Torture is Immoral and Results in False [Sic] Intelligence

Wire Report

Abu Zubaydah: Tortured for Nothing

(WIRE/FFF) – The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “war on terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted¹ as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.²

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”


The Infamous Torture memos

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the president. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published³, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book⁴ for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like”…

Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man, and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental-health problems^5-6, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report, based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music, and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “war on terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

Video Courtesy: Voice of America 2008

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.

In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the U.S. government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the U.S. embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

Source(s): ¹“Anatomy of a Raid” by Tim McGirk Time/CNN • ²The White House Archives. Pres. G. W. Bush”President Discusses Creation of Military Commissions to Try Suspected Terrorists” Sept. 6, 2006 • ³“The One Percent Doctrine” by Ron Suskind 2006 • ⁴The Washington post “The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light” By Barton Gellman, Tuesday, June 20, 2006 •⁵Washington Post “FBI, CIA Debate Significance of Terror Suspect Agencies Also Disagree On Interrogation Methods” By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 • ⁶ Washington Post “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say”, By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick Sunday, March 29, 2009 •⁷

Andy Worthington – Journalist/Author
	Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Wire Report 7 April 2010 Current Events, Featured, Policy Analysis, Politicians, Social, political Abu Zubaydah, al-Libi, Al-Qaeda, CIA, Goerge Bush, Guantanamo, Obama, rendition, torture No Comments

Does the U.S. Government Understand the Terrorist Threat?

Wire Report

(WIRE/IndInst) – Most Americans just assume that the U.S. government’s actions to protect them from terrorism, if not perfect, are rational, based on sound information and analysis, and undertaken with the intention to protect the most people possible. But the government’s response here to the tragic bombings on the Russian subway should raise questions about such assumptions.

In response to the subway bombings in Russia, the metro subway system in Washington, D.C., increased its security—with transit police and bomb-sniffing canines conducting sweeps through subway stations and railroad yards. Yet the subway bombers in Russia are likely Chechens or other peoples in the North Caucuses seeking independence from Russia. Although the Chechen rebels have relied on funding from al-Qaeda and Doku Umarov, the Chechen insurgent leader, has several al-Qaeda emissaries on his staff, the Chechens are attacking Russia because the Russians continue a brutal suppression of Chechen aspirations for independence.

As with most local groups affiliated with al-Qaeda—for example, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia (Iraq), al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa)—the Chechens focus on local issues, rather than attacking U.S. territory. So the Chechens are unlikely to want to attack—and probably don’t have the ability to bomb—the Washington subway system. So why did Washington subway security ramp up after the Moscow bombings? It was either reflexive irrationality that a similar attack might occur here or the government demonstrating that it’s “doing something” to illogically nervous American commuters.

Probably both of these factors had something to do with it. Remember the hysteria after 9/11, when young National Guardsmen were deployed in some U.S. airports with assault rifles? One could only hope they weren’t given any ammunition and that it was all for show. Or how about the short-lived banning of electronic tickets and prohibition on getting out of your seat during the last 30 minutes of every flight into the nation’s capital?

Government action often seems to be reactive, whether rational or not, after a major incident, especially in the very publicly visible realm of air travel. After the shoe-bomber incident, the government required us to take off our shoes and have them X-rayed. After the terrorist plot to mix chemicals for a bomb once on the plane, liquids were limited to three-ounce containers. The Christmas underwear bomber will eventually give us all full-body scanners. Yet one can walk onto an Amtrak train with no security at all and a cruise ship with much less intensive scrutiny than air travel. An easily sinkable cruise ship going down could kill over a thousand people, and a train bombing could kill hundreds, as it did in Spain. In part, airline security gets more government effort because more people fly than take trains or cruise ships, thus resulting in more pubic awareness of security in that sector. Regardless of the threat, politics directs that lots of government attention be paid to air security.

