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The Trump vs. Clinton Game Is On for November |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Monday, 02 May 2016 13:03 |
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Rich writes: "To repeat myself, Trump didn't hijack the GOP. The GOP voters reclaimed the party from its feckless, threadbare Establishment."
Hillary Clinton. (photo: Getty Images)
The Trump vs. Clinton Game Is On for November
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
02 May 16
Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: Trump closes in on the GOP nomination, Kasich and Cruz's dysfunctional alliance, and how North Carolina's bathroom law is factoring into the presidential race.
 fter last night's sweep, Donald Trump surpassed Mitt Romney's 2012 popular-vote total and is, by some calculations, "two key states" from securing the nomination. What kind of changes should we expect once his main target becomes Hillary Clinton?
You can forget about those “two key states.” The fat lady has sung in harmony with the presumptive attorney general, Chris Christie. The Trump-versus-Clinton game is on for November. As for what kind of changes we can expect from Trump, I guess we’re to believe he’ll act more “presidential” (as he keeps putting it). But of course he won’t. His last much-remarked-upon attempt at that, in which he unexpectedly referred to Ted Cruz as “Senator Cruz,” didn’t last a week before he reverted to “Lyin’ Ted.” The shelf life of today’s “presidential” Trump stunt, a foreign-policy speech in Washington presumably delivered from a teleprompter, won’t last much past the moment he hops back on Twitter at Trump Tower tonight.
As a matter of cold political calculation, Trump shouldn’t change his act in any case. He’s been constantly told to tone it down by Republican potentates and pundits throughout his primary run, but he has won by completely ignoring their advice. His voters don’t want another “presidential” Romney or Bush. Quite the reverse: The more unpresidential Trump has behaved, the more voters he has amassed.
His assault on Clinton, however, is likely to shift into a 2.0 phase. His repetitive rhetoric accusing her of lacking “stamina” and of being a “disaster” have devolved into white noise. His misogyny is a disaster in its own right, and it’s likely his wife and daughter Ivanka will get him to tone it down. (Though it must be said that Trump has won a majority of women in some Republican primaries.) Meanwhile, we can look forward to watching an avalanche of opposition research rain down on Clinton when the time is ripe — especially after Labor Day and especially involving the donor ranks of the Clinton Foundation. Bernie Sanders’s demands for the transcripts of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches were a mere warm-up act for what Roger Stone and the other thugs in the extended Trump circle have in store.
Just hours after apparently agreeing to divvy up forthcoming primaries in Indiana, Oregon, and New Mexico to block Trump’s path to a first-ballot convention victory, John Kasich and Cruz couldn't stop trying to solicit voters for themselves in the states where they were purporting to be standing down. Was this strategy DOA?
Of course, like every other impotent GOP effort to derail Trump since he questioned John McCain’s war heroism. But let us linger on this latest #NeverTrump pratfall for a second. It will surely take its place high among the other farcical highlights of this remarkable election year, from Jeb!’s desperate plea that his audience “please clap” to the neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s inability to find his way onto a debate stage.
How this dumb-and-dumber Kasich-Cruz pact played out was representative of every other doomed Trump antidote since he announced his candidacy. Only this time the balloon deflated at warp speed. When the alliance was announced, the Upshot column at the Times, famous for its sightings of Marco Rubio paths to victory no matter how many primaries he lost, wasted no time in sounding its usual note: “Cruz-Kasich Deal Means a Much Better Chance to Stop Trump.” It only took hours for that headline to be jettisoned when the cold reality emerged in another Times story: “Ted Cruz-John Kasich Alliance Against Donald Trump Quickly Weakens.” When the primary results came in hours after that, the latest stop-Trump mirage had vanished without a trace. Cruz, the last supposed Trump-slayer left in the field, failed to clear 20 percent of the vote in four of the five primary states. Exit polls in the three biggest states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut) found that while roughly a quarter of Republican primary voters said they would not vote for Trump in November, even more said they would not vote for Cruz.
Yet to the bitter end, denial has remained the opiate of what remains of the GOP “Establishment.” On primary day, the anti-Trump Wall Street Journal editorial page clung to the argument that Trump couldn’t truly represent Republican sentiments because he had only won more than 50 percent of the vote in one primary, New York, his home state. (It didn’t point out that neither Cruz nor Kasich cleared 50 percent in winning their respective home-state primaries in Texas and Ohio.) In any event, Trump easily cleared 50 percent in every state on Tuesday.
