Land of Perpetual War: US Troop Levels in Afghanistan to Double from Last Year

According to a report by Paul Tait of Reuters, published at Truthout.org, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have expanded to near double the level of last year, with plans to expand to 68,000 troops or more by December, up from 32,000 at the end of 2008. Currently, with both U.S. and other allied troops, there are over 100,000 soldiers facing what is reported to be a more "aggressive" and "brazen" Taliban force.

Forty-one U.S. troops died in Afghanistan in the past month; 71 allied troops overall. The article gave no figures for Afghan deaths.

Commander of U.S. forces, U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal -- formerly head of Special Forces for the Pentagon, during a time when Special Operations units were implicated in torture in Iraq -- "said the resurgent Taliban have forced a change of tactics on foreign forces and warned that record casualty figures would remain high for some months" (emphasis added). No one asks why the Taliban should be stronger now, almost eight years after 9/11 -- well, no one in the mainstream U.S. press.

The war in Afghanistan continues to escalate, even as no one is really sure what the war is about anymore, or what endgame is envisioned. But things are getting clearer and clearer to Afghans themselves. Here's some testimony from Malalai Joya, from Afghanistan, published in the Guardian UK (H/T Chris Floyd):

In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie....

Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.

You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.

For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the "democracy" backed by Nato troops....

So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire.... Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists....

This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that "more loss of life [is] inevitable" in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the "national interests" of both the US and the UK.

I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

Author Tariq Ali reports in the London Review of Books (again, H/T Chris Floyd):

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’....

In May this year, Graham Fuller, a former CIA station chief in Kabul, published an assessment of the crisis in the region in the Huffington Post. Ignored by the White House.... not only did Fuller say that Obama was ‘pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush’ and that military force would not win the day, he also explained... that the Taliban are all ethnic Pashtuns, that the Pashtuns ‘are among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalised and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader’ and ‘in the end probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist’. ‘It is a fantasy,’ he said, ‘to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.’ And I don’t imagine he is the only retired CIA man to refer back to the days when Cambodia was invaded ‘to save Vietnam’....

You don't have to be a genius to see the Democrats, led by Barack Obama, sauntering down the same path as Jack Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson -- or Richard Nixon, for that matter -- and blundering into Asian war, led by the nose by the war profiteers, by the military brass and intelligence agencies that stand to get tons of money and promotions fighting the wars of their generation, oblivious that this grasping after money and glory could have some social cost. Just ask the generals of the former Red Army, or the Wehrmacht, for that matter, about the price of such empire-building, going all the way back to Ipsus and Marathon.

What's worst is the paralysis of much of the liberal left, who cannot bring themselves to call up the old antiwar chants hauled out previously in the early Bush years. Over time, the antiwar movement became subordinated to electing Democrats, and forgot how to do anything else. Now the Democrats are in power and they are pushing the war, and what's a good antiwar progressive to do but grit his or her teeth and hope things will change.

Well, that's bullshit, and if those who call themselves progressive can't bestir themselves to see they must oppose this militarist, imperialist aggression, whose legacy is only death, hatred, and more cycles of violence and war, then they deserve their ignominious fate, which is irrelevancy and a slow descent into reactionary politics, or exit from politics altogether.

Update:
The following information adds corroboration to what I am saying in the diary, and comments not only on the war cost issue, but puts into perspective the military strategy pursued by the U.S. in this new, more deadly phase of fighting in Afghanistan. Jim Maceda, who has reported from Afghanistan since 2001, had this to say, reporting from NBC news (emphasis added, H/T chrississippi in Daily Kos comments):

But [McChrystal's] plan to put troops into heavily populated areas isn't a new strategy. Thousands of Canadian forces have been doing just that for several years in Kandahar, trying to "separate the enemy from the people," with little success.

What is new (that word again) is the commitment of large numbers of U.S. forces to reinforce those Canadian units in the South.

U.S. military experts, quoted in Sunday's Washington Post, said that these security and political commitments will last at least a decade and potentially cost the U.S. more than the war in Iraq.

Mir agreed with the time line. "It could take another decade," he said, "to convince the Taliban that fighting is useless."

