That number is the toll free number of the Congressional Switchboard, which will connect you with the office of any member of Congress.[This is going to have a lot of typos and link glitches but I'll just have to come back to it and try to fix it later, but I'm not sure some of the message can wait]
This is a plea that you call or contact your members of Congress or leaders of your party or anyone or everyone in Congress and tell them that you do not want them to vote for EITHER the House Bill or the Senate "compromise" bill
Other contact info for the House of Representatives: http://www.house.gov/...
And Senate: http://www.senate.gov/...
I'm going to take a stab at explaining why, on more pragmatic or legal or practical grounds, the legislation being offered is a shop of horrors, but on the moral grounds I leave it to Ariel Dorfman (and while I have a very brief excerpt, the whole is worth the read):
"Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
1. What the Senate bill will do.
There are things that have to be said, so that the distorted, propagandized mewlings of "terrorists and ticking time bombs" are at least put in context with what is actually going on and what will be authorized under the legislation. It has almost nothing whatsoever to do with "clarification of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions" and quite a bit to do with providing amnesty, modifying the War Crimes Act and anti-Torture conventions, and gutting sections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and Army Field manual and allowing for future abuses, free from any Congressional or judicial review. And not because these "techniques" have been used on terrorists in a ticking time bomb settin, but rather because of these "techniques" have been used repeatedly - and to tragic results - on innocent civilians.
To insure that innocent people and their families will be prohibited from ever having access to the courts justice, both bills do away completely with the writ of habeas corpus. Ever. No matter what is being done to them. Not only in the future, but for the current cases of abuse and torture involving innocent people. Because the Supreme Court has earlier ruled that habeas does apply to detainees at Guantanamo, the legislation (combined with a prior piece of legislation) takes the habeas statue and says that it will not apply at GITMO, period. So they are trying to legislatively reverse the Supreme Court's decision. Under the legislation, no innocent person who has been tortured by any American administration will be entitled to secure their release from a lifetime detention, with no charges. This includes innocent Americans and it also includes children.
In addition, it provides that the courts will no longer have the "interpret the law" function that we all remember from early civics courses (Congress writes the laws, the President enforces the laws, the Courts interpret the laws). Instead, the legislation specifically states that the President, rather than the Courts, will be "the" authoritative source for the meaning of the Geneva Conventions in the context of the War Crimes Act. If anyone has been paying attention, they may be confused by the seemingly contrasting statements made by the torture proponents like Graham, McCain, Warner et al that a) we have to clarify exactly what soldier and CIA officers can and cannot do, in order to protect them; and b) we can't describe what can and cannot be done in the legislation because then "the terrorists will know" and know how to "prepare" for it.
Well, here's how it works. For any kind of cruel or abusive mistreatment or murder, the old Nuremberg standard of "following orders is no defense" will be replaced by "following orders" needs no defense." This is because the legislation makes the President's word law (for this country - we currently have other European countries that have indictments or are considering indictments against Americans because of the President's tactics). If the President says it is ok, there are no rules and no limits.
They attempt to say that they have preserved a "limit" on certain things - murder and rape - but they do not allow the victims to have a right of habeas and they reserve the right to never tell a family that they ever had possession of someone who is killed in their custody, so even the "disallowed" are only words on paper, with no way to ever punish anyone who perpetrates or conspires to perpetrate those crimes. There is also nothing to prevent the use of children to force their parents to make statements or turning children over to other country's to be tortured. A tactic of Egyptian intelligence, described in The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, is to drug children, sodomize them and take pictures and the threats of, and execution of, rape and abuse against children while their parents are in detention is also documents. Right now, we have whistleblowers in our military who have testified to our own military's use of children to coerce statements from parents and taking wives and children hostage to secure cooperation.