To repeat myself, Trump didn’t hijack the GOP. The GOP voters reclaimed the party from its feckless, threadbare Establishment. The next sound you are going to hear is the clamor of Republican leaders trying to shove Christie to a back row as they leap on the Trump bandwagon.
After Trump criticized a North Carolina law aimed at stopping transgender people from using a bathroom consistent with their gender identity, Cruz exploited the issue in his campaign, releasing an attack ad accusing Trump of "p.c. nonsense." Will this persuade some conservative GOP voters that Trump is too socially liberal to be worthy of their support?
Not enough to make a difference. Despite Trump’s marital history, his manifest inability to fake religiosity, and his surpassing verbal vulgarity, he has won the Evangelical vote in at least twice as many states as Cruz, in the accounting of Dan Balz of the Washington Post. Those who already have embraced him are unlikely to desert him because of this. If anything, Trump’s refusal to demonize transgender Americans may help him with some other voters, given that his relatively benign stance so conspicuously sets him apart from bigots in his own party like Cruz.
Just how bigoted Cruz is can be found in his fearmongering ad, which says that it’s inappropriate that “a grown man … be allowed to use … the same restroom used by your daughter.” He is literally denying the existence of trans women even as he tries to slime them as sexual predators. It’s worth noting that Caitlyn Jenner, whom Trump has said would be welcome in any public restroom she chooses at Trump Tower, is on record as being a Cruz fan. Given that she is relentlessly marketing herself as a spokesperson for transgender people, Jenner’s refusal to stand up to Cruz this week and call him out is as embarrassing as it is cowardly. Then again, maybe she’s just holding her fire on Lyin’ Ted until her inevitable prime-time slot at Trump’s convention.
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Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=31568"><span class="small">Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Monday, 02 May 2016 08:17 |
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Gordon writes: "The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect example of the U.S. government's unique combination of willful law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and 'strategic incompetence.'"
Donald Rumsfeld in 2005. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Exhibit One in Any Future American War Crimes Trial
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
02 May 16
Note for TomDispatch Readers: At this website, the book offers are coming fast and furious these days. Think of it as a late winter and spring flurry. The latest is for a new book by a TomDispatch regular we much admire: Rebecca Gordon. She’s written a particularly readable volume with a well-deserved hot-button title: American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her piece today demonstrates just why such trials were justified (and why, of course, for the leaders of the “sole superpower” they will never happen). For a donation of $100 or more ($125 if you live outside the United States), you can get a signed, personalized copy for yourself and lend this website a helping hand staying afloat in a crazed universe. Check out the details at our donation page.
Let’s take a moment to think about the ultimate strangeness of our American world. In recent months, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have offered a range of hair-raising suggestions: as president, one or the other of them might order the U.S. military and the CIA to commit acts that would include the waterboarding of terror suspects (or “a hell of a lot worse”), the killing of the relatives of terrorists, and the carpet bombing of parts of Syria. All of these would, legally speaking, be war crimes. This has caused shock among many Americans in quite established quarters who have decried the possibility of such a president, suggesting that the two of them are calling for outright illegal acts, actual “war crimes,” and that the U.S. military and others would be justified in rejecting such orders. In this context, for instance, CIA Director John Brennan recently made it clear that no Agency operative under his command would ever waterboard a suspect in response to orders of such a nature from a future president. ("I will not agree to carry out some of these tactics and techniques I've heard bandied about because this institution needs to endure.")
These acts, in other words, are considered beyond the pale when Donald Trump suggests them, but here’s the strangeness of it all: what The Donald is only mouthing off about, a perfectly real American president (and vice president and secretary of defense, and so on) actually did. Among other things, under the euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation techniques,” they ordered the CIA to use classic torture practices including waterboarding (which, in blunter times, had been known as “the water torture”). They also let the U.S. military loose to torture and abuse prisoners in their custody. They green-lighted the CIA to kidnap terror suspects (who sometimes turned out to be perfectly innocent people) off the streets of cities around the world, as well as from the backlands of the planet, and transported them to the prisons of some of the worst torture regimes or to secret detention centers (“black sites”) the CIA was allowed to set up in compliant countries. In other words, a perfectly real administration ordered and oversaw perfectly real crimes. (Its top officials even reportedly had torture techniques demonstrated to them in the White House.)
