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<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">...as it stands now, nearly eight and half
years after Guantánamo opened, the Obama administration’s refusal to take
leadership on the issue, to drop its unacceptable moratorium on releasing
Yemenis cleared by its own Task Force (and in some cases, like Mohammed Hassan
Odaini, by the courts), and to abandon an unprincipled policy of <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/01/23/rubbing-salt-in-guantanamos-wounds-task-force-announces-indefinite-detention/"
target=andy>continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial</A>
demonstrates that senior officials, including the president, genuinely have no
interest in bringing to an end a regime founded on torture and arbitrary
detention. In most respects, their actions — or their inactivity — represent a
ringing endorsement of their predecessors’ vile policies. </FONT></P>
<P><A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com1006i.asp">http://www.fff.org/comment/com1006i.asp</A></P>
<P><STRONG><FONT size=4><FONT color=#003399><FONT face=Times>Obama’s Moral
Bankruptcy Regarding Torture<BR><!-- put file name of author's bio in href below, before .asp --><!-- MOST COMMON HREFs ARE: jgh.asp; rme.asp; sxr.asp; jxb.asp; dxb.asp --></FONT></FONT></FONT></STRONG><FONT
size=2 face=Arial,Geneva,sans-serif>by Andy Worthington</FONT>, <!-- put date below, before </font> tag --><FONT size=2
face=Arial,Geneva,sans-serif>June 28, 2010</FONT></P>
<P></P><FONT
face="Times,Times New Roman"><!-- article body text starts here --></FONT>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Saturday was the <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/06/26/un-secretary-general-and-torture-experts-issue-statements-on-international-day-in-support-of-victims-of-torture/"
target=andy>International Day in Support of Victims of Torture</A>, established
twelve years ago to mark the day, in 1987, when the <A
href="http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html" target=andy>UN Convention Against
Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Punishment or Treatment</A> came
into force, but you wouldn’t have found out about it through the mainstream U.S.
media. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">No editorials or news broadcasts reminded
Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war
or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public
emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone
responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/06/27/calling-for-us-accountability-on-the-international-day-in-support-of-victims-of-torture/"
target=andy>called for the prosecution</A> of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and
Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including,
for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the
Office of Legal Counsel’s “<A href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com0904i.asp"
target=andy>torture memos</A>,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council”
that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former chief of staff,
Alberto Gonzales, the former U.S. attorney general, and William J. Haynes II,
the Pentagon’s former chief counsel. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Instead, two mainstream newspaper articles
revealed the extent to which President Obama has, over the last 17 months,
conspired with senior officials and with Congress to maintain the bitter fruits
of the Bush administration’s torture program — and its closely related themes of
arbitrary detention and hyperbole about the perceived threat of terrorism.
</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">In the first of these two bleak stories,
“U.S. to repatriate Guantánamo detainee to Yemen after judge orders him to be
released,” anonymous administration officials told the <A
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/25/AR2010062505033.html"
target=andy><I>Washington Post</I></A> that the president had generously decided
to release a Yemeni prisoner in Guantánamo, Mohammed Hassan Odaini, whose
release was ordered last month by a judge in the District Court in Washington
D.C. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">As <A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com1006a.asp" target=andy>I explained in an
article</A> following the judge’s May 26 ruling, it had been publicly known
since November 2007 that the government had conceded in June 2005 that Odaini, a
student, had been seized by mistake after staying the night with friends in a
university guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on the night that the house was
raided by Pakistani and U.S. operatives, and that he had been officially
approved for release on June 26, 2006 (ironically, on the International Day in
Support of Victims of Torture). </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Nevertheless, the Justice Department
refused to abandon the case against him, and took its feeble allegations all the
way to the District Court, where they were savagely dismissed by Judge Henry H.
Kennedy Jr. When the judge’s unclassified opinion was <A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com1006g.asp" target=andy>subsequently
released</A>, an even grimmer truth emerged: that shortly after Odaini’s arrival
at Guantánamo in June 2002, an interrogator recommended his repatriation (after
he had been exploited for information about his fellow prisoners), and that, in
April 2004, “an employee of the Criminal Investigative Task Force (‘CITF’) of
the Department of Defense reviewed five interrogations of Odaini and wrote that
‘[t]here is no information that indicates [he] has clear ties to mid or high
level Taliban or that he is a member of al-Qaeda.’” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Odaini was not subjected to specific
torture techniques, but there are many people — myself included — who are happy
to point out to the Obama administration that subjecting an innocent man to
eight years of essentially arbitrary detention in an experimental prison camp
devoted to the coercive interrogations of prisoners who were deliberately
excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions is itself a form of
torture, especially as, unlike the worst convicted criminals on the U.S.
mainland, no Guantánamo prisoner has ever been allowed a family visit, and many
have never even spoken to their families by phone. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Moreover, the fact that the administration
proceeded with his habeas case, despite knowing that he was innocent, and then
refused to release him as soon as the judge delivered his ruling, confirms that,
when it comes to lawlessness and cruelty, the Obama administration is closer in
spirit to the Bush administration than it cares to admit. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">On Saturday, via its anonymous spokesmen,
the administration confirmed how far it has fallen from all notions of decency.
The officials explained that <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/06/11/does-obama-really-know-or-care-about-who-is-at-guantanamo/"
target=andy>the moratorium on any releases to Yemen</A> that was <A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com1001b.asp" target=andy>issued by President
Obama in January</A>, in response to cynical hysteria whipped up in the wake of
the failed plane bomb plot involving a Nigerian who had reportedly trained in
Yemen, “remains in place,” but, as one of the officials stated: </FONT></P>
<BLOCKQUOTE>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">The general suspension is still intact,
but this is a court-ordered release. People were comfortable with this …
because of the guy's background, his family and where he comes from in Yemen.
