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Unilke libertarianism, which Ronald Reagan once called "the very heart and soul of conservatism," it has been neoconservatism that is an aberration to the conservative movement.

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Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:16 EST

In spite of the fact that the United States faces no enemy anywhere in the world capable of opposing it on a battlefield, the Defense budget for 2011 will go up 7.1 percent from current levels. A lot of the new spending will be on drones, America’s latest contribution to western civilization, capable of surveilling large areas on the ground and delivering death from the skies. It is a peculiarly American vision of warfare, with a "pilot" sitting at a desk half a world away and pressing a button that can kill a target far below. Hygienic and mechanical, it is a bit like a video game with no messy cleanup afterwards. The recently released United States Quadrennial Defense Review reports how the Pentagon will be developing a new generation of super drones that can stay airborne for long periods of time and can strike anywhere in the world and at any time to kill America’s enemies. The super drones will include some that can fly at supersonic speeds and others that will be large enough to carry nuclear weapons. Some of the new drones will be designed for the navy, able to take off from aircraft carriers and project US power to even more distant hot spots. Drones are particularly esteemed by policymakers because as they are unmanned and can fly low to the ground they can violate someone’s airspace "accidentally" without necessarily resulting in a diplomatic incident.
Washington’s embrace of drones as the weapon of choice for international assassination is one major reason why the United States has become the evil empire. Drones are the extended fist of what used to be referred to as the Bush Doctrine. Under the Bush Doctrine Washington asserted that it had a right to use its military force preemptively against anyone in the world at any time if the White House were to determine that such action might be construed as defending the United States. Vice President Dick Cheney defined the policy in percentage terms, asserting that if there was a 1% chance that any development anywhere in the world could endanger Americans, the United States government was obligated to act. It should be noted that President Barack Obama has not repudiated either the Bush doctrine or the 1% solution of Dick Cheney and has actually gone so far as to assert that America is fighting Christianity-approved "just wars," a position disputed by Pope Benedict XVI among others. Far from eschewing war and killing, the number and intensity of drone attacks has increased under Obama, as has the number of civilian casualties, referred to by the splendid bloodless euphemism "collateral damage."
Drones are currently killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. It should be noted that the United States is not at war with any of those countries, which should mean in a sane world that the killing is illegal under both international law and the US Constitution. America’s Founding Fathers used constitutional restraints to make it difficult for Americans to go to war, requiring an act of war by Congress. Unfortunately it has not worked out that way. The US has been involved in almost constant warfare since the Second World War but the most recent actual declaration of war was on December 8, 1941. And then there are the special and clandestine operations that span the globe. Apart from Israel, no other country in the world has an openly declared policy of going around and killing people. One would think that the international community would consequently regard both Tel Aviv and Washington as pariahs, but fear of offending the world’s only super power and its principal client state has aborted most criticism. Most nations are resigned to letting assassination teams and hellfire armed drones operate as they please. If Iran were operating the drones and bumping off its enemies in places like Dubai you can be sure the reaction would be quite different.
And it doesn’t stop there. Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder has effectively blocked any inquiry into the use of torture by US government officials, mostly from the CIA. The Administration claims to have stopped the practice but has declared that no one will be punished for obeying orders to waterboard prisoners, an argument that was not acceptable at the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and should not be acceptable now. The United States is a signatory to the international agreement on torture and there are also both federal and state laws that prohibit either carrying out or enabling the practice, so the ruling by Holder is essentially a decision to ignore serious crimes that were committed against individuals who, in many cases, were both helpless and completely innocent. It also ignores the participation of Justice Department lawyers and CIA doctors in the process, involvement that most would consider both immoral and unethical. Worst of all, it lets off the hook the real war criminals, people like George Tenet and those in the White House who approved the practice. Tenet, one recalls, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a $4 million book deal. He still teaches at Georgetown University. Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who made the legal arguments for torture are now respectively a tenured professor at Berkeley and a federal appeals court justice. One assumes that the actual CIA torturers continue to be employed by the federal government or are enjoying a comfortable retirement. So much for accountability for war crimes under President Obama.
Finally there is assassination. On February 3rd Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair commented during a congressional briefing that the United States reserves the right to kill American citizens overseas who are actively "involved" with groups regarded as terrorist. Involvement is, of course, a very slippery expression providing maximum latitude for those seeking to make a case for summary execution. The death list involves a due process of sorts in that a government official makes the decision who shall be on it based on guidelines but it does not allow the accused to challenge or dispute evidence. It should also be noted that no one in Congress objected to the Blair statement and the media hardly reported the story, suggesting that tolerance of illegal and immoral activity now pervades the system. As former Reagan Deputy Attorney General Bruce Fein has commented, the claimed authority to suspend one’s constitutional rights overseas can be extended to anyone in the United States by declaring one an enemy combatant under the terms of the Military Commissions Act. Jose Padilla was denied his constitutional rights to a fair trial even though he was an American citizen and was arrested in Chicago, not overseas. Can we anticipate extrajudicial killing of American citizens in America as part of the war on terror? Of course we can.
Three strikes and you’re out, Mr. Obama. Your government stands for preemptive killing and missile strikes on people living in countries with which America is not at war, lets torturers and torture enablers go free, and has asserted the right to assassinate its own citizens anywhere in the world based on secret evidence. Ronald Reagan once described his vision of America as a shining city on a hill. Over the past ten years the shining city has become the ultimate rogue nation, pumped up with power and hubris in spite of the clearly visible signs of decline and moving inexorably towards a catastrophic fall.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/204678-The-Rogue-Nation

