[Vision2020] A Paradox

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Hi Roger,

You say: "I don't doubt that torture has been used by other countries and I do not support sending detainees to other countries for that purpose."  But you support an administration that did just this on many documented occasions. Will you now condemned the people, namely Bush, et al., who were responsible for this?  You admitted that the case of Maher Arar, the Canadian that we sent to Syria to be tortured, has "some merit."  You are now half way to coming clean on this.

With regard to the "black sites," which a naive Bush wanted to brag about to the world but lucky for us Tenet reigned in the poor gelding, the torture actually began with CIA paramilitary teams, dressed in black and hooded, who, without any determination of innocence or guilt, beat up and inserted sedatives in anuses of suspects, who were in many cases offered by Pakistanis or Afghanis who were paid thousands of dollars for people they perhaps had a grudge against or were easy targets for the bounty money. (Now many verified cases of such innocence.) The detainees were kept in total sensory isolation (a recognized form of torture) until they were delivered to the torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, and Morocco.

As to a balanced column on torture, I will stick to FBI and CIA agents for the evidence.  I will also quote former Bush administration officials who tried to stop it, and also former interrogators, some of them now in prison for deeds ordered from the highest levels of the Bush administration.  I will not need to cite any of the former detainees, although their accounts match very well everything we now know happened in these ghastly detention centers.

Your homework assignment for my column will be Jane Mayer's book "The Dark Side" (literally hundreds of references from FBI, CIA, and Bush administration officials) and the following article from the Washington Post.  Note again how humane treatment stopped the hunger strike while inhumane treatment only intensified the conflict.

When Gitmo Was (Relatively) Good
By Karen J. Greenberg
Sunday, January 25, 2009

In his first week in office, President Obama signed an executive order that would shut down the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. But as the United States moves to end this shameful episode, it's worth reflecting on the untold story of the very beginnings of Guantanamo.

The following account, which draws on dozens of interviews I conducted over the past few years, tells the startling tale of a period shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, when military officers on the ground tried to do the right thing with the recently captured detainees but were ultimately defeated by civilian officials back in Washington. Those early days -- back before Gitmo became Gitmo -- strongly suggest that the damage the prison inflicted on America's honor and security could have been avoided if policymakers had been willing to follow the uniformed military's basic instincts. It may be too late for these revelations to help redeem Guantanamo in its waning days. But those crafting U.S. detention policy in the years ahead could still benefit from learning about these small initial efforts at decency.

The story begins in the first week of January 2002, when Joint Task Force 160, led by Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert, dutifully landed at Guantanamo Bay. Lehnert's approximately 2,000 troops were fired up about their mission: building the first detention facility for prisoners taken from the Afghan battlefield. The unit had a 96-hour deadline, according to Lehnert, and they were told that about 300 detainees were already en route to Cuba. 

. . .
But it wasn't the logistics that most worried Lehnert. It was the policy vacuum into which he and his troops had been thrown. "We are writing the book as we go," one officer said at the time. Lehnert said he had been told by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Geneva Conventions would not technically apply to his mission: He was to act in a manner "consistent with" the conventions (as the mantra went) but not to feel bound by them. 

The Joint Task Force, advised by U.S. Southern Command, was essentially left on its own to improvise a regime of care and custody for the allegedly hardened al-Qaeda terrorists -- whom the Bush administration famously called "the worst of the worst" -- who would be coming their way. The idea, as Lehnert told me he understood it, was to detain them and wait for a legal process to begin.

In the absence of new policy guidance about how to treat the detainees, Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other U.S. laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment. One lawyer for the Judge Advocate General Corps, Lt. Col. Tim Miller, told me that he used the enemy-POW guidelines as his "working manual." A corrections specialist, Staff Sgt. Anthony Gallegos, called Washington's orders "shady," which he told me gave his colleagues no choice but to "go with the Geneva Conventions."

The task force set to work around the clock, processing the detainees upon arrival, administering medical treatment and providing general care in the cells of the newly built Camp X-Ray. Lehnert's lawyers studied the 143 articles of the Geneva Conventions, paying particular attention to Common Article 3, which prohibits "humiliating and degrading treatment." The head of the operation's detention unit, Col. Terry Carrico, summed up the situation to a team of Marine Corps interviewers several weeks into the mission: "The Geneva Conventions don't officially apply, but they do apply."

