THE MEMO-How Internal Effort to Ban Abuse/Torture Was Thwarted-New Yorker

[kpete]

THE MEMO
How an internal effort to ban the abuse and torture of detainees was thwarted.
by JANE MAYER
Issue of 2006-02-27
Posted 2006-02-20


One night this January, in a ceremony at the Officers’ Club at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Virginia, which sits on a hill with a commanding view across the Potomac River to the Washington Monument, Alberto J. Mora, the outgoing general counsel of the United States Navy, stood next to a podium in the club’s ballroom. A handsome gray-haired man in his mid-fifties, he listened with a mixture of embarrassment and pride as his colleagues toasted his impending departure. Amid the usual tributes were some more pointed comments.

“Never has there been a counsel with more intellectual courage or personal integrity,” David Brant, the former head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said. Brant added somewhat cryptically, “He surprised us into doing the right thing.” Conspicuous for his silence that night was Mora’s boss, William J. Haynes II, the general counsel of the Department of Defense.

Back in Haynes’s office, on the third floor of the Pentagon, there was a stack of papers chronicling a private battle that Mora had waged against Haynes and other top Administration officials, challenging their tactics in fighting terrorism. Some of the documents are classified and, despite repeated requests from members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, have not been released. One document, which is marked “secret” but is not classified, is a twenty-two-page memo written by Mora. It shows that three years ago Mora tried to halt what he saw as a disastrous and unlawful policy of authorizing cruelty toward terror suspects.

The memo is a chronological account, submitted on July 7, 2004, to Vice Admiral Albert Church, who led a Pentagon investigation into abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It reveals that Mora’s criticisms of Administration policy were unequivocal, wide-ranging, and persistent. Well before the exposure of prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in April, 2004, Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in February, 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described as “unlawful,” “dangerous,” and “erroneous” novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts could leave U.S. personnel open to criminal prosecution.

more at:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa_fact

[spanone]

1. thanks - KICK

[kpete]

2. "mockery of the law"

Mora concluded that Yoo’s opinion was “profoundly in error.” He wrote that it “was clearly at variance with applicable law.” When we spoke, he added, “If everything is permissible, and almost nothing is prohibited, it makes a mockery of the law.” A few days after reading Yoo’s opinion, he sent an e-mail to Mary Walker, saying that the document was not only “fundamentally in error” but “dangerous,” because it had the weight of law. When the Office of Legal Counsel issues an opinion on a policy matter, it typically requires the intervention of the Attorney General or the President to reverse it.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060227fa...

[wordpix]

3. "unlawful, dangerous, erroneous legal theories: " * authorizes abuse

it's not in a memo, as if we didn't know.

[wordpix]

4. "lawyers closely aligned with Cheney" prevented Mora from prevailing

snip:
Mora had some victories. “America has a lot to thank him for,” Brant, the former head of the N.C.I.S., told me. But those achievements were largely undermined by a small group of lawyers closely aligned with Vice-President Cheney. In the end, Mora was unable to overcome formidable resistance from several of the most powerful figures in the government.

[enough]

5. Very interesting story of the history that brought Mora to this clarity.

snip>

Mora was a well-liked and successful figure at the Pentagon. Born in Boston in 1952, he is the son of a Hungarian mother, Klara, and a Cuban father, Lidio, both of whom left behind Communist regimes for America. Klara’s father, who had been a lawyer in Hungary, joined her in exile just before the Soviet Union took control. From the time Alberto was a small boy, Klara Mora told me, he heard from his grandfather the message that “the law is sacred.” For the Moras, injustice and abuse were not merely theoretical concepts. One of Mora’s great-uncles had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and another was hanged after having been tortured. Mora’s first memory, as a young child, is of playing on the floor in his mother’s bedroom, and watching her crying as she listened to a report on the radio declaring that the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary had been crushed. “People who went through things like this tend to have very strong views about the rule of law, totalitarianism, and America,” Mora said.

snip>

Mora thinks that the media has focussed too narrowly on allegations of U.S.-sanctioned torture. As he sees it, the authorization of cruelty is equally pernicious. “To my mind, there’s no moral or practical distinction,” he told me. “If cruelty is no longer declared unlawful, but instead is applied as a matter of policy, it alters the fundamental relationship of man to government. It destroys the whole notion of individual rights. The Constitution recognizes that man has an inherent right, not bestowed by the state or laws, to personal dignity, including the right to be free of cruelty. It applies to all human beings, not just in America—even those designated as ‘unlawful enemy combatants.’ If you make this exception, the whole Constitution crumbles. It’s a transformative issue.”

