Demand transparency on torture from the White House

Passing on this important online action by the Bill of Rights Defense Committee:

Demand transparency on torture from the White House

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to approve a 6,000 page report on torture based on a three year investigation that reviewed over 6 million pages of documents from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. While the Senate report is sharply critical of torture, however, it remains secret.

Sign this petition to remind America what we once stood for.

The Obama administration and the Senate Intelligence Committee could help advance the debate. Simply allowing the press and the public to read the committee's report would expose the film’s potentially misleading narrative.

Sign this petition to tell the White House that you demand transparency on torture and the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report to the public.

For more information and further analysis, visit The People's Blog for the Constitution, and download flyers to take action locally.

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

We, the undersigned, write to remind you that torture is wrong, immoral, unconstitutional, universally illegal, and has proven harmful to US national security, and also to urge you to promote transparency, as you have repeatedly promised.

The extensive report approved in December 2012 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence could inform the public about an area of persisting secrecy and escalating controversy. We urge you to immediately declassify the report and enable its unredacted release to the public and the press.

Your pledge to promote transparency requires no less. So do domestic and international law, which impose an affirmative obligation to investigate all credible reports of torture and pursue prosecution of all culprits, whatever their position or rank. So far, your administration has dramatically failed that responsibility, choosing political expediency over the rule of law.

In your second term, your administration could address this failure by supporting efforts to promote transparency and accountability, starting by declassifying the Senate Intelligence Committee's report in order to enable its vital release to the public.

With mass incarceration subjecting millions of Americans to a "new Jim Crow" racial caste system, the impunity with which architects of torture flaunt their (in many cases, public, and even judicial) positions makes a mockery of our criminal justice system. Prosecution of only the powerless, and impunity for the powerful, represents a flagrant double standard that ultimately encourages disrespect and disdain for the law.

We eagerly look forward to reading the Senate's findings, and to thanking your administration for helping make your rhetoric a reality.

Sincerely,

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Petition to Close Guantanamo

The following is posted with permission from the website closeguantanamo.org. Disclosure: I've already signed the petition. Take the time and do so, too.

It's three years since President Obama promised to close Guantánamo

Remind President Obama of his promise. Sign the petition on the White House's "We the People" website urging him to honor his promise. 25,000 signatures are needed by February 6 to secure a response, so please sign up, and please spread the word.

What happened to President Obama's bold promise?

Three years ago, on January 22, 2009, President Obama issued an executive order promising to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay within a year, but he did not move swiftly to implement his promise, and Congress then stepped in with onerous restrictions on the release of prisoners or their transfer to the U.S. mainland for any reason, even to be tried or imprisoned.

Instead of being closed, Guantánamo still holds 171 men, even though 89 of these men were cleared for release more than two years ago by the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force, which was established by the President after taking office.

Some of these cleared men, like the Uighurs (Muslims from China's Xinjiang province), remain in Guantánamo because they cannot be safely repatriated, even though the Bush administration conceded they had been seized by mistake, and even though a District Court judge granted their habeas corpus petitions in October 2008.

Others - 28 in total - are Yemenis, whose release was approved by the Task Force but prevented by the President after a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been recruited in Yemen, tried and failed to blow up a plane bound for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009. Although these men had nothing to do with Mr. Abdulmutallab, their release is prevented solely on the basis of their nationality. We believe that this is wrong, and that continuing to hold these men makes a mockery of claims that the United States believes in fairness and justice.

30 other Yemenis are held in what the Task Force described as "conditional detention," a category of prisoner invented by the Task Force, and designed to prevent their release until, by some unknown mechanism, it is decided that the security situation in Yemen has improved sufficiently for them to be released.

We call on the President to release these 89 prisoners, and to bring to an end the unacceptable situation in which those cleared for release are indistinguishable from those recommended for trials or for ongoing detention, because of the unfair obstructions imposed to prevent them being freed.

Again, please sign the petition, and then tell others about it. Let's make 2012 the year that we close Guantánamo.

Also, please note that the petition can be signed by anyone, not just U.S. citizens. When registering from outside the U.S., just leave the "zip code" section blank. Good luck, and thanks for the support!

By Andy Worthington

Petition: “Defend WikiLeaks – End the Secret Wars”

The right wing media are clucking loudly these days, competing over who can be the best sycophant to the President and the Pentagon in the latter’s frenzy over the leaks coming out of Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website. But it’s not just the right wing. Establishment Democrats are lining up to show their pro-military, patriotic fervor, only days after passing a $37 billion dollar defense supplemental to pay for more war in Afghanistan.

Following the release of tens of thousands of documents showing U.S. forces in Afghanistan involved in numerous killings of civilians, in cover-ups, and even running a Special Forces death squad "catch or kill" list, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that a planned new shield law would have a special provision to ensure it would not apply to "organizations like WikiLeaks."