</FONT></P></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">In other words, a mouthpiece of the
administration told a major U.S. newspaper that Odaini, a patently innocent man
whose release was ordered by a U.S. judge, and whose ongoing detention was
cynically sought by the Obama administration, was only being released because
government officials were happy about his family background (his father, it
transpires, is a retired security officer). </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">I shouldn’t really need to explain to the
government that it’s unconstitutional to detain an innocent man, even if his
father happened to be Osama bin Laden rather than a security officer, nor to
point out how it would appear if this vetting procedure were to be applied to
the criminal justice system in general, but in Obama’s world it is apparently
necessary to point out these basic facts. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">The second story that arrived in time to
cast a mocking light on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture —
“Closing Guantánamo Fades as a Priority” — was published in the <A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26gitmo.html"
target=andy><I>New York Times</I></A>. Since President Obama <A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com1001e.asp" target=andy>failed to close
Guantánamo</A> by his <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2009/01/23/return-to-the-law-obama-orders-guantanamo-closure-torture-ban-and-review-of-us-enemy-combatant-case/"
target=andy>self-imposed deadline</A> of January 22 this year, the
administration has failed to set a new deadline — and for a depressing reason,
as Sen. Carl Levin explained to the <I>Times.</I> </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">“There is a lot of inertia” against
closing the prison, “and the administration is not putting a lot of energy
behind their position that I can see,” Sen. Levin said, adding that “the odds
are that it will still be open” by the next presidential inauguration in 2013.
</FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">Sen. Levin had no doubt that this failure
had come about because of a lack of political will on the part of the
administration, which contrasts sharply with the rhetoric of Barack Obama in
August 2007, when he was still a U.S. Senator. On that occasion, he <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2008/09/29/us-election-obama-and-mccain-shirk-discussion-of-guantanamo-and-executive-overreach/"
target=andy>spoke compellingly</A> about how, ”In the dark halls of Abu Ghraib
and the detention cells of Guantánamo, we have compromised our most precious
values. What could have been a call to a generation has become an excuse for
unchecked presidential power.” However, since coming to power, as Sen. Levin
explained, the administration has been “unwilling to make a serious effort to
exert its influence.” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">With a sharp eye for how principled
rhetoric has not been followed up with any attempt whatsoever to persuade
Congress of the importance of closing Guantánamo, Sen. Levin contrasted the
administration’s “muted response to legislative hurdles to closing Guantánamo
with ‘very vocal’ threats to veto financing for a fighter jet engine it
opposes,” and added that last year the administration “<A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com0910i.asp" target=andy>stood aside</A> as
lawmakers restricted the transfer of detainees into the United States except for
prosecution,” and also <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/05/24/house-kills-plan-to-close-guantanamo/"
target=andy>responded with silence</A> just a month ago, when the House and
Senate Armed Services Committees voted to block money for <A
href="http://www.fff.org/comment/com0912h.asp" target=andy>renovating a prison
in Illinois</A> to take the remaining prisoners in Guantánamo who have not been
cleared for release. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">“They are not really putting their
shoulder to the wheel on this issue,” Sen. Levin concluded, adding, “It’s pretty
dormant in terms of their public positions.” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">“Dormant” is a good word, but something
like “extinct” may be more appropriate, if, as Sen. Levin asserts, Guantánamo
will still be open in January 2013. If that occurs, Guantánamo will have been
open for 11 years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about. This is especially
true because, as it stands now, nearly eight and half years after Guantánamo
opened, the Obama administration’s refusal to take leadership on the issue, to
drop its unacceptable moratorium on releasing Yemenis cleared by its own Task
Force (and in some cases, like Mohammed Hassan Odaini, by the courts), and to
abandon an unprincipled policy of <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/01/23/rubbing-salt-in-guantanamos-wounds-task-force-announces-indefinite-detention/"
target=andy>continuing to hold men indefinitely without charge or trial</A>
demonstrates that senior officials, including the president, genuinely have no
interest in bringing to an end a regime founded on torture and arbitrary
detention. In most respects, their actions — or their inactivity — represent a
ringing endorsement of their predecessors’ vile policies. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">The “enhanced interrogation techniques” of
the Bush years may have come to an end, but anyone doubting the baleful effects
of long-term detention without charge or trial should recall what Christophe
Girod of the International Committee of the Red Cross told the <A
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/us/red-cross-criticizes-indefinite-detention-in-guantanamo-bay.html"
target=andy><I>New York Times</I></A> over six year and a half years ago: “The
open-endedness of the situation and its impact on the mental health of the
population has become a major problem.” </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman">That was in October 2003, and I dread to
think what the mental state of some of those prisoners must be by now. The very
thought that, two and half years from now, some of these men might still be held
because the Obama administration doesn’t care enough to do anything about it
cannot be excused for reasons of political expediency. Instead, it confirms
that, in failing to bring to an end to key elements of the Bush administration’s
program of torture and arbitrary detention, the Obama administration has
confirmed its lack of principles. </FONT></P>
<P><FONT face="Times,Times New Roman"><I>Andy Worthington is the author of</I>
<A
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745326641/thefutureoffreed/104-4161725-1443105"
target=book>The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s
Illegal Prison</A> <I>(published by Pluto Press) and serves as policy advisor to
the Future of Freedom Foundation. Visit his website at: <A
href="http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/"
target=bio>www.andyworthington.co.uk</A>.
</I></FONT></P></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>