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by Katherine

Regarding Hil’s most recent post, and particularly her link to George Packer’s article on Iraqi refugees: there is one specific person who is asking for help getting out of Iraq right now.

On November 15, even before the Thanksgiving bombing and the ensuing retaliation against Sunni neighborhoods, Zeyad of Healing Iraq wrote a detailed post on a kidnapping at Baghdad’s university, which abruptly switched from reporting the news to this request:

Very few students turned up for school this morning. My brother Nabil stayed home. I have been looking into solutions to get him out of Iraq as soon as possible because I don’t want him to suddenly end up any moment as a tattered corpse on the outskirts of Sadr City with drill holes in his head just because of what his ID says. I would be forever in debt to anyone who can assist me with this.

In response, one of his readers apparently generously hired an immigration lawyer in New Zealand and offered to sponsor Nabil as a student. I don’t really know the details. I don’t think they can reveal them online, so my knowledge of New Zealand comes mainly from Lord of the Rings DVDs, which didn’t have any special features on immigration law. I also don’t know whether this is the option the family will end up pursuing, but for now it seems to be only one available, and the other day Nabil wrote the following:

I live in fear everyday, I wake up in fear, and I sleep the night in fear too, few days ago I stopped going to college, because the road to college is very dangerous, fake police check-points are everywhere and at any moment they can stop me and ask for my ID and once they see that I’m a Sunni they would have me killed or kidnapped or tortured, because they can figure it out from my name and my address (my district is a sunni district), and the 2nd reason why I stopped going to college, is that in Monday (20th Nov. 2006) two police patrols attacked our college building, and opened fire on the outer gate of the college for nearly 15 minutes, then they stopped after they injured some guards of the college, and they left immediatly without giving excuses for what they did.

The last two months I have experienced a lot of things that I never imagend that I will experience in my life. About two weeks ago, my district was attacked by mortar missiles, we had missiles falling everywhere in the district, destroying houses and killing innocent people, the district was attacked with about 75 missiles in 5 days, one of the missiles fell on the side-walk just two yards away from the outer door of my house, it was shocking and very horrible, about a month ago, gunmen killed a woman who was a hair styler and owns a shop near my house for no reason, they just stopped her in the street when she was closing her shop and killed her, and left her corpse laying on the street, and truly I don’t want to end up like that.

After living 3 horrible years in Iraq and witnessing all what I’ve witnessed, I realized that I can’t live in this country anymore, I can’t live in a country where some gunmen prevent me from going to school, where corrupted policemen will kill me just because of my religion or what’s written on my ID, where religion bigots will have me killed just because I wear jeans, or shorts or because I shave my beard everyday in the morning.

The only thing that I want is to finish my studies, and to work and to create a good life and to be a good man who can be helpful and successful and to live the rest of my life in peace.

New Zealand is a great country, I think it’s the best place for me to study and work in, and that I have great friends there whom they offored to support me make my dream happen…As soon as I can have residency Visa to NewZealand.

Please, help me make my dream, Please Save my Life!.

Nabil
22 November 2006

If you’re interested in helping me escaping Iraq..you can do that, by donating money, there is a paypal button on the top of side bar on the right.
Thanks to anyone who would help me.

The paypal link goes to his brother’s account. Whether it’s to New Zealand or somewhere else, getting out of Iraq costs money, and I would certainly trust Zeyad and his family to use it wisely. (continued)

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by hilzoy

Having wallowed in despair over the detainee bill, I have decided to do something constructive, namely: inflict more misery on you, my gentle readers. — I was looking at the Cook Political Report’s new rankings of the most competitive Senate races, and to my horror and amazement, my own race, which I don’t think of as all that competitive, was ranked ahead of the Virginia Senate race, which pits James Webb against the awful George Allen.

This cannot be allowed to continue.

If Webb wins, several wonderful things happen. First, there’s one more Democrat in the Senate. Second, there’s one more Democrat who is capable and confident about national security. Third, George Allen loses, and macaques everywhere breathe a sigh of relief. But here’s the most important thing: George Allen’s chances of ever successfully running for President become really, really remote.