At the time, the CIA fulfilled its orders to a T and without complaint. A lone CIA officer spoke out publicly in opposition to such a program and was jailed for disclosing classified information to a journalist. (He would be the only CIA official to go to jail for the Agency’s acts of torture.) At places like Abu Ghraib, the military similarly carried out its orders without significant complaint or resistance. The mainstream media generally adopted the euphemism “enhanced interrogation techniques” or “harsh techniques” in its reporting -- no “torture” or “war crimes” for them then. And back in the post-2001 years, John Brennan, then deputy executive director of the CIA, didn’t offer a peep of protest about what he surely knew was going on in his own agency. In 2014, in fact, as its director he actually defended such torture practices for producing “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” In addition, none of those who ordered or oversaw torture and other criminal behavior (a number of whom would sell their memoirs for millions of dollars) suffered in the slightest for the acts that were performed on their watch and at their behest.
To sum up: when Donald Trump says such things it’s a future nightmare to be called by its rightful name and denounced, as well as rejected and resisted by military and intelligence officials. When an American president and his top officials actually did such things, however, it was another story entirely. Today, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldn’t be more relevant. It’s a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Al-Qaeda Leader Who Wasn’t
The Shameful Ordeal of Abu Zubaydah
 he allegations against the man were serious indeed.
* Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda.
* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps... He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”
* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him.
* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by U.S. military forces.
None of it was true.
And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah -- with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials -- is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror.
So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo.
A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin Laden.)
Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature. He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.
Zubaydah’s story is -- or at least should be -- the iconic tale of the illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have presented it as a glowing example of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract desperately needed information from the “evildoers” of that time.
Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and here’s the remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasn’t involved with al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America’s top leaders and its major intelligence agency.
Yet notorious as he once was, he’s been forgotten by all but his lawyers and a few tenacious reporters. He shouldn’t have been. He was the test case for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to bring back, presumably because it “worked” so well the first time. With Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, it’s worth reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After all, it’s only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise even more and “yuger” war crimes in the future.
Experiments in Torture
In August 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In the process, he was severely injured -- shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American surgeon to patch him up. The Agency’s interest in his health was, however, anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture.
When he “lost” his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA custody, the agency’s concern again was not for his health. The December 2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committee’s computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, “[i]n October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that '[w]e have a lot riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.' DETENTION SITE GREEN stressed that ‘this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not] humanitarian concern for AZ.’”
The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former instructors at the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce what they called “learned helplessness,” meant to reduce a suspect’s resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million.
CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83 times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”
Each of those 83 uses of what was called “the watering cycle” consisted of four steps:
“1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subject’s airway 4) lowering of the water-board and return to demands for information.”
The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these “cycles,” only to destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because “they no longer had ‘intelligence value’ and they posed a security risk.” Whose “security” was at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agency’s operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush administration officials who had directly approved their actions.
In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud noises (another psychosis-inducer); “walling” (the Agency’s term for repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a “flexible, false wall,” though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when this was first done to him, “he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall”); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit approval in a memo written to the CIA’s head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different “techniques” on Zubaydah.
It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessen’s and Mitchell’s direction for whatever information he might have, it was also using him to test the “effectiveness” of waterboarding as a torture technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids experimenting on prisoners.
What might lead us to think that Zubaydah’s treatment was, in part, an experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIA’s record keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIA’s brutality. “Careful records are kept of each interrogation,” he wrote. This procedure, he continued, “allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results.” In other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate how well waterboarding worked.
This was Abu Zubaydah’s impression as well. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,” Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”
In addition to the videotaping, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session. The details to be recorded were spelled out clearly:
“In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”
Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a “seal” was achieved (so no air could enter the victim’s lungs); whether the naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the victim could not breathe; and just how much the “subject” vomited up.
It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by transferring them to its “black sites,” the secret prisons it was setting up in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such unacknowledged detainees came to be known as “ghost prisoners,” because they had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, “In part to avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base, the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].”
Tortured and Circular Reasoning
As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the Bush administration used Abu Zubaydah’s “interrogation” results to help justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein to work together “to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.” Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldn’t have known about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says, “absurd,” and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.
In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was beyond circumstantial -- it was entirely circular. The administration’s reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been a senior al Qaeda official.
They then used their “enhanced techniques” to drag what they wanted to hear out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the administration’s formula proved accurate. It was true that, for several years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasn’t so.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, for instance, made this crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001” this way:
“Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa'ida. A common misperception in outside articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa'ida. Pre-11 September 2001 reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a 'senior al-Qa'ida lieutenant,' which led to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to Usama bin Laden."
Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydah’s lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had “helped smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.”
In the same speech, Bush told the nation, “Our intelligence community believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually trained the hijackers -- the operators of flight schools in the United States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the FBI already knew “terrorists” were learning to fly 747s.
In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to remain open, explained that it “serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous... [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11.”
Charges Withdrawn
In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.
The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydah’s central role in al-Qaeda’s activities. It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any “exculpatory” documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity -- because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were true.
The government’s lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush administration had never “contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal involvement in planning or executing... the attacks of September 11, 2001.” They added that “the Government also has not contended in this proceeding that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific impending terrorist operations” -- an especially curious claim, since the prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person in” al-Qaeda, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, “the Government has not contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”
And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention. Exhibit one was now exhibit none.
Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydah’s habeas petition, the DC District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the court’s average 751-day turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time. Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.
Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were interrogating Zubaydah that he would “never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.” In fact, “all major players are in concurrence,” stated the agency, that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” And so far, that’s exactly what’s happened.
The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect example of the U.S. government’s unique combination of willful law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with called “strategic incompetence.” The fact that no one -- not George Bush or Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA -- has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see more of the same in the future.
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New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=29455"><span class="small">Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 01 May 2016 14:05 |
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Greenwald writes: "A newly published study from Oxford's Jon Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression."
A Man uses a cell phone. (photo: Francisco Seco/AP)
New Study Shows Mass Surveillance Breeds Meekness, Fear and Self-Censorship
By Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept
01 May 16
newly published study from Oxford’s Jon Penney provides empirical evidence for a key argument long made by privacy advocates: that the mere existence of a surveillance state breeds fear and conformity and stifles free expression. Reporting on the study, the Washington Post this morning described this phenomenon: “If we think that authorities are watching our online actions, we might stop visiting certain websites or not say certain things just to avoid seeming suspicious.”
The new study documents how, in the wake of the 2013 Snowden revelations (of which 87% of Americans were aware), there was “a 20 percent decline in page views on Wikipedia articles related to terrorism, including those that mentioned ‘al-Qaeda,’ “car bomb’ or ‘Taliban.'” People were afraid to read articles about those topics because of fear that doing so would bring them under a cloud of suspicion. The dangers of that dynamic were expressed well by Penney: “If people are spooked or deterred from learning about important policy matters like terrorism and national security, this is a real threat to proper democratic debate.”
As the Post explains, several other studies have also demonstrated how mass surveillance crushes free expression and free thought. A 2015 study examined Google search data and demonstrated that, post-Snowden, “users were less likely to search using search terms that they believed might get them in trouble with the US government” and that these “results suggest that there is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the Internet.”
The fear that causes self-censorship is well beyond the realm of theory. Ample evidence demonstrates that it’s real – and rational. A study from PEN America writers found that 1 in 6 writers had curbed their content out of fear of surveillance and showed that writers are “not only overwhelmingly worried about government surveillance, but are engaging in self-censorship as a result.” Scholars in Europe have been accused of being terrorist supporters by virtue of possessing research materials on extremist groups, while British libraries refuse to house any material on the Taliban for fear of being prosecuted for material support for terrorism.
There are also numerous psychological studies demonstrating that people who believe they are being watched engage in behavior far more compliant, conformist and submissive than those who believe they are acting without monitoring. That same realization served centuries ago as the foundation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: that behaviors of large groups of people can be effectively controlled through architectural structures that make it possible for them to be watched at any given movement even though they can never know if they are, in fact, being monitored, thus forcing them to act as if they always are being watched. This same self-censorsing, chilling effect of the potential of being surveilled was also the crux of the tyranny about which Orwell warned in 1984:
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You have to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
This is a critical though elusive point which, as the Post notes, I’ve been arguing for years, including in the 2014 TED talk I gave about the harms of privacy erosions. But one of my first visceral encounters with this harmful dynamic arose years before I worked on NSA disclosures: it occurred in 2010, the first time I ever wrote about WikiLeaks. This was before any of the group’s most famous publications.
What prompted my writing about WikiLeaks back then was a secret 2008 Pentagon Report that declared the then-little-known group a threat to national security and plotted how to destroy it: a report which, ironically enough, was leaked to WikiLeaks, which then published it online. (Shortly thereafter, WikiLeaks published a 2008 CIA report describing (presciently, it turns out) how the best hope for maintaining popular European support for the war in Afghanistan would be the election of Barack Obama as President: since he would put a pretty, popular, progressive face on war policies.)
