OMNI NEWSLETTER # 5 ON US
Compiled by Dick Bennett, Building a Culture of Peace
JUNE 26 IS UN INTERNATIONAL DAY IN SUPPORT OF VICTIMS OF TORTURE
Contents of #2
No Exceptions
Apologists
Bad Science and Medical Ethics
Bush Admin. War Crimes, Psychology, and Accountability
Prosecuting Bush Officials
Cheney Admits to War Crimes
CIA Waterboarding Legal Shield
Solitary Confinement
Justice Denied to Guantanamo
Books
President Obama and Faisal Shahzad
Contents of #3
UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Editorial from Manila
Torture Tolerated by US Public
Newsweek, Arab Dictators, and US
Books on US Torture
Contents of #4
Prosecute Bush et al.
Hunsinger, Book, People of Faith Speak
Marjorie Cohn, Book , US
Danner. Book: US History
UN Torture Report
Oppose Torture: Leahy
Former Contractor Suing Donald Rumsfeld
Physicians, Report: Medical Evidence for Torture
Film: Taxi to the Dark Side
Film: Five Fingers, CIA Torture
Olbermann on Gen. Petraeus and Torture
Prosecutors Drop Case Against CIA “Advanced Interrogators”
Torture in California
War, Torture, Execution: Displays of Sovereign Power
Contents of #5
Philippe Sands
Interview by Bill Moyers
Two Books: Torture Team and Lawless World
Global Guantanamo
Morris Davis, Crimes of War Project
Nat Hentoff on Obama
PHILIPPE SANDS
“Philippe Sands,” Interview by Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal . New Press, 2011. Moyers: Sands holds up “a mirror to the [US
Review: “So much for the rights of man”
Philippe Sands's Torture Team exposes the American conspiracy to tear up the Geneva Convention after the attacks of 9/11, says Rafael Behr
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by Philippe Sands
Only a psychopath inflicts systematic brutality on another man in cold blood; a psychopath or a soldier obeying orders. Many of the military interrogators based at the
How did that happen? How did a state, conceived in awe of The Rights of Man, make psychopaths of its children? Who gave the orders? That is the essence of Philippe Sands's inquiry in Torture Team: Deception, Cruelty and the Compromise of Law. Meticulously, soberly, astonishingly, he finds the answer in testimony from some of the most senior figures in the
In the hands of a more polemic writer, that point alone could be sharpened over hundreds of pages and thrust into a rhetorical effigy of George W Bush. But for Sands, proving that the crime was committed is auxiliary to telling another story. Torture Team is about the jurisprudence of moral corruption.
The process started in the months after 9/11. There was widespread expectation of further attacks and a belief that Taliban and al-Qaeda members captured in
One such prisoner was Mohammed al-Qahtani. He was alleged to be an accomplice in the 9/11 plot, a hardcore terrorist. He seemed immune to the established army interrogation techniques, which complied with the Geneva Conventions. So al-Qahtani was made the guinea pig for a new set of techniques. They included the use of 'stress positions', sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, pushing, prodding, forced nudity, exploitation of phobias, simulated drowning.
The first step down the legal path for the state to sanction such behaviour was to declare that the Guantánamo detainees were not covered by the Geneva Conventions. Without
The fact that prized American values were being jettisoned in the 'war on terror' did not go unnoticed on the ground at Guantánamo and inside the Pentagon. There was a furious backlash. The Haynes memo was rescinded, on 15 January 2003. In June 2006, the Supreme Court restored Geneva Convention rights to all
That would be the quintessentially American way to look at it. But the power of such unwavering self-belief, the idea of the nation not just as a group of people but as an intrinsically virtuous endeavour, is partly to blame for the ethical meltdown chronicled in Torture Team. Combined with the shock of 9/11, it gave the political elite a sense of moral sureness that came to resemble radical revolutionary ideology: all means were justified when the end goal was defeating terror; the expedient logic of the 'ticking bomb scenario'.
But the scenario is an illusion, a sado-political fantasy, an intellectual contrivance to coax the anxious mind into legitimising brutality. Like an optical illusion, it presents the possibility of torture as something complex and paradoxical - ethical cruelty. But in reality, it is something quite ordinary. It is a crime.
“Above the law” a review
Martin Jacques salutes Lawless World, a clear and readable account of how America
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by Philippe Sands.
International law is a subject that, on the face of it, has little drawing power. Yet over the past couple of years, in the context of the legality of the Iraqi invasion, it has become central to the political debate in
Although a large body of international law predates 1945, its real growth and influence has come in the period since. Its development was a conscious attempt by the west - notably the Americans and to some extent the British - to design an international order in their own image. Of course, until the end of the cold war, its writ was almost wholly confined to the western world, a fact strangely taken for granted by Sands; indeed it barely gets a mention.