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Robert Roth
Dissident Voice
Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:58 EST

“Two months after the devastating earthquake, the situation in Haiti is downright criminal,” says Robert Roth. According to the spokesperson of the activist network Haiti Action Committee, major western players such as the US are more interested in defending their own geopolitical interests in Haiti than truly helping the hardly hit Caribbean country.
Johnny Van Hove: Haiti has disappeared almost completely from the front pages. Since you are in close contact with a number of Haitian grassroots organizations via the Haiti Action Committee, could you describe how the situation down there is at the moment?
Robert Roth: The situation is a catastrophe. At this point about 230,000 people have died and 3,000,000 people are still left homeless. Hundreds of thousands of people have no shelter whatsoever and are literally sleeping outside. Under sheets, not in tents. In many, many areas there is no water, no tents, no healthcare. One to two million people are in internal refugee camps that are now dotting Port-au-Prince. They were set up by international aid agencies, but they are in terrible shape.
The lack of housing is truly astounding. We have been getting numerous requests from the poorest communities in Haiti for funds for tents. With the rainy season coming, there is a very grave danger of the spread of typhoid, measles, and dysentery. It could be one these situations in which the aftermath of a disaster is even worse than the disaster itself. The situation was, and is, truly criminal.
JVH: Considering the hundreds of international aid organizations working in Haiti, how could it have come to this situation?
RR: The total amount of financial support that has gone through aid groups is close to one billion dollars. Haiti is truly flooded with aid organizations and yet very few aid goods have been distributed. Most goods have been sitting at the airport or in big warehouses. People who were pulled out under the rubble by Haitians could not receive medical aid because it was not distributed efficiently.
You have to distinguish among the aid groups, of course. Two groups which have been very consistent in distributing aid goods are Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders. On the other hand, the Red Cross has been mostly invisible in the poorest communities in Haiti. There have been protests directly at the Red Cross warehouses and offices, demanding that the aid be distributed. The effectiveness of a number of the aid agencies has been astonishingly weak. And when a country has been occupied, when its democratic organizations have been repressed, and when community-based organizations are marginalized, earthquake relief just will not immediately get into the hands of the people.
JVH: What is the role of the UN and the US – which have been major players in Haitian history – in the current catastrophe?
RR: The UN and the US have looked at their role as a security measure. Their concept of aid has been militarized, which means that they have not been diligent in handing out aid to communities. The US military has eleven thousand soldiers down there, the UN nine thousand. Six thousand UN troops have been there since the coup against the democratically elected president Aristide in 2004 and they have been a repressive force, an occupying army in Haiti. In the wake of the earthquake, the US and UN armies have been essentially patrolling Haiti. I am not saying that there has been no help. They have started to distribute food, tents, health supplies. But it has been much more limited than you would expect. There have been many reports from various communities about how armed vehicles just drove by their communities without helping them.
JVH: What were the effects of the “militarization” of the relief aid by the US, amongst other countries – Canada and Japan sent hundreds of troops too, for instance? The American/Haitian activist Marguerite Laurent suggested on her blog that humanitarian aid was blocked in favor of military equipment after the US took over the Haitian airports in the first few days after the earth quake.
RR: The militarization of the relief aid really delayed the distribution of food, water, and particularly medical aid. One of the effects was that in the first few days after the earthquake, five cargo planes of Doctors Without Borders were turned away and rerouted to the Dominican Republic. Partners In Help estimated that about 20,000 people died each day that aid was delayed.
JVH: Is the lack of security in Haiti an explanation for the heavy emphasis on sending in forces? Numerous media reports after the earthquake suggested that insecurity, rapes, and violence erupting during foreign aid handouts were mounting.
RR: The images of insecurity in the media are not accurate at all. There are always security issues in any country. But what is remarkable is the discipline, the non-violence, the resilience, the creativity, and the cooperation that Haitians have exhibited in the face of this catastrophe. Even days and days and days after not receiving aid, the US and UN could not point to any major security issues.
JVH: If Haiti has not been as insecure as hinted at in the media, how can the massive military response of the US be explained?
RR: The primary fear of the US was popular, political unrest. Haiti truly has a very politically conscious population which has never gone down easily. After the coup in 2004, thousands of people were killed and thousands more imprisoned and held without charges. Every member of the Lavalas government – from high level ministers to local officials – were removed from office. Others were forced into exile.
Still, there has never been an end to grass roots organizing. Labor unions protested the price of gas and the privatizing of the phone company. There were major demonstrations demanding Aristide’s return.
Just recently there was a very successful electoral boycott because the Haitian government denied Lavalas the right to participate in the election, even though it is the most popular political party in Haiti.
