Bush Says He Can Edit Security Reports

Bush Says He Can Edit Security Reports

October 5, 2006, ABC News/Associate Press

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2532403

President Bush, again defying Congress, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department's reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints. But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency's 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section "in a manner consistent with the President's constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch."

The American Bar Association and members of Congress have said Bush uses signing statements excessively as a way to expand his power. Bush's signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.

Bush, for example, said he'd disregard a requirement that the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and "demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security."

WE CAN NOT AFFORD ANOTHER TWO YEARS.

US Marine reports widespread prisoner abuse at Guantánamo

A US Marine Corps sergeant has given a sworn affidavit reporting widespread abuse at the US prison camp in Guantánamo Bay. The affidavit comes only a week after the US Congress passed legislation sanctioning indefinite detention, abusive treatment and denial of due process and habeas corpus rights for prisoners held at the facility and at other US prisons around the world.

According to the sergeant, a female paralegal working on a criminal case involving one of the prisoners, guards at the prison bragged to her about beating up detainees. “From the whole conversation,” she reported, “I understood that striking detainees was common practice.” The sergeant reported speaking to a group of guards at a bar on the military base, several of whom reported punching prisoners and engaging in other forms of abuse.

The paralegal’s name was blacked out of copies of the affidavit provided to the press on Friday by lawyers for the Guantánamo prisoners. Her report was also submitted to the Department of Defense.

One guard, identified as Bo, reported “taking a detainee by the head and hitting the detainee’s head into the cell door,” she wrote. Bo told her that the other guards at the prison knew of the action, but that he was not reprimanded or punished in any way. She wrote that “about 5 others” also said that they hit detainees, and that the whole group laughed as the stories were being recounted.

Other forms of abuse are also commonplace at the prison, she wrote. Reuters reported, “A guard named Steven said that even when the conduct of detainees was good, guards would take away personal items.” The paralegal reported that this was done “to anger the detainees so [the guards] can punish them when they object or complain.”

The guards clearly felt they had free rein to abuse prisoners, since they so freely boasted of their actions. Evidently they also believed there would be no consequences to admitting the abuse because they were in the Navy and the sergeant was a Marine.

This is just the latest indication of widespread torture at Guantánamo. Wells Dixon, a lawyer representing several prisoners at Guantánamo, told Reuters, “The fact that members of the US Navy can sit around at a bar and laugh about beating detainees for no reason is outrageous. We’re one step away from Abu Ghraib or possibly worse.”

The methods of torture that became infamous after the release of photographs from Abu Ghraib originated in Guantánamo, with the approval and encouragement of top officials in the military and the Bush administration: enforced nakedness, sexual humiliation, the use of dogs, prolonged isolation, shackling, sensory deprivation and overload, stress positions, and a host of other techniques that constitute torture.

Direct physical abuse as reported by the paralegal is only one aspect, and indeed not the most tormenting, of the torture inflicted upon these prisoners over the course of five years. The method reported by one of the guards—taking away privileges without any rationale—is one in a series of techniques that have been used to make prisoners feel that they have no control over their surroundings and are completely at the mercy of their guards and interrogators.

All of this has been sanctioned by the Bush administration. The statement by Navy Commander Robert Duran that an investigation will be carried out and that “abuse or harassment of detainees in any form is not condoned or tolerated” lacks any credibility.

As early as December 2001, administration lawyers were drafting memoranda to justify the repudiation of the Geneva Conventions in relation to the Guantánamo prisoners and others captured in the “war on terror.” The lawyers argued that the prisoners should have no right to challenge their detention or treatment in US courts. They constructed obtuse linguistic arguments to define “torture” in a way that excluded most torture techniques. They further asserted that the president, as commander-in-chief, had the right to order torture, and that any legal restraints on this power could be unconstitutional.

The aim was to establish the foundation for the repudiation of international law and the US Constitution and give the president unlimited powers to arrest and detain anyone indefinitely, torture him, and deny him any legal rights. The widespread abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is only one of the consequences of these steps.

This legal justification for presidential powers of a dictatorial character and the network of provisions that, taken together, constitute the legal framework for a police state were sanctioned by the US Congress ten days ago in the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The law was passed without any genuine public discussion or any serious congressional hearings. The Democratic Party made a decision not to block the bill, which they could have done by means of a Senate filibuster. The legislation passed the House of Representatives with the support of 34 Democrats, who joined 219 Republicans in a lopsided vote of 253-168. The Senate adopted the bill the next day by an even wider 65-34 margin, with 12 Democrats joining a near-unanimous Republican bloc.

