During a campaign stop in Iowa today, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee commented on the conditions at the military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying that “the inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment” than “prisoners in Arkansas.” “I hope our guys don’t see this,” added Huckabee. “They’ll all want to be transferred to Guanatanmo.”
“If anything, it’s too nice,” said Huckabee:
“The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, ‘I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guanatanmo.’ If anything, it’s too nice.”
Huckabee has said Guantanamo is more a “symbolic issue” than anything else since the detainees are treated better than prisoners in the US.
Huckabee, who recently came out in favor of closing Guantanamo, has made similar comparisons in the past.
In June, Huckabee said on CNN’s Late Edition that “most of our prisoners would love to be in a facility more like Guantanamo.” At the time, he said we couldn’t close the facility because hypothetically, “if we let somebody out” they could “come and fly an airliner into one of our skyscrapers.”
Huckabee may have seen “nice” conditions when he visited Guantanamo. But FBI agents who worked at the facility have reported that detainees were subjected to harsh conditions, including “the use of growling dogs” to “intimidate detainees,” at least as recently as 2004:
Detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were shackled to the floor in fetal positions for more than 24 hours at a time, left without food and water, and allowed to defecate on themselves, an FBI agent who said he witnessed such abuse reported in a memo to supervisors.
A recently released operations manual for the prison, dated March 28, 2003, “indicates that some prisoners were hidden from Red Cross representatives.” Presumably, such “no-access” detainees would have been hidden from visitors like Huckabee as well.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Huckabee: ‘If Anything,’ We Treat Inmates At Guantanamo Bay ‘Too Nice’
Australia imposes tight controls on Guantánamo detainee
Former Guantánamo Bay inmate David Hicks will face strict restrictions when he is released from an Australian prison next week, a magistrate has ruled.
Warren Donald said Hicks remained a threat to Australia's national security as he imposed a control order which requires the Muslim convert to report to police three times a week, stay at premises agreed on by police, remain in Australia and not contact a list of terror suspects.
Hicks, a former kangaroo skinner, is due to be freed on December 29 from a high-security prison in Adelaide.
He had spent more than five years at Guantánamo Bay without trial after being captured in 2001 in Afghanistan.
At a US military tribunal in March, he pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Qaida. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, but most of it was suspended, allowing his release next week.
Hicks was returned to Australia to serve the remainder of his sentence. He has not been convicted of any crime in the country, but police sought a control order.
He has admitted he attended al-Qaida training camps in Pakistan, and prosecutors said evidence showed Hicks undertook "substantial training" in basic arms and combat, guerrilla warfare and advanced marksmanship from al-Qaida and the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.
On Thursday, police lawyer Andrew Berger quoted letters sent in 2001 by Hicks to his family in which he said he had met al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden 20 times and described him as a "lovely brother".
The magistrate said the chances that Hicks would engage in a terrorist act were small, but evidence presented to court showed he did have the capacity to do so, and was therefore a risk to national security.
"I am satisfied on the balance of probabilities that there is a risk of the respondent either participating in a terrorist act or training others for that purpose," Donald said in his ruling.
The restrictions will last for one year, although Hicks has an opportunity to challenge the orders at a hearing on February 18.
His father, Terry, said: "All David wants to do is get back in the mainstream, get on his with life, get on with a job, try to get into a university. David has been under immense pressure for six years and now he's got another 12 months of pressure."
Only one other terrorist suspect has been given a control order in Australia. The first was imposed last year on Melbourne man Jack Thomas, who is facing a retrial on terror-related charges.
Report: Gonzo Opposed Destruction of CIA Torture Tapes
The AP reports that Alberto Gonzales was among a group of White House lawyers who opposed destruction of the tapes:
One official familiar with the investigation said the review so far indicates that Alberto Gonzales, who served as White House counsel and then attorney general, advised against destroying the videotapes as one of four senior Bush administration attorneys discussing how to handle them. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. Gonzales' attorney, George Terwilliger, declined comment.
Another of the administration attorneys, John Bellinger, then a lawyer at the National Security Council, has told colleagues that administration lawyers came to a consensus that the tapes should not be destroyed, said a senior official familiar with Bellinger's account of the 2003 White House discussion. Bellinger could not be reached for comment.
"The clear recommendation of Bellinger and the others was against destruction of the tapes," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "The recommendation in 2003 from the White House was that the tapes should not be destroyed."
No mention of Cheney's David Addington.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Bin Laden's driver is not a POW, U.S. judge says
MIAMI (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden's driver is not a prisoner of war as defined by the Geneva Conventions and can be tried by a Guantanamo war crimes tribunal, a U.S. military judge ruled in a decision made public on Thursday.
