Katherine R

Levity

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This an open thread for posting the funniest thing you’ve seen this week. I nominate this post. Excerpt: You know, when I started this weblog, there weren’t so many weblogs around. Now there are more. I can’t take all the credit for that, but it’s something I’ve noticed. But weblogging used to be real. It … Read more

House Debating Key Amendment Right Now

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Congressman Markey’s amendment will not come before the House floor, but there is an amendment offered by Congressman Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, that substitutes the Senate version of the 9/11 bill for the current House version. The Senate version of the bill has a stronger national intelligence director with budgetary and personnel authority, … Read more

Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to…psych!

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We are a nation of immigrants. You all know this. Most of us had to write an essay about it at some point in elementary school, unless we could get out of it by having our mom bake a loaf of Irish Soda bread or whichever other recipe to honor our heritage.

If the House version of the 9/11 bill becomes law, we will have no right to say it. I’ve focused heavily on the sections legalizing extraordinary rendition, but the awful things is, they are probably not even the worst part of Hastert’s bill. In terms of innocent people sent to torture and death, some of the other anti-immigration provisions would probably do more harm. The ACLU summarizes them here:

Attack on Habeas Corpus (Section 3006) – The House bill would eliminate judicial review of some immigration deportation orders under the ancient “Great Writ” of habeas corpus by channeling virtually all immigration cases to the federal courts of appeals, where appeals in some cases are barred.

Traditionally available to any person, citizen or non-citizen, in the United States as a “safety valve” that allows one final appeal to challenge extreme injustices by the authorities, habeas review would be barred in certain cases involving, for instance:

–Challenges to removal where the deportee is likely to be tortured upon return.
–Attorney malpractice or incompetence.
–Virtually all cases of the unlawful use of “expedited removal,” which allows immigration officials to summarily deport certain non-citizens, including many who are already in the country, if they believe, for instance, that their documents are invalid. Practically, the change could mean that a refugee from the genocide in Sudan who arrives without proper documentation could be sent back without any hearing….

Deportation Before Final Appeal (Section 3009) – The bill would set an extraordinarily high bar for courts to meet before granting “stays” of deportation, even while a deportee’s appeal is pending. Effectively, this section will render those appeals moot in many cases, because the non-citizen will have already been deported.

Deportation to Countries Without a Functioning Government (Section 3033) – The consent of a government to accept a person being deported there is a basic principle in international law. To do otherwise would subject many deportees to extreme human rights violations, torture and even death. The House bill would remove that requirement, allowing the government to deport a person to any country that does not “physically” resist his or her entry….

Asylum Claims Made More Difficult (Section 3007) — Currently, asylum seekers need only show they face persecution based in part on race, religion, nationality or membership in a certain social group. The current law would require one of these criteria to be the “central motive” behind the persecution. This is a significantly higher burden to meet for any asylum claimant who will suffer persecution based on a mixture of these factors, or who will suffer harm that is related, but not directly so, to one of these factors (for instance, an opposition party politician who faces arrest on trumped-up charges).

The section would also allow a judge to require asylum seekers to “corroborate” their claim of persecution, and lowers the ability of other courts to overturn a denial of asylum based on the ruling judge’s demand for corroboration. This is a significantly higher hurdle for asylum seekers, who often lack any ability to prove their claim through anything save their own testimony (imagine, again, a hypothetical Christian refugee who escapes Darfur only by the skin of her teeth). Not surprisingly, asylum-seekers have difficulty obtaining corroborating documents from the very government that is persecuting them.

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Ahmed Agiza & Muhammad al-Zery

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Summary
Thanks to excellent reporting by a Swedish TV program and the Washington Post, this case is the best window we have into how “extraordinary rendition” works in practice.

On December 18, 2001, the United States transported Swedish asylum seekers Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Al-Zery from Sweden’s Bromma airport to Cairo. And for once we have a named witness. Paul Forell, a policeman stationed at the airport that night, described it to the TV show “Kalla Fakta”:

Forell waited with the Swedish security police and two Americans in civilian clothing for the prisoners to arrive. 20 minutes later, the suspects arrived. They were handcuffed, footcuffed and blindfolded. They were each escorted by 3-4 American agents, who were also wearing hoods or balaclavas. Forell said one of the masked American agents was giving orders, and all were “very professional in their way of acting, and if you´d compare with anything it would be the National action force (Swedish elite police unit for special actions). They acted very deftly, swiftly and silently,” and had “absolutely” done this before.

Forell escorted them into a small room, and waited outside. Another, anonymous source told Kalla Fakta that in the changing room, Agiza and al Zery’s clothes were cut off. They were given rectal suppositories, which one witness believed contained sedatives, and dressed in dark overalls.

“When they left the changing-room, they had their clothes changed into overalls, and were still with handcuffs and footcuffs. They were taken out to the cars, and then away,” Forell said.