This matters. We’ve already had an incompetent faux Cowboy with a streak of cruelty as President for eight years. I’m not sure we can withstand another. Allen’s chances of becoming President have already been damaged, but losing his Senate race would drive a well-deserved hemlock stake through their heart.

However, there’s a problem. To illustrate, I made a little graph in Excel:

See what I mean about misery?That’s an eleven million dollar fundraising advantage. And we can’t have that, can we? Of course not. So here’s the link: donate.

If you require actual reasons, read on.

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by Katherine

Senator Mitch McConnell, via the Corner:

"For example, I imagine it would be awkward for many of my Democrat colleagues to go home and explain a vote to provide sensitive, classified information to terrorists, to shut down an intelligence program that we know has helped save lives, or to allow international courts to define the meaning of Common Article III—rather than the U.S. Congress—and put our troops at risk.

What we do know for sure, without question — no ambiguity — is that the current program works and has saved us from terrorist attacks and prevented us from being attacked again at home for over five years. The President needs tools to conduct these programs effectively to protect Americans at home. His proposal for terrorist detainees is one of those important tools. We do not all agree at this point, but we will have that discussion on the Senate floor."

This isn’t true. We do not know that the CIA’s "enhanced interrogation techniques" have saved lives. The President claims that they have, but he is not a disinterested or trustworthy source. Although he was able to selectively declassify the intelligence that he thought best supported his argument, his evidence of the program’s "saving lives" was vague and conclusory, and maybe also false.

What we do know for sure, without question — no ambiguity — is that the CIA’s program has led to prisoners being tortured to death.

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by Katherine

The press coverage of the administration’s post-Hamdan bill has been okay, all things considered. (Among other things, some daily newspaper reporters are finally figuring out that they should ask human rights groups and military lawyers and read Balkinization for good analysis of these issues, instead of doing a he-said-she-said with Congressional Democrats and Republicans.) But the articles have centered on the proposed rules for military commissions and, to a lesser extent, on the amendment to the War Crimes Act. They haven’t said much at all  about what the bill would do to habeas corpus and judicial review.

It’s bad–really bad.

Like the Detainee Treatment Act (which hilzoy and I wrote a long series on last November), the administration’s bill strips the federal courts of jurisdiction of habeas corpus cases filed at Guantanamo. Unlike the Detainee Treatment Act, it clearly applies to pending cases. Unlike the DTA, which only applied to Guantanamo, this bill’s jurisdiction-stripping provisions apply to "any alien detained by the United States as an unlawful enemy combatant".  Unlike the DTA, this bill specifically provides that "No person in any habeas action or any other action may invoke the Geneva Conventions or any protocols thereto as a source of rights, whether directly or indirectly, for any purpose in any court of the United States or its States or territories."

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by hilzoy

One of the nice things about the debate over universal health insurance is that we’re not talking about some bold new policy initiative that would go where no nation has gone before, but about an approach that has been adopted, in different ways, by most other industrialized countries. Thus, rather than having to rely on a priori arguments, we can use actual information about how our health care system stacks up to those of other countries. In what follows, I’ll try to provide some basic data. I’ve tried to rely on well accepted and unbiased sources from either organizations like OECD or the peer-reviewed literature.

I’ve put some of the charts in clickable form, since testing revealed that they did not translate well when resized. Also, a lot of the links to studies require subscriptions.

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by Katherine

(11th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.)

During at least six different CSRT hearings at Guantanamo, the prisoner is accused of associating with a man named Pacha Khan. The allegations describe Khan as “a renegade Pashtun Commander,” who “has been conducting military operations against the Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA) and coalition forces.”

Four of the prisoners were captured together on January 21, 2002: Mohammad Gul, Abib Sarajuddin, Gul Zaman, and Khan Zaman. They all say that Khan was fighting on the Americans’ side, against the Taliban.  In the words of Mohammad Gul, who is accused of being the son of a recruiter for Pacha Khan:

My father did not work for Pacha Khan directly…Pacha Khan came to the village elder, Nazim, to gather and rise up against the Taliban. The village elder told my father to go and tell the other villages close to our village to get together and that we needed to united against the Taliban. Whatever he did, it might have been indirectly for Pacha Khan but Pacha Khan was working with the Americans and he was in the government at that time.

