Tag: rendition

As Dick and George slithered out of DC, a number of lawsuits that were filed by victims of their criminal acts involving FISA, torture and rendition have now been inherited by President Obama.  Bush routinely dismissed these cases by claiming his version of state secrets privilege on unilateral steroids.  The megamedia have reported that the Obama Justice Dept. has indicated in pleadings that it will also invoke the state secrets privilege.  However, there is an alternative which could protect legitimate governmental prerogatives, a victim’s right of redress for harms perpetrated by government officials and society’s right for a transparent government that sustains the rule of law.  The alternative is for Obama to adopt the state secrets standards that govern criminal prosecutions as his guidelines for use in civil litigation until Congress adopts the State Secrets Protection Act that was defeated last year amidst Bush’s veto threats. These guidelines are consistent with Supreme Court precedent that has rarely been correctly utilized.

Crossposted from ePluribus Media.

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My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing…

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What happens when the checks and balances of our government are compromised, and justice is undermined?

What happens when the most criminally corrupt group of criminals rule with nearly complete control of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government for nearly two full Administrations, and the media fails to oppose, to challenge and to expose them?

Criminal malfeasance. Negligence. Dereliction of duty. Failure — multiple failures: failure to uphold the law, failure to act, failure to uphold the duty and responsibility of office.

Actively undermining the just due process of the law and Constitution. Actively interfering with the proper operation of government.

War crimes.

Eight years of crimes, unaccountable to anyone and protected by the entire Republican party — and Joe Lieberman.

The UK Guardian is reporting the United States is holding hundreds of detainees from its international wars on at least 17 “floating prisons” in different harbors around the world. The detainees are interrogated, and then many of them sent via extraordinary rendition to other countries for further interrogation and torture.

According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.

Ships that are understood to have held prisoners include the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu. A further 15 ships are suspected of having operated around the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, which has been used as a military base by the UK and the Americans.

Just a quickie, because this seems like news to me.

From the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

“For the first time, the CIA has acknowledged that extensive records exist relating to its use of enforced disappearances and secret prisons,” said Curt Goering, AIUSA senior deputy executive director. “Given what we already know about documents written by Bush administration officials trying to justify torture and other human rights crimes, one does not need a fertile imagination to conclude that  the real reason for refusing to disclose these documents has more to do with avoiding disclosure of criminal activity than national security.“

Ben Griffin, the British ex-Special Air Service (SAS) soldier who resigned over the illegalities involved in the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, and who has spoken out publicly on British troop collaboration with U.S. forces in these activities, was served with a UK high court gag order. According to yesterday’s Guardian:

Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law.

At least hundreds of Afghans and Iraqis have been swept up in the program run with British and American special forces, and sent to prisons in countries often thousands of miles away to face torture and indefinite detention. Other European countries, including most recently Romania and Poland, have been implicated in the rendition program.

Crossposted at Invictus

Blogger Deep Harm over at Daily Kos did a nice job of writing up a review on Mark Benjamin’s recent article at Salon.com, Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”. Benjamin’s article details the case of CIA Yemeni prisoner (now released), Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.

Mr. Bashmilah was held for 19 months in a succession of prisons, trapped inside the CIA’s secret worldwide gulag. Now the one-time CIA torture victim has filed a declaration as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, and implicated in secret CIA rendition flights.

According to Mark Benjamin, Mr. Bashmilah — a businessman who had travelled from his home in Indonesia to Jordan to help arrange a surgery for his mother — was subjected to extreme psychological torture and physical maltreatment, first by the Jordanians:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A German citizen who alleges the CIA mistakenly kidnapped, detained and interrogated him was denied a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court when the justices rejected his appeal for review Tuesday.

The German citizen is Khaled el-Masri, who was kidnapped in Macedonia on New Year’s Eve, 2003 by U.S. government agents and taken via secret “extraordinary rendition” to a prison in Afghanistan. El-Masri was beaten, humjiliated and drugged. When the U.S. could get nothing out of him, or recognized it was a case of mistaken identity — we don’t know because it’s a “state secret” — he was unceremoniously flown and dumped in a forest in Albania.