As a result of that 2008 report, I researched WikiLeaks and interviewed its founder, Julian Assange, and found that they had been engaging in vital transparency projects around the world: from exposing illegal corporate waste-dumping in East Africa to political corruption and official lies in Australia. But they had one significant problem: funding and human resource shortfalls were preventing them from processing and publishing numerous leaks. So I wrote an article describing their work, and recommended that my readers support that work either by donating or volunteering. And I included links for how they could do so.
In response, a large number of American readers expressed – in emails, in the comment section, at public events – the fear to me that, while they support WikiLeaks’ work, they were petrified that supporting them would cause them to end up on a government list somewhere or, worse, charged with crimes if WikiLeaks ended up being formally charged as a national security threat. In other words, these were Americans who were voluntarily relinquishing core civil liberties – the right to support journalism they believe in and to politically organize – because of fear that their online donations and work would be monitored and surveilled. Subsequent revelations showing persecution and surveillance against WikiLeaks and its supporters, including an effort to prosecute them for their journalism, proved that these fears were quite rational.
There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance. It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity. That’s always been intuitively clear. Now, there is mounting empirical evidence proving it.
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Texas Prisons Assert Right to Censor Inmates' Families on Social Media |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33444"><span class="small">Jordan Smith, The Intercept</span></a>
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Sunday, 01 May 2016 14:04 |
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Smith writes: "In a section of the 146-page Offender Orientation Handbook reserved for 'standards of behavior' - between a rule requiring prisoners to 'show respect' in their interactions with others and another forbidding 'fighting, scuffling, horseplay, or similar activities' - there had appeared a seemingly incongruous new rule stating that prisoners 'are prohibited from maintaining active social media accounts for the purposes of soliciting, updating, or engaging others, through a third party or otherwise.'
Prisoners. (photo: Mayra Beltran/Houston Chronicle)
Texas Prisons Assert Right to Censor Inmates' Families on Social Media
By Jordan Smith, The Intercept
01 May 16
 n the morning of April 15, Pat Hartwell drove up from her home in Houston, Texas, to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Austin, where the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which runs the state’s prisons, was holding a board meeting. The board only offers a public comment period during two of its meetings each year, and this would be the first time in 2016 that the public would have a chance to air grievances or concerns about agency operations, for example, or prison conditions.
For Hartwell, a well-known anti-death penalty activist in Texas, the timing of the meeting was opportune; roughly a week earlier, word had spread among prisoners, family members, and activists that the director of the TDCJ had established a new rule forbidding any prisoner from maintaining a social media presence. Hartwell has for years maintained a Facebook page for a death row inmate she is certain is innocent, and she wanted some answers.
In a section of the 146-page Offender Orientation Handbook reserved for “standards of behavior” — between a rule requiring prisoners to “show respect” in their interactions with others and another forbidding “fighting, scuffling, horseplay, or similar activities” — there had appeared a seemingly incongruous new rule stating that prisoners “are prohibited from maintaining active social media accounts for the purposes of soliciting, updating, or engaging others, through a third party or otherwise.”
Hartwell and others only found out about it because the wife of a death row prisoner happened to be visiting her husband on the day inmates there discovered the new policy. The lack of explanation or guidance concerning its provenance was disconcerting (as far as anyone knew, the rule was never vetted by the department’s board). And they were confused about why it hadn’t been brought directly to anyone’s attention (the responsibility for keeping abreast of new rules falls squarely on the offenders, activists say prisoners were told).
But more importantly, prisoners and their advocates didn’t understand the scope of the new rule. In Texas (as in most places), prisoners have no direct access to the internet, so anything about them that appears online is posted by a third party — by definition, a person who is not under the supervision of the department of corrections. As such, the new rule would infringe on the free speech and expression rights of ordinary citizens — a proposition of dubious constitutionality, says David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
They also didn’t understand why social media was being targeted — or whether the rule was intended to include other uses of the internet, including websites and blogs dedicated to prisoner artwork, exposing abuses inside facilities, or drawing attention to specific cases of apparent wrongful conviction. And since the same information published on a website could easily be — and often is — posted to Facebook and other social media platforms, there was concern the rule was made to be flexible enough that TDCJ could easily broaden its scope to attack other online content.
