The infamous psychologists James Mitchell and John Jessen will be testifying about the tortured they subjected several of the men at Guantanamo to. These men have already agreed to settle some of the claims against them for their torture. The issue is (or at least one of the issues is....) whether the men who were subjected to torture and provided statements while being tortured should have those statements used against them in proceedings in which they face the death penalty.
Read more here.
What about all the other impeachable offences? ... No immunity for impeachment crimes ... Trump remains unchastened ... Fair elections cauterised by the Supreme Court ... War criminals to the rescue ... Judgeships for ideologues and party hacks ... From Roger Fitch in Washington
"There is a mountain of well-known evidence in the public record ... that the current president is a racist, a coward, a bully, a liar, an ignoramus, a hypocrite, a narcissist, and a fool - in short a very bad guy. Yet by design, the Constitution entrusts an impeachment trial to the Senate, not to a jury selected for its impartiality ... If such Senators are capable of putting aside their longstanding views of the president's character to focus on whether he committed treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanours - as the Constitution assumes they are - then surely they are capable of the much easier task of setting aside any bad-guy inference that propensity evidence might engender."
- Law Prof Michael Dorf dismissing the danger Trump could be convicted for the wrong reasons.
There's gangster government in Washington, with a one-man mob taking over a major political party; even so, Donald Trump has received a setback.
In December, the House of Reps finally confronted - albeit gingerly - the brazen criminality of the US president, a man whose "stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government".
In a letter to Speaker Pelosi, constitutional lawyers Bruce Fein and Louis Fisher joined Ralph Nader in listing 12 impeachable offences. Just Securitynoted Trump's pattern of soliciting foreign interference in US elections. The public interest organisation CREW concentrated on five crimes involved in the Ukraine extortion attempts, the basis for the "abuse of power" charge.
Just before the successful vote on the impeachment articles, Mr Trump sent a bizarre letter to Speaker Pelosi, abusing her and the Democrat House of Representatives for having the effrontery to seek his impeachment. The Washington Post fact-checker had a field-day with Trump's six-pages of persecution mania.
As Dan Froomkin complained, it still wasn't enough to make the media question Trump's mental state (a few did), but the media did notice the shameful depths reached by Trump's Republican house supporters.
I like to turn to my friend the talking dog on days like this. Read his post here.
And yes, the bottom line is that Guantanamo remains important... as the dog puts it "the symbol of detached power."
Plans
for panel, concert, and rally during Guantanamo Week
of Action in DC January 7-12: 18 years too
many!
Dear Friends,
Our plans continue to evolve as we prepare for the WAT Fast for Justice
and Week of Action in Washington, DC January 7 - 12 to mark 18 outrageous
years of Guantanamo Prison.
We'll gather on Tuesday to begin working together to plan our street
actions and advocacy, and we'll wrap up on Sunday with a day of
reflection, analysis, and planning for 2020. Below are
details for several major events during the week.
January
9: Exhibit and Panel
Guantanamo 18 Years Later: Witnessing and Resisting
Our Carceral Society
Thursday,
January 9, 2020
Exhibit: 5:00pm to 9:00pm
Panel: 7:00pm to 9:00pm The Festival Center
1640 Columbia Rd NW
Washington, DC 20009
Join
the Center for Constitutional Rights, Justice for Muslims Collective, and
Witness Against Torture as we mark the 18th anniversary of Guantánamo’s
opening and bring the offshore “War on Terror” prison into a larger
conversation on resistance within and to the U.S.’ carceral society.
Reflecting on
Japanese-American incarceration during WWII, mass incarceration, migrant
detention, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, panelists will explore the
criminalization of communities and the state’s use of confinement as a
tool of social control. The discussion will center the ways in which
prisoners and detainees have resisted their captivity, and how advocates
have organized against those systems.
The
event is free and open to the public. Dinner will be served. Please RSVP.
The Justice for Muslims Collective poster exhibition, Shattering Justice &
Re-Making the Muslim Threat, will be on display beginning at
5:00 pm and throughout the evening. The artwork and words provide a
visual timeline of the ways Muslims have been marginalized,
criminalized and dehumanized from 9/11 until now.