***

As far as I can tell this is true. As of December 2001, Pacha Khan Zadran could pick up is cell phone and call in a U.S. airstrike.  He is accused of calling in two strikes that killed approximately 150 civilians during that month.

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by Katherine

(10th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9)

Human Rights Watch has a new report out on abuses in Iraq. As important as their report last fall on Captain Fishback’s allegations were, I think this one may be more so. It hammers about 19 nails into the coffin of the "few bad apples" theory.

There are interviews with three soldiers: an interrogator with Task Force 121/6-26 at Camp NAMA; a sergeant with the 82nd airborne at Forward Operating Base Tiger, near the Syrian border; and  Tony Lagouranis, an army interrogator stationed near the Mosul airport.

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by Katherine

(9th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)

What Faiz Ullah could have probably used, more than anything else, was an officer on his CSRT panel who had read The Kite Runner.

Ullah is an Afghan, from a village near the city of Bamiyan.  His prisoner # is 919, and his CSRT begins on the 28th page of this PDF. He is  accused of associating with the Taliban and Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), and of carrying messages for a Taliban intelligence agent and HIG commander. He replies as follows:

Personal Representative: He says he is not Taliban. The Taliban killed his uncle and brother in law. In his area the Taliban killed several hundred Shia’as. He has heard of HIG (Hizb-I Islami Gulbuddin). He thinks they killed his mother.

Detainee: They took our land. They killed my mother. You can ask. This is true information. They killed my family. My wife said they came with a weapon and drew it on her. I asked the Red Cross to go and investigate if this was true or not. Ask my family….

I have respect for you because you saved our lives. If you people didn’t come, they would have killed us all. From my village, plus or minus two hundred Shia’s were killed. You can ask yourself. This is not a lie. If you people weren’t here to come and help us, we would have all died of hunger because you give us food. At our house we didn’t have even a little bit of oil. You can ask. Even my children were barefoot…Now my poor family have no food, they don’t have anything, and I was detained…I don’t know what happened to my family. I don’t know what happened to my children.

He is accused of laying mines for the HIG and the Taliban in the town of Madr:

Detainee: God knows that I don’t know how to do all this. My hands are scarred by sickles, you can see my hands. My hands are a farmer’s hands, marked by sickles. I don’t know how to do all of that. I wasn’t a big person. I didn’t have all that power. You think about it yourself. When they beat us and they took our land. If the Americans hadn’t come, they would have killed us all. At home we don’t have fuel. In this country, look at the food we are given. If we could find fuel, then we couldn’t salt; we find salt, we can’t find oil or we couldn’t find matches. You can ask about my life, what can I say? You can think about it yourself. Even in here the Taliban doesn’t like me. Even in here they throw water on me they throw urine on me and they beat me. If the Americans hadn’t come, they would have killed us. They took our land. You cannot find one Hazara (ph) who is a supporter of Taliban or Gulbuddin.

He tells the CSRT that the person who denounced him as an HIG and Taliban supporter was Shir Alrah, a local commander who wanted to marry his sister years ago. Ullah refused: "I told him that it was up to my sister who she wants to marry. I cannot force her to marry a person that she doesn’t want." As a result of this dispute he was imprisoned for eleven days by a powerful friend of Alrah’s named "Kalele" (I think he’s referring to Karim Khalili, a Hazara leader/warlord who controlled Bamiyan from 1996-8). Later on, Taliban forces came.  They took his family’s land, killed his mother, killed other relatives and hundreds of other Shi’a in his village, and drove the rest out of their homes.

Ullah was arrested because friends of the local governor, including Shir Alrah, had told him that he could get his family’s land back if he delivered a message and obtained a reply from a former Talib who was responsible for the atrocities against his family. Ullah did this. Afterwards, Alrah apparently gave the letter to the Americans and denounced him. American soldiers came to arrest Ullah at his uncle’s house. The soldiers couldn’t speak Farsi, and Ullah could speak no other language. There was one translator, but it did no good.