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New Video: "Tortured Logic"

The ACLU is continuing to press its Accountability for Torture campaign. They've released a remarkable video, featuring Oliver Stone, Patricia Perry, actors Rosie Perez, Noah Emmerich, John Doman and Reg E. Cathey, and musical composer Philip Glass, among others, reading directly from a memo authored by Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration. The memo was released in April as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

As Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake noted today:

The torture memos produced by the OLC were never meant to be seen and parsed by the public.

These memos used incredibly tortured logic to justify acts which, in prior wars, the United States prosecuted as war crimes.

The effect of watching the video is remarkable, as we hear out loud the monstrous legal justifications for the unjustifiable. ACLU has set up an action page, so that you can forward the video to Attorney General Eric Holder, and immediately send a letter asking him to initiate a "full and comprehensive investigation into Bush administration torture policies." The letter requests Holder "appoint an independent prosecutor with the authority to follow the evidence of torture wherever it leads."

For more information visit:
http://www.aclu.org/torturedlogic
http://www.aclu.org/torture

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Military Attorney Testifies "No Acceptable Basis" for Military Commissions Proposal

Andy Worthington has published excerpts from Lt. Col. David Frakt’s July 30 testimony (PDF) to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. I'm reposting the concluding remarks of Lt. Col. Frakt to the committee, but the entire article and testimony are definitely worth reading. (H/T to Jason Leopold, who reposted Worthington's article at The Public Record.)

The question this committee, and the rest of Congress, must consider is whether there is any point in continuing with military commissions. As President Obama has stated, military commissions are a legitimate forum in which to try offenses under the law of war, but this begs the question of whether there are any law of war offenses to try.

If one were to review the charges brought against all of the approximately 25 defendants charged in the military commissions, as I have, one would conclude that 99% of them do not involve traditionally recognized war crimes. Rather, virtually all the defendants are charged with non-war crimes, primarily criminal conspiracy, terrorism and material support to terrorism, all of which are properly crimes under federal criminal law, but not the laws of war.

In fact, in my estimation, there has been only one legitimate war crime charged against any Guantánamo detainee, the charge of perfidy against Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri for his alleged role in the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000.

But even though perfidy is a traditional offense under the law of war, convicting Mr. al-Nashiri of this offense requires accepting the dubious legal fiction that the United States was at war with al-Qaeda nearly a year before 9/11, for the law of war only applies during a war.

In fact, most of the offenses with which the so-called “high-value detainees” are charged relate to events which occurred on or before 9/11, when the US was not involved in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda. Perhaps more to the point, Mr. al-Nashiri was also charged with several other non-law of war offenses arising out of the same conduct, including multiple charges carrying the death penalty, making the charge of perfidy redundant […].

If there are no real war crimes to prosecute, are there any good reasons to continue with military commissions? The Bush administration’s motive for creating military commissions was to establish a forum in which American standards of due process did not apply and convictions could be obtained for terrorism crimes (not law of war offenses) under summary procedures using evidence which would not be admissible in a regular court of law.

The Obama administration has now rightly concluded that Constitutional due process standards should apply to military commissions, and that normal rules of evidence should apply. Modifying the military commissions to comport with due process and the rule of law will mean eliminating the very reason for their existence. Partially amending them with some minor cosmetic changes will result only in many more years of protracted litigation.

Among the over two hundred detainees still at Guantánamo, there are perhaps a few dozen who have committed serious offenses. I have yet to hear any compelling reason why any of these men could not be prosecuted under existing law in Federal Court. As the recent report by Human Rights First conclusively demonstrates, the federal courts are open, and have a long track record of successful prosecutions of terrorism cases. Military commissions have not proven to be faster, more efficient or less costly than the alternative.

The logistical difficulties in trying cases in Guantánamo have proven to be incredibly vexing. With Guantánamo slated to be closed in the next six months, the military commissions will have to be relocated and a whole new infrastructure created to support the commissions. This could further delay the commissions for months or even years.

Military lawyers, unlike federal prosecutors and federal public defenders, have no special expertise in prosecuting or defending complex international terrorist conspiracies. The entire military commissions experiment has been a massive drain on DoD resources and personnel at a time when the military can least afford it.

The only other reason I have heard advanced for the use of military commissions is the belief that a person who could not be successfully prosecuted in Federal Court because of evidentiary problems might be successfully prosecuted in a military commission. Those who make this argument are essentially conceding that military commissions do not and should not provide the same due process as a regularly constituted American court.