CCR press release on Ali v. Trump
Attorneys Urge Court to Change Ground Rules for Guantánamo Cases.
Without Due Process, Detainees Face Detention for Life, Lawyers Warn
AlterNet | Alex Henderson
‘Guantanamo on domestic soil’: The Trump administration is using an
obscure provision of the Patriot Act to indefinitely detain a Palestinian
man
Military.com on NDAA:
New Law Will Keep Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility Open at Least Another
Year
Andy Worthington on NDAA:
As $738 Billion Defense Bill Is Passed, Guantánamo Prisoners Are Ignored
by Congress
Fasting
during our week of action
Many activists who come to DC for our
week of action will choose to participate in a liquids only fast.
Participation is completely voluntary. This document explains our fasting
rationale and gives fasting tips. If you would like to join us at
home to fast in solidarity, we invite you to let us know at witnesstorture@gmail.com so
that we may stay in touch during the week.
We are grateful for your solidarity this month. Together let's draw
attention to the continuing travesty that is Guantanamo. Justice Now: Close Guantanamo
and End Torture!
The 18 th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo is less than two weeks away (January 11). For the 41 remaining men, one of whom is my client Razak Ali, there is no hope in sight. Even if Razak were to win his pending appeal the win will ring hollow- it will just mean that he would get another trial with a judge that will never rule in his favor and more years will pass. In the early years Razak would always have a smile on his face. We would discuss with great intensity the Harry Potter books, both of us laughing at his version of Azkaban. There is no smile now. There is no laughing. There is only indefinite detention -without any charges ever having been filed against him.
I lost track of these proceedings and h/o to Robert for the reminder and link.
The chief prosecutor at the international criminal court at The Hague is working hard to get the court to look into the war crimes in Afghanistan. What I learned when I worked at the court is that it is ultimately a bureaucratic/political institution but kudos to the chief prosecutor for pushing this.
Hope dies last and all.
We have a very dangerous president here in the US of A. Today some of our congressional representatives are doing the right thing. Unfortunately too many are turning their heads and looking the other way -- because they are more interested in their personal political fates. So, while we wait for the final vote let me leave you with this:
Attorneys Urge Court to Change
Ground Rules for Guantánamo Cases
Contact: press@ccrjustuce.org
Without Due Process,
Detainees Face Detention for Life, Lawyers Warn
December 11, 2019, Washington, D.C. – Today, attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights
urged a federal appeals court to overturn a lower court ruling against Abdul
Razak Ali (aka Saeed Bakhouch), who has been detained at
Guantánamo without charge since June 2002, and to rule more broadly that the
fundamental protections of the Due Process Clause apply to detainees and limit
otherwise limitless detentions there. Mr. Ali had filed a petition for release
together with ten other Guantánamo detainees, arguing that their ongoing
detention is arbitrary and unlawful, particularly in light of Donald Trump’s
stated policy that no one should be released from the prison regardless of the
facts of their case. A lower court held that “the [Constitution’s] due process
clause does not apply in Guantánamo,” which attorneys say
defies Supreme Court precedent.
“During the Bush administration, the Supreme
Court twice struck down attempts to gut Constitutional protections against
arbitrary detention at Guantánamo, but since then the lower courts have made it
effectively impossible to win a case in court no matter how weak the
government’s evidence is,” said Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney of the
Guantanamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who argued today.
“Today’s hearing asks the court to finally provide detainees the fair process
the Supreme Court envisioned ten years ago.”
In its landmark 2008 decision in Boumediene
v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that Guantánamo “is, in every practical
sense, not abroad,” and because of that the right to challenge one’s detention
in federal court could not be denied. Today, Kadidal argued that the same
principle requires that “due process”—the fundamental substantive and
procedural protections guaranteed by the constitution—should also apply at
Guantánamo.
Attorneys further argued that Mr. Ali’s
continued detention does, indeed, violate the Due Process Clause. He remains
detained—for what will soon be eighteen years—based primarily on
an eighteen day stay in a guesthouse in Pakistan associated
with a suspected jihadi leader. Today, Kadidal told the court that after this
length of detention, the government must demonstrate that there is a continued
purpose for detaining Ali, using more reliable evidence than it has produced to
date, and meeting a higher burden of proof.