The judge said Yemeni prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan is an "unlawful enemy combatant" under the law passed by Congress last year to provide a legal basis to try non-U.S. citizens on terrorism charges in a special war crimes court at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Lawyers for Hamdan, who has acknowledged he was paid $200 a month to drive and guard the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan, said he was a civilian support worker who should be considered a prisoner of war deserving of the safeguards outlined in the Geneva Conventions that govern the treatment of war captives.
POWs can be tried by court-martial, but not in ad hoc tribunals such as those still evolving at Guantanamo. A finding that Hamdan was a POW would have raised questions about the status of the other 285 foreign captives held at the Guantanamo prison camp.
The ruling by the military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, clears the way for Hamdan's trial to proceed in the Guantanamo war court, where he would face life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.
C.I.A. to Cooperate With House on Tapes
The Central Intelligence Agency has agreed to make documents related to the destruction of interrogation videotapes available to the House Intelligence Committee and to allow the agency’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, to testify about the matter, Congressional and intelligence officials said Wednesday.
But it remained unclear whether Jose A. Rodriguez, who as chief of the agency’s clandestine service ordered the tapes destroyed in 2005, would testify. Officials said Mr. Rodriguez’s appearance before the committee might involve complex negotiations over legal immunity at a time when the Justice Department and the intelligence agency were reviewing whether the destruction of the tapes broke any laws.
The agreement marked at least a partial resolution of a standoff between the Bush administration and Congress.
The standoff began on Friday, when the Justice Department urged the House panel to postpone any inquiry on the grounds it might hinder the review by Justice and the C.I.A.’s inspector general. The committee’s Democratic chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, and its top Republican, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, responded by refusing to put off the investigation, saying there were many precedents for Congressional inquiries to proceed in parallel with criminal investigations.
This week, the administration has sought a compromise. “The Department of Justice has changed their minds, and today we have reason to believe that we will be getting the documents,” Mr. Reyes told reporters on Wednesday.
In a conciliatory statement Wednesday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department has “no desire to block any Congressional investigation” and has not advised the C.I.A. against cooperating with the committee.
“The wisdom, propriety and appropriateness of the decision to destroy these tapes are worthy and compelling subjects of an oversight investigation,” Mr. Roehrkasse said. But he said officials were still concerned that a Congressional inquiry could cause “disruption of our initial witness interviews, the delay and disruption of our document collection, and the tainting of any future criminal prosecutorial action because of Congressional grants of immunity to witnesses.”
The committee sent unsigned subpoenas for documents and for the testimony of Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Rizzo to the agency on Tuesday, and Mr. Reyes said he was prepared to sign the subpoenas if it became necessary.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, was eager to accommodate the committee as it performed its oversight role. “We’re in touch with the House Intelligence Committee on these matters, and we look forward to it being worked out,” he said.
An intelligence official, offering more details on condition of anonymity, said the top-secret documents would be made available either on Capitol Hill or at the agency, as soon as the logistics could be worked out, as early as Thursday afternoon.
The official also said Mr. Rizzo, the agency’s acting general counsel, would be prepared to testify at a hearing tentatively scheduled for Jan. 16. As the agency’s top lawyer for most of the last six years, Mr. Rizzo played a central role in discussions of whether the tapes should be destroyed.
The official declined to say whether Mr. Rodriguez would testify, and Mr. Rodriguez’s lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, declined to comment.
Current and former intelligence officials have said that the tapes of harsh interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in 2002 were made in part to document the methods being used for the first time by C.I.A. officers. But, they said, officials soon decided that taping sessions was a bad idea and could endanger interrogators if they were ever leaked.
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that discussions about the proposal to destroy the tapes involved four high-level White House lawyers: Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.
In a statement on Wednesday, the White House press secretary, Dana M. Perino, criticized a subheading on the Times article that said, “White House role was wider than it said,” noting that the White House has “not publicly commented on the issue,” except to note the president’s “immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter.” She called any suggestion that might be taken from the subheading to indicate that there was an effort by the White House to mislead the public on the videotapes issue “pernicious and troubling.”
Citing the Justice Department’s preliminary investigation, Ms. Perino said White House officials had been asked not to discuss the videotapes and declined to say who on President Bush’s staff was aware of the tapes. “We have not described, neither to highlight nor to minimize, the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter,” she said.
The New York Times said it would publish a correction on Thursday, and noted that the White House “had not challenged the content of our story,” the newspaper’s spokeswoman, Catherine J. Mathis, said in a statement.
At a confirmation hearing for President Bush’s nominee for deputy attorney general on Wednesday, lawmakers voiced frustration about being denied details of the videotapes’ destruction and urged the nominee, Mark Filip, to cooperate with Congressional inquiries.
Judge Filip, now on the federal bench in Chicago, told lawmakers he might have counseled the C.I.A. not to destroy the tapes.