The law alters the War Crimes Act to define war crimes in a manner that excludes all but the harshest interrogation techniques. All of the methods used at Guantánamo, including direct physical abuse, are not included in the law’s definition of war crimes. For example, only “serious physical pain and suffering” will now be a war crime under US law, and this specifically does not include cuts, bruises or physical pain that is not “extreme” and does not lead to significant impairment or long-term injury. Punching, and the banging of heads into cell walls, will therefore not be a crime.

The president is given wide latitude to determine precisely what methods are allowed. The legislation also permits the use of testimony obtained through torture in the drumhead military commissions that it codifies.

Perhaps most significantly, the bill explicitly denies “unlawful enemy combatants,” including prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, access to US courts. Prisoners will be unable to go into US court to file writs of habeas corpus and challenge their “detention, transfer, treatment, trial, or conditions of confinement.” The law also states that the Geneva Conventions, which the US is systematically violating in its treatment of prisoners, will not be viewed as a source of individual rights in any US court.

Democratic Party leaders have said nothing about the most recent revelations of abuse at Guantánamo, nor has the affidavit from the US Marine received significant attention from the media.

See Also:
Human rights groups condemn US law on military commissions
[3 October 2006]
US Congress legalizes torture and indefinite detention
[29 September 2006]
Senate-White House compromise sanctions CIA torture of detainees
[23 September 2006]

An Unknown City Erupts

*Inter Press Service*
Ali Al-Fadhily and Dahr Jamail

*BAQUBA, Oct 9 (IPS) - The little known city of Baquba is emerging as
one of the hotbeds of resistance in Iraq, with clashes breaking out
every day.*

The violence in this city 50km northeast of Baghdad is also now
spreading elsewhere around Diyala province.

"The new waves of terror are now forming a variety that we predicted
long ago," a political leader in the city told IPS. "The Iraqi people
have complained to everyone, but naturally no one will do anything about
it. We know who is in charge and who is responsible and eventually who
is to be dammed. It is the government of the United States of America."

The local leader, speaking from his home in Baquba, said the situation
in the area was becoming dire in the face of the recent violence.

"The worst is the direct participation of the national security forces
in criminal acts, and the U.S. Army's sudden disappearance from the
scene as soon as those murderers show up," he said. Many have been
killed, and hundreds arrested in the province, he said.

The al-Tawafuq Sunni party has demanded a full investigation into the
violence in Baquba, and immediate release of the detained civilians. "We
are sure the arrests were made under sectarian flags and those detainees
are innocent farmers captured in their own plantations," the group said
in a statement.

An Iraqi army colonel told reporters in Diyala last week that that U.S.
troops had arrested 10 Iraqi soldiers suspected of sectarian killings.
There was no official U.S. comment.

Iraqi MP Muhammad al-Dayni appeared on al-Jazeera television to say that
Brigadier al-Kaabi, leader of the fifth division in charge of Diyala
province security, had led the arrest of 400 civilians. Hundreds of
houses had been looted, he said. Al-Dayni accused the parties in power
of supporting such acts, referring to the Shia parties in parliament.

The fighting has intensified now, but Baquba has long been a city of
fierce resistance to the occupation. Resistance groups have often
frustrated the efforts of the Multi-National Forces (MNF) and Iraqi
security forces to bring the city under their control.

Residents of Baquba told IPS that an Iraqi police brigadier-general had
used loudspeakers to announce dire warnings to residents.

"We were used to hearing our own government calling us terrorists,
Saddamists and Zarqawis before, but this man added new words to the
vocabulary like bastards and expressions of that sort," Abu Omar, a law
student at Diyala University told IPS. "Yet we were not surprised
because we know he was just repeating what his green zone masters have
always said."

Mazin al-Zaidy, a resident of Baquba, told IPS that the situation in
Diyala province could be the worst in Iraq because people of many
ethnicities live in the area. "The MNF and militias concentrate on
clearing it of the Arab Sunnis prior to any federalism plan."

Al-Zaidy said "there are Kurds, Shias and Sunnis who share the province,
and that has to be altered for the benefit of the first two groups."
Al-Zaidy was referring to the towns Mendily, Jalowlaa and surrounding
areas that are marked Kurdish on the Kurdistan map.

The influence of each group changes often. "Each day I wake up I don't
know who is in control of my city," said a religious sheikh in Baquba
who asked to be referred to as Sheikh Ahmed. "One day it is the
Americans, the next day a militia, the next day a resistance group."

Diyala province gets little media attention "because of the journalists'
fear of going in," said al-Zaidy.

The new violence has ripped apart old traditions, he said. "The people
of the province do not understand how these powers could turn it into a
sectarian city from a wonderful 1,400 years of community peace and
intermarriages."

The U.S. military has announced meanwhile that bomb attacks in Baghdad
have hit an all-time high. The number of U.S. soldiers killed is now
approaching the 3,000 mark.

The number of Iraqi casualties runs into hundreds of thousands.