More important, the government also guards things that are unlikely to be attacked, which should lead the average citizen to wonder if it even understands the threat from al-Qaeda central, which is trying to attack U.S. targets. For example, ironically and tragically in Washington, D.C., concrete barriers and a beefed-up police presence have “bunkerized” the Jefferson Memorial, which is supposed to be a tribute to the rhetorical champion of American liberty. Yet al-Qaeda usually attacks symbolic economic (the World Trade Center in New York) or political (the U.S. national military command at the Pentagon) targets. Despite the propaganda of George W. Bush, al-Qaeda does not attack the United States because of its freedom.

Video Courtesy: MoxNews

When Bush kept repeating this nonsense, Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s heinous leader, put out an angry message denying it and reiterating that he attacks the United States because of its “infidel” occupation of Muslim lands and its support for corrupt Middle Eastern dictators.

Silence concerning or the deliberate muddling of al-Qaeda’s motives for attacking the U.S. by American politicians and media allows the American government to avoid being held accountable for its contributory negligence in causing horrific terrorist blowback, such as the 9/11 attacks. The excessive security at the Jefferson Memorial shows the lengths that the government will go to maintain the charade.

If terrorism is to be stopped, the underlying causes have to be eliminated. In the case of Russia, it has to somehow recognize Chechen self-determination. In the case of the United States, an honest debate has to finally occur about the blowback effects from an unnecessarily interventionist and militarized U.S. foreign policy abroad. A nation’s foreign and defense policies are supposed to make its people and territory safer, not less secure.

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Washington University. He has been Director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues, including stints as an investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. He also has served as Evaluator-in-Charge (national security and intelligence) for the U.S. General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), and has testified on the military and financial aspects of NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee, and on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Dr. Eland is the author of Partitioning for Peace: An Exit Strategy for Iraq, Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty, The Empire Has No Clothes: U.S. Foreign Policy Exposed and Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy, as well as The Efficacy of Economic Sanctions as a Foreign Policy Tool. He is a contributor to numerous volumes and the author of 45 in-depth studies on national security issues.

His articles have appeared in American Prospect, Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology (National Academy of Sciences), Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, Chronicle of Higher Education, American Conservative, International Journal of World Peace, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs.

Dr. Eland’s popular writings have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, Washington Times, Providence Journal, The Hill, and Defense News. He has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, PBS, Fox News Channel, CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, CNN Crossfire, CNN-fn, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), Canadian TV (CTV), Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, BBC, and other local, national, and international TV and radio programs.

Wire Report 31 March 2010 Current Events, Global, National, Policy Analysis, Politicians, Social, political airport security, Al-Qaeda, Americans, body scans, Chechens, government, Russia, subway bombings, terrorism, TSA No Comments

Rep. Ron Paul: Bring our Troops Home and End the Occupation of Afghanistan

The Smoking Argus

In this week’s Texas Straight Talk, Representative Ron Paul discusses the need to end the war in Afghanistan, which has become an occupation, long outlasting the original authorization of force. Issued just after the attacks on September 11th, the war is now approaching a decade with no end in sight. Al-Qaeda has long since left Afghanistan and now sits and waits for America, much like the Russians, to bankrupt itself, whilst simultaneously recruiting Afghans turned off by the American occupation, who themselves have a long and bloodied history of resisting foreign occupations.

Dr. Paul opines that while many in Congress continue to couch their support for an UnConstitutional war in terms of supporting the troops via continued funding of the operation, the simple fact remains, needless deaths of American soldiers in a war long past its original mission is an immoral path to secure their bids for reelection. Further he continues that not only are members of Congress completely blind to their Constitutional duty, members even abdicate Congressional responsibility to enforce the War Powers Resolution of 1973, passed after Vietnam, which attempted to restrict the President to using troops for no more than 90 days without appearing before Congress to obtain a formal Declaration of War.