Once held, someone can be held forever with no charge. Not "someone taken off the battlefield" (the Seeton Hall studies, compiling the military's records which it refused to compile itself, show that even being very generous, less than 10% of those sent to GITMO have any relationship with any kind of battlefield or violent activity and the best estimates from military sources on detentions at Iraq and Afghanistan based round up facilities like Bagram and our former use of Abu Ghraib indicate that 80-90% or more of those detained have no reason to be held) but anyone who ends up held by the US military or CIA or other agencies.
If someone is charged, the testimony against them can include testimony obtained from torturing someone else (like the Salem Witchcraft trials testimony rings where eventually people name names they know because they have run out of information to offer) or from torturing the person in detention, although only if the President thinks this is a good idea and the military reviewers think the statements have value. The evidence and charges can be kept secret from the accused (although under the compromise they will only do this if the President thinks it is a good idea). So you can be picked up based on someone else's torture testimony, tortured yourself, then tried without ever knowing the evidence against you.
If, despite these and a few other huge issues for trials, you are found innocent of committing any crime, you can continue to be held, for life, with no access ever to court. Anything about your case that is embarrassing to the government can be kept secret - if anyone ever finds out about your detention. If things go the way the administration wants on the AIPAC decision and companion legislation, if a reporter were to discover your story and try to write about it, they could go to jail because the story is "classified."
As our government disappears people off the streets, it is not required to ever confess to having them. The same kinds of scenes that some of us remember from clips of the Pinochet days - crying women and children with pictures, begging to at least be told if their missing family members are being held somewhere - take place all the time in Iraq, but with no real coverage here.
This is what is being rubber stamped by Congress and in my opinion, if you are an American you should be horrified.
2. Don't we need to be able to do that to "these people?"
After all, "these people" will kill our agents or soldiers, "these people" are animals anyway, "these people" don't deserve rights. So let's take a look at some of "these people" that are being affected by this legislation. There are four main kinds of "detentions" (I love scrubbed up words for things like imprisonment). There are the kinds of security roundups that take place on a fairly large scale in Afghanistan and Iraq; the kinds of targeted "snatches" or renditions (aka kidnappings) performed by CIA or other agencies with detentions at CIA blacksites; there are the same kinds of snatches with turnovers to other countries for torture, and there are the shipment to GITMO of a mixed bag of people who could have come from or been through any of these processes.
A. "Security" roundups. These are what were at issue at Abu Ghraib and other sites and continue to be at issue. http://www.suntimes.com/... "U.S. global prisons now hold 14,000" and
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/...
As noted in the Chicago piece, there have been 98 deaths in these detentions, with at least 34 of those being homicides and almost 50 classified as "unknown."
"In only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has been five months in jail."
Let's look at a Bagram detention that ended in death. http://www.nytimes.com/... Dilawar was given blow after blow, all "legal" blows under the new legislation, across the back of his legs to make them buckle. This happened over days and the blows came from many different people. He would then be tied in a "stress position" with his wrists yanked up behind him in a way that put so much pressure on the lungs you could not breath unless you stood - on those battered legs. The autopsy, because he died from his days of beatings and stress positions that the legislation makes legal, shows the bone and muscle pulverized and jellified from the beatings as if heavy machinery had been driven across him. Innocent, and under the new legislation, everything about this scenario is a legal way to treat innocent people and there is no requirement to ever notify their families of their deaths in detention. If the President wants to classify the story - he also has legislation that would send a reporter who writes that NYT story to jail. Dilawar - "these people."