The desire to achieve convictions at all costs is simply not an acceptable basis for the creation of an alternative legal system. The reason that the military commissions failed — indeed, the primary mistake of the entire “War on Terror” — was the pervasive abandonment of the law by the prior administration.

We must not repeat the mistakes of the past and continue to cut corners. We must remember that this war is ultimately a war about ideas and values. True American values guarantee justice and fairness for all, even for the vilified and unpopular. If there are terrorists and war criminals to be tried, let’s do it the old-fashioned way, in a fair fight in a real court with untainted evidence. America is better than the last eight years. It is time to prove it to the world, and to ourselves.

David Frakt was the military attorney for Guantanamo prisoners Mohamed Jawad and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul. He is also a law professor at Western State University College of Law and a Lieutenant Colonel in the USAF Reserves.

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"Will you confess now?"

Father Beron had been adjoined to the commission by Guzman Bento expressly for the purpose that his enlightened zeal should assist them in their labours. Dr. Monygham could by no manner of means forget the zeal of Father Beron, or his face, or the pitiless, monotonous voice in which he pronounced the words, "Will you confess now?"

This memory did not make him shudder, but it had made of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of common decencies, something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor. But not all respectable people would have had the necessary delicacy of sentiment to understand with what trouble of mind and accuracy of vision Dr. Monygham, medical officer of the San Tome mine, remembered Father Beron, army chaplain, and once a secretary of a military commission. After all these years Dr. Monygham, in his rooms at the end of the hospital building in the San Tome gorge, remembered Father Beron as distinctly as ever. He remembered that priest at night, sometimes, in his sleep. On such nights the doctor waited for daylight with a candle lighted, and walking the whole length of his rooms to and fro, staring down at his bare feet, his arms hugging his sides tightly. He would dream of Father Beron sitting at the end of a long black table, behind which, in a row, appeared the heads, shoulders, and epaulettes of the military members, nibbling the feather of a quill pen, and listening with weary and impatient scorn to the protestations of some prisoner calling heaven to witness of his innocence, till he burst out, "What's the use of wasting time over that miserable nonsense! Let me take him outside for a while." And Father Beron would go outside after the clanking prisoner, led away between two soldiers. Such interludes happened on many days, many times, with many prisoners. When the prisoner returned he was ready to make a full confession, Father Beron would declare, leaning forward with that dull, surfeited look which can be seen in the eyes of gluttonous persons after a heavy meal.

The priest's inquisitorial instincts suffered but little from the want of classical apparatus of the Inquisition. At no time of the world's history have men been at a loss how to inflict mental and bodily anguish upon their fellow-creatures. This aptitude came to them in the growing complexity of their passions and the early refinement of their ingenuity. But it may safely be said that primeval man did not go to the trouble of inventing tortures. He was indolent and pure of heart. He brained his neighbour ferociously with a stone axe from necessity and without malice. The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod; a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture. The doctor had been a very stubborn prisoner, and, as a natural consequence of that "bad disposition" (so Father Beron called it), his subjugation had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks were so pronounced. His confessions, when they came at last, were very complete, too. Sometimes on the nights when he walked the floor, he wondered, grinding his teeth with shame and rage, at the fertility of his imagination when stimulated by a sort of pain which makes truth, honour, selfrespect, and life itself matters of little moment.

And he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking anybody in the face.

-- from Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904)

APA Under Fire: UN Special Rapporteur Calls for Removal of Psychologists from Torture Sites

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The 2009 convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) opens in Toronto Today, August 7. Behind all the busy poster events, interest group parties, speeches and academic get-togethers, the fine wheels of bureaucratic resistance are grinding slowly and inexorably.

Anyone who has ever seen their dream killed by administrative indifference and authoritarian obstructionism will sympathize with the betrayal felt by the leaders of a referendum drive inside the APA to condemn psychologist participation in prison sites that are in violation of international law, say, by torturing their prisoners, or holding them in indefinite detention.

The referendum passed last summer by nearly 60% of voting members. Subsequently, APA revved up their bureaucratic resolution-killing machinery. [In an important update, added at the end of this article, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture has weighed in on the APA referendum issue.]