Video Courtesy: MinnesotaChris

Source(s): Minnesota Chris YouTube Channel • Official Congressional Website of Representative Ron Paul

The Smoking Argus 15 March 2010 Current Events, National, News, Politicians, Social, Texas Straight Talk, political Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Congress, Ron Paul, Russians, Texas Straight Talk, Vietnam, War Powers Resolution No Comments

Do Suspected Terrorists Deserve Criminal Trials or Military Tribunals?

Wire Report

On Guantánamo, Symbolism Trumps Substance

(WIRE/IndInst) – President Obama has been so chastened by his failure to meet the pledge of closing Guantánamo prison within a year that Rahm Emanuel, his chief of staff, is trying to negotiate with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to gain Republican support for doing so. In exchange, Graham wants Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other alleged 9/11 attackers tried using a military tribunal instead of a civilian court and also wants unconstitutional legislation allowing the indefinite detainment of terrorism suspects without trial. Closing Gitmo is designed to revive a tarnished U.S. image abroad rather than being a substantive change in policy, and it now apparently may come at the expense of using unconstitutional and discredited means of holding and trying terrorism suspects.

Although closing Guantánamo would be important symbolically, the law-free sanctuary that the Bush administration had achieved there has already been eroded by the Supreme Court’s demand that detainees have some legal rights. And even if the Obama administration closes Gitmo, some of Bush’s unconstitutional policies would continue in prisons around the United States—for example, the use of military tribunals for some detainees and the detention of some former Guantánamo detainees indefinitely without trial. Thus, the world should, and probably will, focus on the U.S. government’s continued violation of detainees’ rights rather than where they are violated—thus negating any positive public relations benefits from closing Gitmo.

Video Courtesy: HBO Films/SirMildredPierce

John Adams defends British soldiers charged
with murder after “The Boston Massacre”

But why should suspected diabolical terrorists have rights? Because these are our rights that are being trampled on too. The key word here is “suspected.” No matter how horrendous the crime—and slaughtering innocents for political reasons is about as heinous as it gets—the alleged culprit deserves a fair trial because he or she could actually be not guilty. Governments, including U.S. federal, state, and local governments, routinely make mistakes and jail the wrong people for crimes. According to Anthony Gregory, author of a forthcoming book on legally challenging incarcerations, an academic study of Guantánamo prisoners found that more than half had never committed a hostile act against the United States. And all but a few percent had not been picked up by American authorities, but had been turned over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan by Afghans to claim handsome rewards. In other words, innocent people had been turned in to get cash. Only 8 percent of Gitmo detainees were al-Qaeda members.

And why are military tribunals so bad? Although they have been slightly improved since the Bush administration originally set up its kangaroo military courts, they still lack the procedural safeguards of detainee rights found even in military courts-martial. Even more important, they are unconstitutional. The 6th Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights requires a jury trial for all criminal offenses, with no exception for national security cases. Proponents of military tribunals cite their use to try would-be German spies and saboteurs during World War II, but they were no more constitutional then than now. Furthermore, the killing of almost 3,000 people on 9/11 was a shameful crime, and those that allegedly perpetrated it should not be elevated to “warrior” status by trying them in a military tribunal.

Obama is only contemplating abandoning civilian trials for the alleged 9/11 attackers because of political pressure against holding such trials where the attacks occurred—southern New York, eastern Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. It is disheartening that the public in these attacked areas would not leap at the chance to uphold justice and the American legal system in their own communities.

Overseas, people will merely see any use of kangaroo military tribunals for what they are: attempts to shop jurisdictionally to get convictions more easily. Already the Obama administration selected the cases easiest to prove—those against the 9/11 attackers—for pursuit in civilian courts and relegated the more difficult ones to remain in military tribunals. This policy then created the anomaly that the most heinous defendants got the most rights. Of course, throwing the alleged 9/11 attackers’ case back to into military tribunals will correct this anomaly, but at the expense of violating the 6th Amendment. Thus, all defendants in terrorism cases should be tried in civilian courts as potential criminals.