The US is still not comfortable with the popular movement in Haiti. You can see this in the continued banishment of former President Aristide from Haiti. While the Obama Administration has called on former Presidents Clinton and Bush – who was responsible for the 2004 coup – to help coordinate aid, it opposes the return of a former democratically elected president who wants to return as a private citizen to aid in the reconstruction efforts.
JVH: Surely, there must be other reasons to justify the militarization of the aid relief?
RR: There is clearly a major geopolitical and economic interest in Haiti, most prominently by the US. There is a long history of US intervention in the area, including a direct US occupation from 1915-1934. This occupation created the Haitian military and led eventually to the Duvalier dictatorships. In 1991, the US overthrew Aristide and then again in 2004. So the US is clearly opposed to the social program of Lavalas and to its example in the Caribbean.
Haiti is also strategically located close to both Cuba and Venezuela. Haiti is rich in minerals, such as marble, uranium, iridium, and oil. Big corporations, such as the Royal Caribbean Lines, are creating a tourist center in the north which could have an enormous value for the tourist industry in the Caribbean area. And Haiti is looked at as a source of cheap labor. There is a long history of garment assembly in Haiti. Cherokee, Wal-Mart, Disney, and Major League Baseball all had relationships with Haiti. If the US plan for Haiti is implemented, the numbers of sweatshops in Port-au-Prince will surely increase.
JVH: Naomi Klein suggested that “disaster capitalism” is striking in Haiti. Would you agree?
RR: Absolutely. This is disaster capitalism on steroids. Number one, you have had an earthquake that ravaged the infrastructure of a country which has been made poor over the centuries. Secondly, you have more than 20,000 troops and massive amounts of capital circulating there. Plus, the Haitian government has been a very passive partner in the aftermath of the earthquake. That is a perfect recipe. The reconstruction conferences in Montreal and Miami are indicating that Haiti will be rebuilt along the lines of the organizations attending them: the US, Canada, the World Bank, the Clinton Foundation, the IMF, major business corporations such as the Royal Caribbean Lines, the Soros Foundation. Haiti is like a blank board in their minds. It is going be a feeding frenzy soon.
JVH: The Haitian government was attending the reconstruction meetings too, though. What is its role in the current crisis?
RR: What was remarkable throughout the crisis was the invisibility of the government. There are two reasons for that. First of all, the government really seems to have lost its connection to the Haitian people. President Preval has been major disappointment since he was elected in 2006. He has basically been an arm of the occupation forces of the UN. Secondly, the government of Haiti has been starved for years and years by the international lending organizations, including USAID. Even now, the government does not receive true support. It literally gets only one cent for every dollar spent on Haiti. That really creates a dependency on international aid agencies. When a crisis such as this happens, the government is underfunded and the aid agencies take over. All in all, the invisibility and compliance of the Haitian government is a token for the fact that the US, the UN, and the NGOs have taken control of the country.
JVH: Since the relief agencies are not performing efficiently, who has been providing aid at the grassroots level in Haiti?
RR: What is happening in Haiti is that local communities are helping themselves. The mainstream image of Haitians is that they cannot help themselves, that they are dysfunctional and violent. The truth could not be more different. Haiti is a very well organized country at the grassroots level. There are community committees in every one of the poor neighborhoods, which have been organizing protests in order to get the aid goods distributed. They have also been contacting international organizations they know they can trust and started distributing the aid goods to their local communities.
An organization which has been very important is the Aristide Foundation, which has been setting up aid programs, especially in the refugee camps. They have created mobile schools, they have developed local health clinics, and they are also setting up a big health center at the foundation’s site. Partners in Health has continued to provide important support as well. The Haiti Emergency Relief Fund is funding community projects that are not getting aided by the big relief organizations.
JVH: According to Marguerite Laurent in the current issue of the American magazine, The Progressive, the people that could be saved were saved mostly by Haitians “frantically using their bare hands to dig through the rubble and lift pulverized concrete in the immediate forty-eight hours after the earthquake”. Does that give an accurate image of how the digging and rescuing took place?
RR: Laurent is absolutely right. The chair of the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund, for instance, was in Haiti with his family at the time of the quake, and they saw first hand how Haitians were working day and night to save their families and friends. That was basically the story in Haiti: Haitians saving themselves and bandaging and housing each other. They waited for aid that never came and that is why so many people have died unnecessarily.
JVH: Nevertheless, Haiti cannot rebuild itself without external help. The Haitian diaspora will keep on sending close to a billion dollars to their homeland every year. But what role can international aid agencies play? Who should be supported in order to help Haiti?
RR: You can’t talk about disaster capitalism and then donate to the big NGOs. If you donate to the Red Cross, for instance, some help will go to Haiti. At the same time, you are also donating to a system which is not designed to empower Haitians. So if you are progressive, if you want democracy in Haiti, and if you have some faith in the Haitian people, you should be looking for the groups most closely related to, and working with, the grassroots organizations. Hopefully, people can donate to organizations like the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund that are doing just that.

