The Talking Dog looks back at our year.....

 

No one says it better than the dog...

...... What does this mean? Well, it ties in nicely with the overall theme of this blog, to wit, trying to fill some of the space left open by the mainstream media on some of the bigger issues of the day, one of which is the national security state and its war on terror, especially “Guantanamo Bay.” Obviously, one of the biggest sources of mainstream media information ever to come out about GTMO was the Wikileaks treasure trove of GTMO data. Among the curators of this data was our good friend Andy, (who testified at Assange’s hearing in London). Andy has been at the forefront of journalists throughout the world on matters GTMO, despite being an independent, not permanently attached to any major news organization. Although I am nowhere even near Andy’s league in terms of my own journalism, I have still compiled over 70 interviews on the subject (referenced here). While there are “mainstream journos” on the beat (Carol Rosenberg, now at the N.Y. Times being the first that comes to mind), for the most part, I have to say that not just GTMO, but treatment of our military’s prisoners everywhere (CIA black sites, Bagram/Kandahar, GTMO, etc.), or the drone wars, or frankly, just how wide the bloody war on terror actually is, has received a strangely limited amount of coverage from the main stream media, which as I note, has created some openings for “independents.”

Read the rest here.

Musical Interlude

 In memory: John Lennon murdered 12/8/1980

THE OTHER BIG LIE --- updated

 Lindsay Graham is so tiring. He gets on the same bandwagon every time Guantanamo gets mentioned. The return to the battlefield. For those not paying attention my great senator Dick Durbin has put language in the latest defense authorization bill to close Guantanamo. Read his speech here.  The senate is discussing it now.  watch here. (at least watch the first few minutes to see the powerful video).

I did several studies of this particular issue over the years. The numbers of who went back to the battlefield were all over the place- one day 100 the next day 7 - etc. And then what qualifies as a battlefield is of course interesting - Seems writing articles criticizing the US is a battlefield.

Here is one of those articles.

and here is another.

I guess I am on the battlefield too!

THE FOREVER PRISONER

 

“THE PLACE WHERE THE RULE OF LAW GOES TO DIE”: ALEX GIBNEY’S NEW DOCUMENTARY ILLUMINATES THE PLIGHT OF GUANTANAMO’S FOREVER PRISONER

DECEMBER 6TH ON HBO

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian....

 After dithering for weeks, the Justice Department has indicted Trump's mate Steve Bannon for contempt of congress. Some had worried that the ever-cautious attorney general, Merrick Garland, would delay charging Bannon, or not charge him at all; after all, in October, Garland let the five-year statute of limitations run against Michael Cohen's unindicted co-conspirator in the Stormy Daniels hush-money payments: "Individual-l", one Donald Trump.

It was another Houdini escape for El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago. The payments, clear violations of election law, were under investigation by the Federal Election Commission as Trump's term ended, but holdover Republican appointees on the evenly-divided commission engineered a case closure on technical grounds.

If scandal and disgrace fail to sink Trump or his Republican caucus, there's still a faint prospect that the  congressional insurrectionists could be expelled, as they were in 1866, and Trump himself could be disqualified (or "lustrated") from office. 

It's essential that Trump be stopped from standing again, as all the indications are that he's planning a coup in 2024; that's why so much depends upon the work of the House Select Committee that is currently investigating the unsuccessful 2020 coup attempt. 

Even as the committee was sitting, shocking new evidence emerged of Trump's efforts to cling to power, e.g, the Eastman memos, and now, the Ellis and McEntee memos. Jenna Ellis was a Trump campaign lawyer; Johnny McEntee was the 29-year-old White House personnel director who forced out Defence Secretary Mark Esper for (among other things) resisting Trump's efforts to involve the Pentagon in his Putsch.

Even with the overwhelming evidence of wrongdoing, there's little time left for house Democrats to deal with Trump. The recent Virginia state elections exposed the continuing credulity of Republican voters, a softening of Democrat support and most worryingly, 2020 Biden voters with a short memory.

In November 2022 there will be congressional elections. Inflamed by the ceaseless Stolen-Election lie and powered by gerrymanders that would make Bjelke-Petersen blush, Trump's Fox-fed Lumpenproletariat will regain control of the House of Reps and put an end to its inquiries into Trump's malefactions. 