Lastly, the civilian courts—just as they have in other cases with sensitive information, such as espionage and Mafia cases—have an excellent record of obtaining convictions. Civilian trials have resulted in hundreds of successful terrorism prosecutions, whereas the flawed military tribunals have resulted in only a few convictions—and most of those were overturned.

So if a deal is cut with Sen. Graham to close Guantánamo in exchange for tossing the alleged 9/11 attackers’ case back into military tribunals, the Constitution again will have been trampled under foot and the positive symbolism of closing Gitmo will have been offset by the use of kangaroo military commissions, which have been justly reviled around the world.

Ivan Eland, Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace and Liberty, The Independent Institute

Wire Report 13 March 2010 Current Events, Editorial, National, Politicians, Social, political accused, Al-Qaeda, Boston Massacre, criminal trial, detainees, Gitmo, Guantanamo, John Adams, kangaroo court, military tribunals, President Obama, Senator Lindsey Graham, suspected, terrorists, unconstitutional No Comments

When the Military Serves as Police

Wire Report

Jacob G. Hornberger – Founder & President, The Future of Freedom Foundation

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, publisher of The Freeman.In 1989, Mr. Hornberger founded The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a regular writer for The Foundation’s publication, Freedom Daily. Fluent in Spanish and conversant in Italian, he has delivered speeches and engaged in debates and discussions about free-market principles with groups all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Europe, and Latin America, including Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Argentina.

He has also advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows. Most recently, he has regularly appeared as a commentator on Fox News’ legal commentator Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Internet-based show Freedom Watch.

His editorials have appeared in the Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, La Prensa San Diego, El Nuevo Miami Herald, and many others, both in the United States and in Latin America.

He is a co-editor or contributor to the eight books that have been published by the Foundation.

(WIRE/FFF) – What happens when the military is used in a police capacity? You get a “war on terrorism,” one in which people think that the laws of war now apply to the situation. But in actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. What you actually get is a criminal-justice problem that inevitably goes horribly awry, causing the problem to escalate into a deadly and destructive horror story.

Consider the war on drugs. Most everyone concedes that drug dealing and drug possession are federal criminal offenses. Drug offenses are listed as crimes in the U.S. Code. People who are caught violating them are arrested, indicted by a federal grand jury, and prosecuted in U.S. District Court. The Bill of Rights requires the government to accord drug defendants all the rights and guarantees of the Bill of Rights, including trial by jury and due process of law. Incompetent, irrelevant, and illegally acquired evidence is excluded from the trial. The defendant is presumed innocent and must be found not guilty unless the government provides sufficient evidence to convince the jury that the defendant is guilty. Cruel and unusual punishments are prohibited. The defendant has the right to remain completely silent, before, during, and after the proceeding.

Now, consider the following scenario. In a concerted effort, a couple thousand members of powerful Latin American drug cartels cross the Mexican border into the United States. Employing automatic weapons, bombs, and grenades, they begin killing DEA agents, federal judges, and local cops and blowing up federal buildings in retaliation for U.S. military actions against drug cartels in Colombia and DEA actions in Mexico. The drug gangsters slip back into the populace, only to engage in more assaults in the following weeks.

The local cops take on the drug gangs, but they are clearly outgunned. The state governors ask the president to send the U.S. military to help them out. The president persuades Congress to suspend the posse comitatus law, and he reassigns U.S. military forces fighting the drug war in Colombia to the U.S. southern border.

Question: Does the military’s participation in the drug war automatically change the drug war into a real war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War?

Answer: No. The matter continues to remain one of criminal-justice. The gangsters are violating laws against murder, mayhem, drug dealing, illegal entry, and no doubt dozens of other criminal laws on the books. But the fact that the military is being employed to assist the police doesn’t mean that the matter is now governed by the laws of war. The gangsters do not become enemy combatants. They remain criminal suspects.