This was not the first time APA leadership has moved against an anti-torture measure. At the 2007 convention, for instance, they pulled some tricky maneuvers at the Council of Representatives meeting and ensured a motion on banning psychologists from torture interrogations would never come to a vote. In response, APA anti-torture activists discovered a never-before-used rule allowing for a member-initiated referendum. They leaped over all the barriers put in their way, and as noted above, by late last summer had passed the anti-torture, pro-human rights measure against the protests of military psychologists and others who worried (they claimed) that psychologists would thereby lose jobs in non-military settings, such as jails and nursing homes.

When Healers Harm: Rights Groups Call for Canadian Investigation of Guantanamo Psychologist

Given the failure of the U.S. government to pursue legal accountability for acts of torture and abuse committed by military and other government personnel, including contractors, it has fallen to citizens to pursue by civil means a redress of these crimes. Psychologist Trudy Bond has been one of those brave individuals who has matched time and dedication with principles.

In April, 2007, Dr. Bond filed an ethics complaint with the American Psychological Association (APA) against psychologist John Leso, who had been implicated in the torture of Guantanamo prisoner 063, Mohammed al-Qahtani. She recently wrote an article for ACLU Blog of Rights that detailed her experiences with APA's delaying tactics in following up on her complaint, in effect, protecting Leso from examination of the charges.

A recent article on the 2001 referral to APA of ethics charges against former Navy Chief Forensic Psychologist Michael Gelles was recently published at Truthout. Both Gelles and Larry James (see below) were members of the APA's Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force, which in 2005 ignored evidence of psychologist complicity in the torture then taking place at the behest of the Bush administration, and rubber-stamped participation of psychologists with the lie that such participation made things safer for prisoners, when in fact military and intelligence psychologists and contractors were deeply implicated in the torture itself.

On February 29, 2008, Bond filed a complaint against psychologist, Colonel Larry James, with the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists for his part in the torture and abuse that occurred at Guantanamo during his tenure there.

Dr. James is a major figure at APA. As the information in the press release below explains, he is President of the APA's Division for Military Psychology. At the APA's 2007 convention, he made an impassioned speech against a resolution that would remove psychologists from Guantanamo and other sites where human rights were being abridged. He has been a major spokesman for the APA and military's position that psychologists should be part of national security interrogations. In that role, at Guantanamo, Dr. James was a senior leader of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT).

James claims that he stopped the abuse at Guantanamo when he arrived in January 2003. But a recent release of documents, obtained by ACLU, show that torture and abuse continued at Guantanamo during and after the period James was there. For his part, James denies any involvement in torture or abuse.

The APA is about to open its yearly convention, held in Toronto, Ontario this year. Fights are certain to emerge over ongoing obstructionist behavior by the APA bureaucracy, which has held up action on implementing a member-passed referendum against psychologist participation in sites like Guantanamo, as well as delaying for the fourth year straight action on changing the language of a controversial section of its ethics code that well-known attorney and Harper's columnist Scott Horton called the Nuremberg Defense, after the Nazis' infamous apologia for their crimes, in that they were simply following orders.

I'll have more to say about the referendum and the ethics code in a future article. Of imminent importance is the call that has just gone out from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) for the Canadian government to take advantage of the appearance of Col. James at the Toronto APA convention and investigate the military psychologist for his role in torture. Their press release, along with copious links to corroborative and supplementary material, follows:

Rights Groups Call on Canada to Investigate Guantanamo Psychologist for Possible Torture Complicity

Legal Battle Continues Against Louisiana Psychology Board for Refusing to Investigate Professional Misconduct Allegations Against Dr. Larry James

CONTACT: press@ccrjustice.org

August 6, 2009, Ottawa and New York - Human rights organizations are calling on the Canadian government to investigate retired U.S. Army colonel and psychologist Dr. Larry C. James, a former high-ranking advisor on interrogations for the U.S. military in Guantanamo Bay. According to his own statements, Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention at the base. Publicly-available information suggests that while Dr. James was at Guantanamo in the spring of 2003, abuse in interrogations was widespread and cruel treatment was official policy.

Responding to reports that he would travel to Toronto this week, the Canadian Centre for International Justice (CCIJ) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) sent a joint letter yesterday to Canada’s Minister of Public Safety requesting an investigation into whether Dr. James had a role in war crimes or torture at Guantanamo Bay in 2003. Dr. James, who currently serves as the President of the American Psychological Association’s Division 19 for Military Psychology is expected to attend the APA’s Convention beginning today in Toronto.