B. Renditions to blacksites. Rendition has been around for awhile and runs some risks on its own (it means taking someone from a country by means other than legal extradition and while it is often done in coordination with the host country, if it is not then there is the potential for many problems as the local authorities cannot distinguish it from a kidnapping). In the past it has typically been done to bring the rendered person to a place where they will be tried for crimes, in a judicial proceeding. The new overlay has been to instead take the kidnapped person off to a blacksite for torture. But why not? Why should "these people" have rights? Well, let's look at the blacksite rendition of Khaled el-Masri. If you've been paying attention in Iraq, a prominent terrorist has the name, "al-Masri" (all the rest of their name is different). In any event, a German man named el-Masri is on vacation in Macedonia and has a fight with his wife. He goes out, gets drunk and after a few days later finds himself being tortured in a CIA blacksite. http://www.washingtonpost.com/... Apparently the CIA has about three dozen of these "oops, kidnapped and tortured the wrong guy" situations they are taking a look at inhouse, but under the new legislation there is not need to do that. It is ok to kidnap and torture innocent people and if something makes us look bad, we can just send them to GITMO for the rest of their lives to cover it up. Definitely, there will be amnesty for anything that has happened and no one, from Congress through the Courts through the Media, will have any right to ask questions.
C. Rendtitions to Other Countries. The story in the news is Arar. The cites are all over is you look for them, but he is a Canadian who was on vacation and was called back by his office for work. He is picked up on a flight layover in New York and eventually the US drugs him, cuts off his clothes, and ships him to Syria via Jordan for torture (despite saber rattling, Syria and Egypt both have been cooperating in torturing rendered persons for the US). Under torture, he even admits to training at camps that he could never have attended. The US is still claiming everything is "super duper secret" but the Canadian report just issued was scathing. And it also highlighted the Canadan/US intelligence tactics of leaking all kinds of ominous sounding disinformation that is untrue or out of context, just to make it sound as if they had some reason other than arrogant indifference and negligence for sending an innocent person off to be tortured.
D. Round ups that end up at GITMO. Let's look at the story of the Chinese Uighurs that ended up at Guantanamo. They were a group that left China, where they were being persecuted, and were working their way to Pakistan for work when they were rounded up in Afghanistan and shipped off to Guantanamo. http://abcnews.go.com/... "...even American authorities said they were innocent, referring to them as "no longer enemy combatants" or "NLEC." Nevertheless, they remained imprisoned more than a year after their names were cleared -- after the U.S. government determined they did nothing wrong and posed no terrorist threat to America or Americans." The reason that the Uighurs are not still in GITMO is access to the judicial system and habeas. Bush wants to keep his mistakes under wraps rather than letting the courts have a peek at what he has done, and Congress is ready to go along.
Again, we know from the Seeton Hall studies and other sources that there is a large group of detainees at GITMO that could never have been enemy combatants. Think that is a bleeding hearts study? Well, how about this very recent interview in Haper's Magazine, with Dr. Emile A. Nakhleh. Dr. Nakhleh served in the CIA for 15 years and retired on June 30, 2006, as the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, the intelligence community's premier group dedicated to the issue of political Islam.
"Some of the detainees participated in jihad in Afghanistan, mostly against the Northern Alliance; others did not but were caught in the dragnet--having been at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Even the command down there knew that probably one-third of the prisoners were neither terrorists nor jihadists, and wouldn't have been there if we weren't paying a bounty to Pakistani security forces for every Middle Eastern-looking person they handed over to us. Almost every detainee I spoke to claimed that we paid $5,000 per person. Unfortunately, we treated everyone the same, which led the non-jihadists at Guantanamo to hate us as much as the rest, becoming more hardened in their attitudes toward the US and more disappointed in the American sense of fairness and justice."
You do not hear Rumsfeld or the President talk about the fact that we bought people in Afghanistan, with no proof that they ever had done anything wrong. There are many other stories, they just get very little press attention.
3. But what about the Ticking Time Bomb - don't we have to round up and torture innocent people and hide them away for the rest of their lives so that we don't have that ticking time bomb go off?