The military is simply being used in a police capacity, albeit one employing much more force than the cops employ. But in principle the situation remains the same: when the military is used in a police capacity, it is still subject to all the rules and processes that govern the police. When the military takes one of the drug suspects into custody, the suspect is entitled to all the rights and guarantees that drug suspects are entitled to when the police take them into custody.

Why don’t we use the military to enforce the drug war and other federal crimes here in the United States? Why is there a policy against it? After all, the U.S. military is used to wage the drug war in Colombia, and the Mexican government employs its military to fight the drug war in Mexico. Why don’t we do the same thing here?

The reason is that the mindset of a law-enforcement officer is completely different from that of a soldier.

The mindset of policeman is: apprehend the suspect and bring him to justice, which means a trial to determine whether he’s guilty, and, in the process, do your best to ensure that innocent bystanders are not hurt.

The mindset of soldier is: kill the enemy and win the war. The killing of innocent bystanders is acceptable as collateral damage, especially if the action results in the killing of the enemy and protection of U.S. troops.

That brings us to the subject of terrorism. Like drug dealing, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. No one can deny that. It has long been listed in the U.S. Code as a crime. That’s why terrorists are indicted in U.S. District Court and accorded all the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights, just like drug defendants. It’s why such famous terrorists as Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, Jose Padilla, and Timothy McVeigh, to name only a few, were indicted, tried, and convicted in federal court.

In fact, the Yousef case provides a good example for analysis. He’s the man who committed the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, an attack which, in principle, was no different from the subsequent attack on the same building 8 years later, on September 11.

After attacking the WTC, Yousef, a foreign citizen, escaped from the United States. In 1995, Pakistani law enforcement agents learned that he was holed up in Pakistan, arrested him, and extradited him to the United States, where he stood trial for terrorism in U.S. District Court and convicted. He is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal penitentiary.

Was Yousef’s attack on the WTC an act of war? No. It was a federal criminal offense. When he was taken into custody, he wasn’t taken to a prisoner of war camp. He was instead turned over to U.S. law-enforcement agents.

Let’s suppose that Yousef had been located in an area of Pakistan in which he was protected by 3,000 compatriots who had conspired with him to commit the terrorist attack. Would the large size of co-conspirators convert the attack into an act of war? Again, the answer is no. It doesn’t make any difference whether a criminal act has 2 co-conspirators or a thousand. It still remains a criminal act, albeit one involving a larger conspiracy.

Suppose that Yousef and his gang were armed with automatic weapons and that the Pakistani police and military were unable to take him into custody. Let’s say that the Pakistani government invites the U.S. government to send in its military forces to take Yousef into custody. The U.S. military enters the country, attacks Yousef and his cohorts, and takes him into custody.

Has the matter now been converted into a war, like World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War, simply because the U.S. military is involved and doing the apprehending?

Again, the answer is no. The issue of war does not turn on whether a nation’s military branch is used to subdue and apprehend a suspected criminal. Once the military took Yousef into custody, it would be required to do what the police did — turn him over to the authorities for trial. By subduing and apprehending Yousef, the military has simply functioned in a police capacity, albeit one with overwhelming force.

Consider Al Capone and his gang during Prohibition. They used machine guns against local cops and federal agent Elliot Ness and his “untouchables.” Did that constitute war? Of course not. But what if it had been necessary to bring the military into the situation to overcome Capone’s massive firepower? Again, the military would simply have been operating in a police capacity and, thus, subject to the rules that govern the police.

The problem though, as I mentioned earlier, is that the military, because it has a different mindset than the police, will inevitably treat the matter differently than the police. For example, the police will stake out a building for days where they suspect that a criminal suspect is holed up. That’s not what the military would do. If they are reasonably certain that the suspect is in the building, they would simply drop a bomb on it. And if it turned out that the suspect was killed in the blast, the military would consider the operation to be a success, even if a several innocent bystanders were killed in the process.