Upon learning of the rule, Hartwell penned an email to agency spokesperson Jason Clark with a list of questions. When she didn’t hear back, she emailed the head of TDCJ, its general counsel, and its ombudsman. The day before the April board meeting, she got a short reply from the ombudsman that didn’t exactly assuage her concerns — or directly address the majority of her questions. It was, she would tell the board, an “inadequate answer.” Restating the new rule, the ombudsman said that it applied to all social media, and not only would offenders be punished for violating it, but outside third parties would be as well, by having their ability to visit or correspond with their loved ones suspended.
By the time Hartwell arrived at the Crowne Plaza for the meeting, she was mad; she felt forced by the TDCJ to take offline the Facebook page she had long maintained. And that quickly turned into frustration when a board coordinator approached to deliver a bit of confounding news. Because there were so many people signed up to speak during the public comment period (including three who wanted to speak about the social media rule), the board’s chair had decided to chop in half each speaker’s normal allotted time of three minutes. How many people were signed up? The board rep didn’t know; this is what the chairman has decided, she said.
But throughout the comment period, the rules kept changing, and not everyone got the promised 1 1/2 minutes. First, Chair Dale Wainwright, a former jurist on the Texas Supreme Court, announced that individuals who’d signed up to speak on the same topic would have to coordinate among themselves to figure out who would abridge and deliver comments on behalf of the group — regardless of whether the individuals had similar comments to make. For social media comments, he would offer a total of two minutes. Midway through the meeting, Wainwright changed the rules again, offering each speaker just 60 seconds to communicate their complaints and concerns.
After the comment period — during which board members did not respond to questions (Wainwright promised each speaker would later receive a written response) — Hartwell was quick to link the chair’s actions to concerns about the social media rule. If the board so easily bent its rules for citizen communications, what was to keep the agency from bending its social media rule too? “They’re very arbitrary,” she told The Intercept. “They do what they want to do, and this is what scares me about this stuff.”
The new rule first made news on April 12, when a reporter for the local FOX station in Houston essentially took credit for its creation. According to the reporter, the rule followed from a story he did back in January that drew attention to a Facebook page maintained for a prisoner named Elmer Wayne Henley Jr., who in the early 1970s, was an accomplice to the sexual assault and murder of more than two dozen teenage boys. In addition to written posts, Henley’s page was apparently displaying jewelry for sale and other art that he made in prison.
Although he didn’t mention Henley directly, TDCJ spokesperson Jason Clark later said the rule was necessary because some inmates had misused their accounts. “Offenders have used social media accounts to sell items over the internet based on the notoriety of their crime, harass victims or victims’ families, and continue their criminal activity,” he told Fusion in an email. Of course, trying to sell so-called murderabilia or threatening or harassing victims is already prohibited under TDCJ rules. Given that the content for Facebook and other internet sites must be transmitted from prison via mail, phone, or in-person visit, all of which are heavily monitored, it is hard to see how banning social media for all prisoners would be necessary to ferret out such violations.
When asked to provide details on incidents that prompted adoption of the rule, Clark referred The Intercept to the agency’s Office of the Inspector General, suggesting we file an open records request for the information. In a follow-up email, he said there was “not one specific incident related to an offender that prompted the new rule.” Rather, he wrote, it was that “it had become more difficult to have an offender’s social media account take down because the agency had no policy that specifically prohibited it.”
As it turns out, Facebook, at least, has been censoring prisoner pages for a number of years — despite its stated goal of giving “people the power to share and to make the world more open and connected.” According to reporting by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, from at least 2011 through early 2015, prison officials and Facebook shared a “special arrangement” whereby a prison could provide Facebook with links for prisoner pages it wanted removed, and Facebook would then suspend those profiles, “often [with] no questions asked, even when it wasn’t clear if any law or Facebook policy was being violated.”
Records obtained by EFF showed that Facebook had censored hundreds, if not thousands of accounts in this fashion. In the wake of the revelations, Facebook revised its procedures, creating a form for prison officials to fill out that includes not only information about the prisoner in question, but also a requirement that the complaint include a link to “applicable law or legal authority regarding inmate social media access,” EFF reported. If no rule or law is in place, the prison must provide “specific” safety-related reasons that the page should be taken down.
In an email to The Intercept, Clark confirmed that TDCJ had benefited from a chummy relationship with Facebook: Prior to adopting its new rule, the agency had requested that prisoner pages be suspended, and Facebook had granted those requests. He did not say how many requests TDCJ made or how many suspensions occurred as a result — again suggesting that we send an open records request to the OIG for the information. (The Intercept has submitted such a request.)