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/204675-Haiti-Disaster-Capitalism-on-Steroids-An-interview-with-Robert-Roth

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With the invasion of Iraq, the US didn’t "support the troops"–it abused them, and this year’s Best Picture Oscar went to a movie about America at its worst.

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by Andy Worthington

Global Research, March 3, 2010

The Future of Freedom Foundation – 2010-03-01

When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing.

Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military-review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, and to determine whether they constituted an ongoing threat to the United States. This appeared to be a maddeningly arbitrary system, but it led to the release of hundreds of the prisoners.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court added a second layer of review, of a more substantial nature, when it recognized constitutionally garanteed habeas corpus rignts for prisoners; in other words, the right to challenge the basis of their detention in a U.S. court. This right had been upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2004, leading to the filing of habeas petitions on behalf of the majority of the prisoners, but these were all stalled when Congress submitted to the president’s wishes and passed legislation that purported to strip the prisoners of these rights, in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under George W. Bush

Following the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, District Court judges began hearing the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions, and the prisoners secured, for the first time, an objective review of what the government claimed to be evidence proving that they were connected to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. The result was a disappointment for the government, although it came as no surprise to those who had been studying Guantánamo closely and who knew that the majority of the prisoners had been seized by America’s Afghan and Pakistani allies, at a time when substantial bounty payments were being offered, and that the majority of the supposed evidence against the men came from their own interrogations, or those of other prisoners, which were often conducted in conditions where torture, coercion, or bribery were prevalent.

From October 2008 to January 2009, 23 prisoners won their habeas petitions, and just three cases were won by the government. In the case of 17 Uighurs (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province), the government gave up all pretense that they were “enemy combatants,” having established, soon after they were seized in December 2001, that their only enemy was the Chinese government, and having suffered a humiliating court defeat shortly after the Supreme Court ruling last June. A judge also dismissed the government’s claims against five Algerian-born Bosnian citizens, who had been kidnapped by U.S. agents from Sarajevo in January 2002, in connection with a non-existent plot to bomb the U.S. embassy, and the case againsta Chadian national, who was a child at the time of his capture by Pakistani police in a raid on a mosque in Karachi.

In both cases, the judge — Richard Leon, an appointee of George W. Bush — dismissed the government’s supposed evidence by ruling, in the case of the Bosnians, that a supposed informer was unreliable, and in the case of the former child prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, that unreliable witnesses in Guantánamo (whose unreliability was known to the authorities) had concocted a fictional story about him.

Judge Leon also ruled that the government had established a case against one of the Bosnians — in connection with purported plans to recruit men to fight in Afghanistan — and against two other prisoners with supposed connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, but it was a poor start for the government’s defense of its rationale for holding men for seven years without charge or trial, and these same problems resurfaced under Barack Obama.