All this brings us to Osama bin Laden and the military invasion of Afghanistan.

The attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 was, in principle, no different from the attack on that same building in 1993. Again, terrorism is a federal criminal offense. As the suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden was in no different position from people who conspired with Ramzi Yousef to commit the 1993 attacks.

After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush demanded that the Afghan government turn over bin Laden to U.S. officials, just as Pakistan had turned over Ramzi Yousef to U.S. officials. If the Afghan government had complied with Bush’s request, then U.S. law dictated that bin Laden be treated the same way as Yousef and, for that matter, 9/11 conspirator Moussaoui, were treated — that is, indicted in U.S. District Court and prosecuted for conspiring to commit a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

However, the Afghan government refused to unconditionally comply with Bush’s demand. For one thing, there was no extradition agreement between the United States and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the Afghan government expressed a willingness to deliver bin Laden to an independent third party for trial if the U.S. government provided evidence establishing bin Laden’s complicity in the attacks, the type of evidence that would have been required in an extradition hearing.

Bush refused those conditions and emphasized that his demand for bin Laden was unconditional. The Afghan government refused. At that point, the United States attacked Afghanistan. Thus, that involved the U.S. military in two separate actions: a war against the Afghan government for refusing to comply with Bush’s extradition demand and a police action to apprehend Osama bin Laden.

The action against the Afghan government constituted war, like World Wars I and II. It was a conflict between two nation states. Clearly it was an illegal war, given that it was waged without the congressional declaration of war required by the Constitution but it was a genuine war nonetheless.

Not so, however, with respect to the military action intended to apprehend bin Laden. Like our examples regarding Ramzi Yousef, Al Capone, and the Latin American drug gangs, that action remained a police action, one in which the military was being used in a foreign country to employ its overwhelming force to bring a suspected criminal to justice.

The problem arose when the U.S. government made no attempt to distinguish between legitimate prisoners of war and suspected terrorist criminals. Instead, it intentionally conflated the two and then defaulted into making all them — Afghan soldiers and al-Qaeda members alike as “illegal enemy combatants.”

At the same time, of course, was the massive war-on-terrorism propaganda that the Bush administration issued after the 9/11 attacks. In the fear-laden environment of post 9/11, federal officials embarked on a big hype campaign in which they convinced people that this particular criminal offense was either a criminal offense (which is precisely why they indicted and prosecuted 9/11 co-conspirator Moussasoui in federal court) or an act of war, at the option of U.S. officials. At the same time, by conflating the prisoners of war taken captive in the war against Afghanistan with suspected members of al-Qaeda taken captive, U.S. officials succeeded in confusing the separate issues of war and criminal justice in people’s minds.

Thus, we have the horribly muddled situation today, one in which some people are saying that some suspected terrorists should be treated as criminal defendants, while others are saying they should be treated as illegal warriors, while others are saying that the government should continue to have the option of treating them either way. Perhaps the most bizarre suggestion came from those who said that the Detroit bomb suspect should have been turned over to the military for torture and then returned to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution in federal court.

We now also have a warped dual-track judicial system with respect to suspected terrorists. One track involves criminal prosecution in the federal judicial system established by the Constitution, where people are presumed innocent and the Bill of Rights applies. The other track involves criminal prosecution in an alternative, competing military tribunal system established by the Pentagon, one in which people are presumed guilty of terrorism, subjected to torture and abuse, and tried in kangaroo proceedings where the Bill of Rights does not apply. The government has the arbitrary, ad hoc power to decide which track people are going to be subjected to.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the horrific consequences of the Bush administration’s decision to employ the military to apprehend bin Laden, unlike the case with Ramzi Yousef several years before.

In Yousef’s case, no bombs were dropped on Pakistan. U.S. officials waited patiently for two years before he finally turned up and was taken captive, with no loss of life to innocent bystanders.