Q: Did you support the Taliban or U.S. at any time?

A: I was a refugee. The Americans came and previously they had burned our houses…One help organization gave us enough wood to build a house. Because the weather was so cold and my wife was pregnant and Bamian was cold we decided to go to Kamard. I didn’t have any wood, we didn’t have anything. They gave us twenty pieces of lumber so we covered the house. The help organization had given a door to me and I haven’t even put the door in. I covered the house and the door was at the house of the husband of my sister. In wintertime it gets cold and it’s freezing. When they make bread, the heat heats the house. When Taliban burned the houses, we didn’t have equipment to make bread with.

…

Q: Before you left, while you were in Afghanistan, were you very religious, medium? How often did you go to the mosque?

A: I’m from Khamard and [the] mosque is one hour away from me. The Sunni, they tried to teach us how to pray and everything and tried to teach me something but I didn’t learn it. Once a year there is a special place that we pray. Once a year we go to that special place and pray. The Taliban had killed the mullah. His name was Salabar (ph). We don’t have anything.

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by Katherine

(7th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Before I continue, I should probably explain why I am going into such excruciating detail about the differences and similarities between the requirements of Hamdan and those of the Detainee Treatment Act/McCain amendment. It’s because based on the news stories and hearings on the response the Hamdan, I think the Bush administration is going to introduce a bill that: (1) strips the courts of jurisidiction over pending habeas cases at Guantanamo (the Son of the Graham Amendment, basically), and (2) amends the War Crimes Act so that it forbids the exact same things as the McCain Amendment.

The Washington Post has reported:

McCain said yesterday that at a long White House meeting, with Graham and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley an agreement was reached that legislation would use the military code — not the administration’s plan — as the framework, and a final bill would adhere to Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

The bill could adopt language crafted by McCain last year to ban torture at U.S. detention facilities that makes some changes to Common Article 3. For instance, it could drop the phrase "outrages upon personal dignity," which the administration sees as overly vague.

The New York Times has reported:

Senator Graham, who pointedly warned administration lawyers that the president would not win by fighting for his approach on trials, said in interviews that Common Article Three must be “reined in.”…

Mr. Graham said defining Article Three would be “the hardest part” of the debate on how to bring detainees to trial. He suggested that Congress could limit it in a way that resembled the language of the measure setting standards for the treatment of detainees that was written by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and signed into law last year.

“It says that every detainee will be treated humanely and that cruel, inhumane treatment will not be allowed against detainees,” Mr. Graham said. “Common Article Three with its language goes well beyond the McCain standard."

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by Katherine

(6th in a series. Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

While I’m on the subject of the need for clear guidance for interrogators, I  wanted to point out: As far as the military goes, the McCain Amendment, Hamdan, and Field Manual 34-52 are absolute miracles of clarity compared to the standard they replaced.

On February 7, 2002, President Bush officially signed an order concluding that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at all to al Qaeda prisoners, and did not provide any meaningful protection to Taliban prisoners. The order did require that "detainees be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva."

In 2005, Deputy White House Counsel Timothy Flanigan was nominated to be Deputy Attorney General. During his confirmation hearings in September, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois tried at length to get him to explain exactly what the requirement that prisoners be treated "humanely" meant.

In his first set of written questions Durbin asked Flanigan, "how do you define inhumane treatment?" Flanigan replied:

Any questions that may arise regarding whether particular treatment complies with that directive should be resolved by reference to the customary laws of war based upon a careful review of all the relevant facts and circumstances. Because the determination of whether particular treatment is inhumane is fact-specific, I do not believe that the term "inhumane" treatment is susceptible to a succinct definition.

Durbin tried asking about specific techniques:

a. In your personal opinion, is it legally permissible for U.S. personnel to subject a detainee to waterboarding (simulated drowning)? Is it inhumane?

b.  In your personal opinion, is it legally permissible for U.S. personnel to subject a detainee to mock execution? Is it inhumane?

c.  In your personal opinion, is it legally permissible for U.S. personnel to physically beat a detainee? Is it humane?

d.  In your personal opinion, is it legally permissible for U.S. personnel to force a detainee into a painful stress position for a prolonged time period? Is it inhumane?