According to the Washington Post, declassified Swedish government documents “noted that ‘the American side” had offered to help in the deportation “by lending a plane for the transport” and that “”the transport from Sweden to Egypt was carried out with the help of American authorities.”

Airport records obtained by Kalla Fakta show that a Gulfstream V jet registered with an American company identified by the registration/tail number N379P, the same plane that transported Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed from Karachi to Cairo, flew from the Swedish airport to Cairo that night.

Agiza and Al Zery were held in the Masra Tora prison, which is just south of Cairo. Agiza’s mother, Hamida Shalaby, says they were tortured there. She told Kalla Fakta,

The mattress had electricity. The mattress. He would lay on it – like this – and his arms in chains on both sides and his legs in chains too. When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity.

Shalaby said this happened four times from December 19 to February 20, and “every day” her son was tortured with electrodes while stapped to a chair. She told the Washington Post that

told her during separate visits that he was given electric shocks and that prison doctors tried to cover up scars on his body by applying a special cream. “He couldn’t even pick up his arms to hug me,” she said in an interview. “He was very slow and very tired and very weak.”

Al Zery denied that he’d been tortured in an interview with Kalla Fakta, but it was conducted under the supervision of Egyptian security officers. (Zery has been released from prison, but cannot leave Egypt or indeed his village there & is under tight surveillance.) Zery’s lawyer, Kjell Jonsson, said

It´s evident that he is speaking under coercion…This information, that they have been tortured is now confirmed. It is about very painful torture. They fasten electrodes to the most sensitive parts of the body. That is, genitals, breast nipples, tongue, ear lobes, underarms. There are physicians present to judge how much torture, how much electricity, the prisoners can take. Afterwards the exposed parts are anointed, so that there won´t be marks and scars, and cold water is poured to stop blood clots.

Swedish government documents corroborate these allegations. From the Post:

In a report made public shortly afterward, Sven Linder, the Swedish ambassador to Egypt, wrote that Agiza and Zery told him they had been treated “excellently” in prison and that to him “they seemed well-nourished and showed no external signs of physical abuse or such things.”

Another section of the ambassador’s report that remained classified until recently, however, offered a different appraisal. It noted that Agiza had complained that he was subjected to “excessive brutality” by the Swedish security police when he was seized and that he was repeatedly beaten in Egyptian prisons.

From the Swedish TV show:

Kalla Fakta has taken part of original documents which support the testimonies, and which prove that the two men have been systematically tortured, with electricity, blows and kicks. On at least four occasions, Swedish authorities have received information through different channels from the men about what they have been subjected to.”

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Guantanamo’s Evil Stepson

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(12th post in a series on the House GOP’s attempt to legalize “Extraordinary Rendition”. Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)

Please read this very, very important Newsweek story. As I feared, Gonzales’ letter is not worth much.

Hastert’s spokesman John Feehery said that Homeland Security had requested the extraordinary rendition provision, but “for whatever reason the White House has decided they don’t want to take this on because they’re afraid of the political implications.”

It’s actually worse than I thought. It’s not just a legal justification to keep doing what they’ve been doing. It’s not justa way to get rid of the Maher Arar case. It still might have been a political ploy, but not only a political ploy. Torture outsourcing was going to be–still may be–the substitute for Guantanamo Bay after the Supreme Court decision:

He said the provision, mainly laid out in Section 3032 and 3033 , was designed as a way of addressing the problem created by last summer’s Supreme Court decision. The justices ruled that the administration couldn’t detain people indefinitely without trial or charges. As a result, the government has ordered the release of suspects such as Yaser Hamdi, a dual citizen of the United States and Saudi Arabia who was captured in Afghanistan and held for three years as an enemy combatant.

Now, Feehery said, “we’ve got a situation where we’ve got these people in the country who ought not to be in the country. We have to release them because of the Supreme Court case. So Homeland Security wanted this provision.”

The DOJ spokesman confirmed this:

Justice spokesman Mark Corallo also said it was Homeland Security’s call. “It’s their issue,” Corallo said. “They’re the immigration people now. Not us.”

The House is still pushing for the provision, and I’m sure the White House has no objection. They just need to keep a safe distance. They can’t be allowed to. The press must ask Bush about this directly.

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Five Suspects Deported From Malawi to Zimbabwe

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(10th post in a series on the House GOP’s attempt to legalize “Extraordinary Rendition”. Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)
Summary
I just learned about this one a half hour ago. It’s been reported on even less than the other cases in the U.S. press (yoo hoo, U.S. press! Look alive!)–just one news brief and one editorial in Seattle newspapers over a year ago, and no one’s picked up on the Amnesty International report–so I’m posting it out of chronological sequence.