Contrast that with the horrific mess in Afghanistan. In the midst of all the anger and hatred that people all over the world now have for the United States, it’s easy to forget the outpouring of sympathy and friendship that came from all over the world after 9/11, including from the Muslim community. If U.S. officials had simply waited out the situation, as they had with Yousef, bin Laden would have been isolated. That is, he could never have travelled freely and there were countless people all over the world sympathetic to the United States who would have been willing to turn him, especially for a sizable reward. His recruiting efforts would have been limited to people who were angry with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East (e.g., unconditional support of Israel, the sanctions against Iraq, etc.)

Instead, the Bush administration sent in the military — the people with the mindset of “kill the enemy even if it kills innocent bystanders,” which produced massive death and destruction in Afghanistan, which in turn converted all that sympathy and friendship for the United States into widespread anger, hatred, and rage, which in turn greatly fueled bin Laden’s recruiting efforts. And, oh, by the way, even after 8 long years of death and destruction in Afghanistan, they still haven’t apprehended bin Laden.

Finally, I should also point out that the terrorism-is-war crowd has never answered a critically important question: How is the war on terrorism expected to end? That is, how do we know when all the terrorists in the world have been killed? Or, better yet, how do the terrorists surrender? Does the president of the TAW (the Terrorist Association of the World) sit down on a U.S. ship and sign the surrender papers, just like Japanese military officials did at the conclusion of World War II? Yes, that is ridiculous, but it goes to show what the terrorism-is-war paradigm has led us to — perpetual military conflict, along with perpetual death and destruction, along with ever-increasing military expenditures, along with ever-growing infringements on civil liberties.

It’s time to bring the military home and end its role as domestic and international cop.

Wire Report 5 February 2010 Best of the Week, Current Events, Editorial, Global, National, Social, political 1993, 9/11, Afghanistan, Al Capone, Al-Qaeda, Bill Clinton, Bill of Rights, Bush, civil liberties, DEA, Federal, foreign, freedom, Jacob Hornberger, Justice, McVeigh, military, Moussaoui, Osama bin Laden, Padilla, police, posse comitatus, War on Drugs, world trade center, WTC, Yousef 1 Comment

President Obama Weekly Address: Steps Taken to Protect the Safety and Security of the American People

The Smoking Argus

WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL STATEMENT / WASHINGTON D.C. – In his weekly address, President Barack Obama discussed his solemn responsibility to protect the nation and the steps the administration has taken to that end. From ordering reviews into the attempted act of terrorism in Detroit to a comprehensive strategy that has refocused our efforts on the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan and strengthened international partnerships to keep unrelenting pressure on extremists across the globe, the President will continue to do everything in his power to uphold the nation’s security.

—END OFFICIAL STATEMENT—

Video Courtesy: The White House

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	President Obama Weekly Address: President Obama Outlines Steps Taken to Protect the Safety and Security of the American People TRANSCRIPT (PDF 13.4k)

Source(s): The White House Briefing Room

The Smoking Argus 2 January 2010 Current Events, National, News, Politicians, Weekly Address, political Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, Detroit, Obama, President, safety, security, terrorism, weekly address No Comments

Al -Qaeda Desires to Use Pakistan’s Nuclear Missiles to attack United States

Allison Bricker

Al-Qaeda’s third in command, Mustafa Abul-Yazeed, said in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera¹ today, that he is praying Taliban forces are able to capture Pakistani nuclear weapons as they continue fighting their way towards Islamabad. In April of this year, Taliban forces captured the “Swat Valley region” and are now approximately sixty-miles outside the Pakistani capitol.

Abul-Yazeed also goes on to say during the interview that hostilities will only cease when the United States removes its forces from all Muslim countries and quits supplying military funding to nations hostile towards Muslims, namely Israel. Foreign policy experts, the C.I.A., and Representative Ron Paul have also cited our interventionist foreign policy as the root cause of what is known as “blowback”, i.e. the motivation to commit acts of terrorism against the United States.