not go unpunished.

Tell Congress to setup an independent investigation.

US Weapons Pour Into Israel

April 2, 2009 at 5:35 PM

Despite reports of US weapons used in human rights violations in Gaza, another shipment has arrived and been unloaded in Israel. In January, Amnesty International along with other groups in Greece were able to divert and delay this shipment of arms, but on January 12, in the midst of the conflict, the ship disappeared from the radar near Greece. It reappeared March 23, traveling from Israel to the Ukraine.  The Pentagon confirmed that on March 22, the cargo ship unloaded 300 containers of munitions to the Israeli port Ashdod. There is not too much to add to the statement of Amnesty’s Brian Wood:

Legally and morally, this U.S. arms shipment should have been halted by the Obama administration given the evidence of war crimes resulting from military equipment and munitions of this kind used by the Israeli forces.

Even still, President Obama has committed to a 10-year contract with a 25% increase in military aid totaling around $30 billion. There must be an immediate cease of arms trade to Israel and all Palestinian armed groups or the risk of serious human rights violations continues. The US government clearly owes us some answers as to why the recent arms shipment was delivered.

Guantanamo's Uighurs Coming to the US?

March 20, 2009 at 11:44 AM

(Originally posted on Daily Kos)

On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the first public indication that at least some of the Chinese Uighurs cleared for release from Guantanamo in September 2008, but unable to return home to China for fear of persecution, will be allowed to settle in the United States. His announcement followed the visit of the European Union’s Counterterrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove to US.

De Kerchove is believed to have delivered the blunt message to the Obama administration that, unless the US demonstrated its good faith by resettling the Uighurs on American soil, it was highly unlikely that any European country would be prepared to help in the dismantlement of the Guantanamo prison camp by accepting other discharged detainees.

The Uighurs were among 22 Chinese citizens of Uighur descent who were captured near Tora Bora towards the end of 2001. The circumstances of their capture is unclear although former detainee Abu Bakr Qasim has claimed they were handed over to US forces for a $5,000 a head bounty.

The men are alleged to be militant separatists affiliated with the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) who had received weapons training at a camp in Afghanistan with the apparent objective of fighting against China for Uighur independence.

None took part in hostilities against the United States nor bore any apparent animosity towards the west. Indeed, Abu Bakr Qasim told reporters that he had expected the US to be sympathetic to his people’s cause.

In May 2006 five of the original group were released from Guantanamo and resettled in Albania although one, Adel Abdu Al-Hakim, has subsequently been allowed to relocate to Sweden.

The US government finally conceded in September 2008 that none of the remaining Uighurs in Guantanamo could be categorized as an ‘enemy combatant’ and in October the US District Court ordered the Uighurs released. They have been trapped in limbo ever since with no country prepared to offer them a home for fear of angering China.

The saga of the Uighars has only served to underline the comments made this week by Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a guest post on The Washington Note. Wilkerson lambasted the ‘utter incompetence’ of the battlefield intelligence screening process that saw so many individuals who posed no threat to US interests transferred to Guantanamo and proclaimed to the American public as ‘the worst of the worst’.

In Wilkinson’s words:

Several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released… But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror.

Hundreds of detainees have been held in Guantanamo for an unconscionable length of time in defiance of international law and notions of due process. Wilkinson estimates that only two dozen or so could actually be considered terrorists. The rest have suffered long enough. The Obama administration must set an example and put right a wrong that has cast a long shadow over America’s global reputation. It can start by offering the Uighurs of Guantanamo a new home on American soil.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

March 17, 2009 at 9:15 PM

Late on Friday afternoon, in a move apparently designed to give the media as little time to respond as possible, the Obama administration filed a new motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia clarifying that the administration still asserted the authority to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely at the US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay.

The filing marked three departures from the policies of the Bush administration. First, the administration no longer asserted that this power derived from the executive office of the presidency but from the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks.

Second, in a deliberately symbolic gesture the filing dispensed with the term “enemy combatant.” Third, the threshold for detention has been elevated to just those who are part of or “substantially support” the Taliban, Al Qaeda or associated forces, and excludes the category of “unwitting supporter”. 

How significant are these new positions? In short, beyond the symbolism of retiring a much overused term associated with the Bush administration, little has changed. The power to detain suspected members of Al Qaeda and its affiliates indefinitely and without charge remains entirely intact.

The Attorney General, Eric Holder, held out the possibility that there may be “further refinements” of the government’s position once the interagency review of detention policy is completed but this hardly hints at sweeping change.

The publication over the weekend of comprehensive excerpts from a 2007 report submitted to the United States government by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concerning the treatment of fourteen “High Value detainees” held in CIA custody highlighted all too clearly why ‘staying the course’ is an unacceptable position for the Obama administration to adopt.

The report was leaked to the author of Torture and Truth, Mark Danner, and it leaves little doubt as to the dark and sordid waters to which this course leads. In the words of the report’s authors:

“The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the C.I.A. program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

This finding is about as definitive as it is possible to get. It was compiled from interviews of individuals in US custody who had had no opportunity to collaborate on fabricating a shared story concerning their experiences. The assessment was conducted by an organization famous for both its discretion and neutrality that is charged with upholding the Geneva Conventions.  It is a damning indictment of acts that amount to war crimes.

And where did it get us? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged architect of the 9/11 attacks, told the Red Cross:

“I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop…. I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent…wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.”

The Obama administration seems to be finding it very difficult to turn the page on one of the darkest chapters in recent American history. It is vitally important that we continue to keep up the pressure on them to reject the discredited policies of the Bush administration. The only change we can truly believe in, is the change we bring about for ourselves.

The Gift that keeps on Giving

March 13, 2009 at 2:47 PM

The appointment of Daniel Fried, a career diplomat who has formerly been both Ambassador to Poland and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, as the new Special Envoy on the Guantanamo Bay detention facility suggests that the Obama administration is stepping up its efforts to persuade European states to accept detainees who have been cleared for release.

As things stand, there are approximately 40 detainees still held in Guantanamo who could leave tomorrow if a suitable home for them could be found. These individuals cannot return to their country of origin because they would face persecution, torture or worse at the hands of the local authorities. Several European states, most notably Switzerland and Portugal, have indicated willingness to accept a limited number of former detainees and a number of other European states such as Ireland, France and Hungary may yet be persuaded to the same.

Unfortunately, US efforts to gain European support for resettlement are being undermined by political grandstanding in Congress as representatives try to outdo themselves in synthetic outrage playing the not-in-my-back-yard card regarding the possibility of transferring GITMO detainees to US soil. This alarmist narrative makes it all the more harder to build bridges to potentially sympathetic European states.  Having created the problem, it now seems that some Congressional Republicans are also hell bent on torpedoing the solution.