According to Amnesty International, Ibrahim Habaci and Arif Ulusam of Turkey, Faha al Balhi of Saudi Arabi, MUhmud Sardar Issa of the Sudan, and Khalifa Abdi Hassan of Kenya were arrested in Blantyre, Malawi, on June 22, 2003. The arrests were carried out by Malawian police and CIA agents. They were held in secret. Their families lawyers intervened with the High Court of Malawi, which ordered them to be brought before the court in 48 hours.

By then they’d been flown out of the country. On June 26, 2003, a Malawian government official wrote to Amnesty that:

the arrests were not done by the Malawi Police but by the National Intelligence Bureau and the USA Secret Agents who controlled the whole operation. From the time the arrests were made, the welfare of the detainees, their abode and itinerary for departure were no longer in the hands of the Malawian authorities. Thus as a country we did not have the means to stop or delay the operation…In Malawi we do not know where these people are but they are in hands of the Americans who them out of the country using a chartered aircraft. They should now being going through investigations at a location only known by the USA.”

The U.S. ambassador to Malawi denied that the U.S. was responsible for the deportations.

There was some question over where they were taken. According to the Seattle Times, the men were suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda through Islamic charities, and had been flown to Botswana for interrogation. A Guardian article from August 2003 describes “reports that the Air Malawi plane chartered by the US stopped off in Zimbabwe on the way to a third country, possibly Djibouti or Uganda, where the men were questioned for a month.” Several other sources said that they were interrogated in Zimbabwe for a month.

It seems as if the last story is accurate, based on what one of the prisoner’s told his wife. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, and severe and sometimes fatal torture is widespread there. But fortunately, for once, these men seem not to have been harmed. Ella Ulusam, Arif Usulam’s wife, told Xinhua New Service that her husband had called her from Istanbul,

informing her that they were kept for 29 days in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwean(sic), where US and Malawian intelligence officials cleared them of any al-Qaeda links.

“He told me apart from the trauma of being arrested at night with no reason, they were treated well and are all in good health, ” she said.

The Guardian confirms that the CIA and the Malawian government decided they were innocent:

Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the CIA decided they were innocent.

The President of Malawi met with Ella Ulusam and another of the prisoner’s wives and apologized to them for their treatment. From Xinhua Net:

“The president was very apologetic,” said Ella during the Tuesday interview. “He just said he was sorry, it was not the Malawi government, it was all the Americans. That’s all he said.”

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Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed

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(9th post in a series on the House GOP’s attempt to legalize “Extraordinary Rendition”. Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)

Summary
At 1 am in the morning of October 23 or 24, 2001, in a dark, empty corner of the Karachi airport, Pakistan handed, Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, over to U.S. officials. Mohammed was shackled and blindfolded. A Pakistani newspaper reported that he had been “missing since the start of October” from Karachi University, where he was studying microbiology.

Mohammed is Yemeni, and was a suspect in the U.S.S. Cole bombing.

The U.S. flew him to Amman, Jordan on a private Gulfstream jet (which you may hear more about in a subsequent post) with the registration number N379P.

He hasn’t been seen since. Amnesty International has asked the U.S. where he is and what his legal status is, but gotten no reply. According to the 2001 State Department human rights report for Jordan, prisoners there made allegations of “methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions, and extended solitary confinement.”

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Torture Legalization: A Winning Strategy for YOUR Congressional Campaign!

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(8th post in a series on the House GOP’s attempt to legalize “Extraordinary Rendition”. Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.) I noted in my last post that if Congressman Markey’s amendment fails, and the language legalizing extraordinary rendition make into the final version of the 9/11 Commission bill, … Read more

Legislative Update: Torture Outsourcing Bill One Step Closer

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(7th post in a series on the House GOP’s attempt to legalize “Extraordinary Rendition”. Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)

Via Congressman Markey’s Office: The Republican leadership has released the version of the 9/11 Commission bill that will go before the full House this week. Here is a PDF version. The torture outsourcing provisions are still there. (Sections 3032 and 3033, pages 254-258.)

I didn’t have much hope otherwise. I’m still pretty depressed right now.

The Senate version doesn’t include the language legalizing extraordinary rendition. But given that the D.O.J. apparently requested these provisions and given the routine exclusion of Democrats and moderates from conference committees on major bills, I would be very very surprised if they were not included in the bill that comes out of conference.

Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans will probably not vote against, let alone filibuster, the bill based on this issue. Not the 9/11 Bill, not in an election year. They remember the Homeland Security Bill and the 2002 midterms. They remember how a triple amputee was successfully painted as soft on defense and this led to the loss of the Senate. I don’t think it’s farfetched to say that Hastert and DeLay remember too, and that it’s part of the reason for the anti-immigration provisions in the bill. Heads they win, tails Democrats lose. Maybe they can even have it both ways: pass the bill AND get a few conscience-ridden Democrats to oppose it and give them negative ad fodder.

So if I had to guess, I would tell you that Markey’s amendment is our last, best hope of stopping this.

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