Yet there's no lack of ongoing litigation (here's the latest list), with a fresh grand jury inquiry into the Trump Organisation. Trump remains in personal legal peril with the January 6th jailings: his aiding and abetting the Capitol occupation would be one of the easiest cases for prosecutors to prove. As well, there's the incriminating Hatch Act violations of underlings in which he's implicated.

READ THE REST HERE....

When the FBI is claiming to be the good guy...

ALWAYS QUESTION IT.... GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In the torturous history of the U.S. government’s black sites, the F.B.I. has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy “clean teams” untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that F.B.I. narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine F.B.I. agents to temporarily become C.I.A. operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners. The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are currently examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captors’ wishes. At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at Guantánamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each man’s account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy. READ THE REST HERE....

Musical Interlude

Majid Khan (continued)

I have been thinking about this alot. About the 7 members of the military jury who asked for clemency for Mr. Khan. About the one hold out. The one holdout who probably was the reason why the sentence for Mr. Khan was 26 years instead of the minimum 25 years. The holdout who could not even say that the minimum is good enough. Maybe I have been focusing too much on that one hold out. The asshole as I have been frequently describing him or her. Fortunately there are others who can get past the one hold out. Fellow Gitmo attorney Joe Margulies is one of those who looked at the more positive side of this. Call it a hope for humanity. "And that is what seven senior U.S. military officials on Majid Khan’s panel told the United States government. They didn’t use my language. They used the language of constitutional betrayal. Due process. Disregard. Affront. Justice. They used the language of national values, damning the abuse heaped upon Khan as “closer to [the] torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history” and “a stain on the moral fiber of America.” But most of all, they used the language of shared humanity, insisting that Khan is, and has always been, within the circle. He was “a young man reeling from the loss of his mother,” “a vulnerable target” for recruitment no different from “many others.” “He is remorseful and not a threat for future extremism.” In short, he has a past that brought him to this day and a will that can take him elsewhere. He is human. He is one of us. Seven of eight panel members, each writing in their own hand, joined the letter. The panel recommended clemency for Khan. In the law, clemency pairs with mercy and is extended in those cases that “merit an exemption from punishment.” More than eighteen years ago, Khan begged his torturers for the same mercy. They ignored him. In a courtroom in Cuba, his plea was finally heard. May we all listen." Thank you Joe. Read the rest of Joe's post here.

Sentencing of Majid Khan

Sorry -- some technical problems with the story about the sentencing of Mr. Khan. I will try to fix and get it up in the next day or so...patience.

The Talking Dog on Majid Khan's "trial"

 As I said in my post yesterday I will have more reflection on this tomorrow as I process and finish a couple of other things. However, the Talking Dog has already processed and here is what he has to say.

This is just some of the torture my country inflicted on men at Guantanamo...

 Again from the New York Time's Carol Rosenberg:

Mr. Khan gained attention with the release of a 2014 study of the C.I.A. program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that said, after he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a purée of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.

The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses.”

“They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water,” he said, adding that he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.

He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.

The intelligence agency declined Thursday to comment on the descriptions offered in the hearing but noted that its detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Mr. Khan also said he received beatings while nude and spent long stretches in the dark and in chains — at times shackled to a wall and crouching “like a dog,” or with his arms extended high above his head and chained to a beam inside his cell.

Before the C.I.A. moved him from one prison to another, he said, a medic inserted an enema and then put him in a diaper held in place by duct tape so he would not need a bathroom break during flights. For one brutal transfer, he said, guards used duct tape to blindfold him. Once in his new cell, he removed the diaper but found peeling the tape off his face “especially painful because it ripped off my eyebrows and eyelashes.”

read the rest here.

musical interlude

 

Happy Birthday Talking Dog....

 a mere child!

Some of us use our birthdays to do a real reflection on our lives and our world. I don't count myself in that group but I am so very grateful for my dear friend "the dog" to remind us what is really happening and what is really important.