A. Not one of the torture interviews known about to date has involved a "ticking time bomb"
B. There is no evidence that you get anything other than the answer you want to hear from torture and a tortured answer to the location of the ticking time bomb is likely to be - wrong. For example, the US worked with Egyptian torturers who interrogated al-Libi, a bad guy. Where they torturing him to get ticking time bomb information? No. Cheney and Co. had been saying over and over that al-Qaeda had ties to Iraq (it clearly did not and the Phase II Senate Intel report pretty much settles all the leaked disinformation on meeting in Italy etc.). So al-Libi was tortured to provide back up for this. Eventually he confessed to al-Qaeda training camps in Iraq, which Cheney & Co. used to help bolster the case for war and they classified the source as "secret" but "reliable." Well, it was neither. All kinds of people and countries knew what was going on with al-Libi and the Phase II report also shows that his information was false and could not have been accurate. But it was what Cheney wanted to hear.
C. Zubaydah. He's nuts. The President has gone on and talked about the interrogation of Zubaydah and his position as a top al-Qaeda operative. He was never an al-Qaeda top guy or planner or strategist - although they had hopes when they first captured him. Instead, his name came upon intercepts often because he acted as a kind of travel agent for al-Qaeda. So he's a guy who is tied in with the terrorist organization. He's also nuts - as in, split personality nuts. The FBI interviewers discovered this immediately after they talked to him an reviewed information. I'm running out of time to dig up links, but google with the name Coleman (an FBI investigator who has spoken about Zubaydah).
D. Here's the thing. We have laws against breaking and entering (I'm lifting this example from someone else, but don't have time to dig up who I need to give credit). Let's say you are passing a fenced, locked yard but see beyond the fence a child drowing. If you break in to save the child, you have a valid defense to breaking and entering. We don't do away with all the laws and make any kind of breaking and entering ok, because some day there may be a drowning child. Instead, the law has always recognized certain defenses based on exigencies, defense of others and defense of self. Even if the child was not drowning, but there was a very good faith belief that it was, the defense stands. We don't make murder legal, because some day someone may need to act in self defense. There is no reason to make murder legal, unless you are a murderer and want to go free.
4. But aren't we safer, being able to torture people?
A. One side effect of the Arar case is that the judge reviewing the case has stated in the report that the RMCP will have to change the way it shares information with the US, as a state sponsor of torture. Does that make us safer? If we pass legislation endorsing torture, will others follow?
B. From the articles above (on the 14,000 being held and the Harpers interview) it is clear that our failure to act in a way that promotes justice has turned huge numbers against us.
From the Harper's article:
"We've lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world. ... We have lost credibility across the Islamic world regarding "democracy" and "representative government" and "justice." We are devising new rules and regulations for holding people without charge. The FBI has been at Guantanamo for years, and no charges have been brought against anyone. The Islamic world says "you talk about human rights, but you're holding people without charging them." The Islamic world has always viewed the war on terror as a war on Islam and we have not been able to disabuse them of that notion. Because of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other abuses we have lost on the concepts of justice, fairness and the rule of law, and that's the heart of the American idea. That's very serious, and that's where I see the danger in the years ahead."
C. The recently revealed National Intelligence Estimate indicates that it is the consensus view of 16 different spy agencies in the US that the Iraq war has made America less safe. http://www.nytimes.com/... Was torturing al-Libi to provide back-up to take us into that war such a good idea, in hindsight? Has the way we have proceeded, with Abu Ghraib, torture, security round ups that lead to disappearing people off the streets (can you understand why many Iraqis blame the bodies that appear dumped on Americans?) made us safer?
*************
Last year, there was a lengthy NYU piece on torture
http://www.nytimes.com/....
by Joseph Lelyveld, titled "Interrogating Ourselves" where he noted large that Senators shied from the torture issue because none of their constituents were saying anything about it.
Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. ''You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,'' Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ''I think they want it blurry.''
Read that again - negligible number of calls and letters and an American public that is not being suppressed into going along with torture, but one that just wants to keep things "blurry." Is that what Americans have become?
We need to change that. We need to not only to make the calls, but to let them know that we understand that Congress is doing nothing while crimes against innocent people are being committed and they need to stand up and take responsibility. Americans are made safer by kidnap, torture and lifetime detentions and we are disgusted by it.
I may be using "we" too loosely. I hope not, but if I am, then I am tremendously sorry to hear it.