Clark insists the rule is aimed only at social media and that third party-maintained prisoner blogs and websites are still allowed. When asked why that is, if the content is essentially the same, he explained that the agency has no mechanism to request the removal of other web content. So, if such a mechanism existed, would TDCJ prefer that all online prisoner-related content be eliminated? “I’m not going to get into some hypothetical, ‘if there was a rule,’ are we going to try to get that off,” he said.
The real issue, Clark wrote in an email, is that the prisoner Facebook pages not only violate TDCJ’s new rule, but also the company’s own terms of service — including a provision that the TDCJ believes forbids third parties from updating a page. “We are asking social media companies to take down accounts of offenders who are not updating them themselves, which would be a violation of their terms of agreements,” he wrote. “Speech on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is as free as the terms of their agreements permit.”
But it isn’t clear that the agency’s reading of Facebook’s terms of service is accurate. The company forbids sharing a password or allowing anyone to “access your account” — which is one kind of third-party access. But offenders don’t actually create their own pages (unless, of course, the page was set up by a prisoner using a contraband cellphone — but that would be its own, separate TDCJ rules violation). The other kind of third-party access — having a person who is not in prison create and maintain the account — is not expressly forbidden by Facebook’s terms.
Facebook did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Texas isn’t the only state where corrections officials have tried to tamp down prisoner access to the online world — though it is hard to know exactly how many states have such a rule on the books. New Mexico has a rule (EFF and other activists have asked that it be repealed), as do Alabama and South Carolina. South Carolina’s rule is particularly punitive; it is a violation of the highest level and can land a prisoner in solitary confinement for years. As EFF has reported, one South Carolina inmate was given 37 years in solitary for violating the social media rule. In Texas, the offense isn’t considered as serious. Still, violating the rule can get an inmate confined to his cell for up to 30 days at a time.
And although Texas insists its policy does not violate the free speech rights of either prisoners or the public, the ACLU’s David Fathi disagrees. “They are purporting to regulate the speech not only of prisoners, which is problematic, but they’re purporting to regulate the speech of non-prisoners in the entire world and they can’t constitutionally do that,” he said. Prisons have the right to regulate speech “to the extent that it’s necessary for prison safety and security,” he said. Since the speech in question happens “completely outside the prison,” he argues that any link to an actual penological interest “seems extremely attenuated or nonexistent.”
A federal court case decided in 2003 supports Fathi’s position. In 2000, Arizona legislators passed a law prohibiting prisoners from any internet access; at least five inmates were subsequently punished after officials found mention of them online. In 2002, the Canadian Coalition Against the Death Penalty — represented by Fathi and the ACLU — sued, arguing the restriction was unconstitutional. A year later, a federal district judge agreed. Although Arizona had argued its ban was necessary to prevent nefarious activity — like harassing victims, a motivation Texas cited in creating its rule — there were already rules and statutes prohibiting such conduct, which is also true in Texas. Ultimately, the Arizona judge found that the state could advance its penological interests without the internet ban — by enforcing existing regulations.
Anthony Graves, who spent 18 years in prison in Texas, including 12 on death row, before being exonerated for a grisly multiple murder that he did not commit, expressed his concern that unless the rule is repealed, wrongful convictions like his will go unnoticed. “I don’t see this as a security breach because its been going on” for a long time, he said, referring to prisoners’ presence on social media. “It’s another way to oppress an inmate,” blocking him from interaction with family and others in the outside world, “and it takes away a tool from those with legitimate claims of innocence,” he said. “The most powerful tool innocent people have is social media.”
Fathi says the Texas rule and others like it not only do damage to free speech rights, but simply make no sense. “Some prison officials fear the internet. They don’t really understand it and they attribute to it magical powers. And I think that lies at the root of nonsensical rules like this,” he said. “Everyone agrees that a prisoner could write a letter to the New York Times and place an ad saying, ‘I’m innocent.’ So what’s the difference if he writes a letter [to a friend] and says, ‘Post this on Facebook’? Like, what is the difference?” he asked. “If you think about it for 30 seconds, it doesn’t make any sense.”
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’ve been waiting 40 years for someone like you.” Those were the first words Daniel Ellsberg spoke to me when we met last year. Dan and I felt an immediate kinship; we both knew what it meant to risk so much — and to be irrevocably changed — by revealing secret truths.