Guantánamo and habeas corpus under Barack Obama

In Obama’s first year in office, nine prisoners won their habeas petitions, and six lost. Those who won included a Syrian who had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy, an Afghan (also a child at the time of capture) whose confessions were taintedby threats of torture, and a Kuwaiti businessman who had been tortured in Guantánamo until he came up with false confessions that were only finally exposed by a judge last September. In all these cases, false confessions and unreliable witnesses fatally undermined the government’s case.

Moreover, in the majority of cases that the government won, the fault lines in the Bush administration’s rationale for defining men as “enemy combatants” became apparent: most were, at best, peripheral characters in the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance that preceded al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and should, by any objective measure, have been held as enemy prisoners of war and protected by the Geneva Conventions.

Obama’s Task Force muddies the waters

Although the majority of the nine prisoners who lost their habeas petitions were cast back into the unprecedented world of indefinite detention conceived by the Bush administration, awaiting a substantial overhaul of the very basis of detention policies in the “war on terror” that has not yet happened, it was clear that the courts provided the first objective review of the Bush administration’s policies. It muddied the waters, therefore, when President Obama established an interagency Task Force to review all the prisoners’ cases, and to come up with its own conclusions about who should be released and who should be put on trial.

The Task Force struggled to pull together information about the prisoners that was scattered throughout various department and agencies, and took until January this year to complete its findings, advising the president that 35 prisoners should be put forward for trials, that 47 should continue to be held indefinitely without charge or trial, and that the rest — around 110 prisoners at the time — should be released.

The announcement revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the review process. It was, of course, heartening that only 35 prisoners would face trials, as this figure corresponded to analyses revealed by intelligence officials over the previous eight years, demonstrating that less than 5 percent of the 779 prisoners held throughout Guantánamo’s history had any meaningful connection to al-Qaeda, the Taliban leadership, or international terrorism. Similarly, the decision to release 110 men was a swifter judgment than the courts were able to achieve — although it should be noted that the progress of the habeas petitions was severely obstructed by the Justice Department, where lawyers dragged their heels providing necessary information to the defense, and also that an executive decision to release a prisonerdid not carry the weight of a court verdict, and did not, crucially, remove the stigma of having been held for years as an “enemy combatant.”

However, the biggest disappointment was the Task Force’s recommendation that 47 men be held indefinitely without charge or trial. “Preventive detention” was at the heart of the Bush administration’s baleful experiment in holding prisoners neither as prisoners of war, protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as criminal suspects to be put forward for trial on charges related to terrorism, and it was profoundly disturbing to hear President Obama explain, as he did in May last year, that the men in question were those who “cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States.” Essentially, what this statement revealed was that the administration was prepared to rely on information obtained through torture as a reason for continuing indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Moreover, the Task Force’s announcement in January — and Obama’s apparent endorsement of it — also ignored the role of the courts, for the simple reason that the majority of these men had outstanding habeas corpus petitions, and that, as a result, it was up to the District Court judges, and not the executive, to decide whether the supposed evidence against them was at all reliable.

Such is the muddle created by the Task Force — and such is the secrecy surrounding its decisions — that it is impossible to know whether the nine men consigned to indefinite detention after losing their habeas petitions in the courts are included in the 47 men that the Task Force advised should be held indefinitely. I can only presume that this is the case, but, as events last week showed, we are now in a position where rulings on prisoners’ habeas petitions no longer stand independently, but are actively compared to the results reached by a Task Force whose findings are secret.

The latest habeas corpus rulings

Last week, judges ruled on the habeas petitions of three Yemeni prisoners. The unclassified opinions have not yet been released, so the judges’ reasoning is not yet available, but in two cases the prisoner’s habeas petitions were denied, and in the third case the petition was granted. The two men who lost their petitions are Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani, and the man who won was Uthman Abdul Rahim Mohammed Uthman. To confuse matters further, both al-Nahdi and al-Assani had been cleared by a Bush-era military review board, while Uthman had not. It is, of course, not known what decision had been reached by the Task Force regarding these men.

Although the judges’ unclassified opinions are not yet available, a glance at these men’s stories, as available through publicly accessible Pentagon documents, indicates how the decisions may have been made. As I explained in my book The Guantánamo Files, Othman, who was 22 years old at the time of his capture, “said that he had traveled between Kabul and Khost teaching the Koran from March to December 2001.” Although he “admitted that he had stayed at a Taliban house in Quetta, Pakistan, which was the normal entry point for volunteers who had come to fight with the Taliban,” he stated that this was “only because he had been told that it was the only way for him to enter Afghanistan.”