Also today, a motion for appeal was filed in Louisiana, in the case Dr. Trudy Bond v. Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists (LSBEP). In compliance with her ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, Dr. Bond, a Toledo-based psychologist, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the LSBEP, the agency that issued and now regulates his psychology license. Dr. Bond alleged that Dr. James breached professional ethics by violating psychologists’ duties to obtain informed consent, to protect confidential information and to do no harm. As Chief Psychologist of the Joint Intelligence Group and a senior member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) at Guantanamo, Dr. James had access to the confidential medical records of people he was charged with exploiting for intelligence. Reports issued after his departure alleged that BSCTs used information from patients’ records to help identify physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees for the purposes of interrogation. Dr. James denies that claim.

Following the LSBEP’s summary dismissal of the complaint without investigation, Dr. Bond filed suit against the LSBEP in Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District Court, which dismissed her case last month. Today’s motion signals Dr. Bond’s intention to continue her pursuit of accountability at the state appellate level.

Allegations of abuse during Dr. James’ January to May 2003 deployment include beatings, religious and sexual humiliation, rape threats and painful body positions. Canadian citizen Omar Khadr is one of the prisoners who has alleged brutal treatment in the spring of 2003 when he was only 16 years old.

Based on this information, the CCIJ and CCR called on the Canadian government to investigate whether action should be taken against Dr. James or other attendees of the APA Convention who may have been involved in abuse of detainees.

The organizations have appealed to Canadian officials because the United States government, despite the change in administration, has failed to take proper steps to investigate people in positions of military, intelligence and political leadership who may have been involved in crimes related to the torture and abuse of detainees.

Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act gives the federal government power to prosecute war crimes regardless of where they were committed if the alleged perpetrator is later present in Canada. A similar provision of the Criminal Code applies to crimes of torture.

Said CCIJ Legal Coordinator Matt Eisenbrandt, “Any time there is credible information that someone on Canadian soil may have been involved in torture or war crimes, the Canadian government should investigate. The fact that a Canadian citizen says he was abused during the time Dr. James was at Guantanamo only makes the case stronger for the government to conduct a full inquiry into the evidence.”

Said CCR Fellow Deborah Popowski, “”The Louisiana Board should investigate Larry James to find out whether he hurt people using the license it issued him to heal. No one can afford to ignore evidence that a psychologist may have been complicit in torture. When politics trump the rule of law, everyone suffers: survivors of torture, the health profession, and all patients.”

James was also stationed in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 and returned to Guantanamo in 2007.

For more information on the involvement of health professionals in torture and abuse visit the Center for Constitutional Rights website www.whenhealersharm.org.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

The Canadian Centre for International Justice/Centre Canadian pour la justice internationale (www.ccij.ca) is a charitable organization that works with survivors of genocide, torture and other atrocities to seek redress and bring perpetrators to justice.

Larry James once famously said that when it comes to his belief about how one operates in an intelligence setting, "... if I don't have a specific need to know about something, I don't want to know about it. I don't ask about it." Well, the people have a right to know about the torture and other crimes that have occurred by their government. And we will know, one way or the other, and thanks to individuals like Dr. Trudy Bond, and organizations like CCR, CCIJ, and ACLU, the torturers will be brought to justice.

Resources (courtesy of CCR):

The CCR/CCIJ letter to the Canadian Department of Public Safety

Cover letter of the CCR/CCIJ letter sent to James H. Bray, President of the American Psychological Association

Media backgrounder on Larry James and the Bond vs. Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists case

List of sources on Larry James, also available as a single PDF document

Court documents on Bond vs. Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists

Timeline of events: Bond vs. LSBEP

Meeting in Maryland: "Holding Architects of Illegal Wars and War Crimes Accountable"

From blogger David Swanson, this announcement:

Holding Architects of Illegal Wars and War Crimes Accountable

At the Veterans for Peace National Convention

Friday, August 7th, 8:30 - 10 a.m.
In the Student Union, University of Maryland
College Park, Maryland

SPEAKERS:

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union by Seven Stories Press.

Ron Fisher, Captain US Navy (retired), Acting Chair VFP Prosecute War Criminals Working Group and nuclear submariner and part time prosecutor for court-martials while in the Navy.

Barbara Olshansky, Visiting Associate Professor of Human Rights, Stanford Law School.