Schumer joins forces with creepy finks like Adrian Lamo and his mentors at Project Vigilant (PV) in going after Wikileaks, as if they were some criminal outfit. According to an excellent analysis by Glenn Greenwald, PV leader Chet Uber "strongly pressured Lamo to inform" on PFC Brian Manning, held now at Quantico under suspicion of leaking the Afghan war documents. Uber strongly suggested to Lamo that he might be arrested for holding the documents he supposedly got from Manning if he didn’t turn them over to the feds. Lamo apparently hesitated a moment before turning definitively to the dark side. Greenwald makes a good case for seeing the actions by Uber and Project Vigilant (and their Renfield, Lamo) as a sinister example of the new privatization of the intelligence apparatus, aimed at cowing an already submissive public into total political somnolence.

It’s really beyond dispute that one has virtually no privacy from the Government. That’s not just true in theory, but in practice, as the Government seriously escalates the various ways it maintains dossiers on citizens….

Many people are indifferent to the disappearance of privacy — even with regard to government officials — because they don’t perceive any real value to it. The ways in which the loss of privacy destroys a society are somewhat abstract and difficult to articulate, though very real. A society in which people know they are constantly being monitored is one that breeds conformism and submission, and which squashes innovation, deviation, and real dissent.

Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange, supply a strong antidote to this nihilistic surrender to a surveillance society. As a result, they have been attacked by the likes of Fox News and Washington Post Cheney-groupie Marc Thiessen. The latter could barely contain himself, reporting on the Pentagon’s request that Wikileaks turn over all their Afghan war logs, and calling the Pentagon’s bluster "a final warning," while fantasizing about the Pentagon launching a black ops or rendition on Assange. While the consensus is the Pentagon can’t really do much about the leaks, nothing is too desperate for the rulers of America, if they see themselves losing. It is imperative that believers in a free press, in transparency in government, in protection for whistleblowers, and for an end to the fruitless and criminal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to stand up in defense of Wikileaks.

Assange and his supporters have put themselves smack in the way of the Pentagon war machine, and the generals and admirals don’t like it one bit. The military has now ordered all personnel that they cannot visit the Wikileaks website. We should remember, too, that it was only last March that Wikileaks revealed a U.S. counterintelligence plan to stop potential whistleblowers from sending documents or videos to them. The SECRET/NOFORN document argued for actions that could "damage or destroy this center of gravity [Wikileaks] and deter others considering similar actions [leaking] from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site."

Tom Hayden has posted a petition calling for the defense of Wikileaks. The title of the petition reads, "Defend WikiLeaks – End the Secret Wars."

Here’s the text, along with a list of prominent endorsers:

Background (Preamble):
We believe that WikiLeaks and those whistleblowers who declassify documents in a time of secret war should be welcomed as defenders of democracy, not demonized as criminals.

We support their First Amendment rights and welcome their continued disobedience in response to a long train of official deception.

Petition:
Our government and its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan have stretched the labels “national security” and “secrecy” beyond all reasonable definitions, because they wish to keep the realities of these wars hidden from the American people. “National security” is becoming the last refuge of scoundrels. Only consider –

- Our government prohibited the media from photographing the returning remains of our dead soldiers, until public pressure forced a change in policy;

- The Abu Ghraib torture scandal only came to public attention when photographs were leaked by an MP;

- The war in Pakistan is shrouded in secrecy because it violates that country’s sovereignty, results in the killing of innocent civilians, and is deeply unpopular;

- According to the new information from WikiLeaks, our Special Operations Task Force 373 operates outside the ISAF mandate to kidnap and kill targeted insurgents in a repeat of the discredited Phoenix program of the Vietnam era.

- Gen. Stanley McChrystal was forced to resign after a Rolling Stone reporter uncovered attitudes hostile to civilian authority;

- The same Rolling Stone article quoted a top official saying if the truth about these wars was known by the American people, they would be even more unpopular.

Given this context of cover-ups, whistleblowers have been a last resort in keeping democracy alive.

We understand the embarrassment of high officials when exposed, but it is Orwellian for the Pentagon to accuse the WikiLeaks of having “blood on their hands.” We are in the tenth year of a war which has claimed over 1,100 American lives, and where Afghan and Pakistan casualties are obscured deliberately. Many of America’s killed and wounded are listed as non-combat, minimizing the actual toll. WikiLeaks has been careful to delete information which might expose individuals to lethal risk. Those who really have blood on their hands are the authors of this war. We stand with those who expose them.

TOM HAYDEN
REV. GEORGE HUNSINGER, Princeton Theology Seminary
ED BACON, All Saints Episcopal
MEDEA BENJAMIN, Co-founder, CODEPINK
TIM CARPENTER, Progressive Democrats of America
REV. JIM CONN
ARIEL DORFMAN, Author
DANIEL ELLSBERG
PETER DALE SCOTT, Author
DONALD SHRIVER, President of Union Theological Seminary in NYC [ret.]
PEGGY SHRIVER, Assistant General Secretary, National Council of Churches [ret.]
JEAN STEIN, Editor/Author

You can sign the petition by clicking here.

A defense website has also been set up for Bradley Manning, and can be accessed here.