From the dog's birthday of the plague year post (2nd edition):

Meanwhile, stuff is happening! In hobby-horse news, a GTMO detainee has prevailed in a habeas case for the first time in over a decade. This comes just as the same detainee (and another) were approved for transfer, bringing to 13 the number of men officially held at GTMO even though our government says its OK to release them. Cause for optimism, in that front. Literally 1/3 of the men at GTMO are now “cleared for release” (actual release… pending?), with 12 “eligible for [kangaroo court] military commissions” and 14 still in the “forever prisoner” category. What does this mean in the great scheme of things? Well I’ll tell you.

If we can somehow get it together and clear out and close down GTMO via some mechanism other than the natural death of the last prisoner, it will mean that our government (whichever party pulls it off) has managed to overcome the almost infinite structural obstacles to accomplishing anything constructive, particularly when there are bullshit media elements as well as presumably the Christianist elements of the military industrial complex who are standing in the way. And aside from it being morally and legally necessary to close down one of our premier symbols of “executive overreach” (by which I mean war crimes, torture, racism, etc.), it will at least take away a major “what about your red Indians” talking point by the world’s dictators, who rightly tell us to fuck off when we dare criticize their human rights records.

Read the whole bday post here.

Read the whole thing!!

Habeas WIN (not my client!) UPDATED

 Federal Judge Mehta has granted the great writ in Asadullah Haroon Gul’s case. All of the details are still classified and we will wait with baited breath to see whether Biden will do the right thing and honor the Court's decision and set Mr. Gul free -- or do as his predecessors have done and fight and appeal. But for now it is a win and for that we are all happy. One of the snags in Mr. GUl's case is that he is Afghani and it is uncertain how he could be returned to his homeland. You can read more about Mr. Gul and his case here.

And for more discussion on what this case means and what could come next read this.

From Roger Fitch and our friends down under at Justinian

 ≈   ≈   ≈

Blowback from the "war on terror" of the early 2000s still affects the supreme court docket: one of the first cases argued in the court's new October term was that of Abu Zubaydah, the long-suffering, much-abused Guantánamo internee. 

Zubaydah's detention and mistreatment was one of the earliest emanations of that time when George Bush, aided and abetted by congress, effectively blew up the rule of law, and consequently, federal criminal (and sometimes civil) justice: not just through torture, but in the torture cover-up, repeatedly claiming, in shameless bad faith, the so-called state secrets privilege. 

The Zubaydah case, now in the supreme court, directly confronts the question, how does the privilege apply when the "state secret" - the fact that Poland assisted CIA torture - is not a secret at all. 

The Poles themselves have already acknowledged their participation and even paid damages to Zubaydah, in the European Court of Human Rights; however, they haven't gone so far as to give tours of the former US torture facilities, as the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan.

An amicus brief filed by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism demonstrates why the case does not in fact involve state secrets, more here, oral argument here. 

Although the justices appeared unlikely to rule in Zubaydah's favour on the state secrets issue, they seemed genuinely astonished that the prisoner's habeas petition had not been acted upon since 2008. 

The court will also hear another "state secrets" case this term, involving FBI surveillance.

Nine important cases are already on the supreme court's docket for the October term, including a case in which, surprisingly, public defenders joined the enemy gun camp in opposing New York's concealed-gun regulations. 

Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky has a preview of the supreme court's term, and a new book warning of the right-wing court's ominous agenda; the Nation's Ely Mystal, a Harvard lawyer, also paints a bleak view of the likely regressive direction of the court's new conservative supermajority. 

Berkeley's Chemerinsky: court's ominous agenda

In its recent recess orders overturning Biden administration executive orders, so at variance with the court's deferential treatment of Trump's orders, the majority seems to be siding with Republican party policy, issuing transparently partisan decisions; so far, the court has favoured Trump executive orders 28 times compared to zero for Biden. More here. 

If these shadow docket decisions are any indication, Donald Trump's ideological judicial appointments portend a partisan court that will be anti-progressive, anti-regulatory and pro-corporate, a rubber stamp for Republican causes and initiatives that will last for years.

The court has also weaponised lower court orders of Trump-appointed judges, as in the case of states' meddling in immigration, here and here. The district court judges, both sitting in Texas, ruled in response to red border states who oppose the Biden administration's immigration policies, policies heretofore considered exclusively within the purview of the federal government.

This latest supreme court mischief has only increased calls for judicial reforms, including additional members for the court.

READ THE REST OF FITCH HERE...