Closing Guantanamo puts pressure on leaders who back cruelty

[struggle4progress]

January 31, 2009
By shutting the prison, Barack Obama has made it difficult for other leaders to turn a blind eye to cruelty

Philippe Sands

... in the eyes of many, the seven-year policy of abuse was seen as necessary and came to be well entrenched. Despite that it brought the US into disrepute and undermined its global authority. Despite its cruelty and illegality. Despite the meaningful intelligence it did not produce. The policy had domestic defenders, in surprisingly large and scary numbers. If nothing else, Bush made torture and cruelty fashionable, even in circles of educated souls, from Berkeley to Harvard. The taboo against torture was broken, and I feared the political price of restoring virtue, for Obama, would be too great ...

And it is torture we are talking about, nothing less. You don't need to take that from me. A couple of weeks before the Obama inauguration, the Vice-President Dick Cheney owned up to his role in approving waterboarding and said that he would do the same again tomorrow. “I think on the left wing of the Democratic Party,” he said, “there are some people who believe that we really tortured.” He obviously didn't have Susan Crawford in mind. She is the Bush-appointed convening authority of the military commissions at Guantánamo, responsible for the prosecution of detainees, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan Administration and as Pentagon Inspector-General. A week before the inauguration The Washington Post published a front-page interview by Bob Woodward, in which Crawford stated without equivocation or ambiguity that the treatment of the alleged twentieth 9/11 hijacker - Mohammed al-Qahtani, Detainee 063 at Guantánamo, the subject of my book - was “torture”. And she went farther: because of the abuse, she decided that he could not be prosecuted ...

Within hours of the inauguration, we learnt that Obama is not just words. On the day of taking office he took steps to suspend the military commission hearings, created to prosecute detainees in the “War on Terror” (a phrase that Obama seems to be avoiding) without meeting minimum fair trial standards. And then we learnt that he had put the weeks between election and taking office to good use: new executive orders came tumbling out of the ether, the product of bipartisan taskforces. A first order decides to close Guantánamo within a year, sooner than previously signalled. A second prohibits the use of cruelty and torture and commits the US across the board, including the CIA, to follow the standards and definitions of the Geneva conventions and the 1984 convention prohibiting torture. It points the finger of blame at the lawyers who allowed the torture to occur. It determines that any person associated with the US Government “may not, in conducting interrogations, rely upon any interpretation of the law governing interrogation... issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009”. A third executive order institutes a wide-ranging review of future detention policy.

These are instant and far-reaching changes that have dramatic consequences. They go a long way to restoring the country's reputation. I watched the inauguration on television in London, with my children and my friends and their children. We were enthralled. It says something that the attention of an eight-year-old can be maintained for the full length of a 20-minute political speech. Everyone in our little room sensed that we were witnessing an unparalleled moment of change, having historic dimensions at many levels and, potentially, across the globe. It was as though an entire nation was transformed in a single hour ...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5618157.ece

[alexandria]

1. Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition (12/6/2005

Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism to detention and interrogation in countries where -- in the CIA's view -- federal and international legal safeguards do not apply. Suspects are detained and interrogated either by U.S. personnel at U.S.-run detention facilities outside U.S. sovereign territory or, alternatively, are handed over to the custody of foreign agents for interrogation. In both instances, interrogation methods are employed that do not comport with federal and internationally recognized standards. This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."




How come no one bitched when Clinton was doing it?


My bad.

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/22203res20051206.html

[struggle4progress]

2. That the technique was ever used seems not to have become widely known until 2002

See: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/timelines/

As the public became aware of the technique, it became clear that, under the Bush administration, so-called "extraordinary rendition" (that is, renditions neglecting the ordinary international channels for rendition)had become much more common and were apparently tied to a systematic disrespect for international law

Although the "Fact Sheet: Extraordinary Rendition (12/6/2005)" that you cite notes previous "extraordinary rendition" by Clinton, the fact sheet does note the dramatic increase in "extraordinary rendition" under Bush, as well as the growing disregard for international law. Here BTW is the link to the ACLU fact sheet, which you neglected to provide: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/22203res20051206.html

Moreover, as you are no doubt aware, policy under the Bush administration allowed and encouraged abuse of prisoners, in number, manner and degree unprecendented