But there were early signs of trouble. Lehnert told me that his request to bring representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Guantanamo -- something international law requires for all prisoners being held in war-related situations -- was, as he heard it, shunted aside somewhere up the chain of command. "The initial request," he recalled, "was turned down." He persisted. Even if he obviously could not implement some of the Geneva Conventions requirements -- the right to musical instruments, for instance, or the right to work for payment -- he wanted advice from ICRC professionals to help him ensure the prisoners' safety and dignity.

Exasperated by repeated attempts to find out which guidelines to apply to the detainees, Col. Manuel Supervielle, the head JAG at Southern Command, picked up the phone and called the ICRC's headquarters in Geneva. As one member of the Southern Command staff remembers the episode, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned the Gitmo task force that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office opposed getting involved with the ICRC. But now, according to Supervielle, a U.S. officer was asking the ICRC to help out at Guantanamo. The ICRC answered with an immediate "Yes."

It was a pivotal moment in the history of Guantanamo. Once Supervielle's call had been made, the civilian policymakers around Rumsfeld could not undo what the uniformed military had done -- although, according to Supervielle, an irritated team of lawyers, including Pentagon general counsel William J. "Jim" Haynes II, asked the Southern Command lawyer days later whether there was "a way to back out of it now."

The ICRC arrived at Guantanamo on Jan. 17, 2002 -- six days after the detainees did. Thus began what amounted to a period of subtle defiance of Washington's lack of direction. The ICRC worked with Joint Task Force 160 to create a rational, legal detention operation. ICRC representatives immediately began to help Lehnert's troops improve the grim physical situation of the hastily constructed camp: the open-air cages in which prisoners were held, the cells without toilets, the constant exposure to heat and rain.

To intensify his efforts, Lehnert told me, he requested a Muslim chaplain, Navy Lt. Abuhena M. Saifulislam. "Saif," as the Bangladeshi American imam was known throughout the camp, became a fixture inside the blocs of cages at Camp X-Ray. Task force members recall him strolling daily through the camp, sometimes accompanied by Lehnert, and conversing with the detainees -- some of whom were in no mood to chat, some of whom had stories to tell. Lehnert tried to assure them that some form of legal remedy or transfer home was in the works, as one former detainee, British citizen Shafiq Rasul, told me.

Brig. Gen. Lehnert had built his own Guantanamo, one with ICRC oversight, a Muslim chaplain and an overriding ethos that stressed codified law and the unwritten rules of human decency. Lehnert's team let the detainees talk among themselves; it provided halal food, an additional washing bucket inside cells that lacked toilet facilities, a Koran for each detainee, skullcaps and prayer beads for those who wanted them, and undergarments for the prisoners to wear at shower time, in accordance with Islamic laws that proscribe public nakedness.

Perhaps Lehnert's Guantanamo could have been sustained. But Rumsfeld wanted something else: He expected to get valuable, actionable intelligence from the detainees. By late January 2002, according to Brig. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, Lehnert's chief contact at Southern Command, the defense secretary told officers on a video conference call with Southern Command that he was frustrated by the absence of such information.

A displeased Rumsfeld seems to have decided to create a second command, one that would exist side by side with Lehnert's. It would be devoted solely to gathering intelligence and would be headed by a reservist major general, a former U.S. Army interrogator during the Vietnam War named Michael Dunlavey. Jackman told me that he considered the idea of two parallel commands a "recipe for disaster." At the same time, Navy Capt. Robert Buehn, the commander of the naval base at Guantanamo, recalled, the Gitmo task force's initial expectations of orders to build a courtroom began to fade.

As Dunlavey's command took shape in late February and early March, the fabric of prisoner's rights that Lehnert had woven was beginning to unravel. By the end of February, nearly 200 detainees had mounted a hunger strike to protest their treatment. Interrogations, not trials, had become the future of Guantanamo.