Mora said that he did not fear reprisal for stating his opposition to the Administration’s emerging policy. “It never crossed my mind,” he said. “Besides, my mother would have killed me if I hadn’t spoken up. No Hungarian after Communism, or Cuban after Castro, is not aware that human rights are incompatible with cruelty.” He added, “The debate here isn’t only how to protect the country. It’s how to protect our values.”

more>

[Roland99]

6. Ashcroft selected wardens with atrocious records to setup Abu Ghraib

The writing was on the wall from day one.

[Trevelyan]

7. Human Rights Watch Email Against Torture

raqis wait for information about relatives detained at Abu Ghraib prison, May 14, 2004 Photo === [e-mail] <

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Bush:

Like you, I share a "deep disgust" at the pictures of U.S. military personnel subjecting Iraqi detainees to cruel and humiliating treatment at Abu Ghraib prison. But the abuse was not limited to one prison in Iraq. U.S. forces have abused detainees at numerous detention facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere.

I write to ask you to act immediately to end the use of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees by U.S. forces or contractors. Protecting national security does not require human rights violations; indeed, the mistreatment of detainees harms U.S.,efforts to end terrorism.

You and I would both be outraged if captured U.S. soldiers were hooded, paraded around naked, forced to hold painful positions for long periods of time, deprived of sleep, deliberately subjected to extreme heat, cold, noise and light, or forcibly submerged in water to the point of almost drowning. Yet such practices continued with little official protest until they were brought to the public’s attention. Surely, detainees in the hands of U.S. forces should be treated no worse than we would want U.S. soldiers to be treated.

I urge you to announce that, from now on, no U.S. soldier or government official will employ coercive interrogation techniques—without exception. You should make clear that the administration prohibits—without exception—the deliberate use of pain, suffering, or humiliation as part of any interrogation process, regardless of the locale, regardless of the legal status of the detainee, regardless of the secrecy or openness of the detention. You should take steps to back up your decision with necessary enforcement mechanisms, ensuring that any one who violates this policy will be held accountable.

I also urge you to publicly support the creation of an independent congressional commission to investigate the extent of abuse of persons in U.S. detention facilities, determine who is responsible, and set out the steps necessary to put an end to those abuses. Such a commission’s report should be public.

Forceful action by you is needed to ensure this stain is lifted from America’s record.

Respectfully,
http://hrw.org - Human Right Watch - Torture - Abuse of Detaineers - Iraq - Afghanistan

[Trevelyan]

8. K&R Very Important -- The Swiss are Trying to Stop the Renditions

and according to a comment on Kos about Cheney's Swiss Miss they may be doing more to try to charge the bush regime with war crimes.

Swiss open investigation into CIA flights December 16, 2005 9:50 PM

The US air base in Ramstein in Germany may have been used for CIA flights (Keystone) The Federal Prosecutor's Office has opened a criminal investigation into alleged overflights in Swiss airspace of CIA planes carrying detainees.

The investigation will seek to establish whether the United States committed illegal acts on Swiss territory. "The investigation is in connection with the alleged CIA overflights," Hansjürg Mark Wiedmer, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, confirmed.

The investigation was launched earlier this week, but prosecutors are aware of the difficulties they will probably face in obtaining information from Washington, Wiedmer said. The Swiss foreign ministry has twice sought clarification about four alleged CIA flights touching down at Geneva airport and some 30 other flights passing through Swiss airspace.

But Washington has yet to respond to the questions...
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=6325344

The Swiss charged with investigating the CIA

...Marty's mission has turned him into hot property among journalists. "My phone never stops ringing," he told swissinfo, mentioning Al Jazeera, CNN and Swiss television by name. "But I don't like being on screen – I'm a loner."