“It might be the better practice to keep those in any event, given the interest in the subject matter that was on the tapes,” Mr. Filip told the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
House panel prepares subpoenas for CIA officials.
After Attorney General Mike Mukasey blocked CIA officials from appearing at a closed hearing before Congress last week, the House Intelligence Committee “said Wednesday it has prepared subpoenas to force CIA officials to testify about the agency’s secret destruction of interrogation videotapes.” The Committee’s threat marks “the second challenge to a White House attempt to shut down independent investigations,” after “a federal judge rejected an administration effort to keep the courts out of the investigation.”
Deputy AG Nominee: Waterboarding Is ‘Repugnant,’ But Can’t Say Whether It’s Torture
Today in his nomination hearing to be Deputy Attorney General, Mark Filip refused to explicitly say whether he believed waterboarding to be torture. He told Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) that he found the interrogation technique “repugnant,” but couldn’t answer without taking “a long hard look at” the information:
KENNEDY: The key question is what constitutes torture. So the question that Judge Mukasey would say nothing at all on that question. So the same question to you: Do you consider waterboarding torture.
MARK FILIP: Senator, speaking personally, I consider waterboarding to be repugnant as it’s been reported in any of its various iterations. […]
That said, the Attorney General of the United States is presently reviewing that legal question. He determined that he wanted to have access to the classified information and memos about it. I don’t think I can or anyone who could be potentially considered to be his deputy could get out in front of him on that question while it’s under review.
Kennedy continued to press Filip, expressing surprise that he was dodging the issue:
I must say, everyone is familiar with the challenges that were out there for Mr. Mukasey when he refused to give an answer on that, and we thought you’d be able to give a response to this. You’ve been a judge, made the decisions, know what the issues are. It’s not a complicated issue in question, and it seems to be that you ought to be able to respond to it.
Filip simply replied that he awaits the opportunity to have “access to that information” so that he can “give candid advice to the Attorney General.
In October, the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to approve Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey with little objection, until he obfuscated on waterboarding. Mukasey claimed that although waterboarding was “repugnant” to him on a “personal basis,” he was unable to strike a “legal opinion” without the “actual facts and circumstances.”
UPDATE: Later in the hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Filip that he was not “satisfied” with Filip’s answer on waterboarding:
I think it is a response consistent with Attorney General Mukasey. But consistent with Attorney General Mukasey’s response to this committee, he received the lowest confirmation vote of any Attorney General nominee in the last fifty years. And that’s where you find yourself at this moment, over the same issue.
Transcript:
KENNEDY: I just wanted to clarify an earlier response that you gave to Chairman Leahy, that was on the torture issue. I heard you say to the Chairman that torture is unconstitutional so it’s always prohibited. Judge Mukasey said the same thing to us. But everyone agrees with that point. The key question is what constitutes torture. So the question that Judge Mukasey would say nothing at all on that question. So the same question to you: Do you consider waterboarding torture.
MARK FILIP: Senator, speaking personally, I consider waterboarding to be repugnant as it’s been reported in any of its various iterations. The Attorney General — I also think it’s important for us to all be mindful that we have service members around the world often times in precarious places, and I don’t view that as some sort of abstract platitude. I had a grandfather who was in a German prisoner of war camp.
That said, the Attorney General of the United States is presently reviewing that legal question. He determined that he wanted to have access to the classified information and memos about it. I don’t think I can or anyone who could be potentially considered to be his deputy could get out in front of him on that question while it’s under review. But I will tell you that if I’m confirmed at a time such that that review is ongoing or he otherwise sought my advice on it, I would view it like any other legal question and take a long hard look at it, and if I had a view on it different from his, I would tell him so.
KENNEDY: Well, you’ve been a judge. You know what this issue is. This shouldn’t be something that’s going to take a lot more study about. I mean, you know what we’re talking about. Not only are you familiar with the concept but you know the arguments of it, and you know what the debate’s been about, and you know what the Geneva Convention. I mean, we ought to get — “repugnant” is not the answer that meets the requirement in terms of the various statutes. You’re not prepared to tell us in your own words whether you believe that waterboarding is torture, the same kind of techniques that the United States prosecuted Japanese for doing to Americans in World War II.
FILIP: I think Senator that I’d await having access to that information, and await an opportunity of confirm to give candid advice to the Attorney General on that before I answer a question he presently has under review.
KENNEDY: Well others will come, I’m sure, back to that, but I must say, everyone is familiar with the challenges that were out there for Mr. Mukasey when he refused to give an answer on that, and we thought you’d be able to give a response to this. You’ve been a judge, made the decisions, know what the issues are. It’s not a complicated issue in question, and it seems to be that you ought to be able to respond to it.