Marjorie Cohn, President, National Lawyers Guild and author of Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent

Andrew Kreig, Attorney, author and journalist;

Isidoro Rodriguez, Attorney and Marine Veteran Saigon Class of '65.

Please join us. For more info contact Ron Fisher DFPA@aol.com 703-725-7849

Scahill Reports: "Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder"

Jeremy Scahill reports in The Nation that two sworn affadavits have been filed in a federal suit at Eastern District of Virginia accusing Erik Prince, owner and founder of the notorious contracting agency, Blackwater, of murder, weapons trafficking, destruction of evidence, and basically organizing his own holy war against Muslims in the Middle East.

There is so much that is fantastic and shocking in the article that I won't attempt to summarize it here, but strongly encourage following the link to read the entire thing. The article notes carefully that The Nation "cannot independently verify the identities of the two individuals, their roles at Blackwater or what motivated them to provide sworn testimony in these civil cases." Apparently these sources, who remain anonymous for presumed fear for their lives, have also cooperated with federal officials persuing criminal charges against the well-linked Blackwater company. (Its vice chairman since 2005 is former Director of Operations at the CIA, and in 1999 Counter-Terrorism Cener Director, J. Cofer Black.)

Excerpted below is a section of the article that describes how Blackwater ignored warnings from mental health professionals that they were sending mentally unbalanced agents into the field. Even more, when there were protests, the whistleblowers were suppressed. A member of the intelligence community confirmed to me that the contractor issue had been a matter of some dissent within the IC, and that it was known that unfit contractors, many of them former Special Forces personnel, were deployed by companies such as Blackwater, but also by foreign security companies.

Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, "were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department." Doe #2 adds that "Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis." Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy "unfit men" and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were "the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to 'kill ragheads' or achieve 'kills' or 'body counts,'" as well as "excessive drinking" and "steroid use." However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, "Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to 'stop costing the company money.'"

Doe #2 also says Prince "repeatedly ignored the assessments done by mental health professionals, and instead terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men." He says Prince and then-company president Gary Jackson "hid from Department of State the fact that they were deploying men to Iraq over the objections of mental health professionals and security professionals in the field," saying they "knew the men being deployed were not suitable candidates for carrying lethal weaponry, but did not care because deployments meant more money."

Doe #1 states that "Blackwater knew that certain of its personnel intentionally used excessive and unjustified deadly force, and in some instances used unauthorized weapons, to kill or seriously injure innocent Iraqi civilians." He concludes, "Blackwater did nothing to stop this misconduct." Doe #1 states that he "personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using unnecessary, excessive and unjustified deadly force." He then cites several specific examples of Blackwater personnel firing at civilians, killing or "seriously" wounding them, and then failing to report the incidents to the State Department.

Bravo to Jeremy Scahill and The Nation for breaking this important story. A list of security contracting companies doing business in Iraq as of 2004 can be accessed at this page, posted by Globalsecurity.org.

Candace Gorman on "My Experiences Representing a Guantanamo Detainee"

Attorney H. Candace Gorman, who represents Guantanamo prisoner Abdul Al-Ghizzawi, as well as another Guantanamo prisoner, both pro bono, has had an essay published in the American Bar Association's Litigation Magazine. What follows is a brief selection from the article, which the ABA let her post online.

Shortly after receiving what I thought was the name of my client, I filed a petition for habeas corpus on his behalf. I had to clear a daunting series of bureaucratic hurdles before I was allowed to meet with him. To see Guantánamo detainees, their attorneys must first receive a security clearance and then have a protective order entered by the court that outlines the rules for habeas counsel. I applied for my security clearance shortly after filing the habeas petition. As I was waiting for my clearance, I received news that my client’s health was deteriorating, and I filed an emergency motion to have the protective order entered so that an attorney who already had clearance could visit with my client and determine his condition. The DOJ opposed the order, and the judge subsequently denied my motion, finding that I did not show anything “concrete” or any “impending irreparable harm” to warrant the entry of the protective order at that time. The judge did not explain exactly how I was to show something concrete when I was not allowed to communicate with my client.

Ms. Gorman notes that al-Ghizzawi, who had been very ill with hepatitis and languishing in solitary for what seemed like forever, is now out of isolation, and while still quite ill, is doing better.

Read her piece in order to get a good picture of how dedicated attorneys, standing for the rule of law, struggled to bring legal representation to prisoners in a U.S. prison.