However, he's happy to talk about his probe into the CIA, describing it as an extremely important mission. "If people are detained, transported and tortured without reference to the law, what are the values of our continent worth?" Europe didn't spend hundreds of years ridding itself of such practices, says Marty, only to see them return overnight...
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=105&sid=6331772

[bpilgrim]

9. the good people on the inside are gonna be key to taking our country back

thanks for sharing :toast:

k&r

peace

[wordpix2]

13. don't depend on "people on the inside," We also need "we, the people"

[Trevelyan]

10. Guantanamo Bay is anticipating more political prisoners to torture

Defiant US Presses On With Construction of Maximum-Security Prison Complex
By Con Coughlin 17/02/2006

America is pressing ahead with the construction of a complex of high-security jails at Guantanamo Bay despite calls from the United Nations for the prison camp to be closed.

The US military has just finished building a $16 million (£9 million) 100-bed maximum-security prison, and a second jail capable of holding 200 prisoners is due to be completed this summer.

Senior officers at Guantanamo say they aim to have all of the 500 detainees currently held at the US Naval base housed in the maximum security prisons, which are based on a state-of-the-art jail in Idaho.

Work on the jails is continuing despite a call from the authors of a UN human rights report for the immediate closure of Guantanamo and prosecution of American officials found guilty of torturing the inmates.

The White House last night dismissed the report as a "discredit to the UN". "They haven't even looked into the facts, all they've done is look at the allegations," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "We know that al-Qa'eda terrorists are trained in trying to disseminate false allegations."

The Pentagon has rejected the findings of the UN report, and says it will continue to hold the detainees, which it classifies as enemy combatants, so long as they can provide intelligence and until they are no longer deemed to be a threat to the security of the US.

SOURCE: The Telegraph

[Trevelyan]

11. Write To The Forgotten Detainees

It takes little imagination to visualise life in a prison. The confined cell, the bare walls, the silence, and most of all, the feeling of isolation. Many have no family members in the UK and as a result they have become despondent and desperate. In one case, a detainee was actually seeking permission from a scholar to commit suicide until he began to receive letters from the public, which renewed his desire and motivation to live.

It is not enough that we feel sorry for what they are going through. It is not enough that we shed a few tears when we sit and think about what they are experiencing. Nor is it enough that we lay back and wait for others to take on the responsibility of reaching out to them.

We must not fail them at this critical time. We must hasten to comfort them, and support them at a time when they need us most. We must write letters that give them hope, help strengthen them and motivate them to persevere in remaining patient. We must be their link to the outside world, a link that shows that they have not been forgotten.

Such letter-writing campaigns have proved to be hugely successful – with the 8 Belmarsh detainees receiving 60 letters each in the week that the campaign was first launched and with Babar Ahmad receiving over 50 letters in his first week in prison.

Therefore we urge you all to make it a regular practice to write to at least one prisoner a week and to encourage all your family members and friends to do the same. The letters can be as short as a paragraph, preferably written in your own handwriting as it is more personal, or if you do not have time to write a letter, you can buy a set of 'Thinking of You' cards. The content of the letters should be encouraging them to be patient, reminding them to have hope and that they have not been forgotten. This should not take more than half an hour and should not cost you more than £3. However, it may give hope to a prisoner for whom half an hour is like half a year.

Simple messages of goodwill are enough. Never advance your political opinion or discuss politics at all.Clearly state the prisoner number otherwise the card will not reach the intended recipient. In some cases, the names of prisoners are withheld for legal reasons.For more information on why you should write and for ideas on what to write, click here.

If you have included your name and address (preferably a stamped addressed envelope) it is probable that the prisoners will write back to you and you can find out exactly what their situation is like inside. If you still prefer not to leave your name and address, then please write to them anyway.