If Othman had a plausible argument that he had traveled to Afghanistan as a missionary, this was not the case with al-Nahdi and al-Assani. Both had been seized in the Tora Bora region of eastern Afghanistan (where a major showdown between al-Qaeda and the U.S. military’s Afghan proxies had taken place in November and December 2001), and, although it is clear from the cases of many of the men held at Guantánamo that passing through Tora Bora to escape the chaos of Afghanistan did not prove that they were involved in any kind of military activity (because thousands of civilians were also trying to escape), both men came up with accounts which suggested that they were at least peripherally involved in the conflict.

As I explained in The Guantánamo Files, al-Assani, who was 24 years old at the time of his capture:

was a recent recruit to the Taliban cause, a foot soldier in an inter-Muslim civil war that had suddenly gone global. He traveled to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001, trained briefly at al-Farouq [a training camp established by an Afghan warlord but associated with Osama bin Laden in the years before the 9/11 attacks] and ended up in Tora Bora, but only, he said, because “I was fleeing for my life with many other people to avoid the bombing that was imminent,” and not, as was alleged, because he “was assigned to augment Taliban and al-Qaeda forces already in defensive positions in Tora Bora.” He added that he was with a group of Pakistanis, trying to get to Pakistan, when they were bombed by U.S. forces and he was “the sole survivor.”

He was then taken by Afghan forces to a hospital in Jalalabad, and delivered to U.S. forces some months later.

Al-Nahdi, who was 27 years old at the time of his capture, explained that he had been inspired to assist the Taliban through a fatwa issued by a notorious cleric, and had spent a month at al-Farouq. He added that:

[He] saw Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, when he “talked about the jihad for approximately one hour and then a senior al-Qaeda operative [identified as Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2] made a few comments,” and then went into the mountains, where he took turns guarding a foxhole with 15 other people. Responding to an allegation that he “may have fought in Tora Bora,” he said, “I never fired a weapon. I was only sitting,” and, when asked if he would have shot at Americans, he [said]: “I did not see any Americans. If I had seen any Americans, I would not have shot at them. I would have only shot at them if they had shot at me first, to defend myself.”

Guantánamo’s continuing existence as a legal black hole

Over eight years after Guantánamo opened, it is clear from these three rulings that the fate of the men in question is still dictated more by the disgraceful innovations of the Bush administration than it is by any objective notions of justice. Othman may be released, but only when the Obama administration decides that it is politically safe to free any cleared Yemeni prisoners (having capitulated to unprincipled criticismfollowing the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt by suspending all releases to Yemen until further notice). Moreover, it is impossible to know whether any of these three men were cleared for release by Obama’s Task Force, and, if so, what it means if a prisoner loses his habeas petition, when the Task Force had recommended his release.

Behind all this, of course, lies the problem that I have been highlighting ever since Judge Leon ruled, last January, that Ghaleb al-Bihani, another Yemeni, couldcontinue to be held indefinitely because he had worked as a cook for Arab forces supporting the Taliban, and had not magically spirited himself out of Afghanistan on the day that the U.S.-led invasion began, in October 2001. Absurdly, it seems to me, this was when the Taliban’s civil war with the Northern Alliance suddenly became a “war on terror,” in which U.S. forces, who hooked up with the Northern Alliance after years of indifference to their cause, were conventional soldiers, but those who opposed them were terrorists.

If there were truly any justice, Ghaleb al-Bihani — and Suleiman al-Nahdi and Fahmi al-Assani — would have been held as prisoners of war according to the Geneva Conventions, and not as special “war on terror” prisoners whose detention was endorsed by Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which empowered the president to seize and hold anyone he regarded as having a connection to al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban. Crucially, this would mean that they could continue to be held until the end of hostilities (whenever that may be), but it would also mean that they would not have been subjected to the abusive innovations of the “war on terror,” and would have been shielded from coercive interrogations and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

I have serious doubts about whether it is acceptable to continue holding peripheral figures seized during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 for longer than the duration of the Second World War, but even if this were the case, no one in the executive branch, Congress, or the judiciary has fully addressed the fact that, instead, they are still effectively in the black hole dreamed up by the Bush administration when the president accepted, in February 2002, that he had the right to hold a new category of human being — “enemy combatants” without rights — outside the Geneva Conventions.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at:www.andyworthington.co.uk.

Andy Worthington is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Andy Worthington

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17897

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