But Lehnert did not concede defeat. In later accounts, several detainees described the surprise they felt watching the general walk through the camp in response to the hunger strike. As these prisoners remembered it, Lehnert would sit on the ground outside the wire-mesh cells, hat in hand, and make promises to prisoners in exchange for their agreement to eat. According to these detainees, he promised to remove a guard who they said had kicked a copy of the Koran and to find a way to reduce the chafing of the ankle shackles they wore during transport. One German detainee, Murat Kurnaz, was among the detainees who watched Lehnert negotiate with the prisoners. "Was he trying to signal that . . . he wanted to speak to the prisoner as a human being?" Kurnaz wondered. Lehnert admitted to me that, with the help of Saif, the chaplain, he even put in a call to a detainee's wife to find out whether she had safely delivered the baby they were expecting -- a boy, it turned out. Above all, the U.S. general hoped to avoid having to feed the prisoners by force.

Thanks in large part to Lehnert's efforts, the hunger strike dwindled to a couple of dozen fasters by the first week of March. But as much as he might have championed the need to respect the detainees as individuals -- albeit allegedly dangerous terrorists -- Guantanamo's future had been decided. As the hunger strike wound down, Lehnert said, he and his unit were given notice that they would soon be leaving.

Once Lehnert's troops departed, a new Guantanamo took shape -- the Guantanamo that an appalled world has come to know over the past seven years. Inmates were kept in isolation, interrogation became the core mission, hunger strikers were regularly force-fed, and above all, the promise of a legal resolution to the detainees' cases has eluded hundreds of prisoners.

As Obama moves to close Guantanamo down, the story of Joint Task Force 160 takes on new significance. Had the United States been willing to trust in the professionalism of its superb military, it could have avoided one of the most shameful passages in its history. Lehnert still regrets the legal limbo that Guantanamo became -- and the damage that did to America's "stature in the world." As he put it, "the juice wasn't worth the squeeze."

And there is a final irony on the horizon.

One of the places now being considered as a new U.S.-based destination for the remaining Gitmo detainees is Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in Southern California. The base's commanding general is none other than Michael Lehnert, now a major general. The detainees might well be returned to his custody. In several senses, we could wind up right back where we started. This time, however, we should have the law on our side -- not to mention a conscience.

Karen J. Greenberg is the executive director of New York University's Center on Law and Security and the author of the forthcoming "The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days."





---- lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote: 
> Nick
> I don't doubt that torture has been used by other countries and I do not support sending detainees to other countries for that purpose. The web is full of reports about the abuse  of detainees at GITMO. Practically all of they rely on reports from the detainees. Just what do you except these people to say. Their whole purpose is to discredit the US. If you write a column on it, please be balanced and include what has been reported by other investigations. 
> I have never said that Bush did not share any of the blame. He does. My point was that the the subprime mess started with the Community Reinvestment Act. I think that there is enough blame to go around.
> You accuse me of raw partisanship and that I should give it a rest. I think that I have been more balanced than most of the people on the left. Yes, I am a libertarian fiscal conservative and I should have a right to express my opinion with out being personally condemned for it. You think that because the republicans lost this election that they shut up and just go along with everything that the democrats do. Did you do that when Bush won? No, You never let up on him. I reserve the right to support the democrats when I think that they are right and to descent when they are wrong.
> By the way do you support moving the census to the White House Chief of Staff. That is a raw political move if there ever was one.
> Roger
> -----Original message-----
> From: nickgier at roadrunner.com
> Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:57:53 -0800
> To: vision2020 at moscow.com,  lfalen lfalen at turbonet.com
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] A Paradox
> 
> > Hi Roger,
> > 
> > I've replied to you so many times about water boarding and torture in general, now even more fully documented than before, I'm not sure if it is worth continuing the debate.  But, just for you, I've chosen to do next week's column on Gitmo and how humane it could have been under the original management, but how bad, bad, bad it became under Bush-Rumsfeld's insistence that there were no innocents there and that the "gloves had to come off. 
> > 
> > Yes, Rumsfeld did finally withdraw his "I stand 8 hours a day" torture memo but only after ethical GOP attorneys in the administration (there were a few but they did not last very long)begged him to.  But enhanced techniques still were practiced in CIA black sites all over the world and even worse torture was inflicted on detainees sent to Syria, Egypt, and Morocco.
> > 
> > But first, I'll respond to your putting the blame on the financial crisis solely on the Democrats and Fannie and Freddie.  Below is an excerpt from a column written by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman. Your theory does not have even a peg leg to stand on.  And, Roger, your raw partisanship is just too shrill and brittle, quite apart from your positions being unfounded.  You guys lost; you lost big time; so give it a rest, OK?
> > 
> > Paul Krugman, "Frannie, Freddie, and You," The New York Times, July 12, 2008:
> > 
> > . . . But here’s the thing: Fannie and Freddie had nothing to do with the explosion of high-risk lending a few years ago, an explosion that dwarfed the S.& L. fiasco. [with 4 GOP and one Demo Senators complicit] In fact, Fannie and Freddie, after growing rapidly in the 1990s, largely faded from the scene during the height of the housing bubble. 
> > 
> > Partly that’s because regulators, responding to accounting scandals at the companies, placed temporary restraints on both Fannie and Freddie that curtailed their lending just as housing prices were really taking off. Also, they didn’t do any subprime lending, because they cant: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesnt meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income. 
> > 
> > So whatever bad incentives the implicit federal guarantee creates have been offset by the fact that Fannie and Freddie were and are tightly regulated with regard to the risks they can take. You could say that the Fannie-Freddie experience shows that regulation works.
> > 
> > In that case, however, how did they end up in trouble?
> > 
> > Part of the answer is the sheer scale of the housing bubble, and the size of the price declines taking place now that the bubble has burst. In Los Angeles, Miami and other places, anyone who borrowed to buy a house at the peak of the market probably has negative equity at this point, even if he or she originally put 20 percent down. The result is a rising rate of delinquency even on loans that meet Fannie-Freddie guidelines.
> > 
> > Also, Fannie and Freddie, while tightly regulated in terms of their lending, haven’t been required to put up enough capital — that is, money raised by selling stock rather than borrowing. This means that even a small decline in the value of their assets can leave them underwater, owing more than they own.
> > 
> > And yes, there is a real political scandal here: there have been repeated warnings that Fannie’s and Freddie’s thin capitalization posed risks to taxpayers, but the companies’ management bought off the political process, systematically hiring influential figures from both parties. While they were ugly, however, Fannie’s and Freddie’s political machinations didn’t play a significant role in causing our current problems.
> > 
> > Still, isn’t it shocking that taxpayers may end up having to rescue these institutions? Not really. We’re going through a major financial crisis — and such crises almost always end with some kind of taxpayer bailout for the banking system. 
> > 
> > And let’s be clear: Fannie and Freddie can’t be allowed to fail. With the collapse of subprime lending, they’re now more central than ever to the housing market, and the economy as a whole. 
> > 
> > 
> > ---- lfalen <lfalen at turbonet.com> wrote: 
> > > People are right to celebrate the election of Obama as a historic event. It truly is. It has been along hard struggle to archive the equality that is stated in the constitution. A lot of brave men have been involved in the struggle. Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Medger Evers, King and may others. Some have given their lives. This is a bitter sweet victory, but wont be truly won until the color barrier is completely erased. A time when ones color is no more of an issue than being Irish or German and race is not even mentioned. The tragedy is that Obama's economic views are so horribly wrong. What he is doing will prolong the recovery. I will be in the poor house before the economy recovers. Already people are saying medical care will have to prioritized. An old codger like me will be considered to have lived long enough. Any ailment will be allowed to run its course. 
> > > Obama blames Bush, talking about the failed polices of the last eight years. Bush certainly bares some of the blame. The main cause however lays with Acorn, Obama himself, Carter, Franks Dodd and Clinton. Franks and Dodd were warned about the problem with Freddie and Fannie and said that everything was fine. Dodd and Obama are the two largest recipients of contributions from Freddie and Fannie. Thes are now the people in charge of fixing the problem. This is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
> > > Obama calls for a bipartisan effort to pass his program. If he want bipartisan support he first needs to rain in Rham Emanuel. Emanuel wamts to take the census away from the Commerce Department and put it under his control This is to politicize it. The goal is to ensure democratic control forever. Obama is saying to the republicans in essence "I want to destroy you and I would like this to be a bipartisan effort". The Republicans would have to have a death wish to go along with it. totally aside from the harmful effect to the country.
> > > Roger
> > > 
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