Please ensure that the prisoner addresses are written exactly as they appear below.
http://www.CagePrisoners.com/

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA

Prisoner name (see prisoner gallery profiles)
Camp Delta
P.O. Box 160
Washington DC 20053
USA

NOTE: Individuals should note that while we have had it confirmed from one of the US lawyers who has visited Guantanamo, that the US government do allow mail from non-family members, all mail is subject to extreme delays as well as censors. There is a strong possibility that the JTF in Guantanamo will withhold letters for up to a year or longer, or that the detainees may never receive your letter. Only one released detainee we spoke to has received mail from non-relatives, in spite of many having been sent. The US is believed to be clamping down on mail particularly, of late. However, letter-writing can be considered a protest action, as it sends a strong message to the US administration that the world has not forgotten the prisoners in Guantanamo, but rather is immensely concerned about what is
occuring in Cuba

[Higans]

12. Link to prisoner gallery profiles

http://www.cageprisoners.com/prisoners.php?location=Guantanamo

[2stolenelections]

14. Best parts

Mora's response, after being summoned to Rumsfeld's office for a meeting with the civillian leadership of the millitary:

"In exasperation, according to another participant, Mora said that whether the Pentagon enshrined

as official policy or not, the Geneva conventions were already written into both U.S. and international law. Any grave breach of them, at home or abroad, was classified as a war crime. To emphasize his position, he took out a copy of the text of U.S. Code 18.2441, the War Crimes Act, which forbids the violation of Common Article Three, and read from it. The point, Mora told me, was that “it’s a statute. It exists—we’re not free to disregard it. We’re bound by it. It’s been adopted by the Congress. And we’re not the only interpreters of it. Other nations could have U.S. officials arrested.”

Elsewhere in the story: "..the Uniform Code of Military Justice <...> characterizes “cruelty,” “maltreatment,” “threats,” and “assault” as felonies.... U.S. soldiers preparing to violate these laws in their interrogations might be able to obtain “permission, or immunity” from higher authorities “in advance.” Now, since "Rumsfeld had signed the working-group report—the draft based on Yoo’s opinion—a year earlier, without the knowledge of Mora or any other internal legal critics. Rumsfeld’s signature gave it the weight of a military order." The way I read it, nevermind getting him over to the Hague, Rummy is guilty of a felony within our own military establishment -- or in other words, Rummy, bend over and pick up the soap, you old haggard bitch.

[annabanana]

15. Thank God he hasn't been able to purge ALL

the Real Americans. I believe that we are finally going to see some checks on this endless power grab.

[leftchick]

16. doesn't this sound familiar?

apparently those few bad apples at Abu Ghraib learned from the few bad apples at GITMO...

<snip>

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.

[leftchick]

17. cheney cheney cheney....

<snip>

In confronting Haynes, Mora was engaging not just the Pentagon but also the Vice-President’s office. Haynes is a protégé of Cheney’s influential chief of staff, David Addington. Addington’s relationship with Cheney goes back to the Reagan years, when Cheney, who was then a representative from Wyoming, was the ranking Republican on a House select committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. Addington, a congressional aide, helped to write a report for the committee’s Republican minority, arguing that the law banning covert aid to the Contras—the heart of the scandal—was an unconstitutional infringement of Presidential prerogatives. Both men continue to embrace an extraordinarily expansive view of executive power. In 1989, when Cheney was named Secretary of Defense by George H. W. Bush, he hired Addington as a special assistant, and eventually appointed him to be his general counsel. Addington, in turn, hired Haynes as his special assistant and soon promoted him to general counsel of the Army.

After George W. Bush took office, Addington came to the White House with Cheney, and Haynes took his boss’s old job at the Pentagon. Addington has played a central part in virtually all of the Administration’s legal strategies, including interrogation and detainee policies. The office of the Vice-President has no statutory role in the military chain of command. But Addington’s tenacity, willingness to work long hours, and unalloyed support from Cheney made him, in the words of another former Bush White House appointee, “the best infighter in the Administration.” One former government lawyer described him as “the Octopus”—his hands seemed to reach into every legal issue.

Haynes rarely discussed his alliance with Cheney’s office, but his colleagues, as one of them told me, noticed that “stuff moved back and forth fast” between the two power centers. Haynes was not considered to be a particularly ideological thinker, but he was seen as “pliant,” as one former Pentagon colleague put it, when it came to serving the agenda of Cheney and Addington. In October, 2002, almost three months before his meeting with Mora, Haynes gave a speech at the conservative Federalist Society, disparaging critics who accused the Pentagon of mistreating detainees. A year later, President Bush nominated him to the federal appeals court in Virginia. His nomination is one of several that have been put on hold by Senate Democrats.