By far the most important body of international law concerns trade and overseas investment. Sands shows how rules governing overseas investment began to take shape in the 1960s as a direct response to the emergence of the newly independent former colonies and a conscious attempt to shackle their political freedom. It is these laws - secretive, hidden from view and, above all, binding - that have underpinned the neoliberal globalisation project. The chapters on trade and investment reveal how biased these rules are in favour of the west, and how they are made and exercised in institutional recesses that are unaccountable, even to cabinets, let alone parliaments, and utterly invisible to the public eye. This is the nexus of corporate, bureaucratic and judicial power.
By and large, though, Sands is more optimistic about the value and prospects for international law. He discusses the Pinochet judgment, which placed human rights abuses by a president above the sanctity of the sovereign nation-state. In the same context, he gives a positive appraisal of the formation of the International Criminal Court. Similarly, he shows how legislation to protect the environment, especially in the sphere of climate change, most notably
The nub of the book, however, concerns the way in which the
In so doing he throws new light on the nature of the neo-conservative revolution and its determination to remake the world in
It is a salutary reminder that what appeared in an earlier era (notably the 1990s) to be the remorseless logic of an increasingly globalised world - namely the emergence of new rules of global governance, together with a plethora of institutions to exercise them - far from being the product of some neutral "universal interest", was and is, on the contrary, a function of good old-fashioned political power. In one leap, the
Sands is right that, as some aspects of international law have become increasingly subject to the influence of other actors, the United States no longer feels comfortable with them and thus believes that they are no longer in its interests. But Sands also underestimates what might be described as the political dimension of the legal question. International law remains a function of power - the power of nation-states. And none is more powerful than the
The withdrawal of its support undermines - in one blow - the legitimacy of those treaties that
This is an excellent book. It is also highly readable, which is a fine achievement, given the slightly forbidding subject matter. At times the book is engagingly personal. Sands describes the scene at the House of Lords appeal on Pinochet so well that one almost feels as if one is there. And he memorably recounts the process by which the climate-change conventions arrive at their decisions: far from being neat and legalistic, they are a cacophony of late nights, private deals, stamina and eccentric individuals who enjoy an influence well beyond expectation.
Sands writes not as a dull international lawyer but as an astute observer of human situations. Lawless World is also a model of clarity: one is never left gasping for comprehension. Above all, though, it is authoritative and ruthless in its analysis of the conduct of the
· Martin Jacques is visiting fellow at the LSE Asian Research Centre
“Bush Confronted with Guantanamo Torture Complaint at Canadian Economics Summit” by Carlos Maza, NationofChange, Oct. 21, 2011: “International human rights lawyers in western Canada greeted George W. Bush’s arrival at an economics summit Thursday by asking a Canadian court to consider a torture complaint by four Guantanamo captives, three of them free and one still held at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba Guantanamo Geneva
MORRIS DAVIS AND CRIMES OF WAR PROJECT
NAT HENTOFF: REPORTER OF OBAMA’S TORTURE RECORD
HENTOFF’S LATEST ARTICLE WHAT OBAMA SAID AND WHAT HE DID REGARDING TORTURE: “Obama’s Growing Torture Record,” Free Inquiry (Feb. March 2012). Among other wrongs, Obama violated the Leahy Amendment and abdicated responsibility for torture and other war crimes.
by N Hentoff
Feb 17, 2010 – Author: Nat Hentoff, Published: 2010-02-17, Type: Commentary. ... has to say about Obama allegedly banning torture — and the accompanying ... notes that " theUnited States
Feb 17, 2010 – Author: Nat Hentoff, Published: 2010-02-17, Type: Commentary. ... has to say about Obama allegedly banning torture — and the accompanying ... notes that " the
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=26097Cached
Aug 20, 2011 – Culture, Society & History ... by Nat Hentoff ... 4, President Barack Obama refused entry to the United States
A A A Comments (54) By Nat Hentoff Tuesday, Jan 12 2010 ... Does that make Obama complicit in these acts of torture? You decide. What is clear, beyond a ...
www.fff.org/whatsNew/Archive/WarOnTerrorism.aspCached
by Bruce Ackerman Washington
Dec 17, 2009 – A snippet: Nat Hentoff: In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other ... Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? .... A reading of history informs me that it was going on long before I came of age and started watching. ..... We had an unemployment rate lower the 5% and a growth rate in ...
END NEWSLETTER US
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