“My client lost his first appeal six years ago
even though, in the words of one of the judges, he ‘never planned, authorized,
committed or aided any terrorist attacks,’ because the burden of proof on the
government is lower than what’s required in traffic court,” said H. Candace
Gorman, a Chicago-based attorney who has represented Ali for 13 years. “If the
legal status quo doesn’t change, Ali will die in prison without ever having
been charged with a crime.”
Forty men remain detained at Guantánamo.
Twenty-eight of them have never been charged. Twenty-seven were held by the CIA
at some point during their detention. Five have been unanimously cleared for
release by all relevant agencies (including the State Department, FBI, and the
military).
For those of you in the DC area I invite you to come and watch the oral argument in the DC Circuit Court for my client Razak Ali. The issue is simple but also so very important -- does the due process clause apply at Guantanamo?
The argument is set for 930 tomorrow morning and my co-counsel Shane Kadidal from the Center for Constitutional Law will argue for Mr. Ali.
For the rest of this article and more drawings by Abu Z (click here) (sorry I am having problems copying this so just go to the article...)
What the C.I.A.’s Torture Program Looked Like to the Tortured
Drawings done in captivity by the first prisoner known to undergo “enhanced interrogation” portray his account of what happened to him in vivid and disturbing ways.
An image drawn by Abu Zubaydah, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, shows how the C.I.A. applied an approved torture technique called “cramped confinement.”Credit...Abu Zubaydah, Courtesy Mark P. Denbeaux
Impunity is meanwhile everywhere. In an action viewed as damaging the US military, Trump handed out pardons to convicted and accused US war criminals, though it's hard to see what votes he will get out of it, especially among service members, some of whom dobbed in their lawless officers and NCOs.
Defence opposed the pardons, particularly that of Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher, one of the most vicious convicted SEALs. Trump, responding to a Fox News beat-up, sought to completely exonerate Gallagher, while the Navy tried to expel him from the SEALs. In an extraordinary action, the president personally ordered Gallagher's retention in the unit, and sacked the Navy Secretary.
Trump's sanctioning of war crimes begs the question, will he attempt to reintroduce torture, a practice he has condoned in the past. It's a timely subject, as a new film about the Senate Torture Report has put the notorious CIA torture program - implemented by George Bush - back in the news.
Barack Obama effectively pardoned participants in the Bush administration program, with dilatory and cosmetic inquiries conducted while the statutes of limitations - except for murder - ran. We now know that, even had Obama's Justice Department prosecuted and jailed those involved, Mr Trump would have pardoned them, given them medals, and, as he actually has done in the appointment of CIA Director Gina Haspel, rewarded them.
Trump has also successfully stonewalled the proposed ICC investigation into torture in Afghanistan and other Rome Statute countries where CIA torture occurred; the matter is now under appeal at the Hague. More here on the international efforts to hold accountable those countries implicated in CIA black site torture.
Today is thanksgiving here in the good old U S of A. A holiday that celebrates the early European settlers making it through a rough period with the help of the native peoples.... then of course we went on to slaughter most of them...
So with that in mind I leave you with this musical interlude.
Probably the most important book of 2014 as it gives a comprehensive look at the extent this country of mine has creeped into the bedrooms of all of us across the world-and the importance of hero EDWARD SNOWDEN- in risking his freedom to let all of us know. What we do with that knowledge will say alot about all of us...
If you have not read Ron's book then you do not have the whole story about what I have been doing to try to get my clients out ofGuantanamo. Ron kept up with my activities and even followed me around on occasion to get the full story... then he weaved my story in with the stories of other individuals who are concerned with the direction of the United States. I recommend the book to all of you out there who also care about the direction that the US has gone these past eight years and want to work to change things.
There's gangster government in Washington, with a one-man mob taking over a major political party; even so, Donald Trump has received a setback. 
![Donald J. Putin on American Exceptionalism : It's Not You, It's Just America Being America by [Putin , Donald J.]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41sgaLfw%2B%2BL.jpg)
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