He got exact the same answer:

With respect to your question about whether these techniques are "inhumane," "inhumane" treatment is not susceptible to a succinct definition. It is informed by the customary laws of war and depends on all of the relevant facts and circumstances.

Not satisfied with this, Durbin submitted a second set of written questions:

I have difficulty imagining facts and circumstances in which it would be legal or humane to subject a detainee to waterboarding, mock execution, physical beatings, or painful stress positions for a prolonged time period. Can you suggest any facts and circumstances in which treating a detainee in this fashion would be legal and humane?

Flanigan responded:

As I have previously stated, my role as Deputy Counsel to the President was not to evaluate particular interrogation methods, and I have not done so. Whether a particular interrogation method, such as those you mention, would be lawful would depend on the fact facts and circumstances surrounding its use….I am not in a position to discuss the application of those or other legal standards in the abstract to hypothetical conduct without more specificity. For all of these reasons, it would be inappropriate for me to speculate about whether such techniques are lawful or humane.

Durbin asked Flanigan whether, to his knowledge, the White House had "provided any guidance regarding the meaning of humane treatment."  Flanigan answered that "I am not aware of any guidance provided by the White House specifically related to the meaning of humane treatment."

Durbin asked how the military could "comply with the President’s directive if inhumane treatment is not susceptible to a succinct definition". Flanigan gave this reassuring response:

To say that the term "inhumane" treatment is not susceptible to a succinct definition is not to say that the term lacks meaning or that the Department of Defense cannot provide service men and women with appropriate guidance in the context of specific facts and circumstances.

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by hilzoy

Maureen Dowd Eric Lipton has a good column article today. It’s about the Department of Homeland Security’s “National Asset Database”, which lists some 8,591 possible terrorist targets. Not surprisingly, it turns out to contain some peculiar things:

“It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the official federal antiterrorism database. (…)

In addition to the petting zoo, in Woodville, Ala., and the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tenn., the auditors questioned many entries, including “Nix’s Check Cashing,” “Mall at Sears,” “Ice Cream Parlor,” “Tackle Shop,” “Donut Shop,” “Anti-Cruelty Society” and “Bean Fest.”

Even people connected to some of those businesses or events are baffled at their inclusion as possible terrorist targets.

“Seems like someone has gone overboard,” said Larry Buss, who helps organize the Apple and Pork Festival in Clinton, Ill. “Their time could be spent better doing other things, like providing security for the country.”

Angela McNabb, manager of the Sweetwater Flea Market, which is 50 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., said: “I don’t know where they get their information. We are talking about a flea market here.” (…)

One business owner who learned from a reporter that a company named Amish Country Popcorn was on the list was at first puzzled. The businessman, Brian Lehman, said he owned the only operation in the country with that name.

“I am out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Lehman, whose business in Berne, Ind., has five employees and grows and distributes popcorn. “We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care.”

But on second thought, he came up with an explanation.

“Maybe because popcorn explodes?””

Ha ha ha. Those kidders at the Department of Homeland Security. In addition to Nix’s Check cashing, there’s also a Mailboxes Etc., a tackle shop, and something listed only as “inn”. I’m sure all the patrons of these fine establishments will feel safer knowing that DHS is keeping an eye on them. If only the same could be said for the rest of us.

But how, I hear you ask, did DHS manage to add insult to the possibility of injury? Well, as I was reading the actual DHS report (pdf), I got to its first list of “Examples of Out-of-Place Assets” (p. 11). Assets are supposed to be either “critical infrastructure” or “key assets”, and key assets are defined as follows: “Key assets include symbols or historical attractions, such as prominent national, state, or local monuments and icons.” (pp. 2-3) “Out-of-Place Assets” are things that do not meet these criteria, but are on the list anyways; this list picks out some supposedly egregious examples. And there, along with Nix’s Check Cashing, Mall At Sears, Auto Shop, and one state’s “Right to Life Committee” (?!), what did I find?

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