Official story of 9/11 “almost entirely untrue”
Daily Kos
Saturday, May 16, 2009

Spanish AG: No torture probe of US officials
By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press

MADRID (AP) — Spain’s attorney general has rejected opening an investigation into whether six Bush administration officials sanctioned torture against terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, saying Thursday a U.S. courtroom would be the proper forum.

Candido Conde-Pumpido’s remarks severely dampen the chance of a case moving forward against the Americans, including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Conde-Pumpido said such a trial would have turned Spain’s National Court “into a plaything” to be used for political ends.

“If there is a reason to file a complaint against these people, it should be done before local courts with jurisdiction, in other words in the United States,” he said in a breakfast meeting with journalists.

Spanish law gives its courts jurisdiction beyond national borders in cases of torture, war crimes and other heinous offenses, based on a doctrine known as universal justice, but the government has made clear it wants to rein in the process.

Last month, a group of human rights lawyers asked Judge Baltasar Garzon, famous for indicting ex-Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet in 1998, to consider filing charges against the six Americans. Under Spanish law, the judge then asked prosecutors for a recommendation on whether to open a full-blown probe.

National Court prosecutors have not formally announced their decision, but Conde-Pumpido is the country’s top law-enforcement official and has the ultimate say. While an investigative judge like Garzon is not bound by the prosecutors’ recommendation, it would be highly unusual for a case to proceed without their support.

A senior court official told The Associated Press that a formal announcement would come Friday. He said prosecutors would stop short of an outright call for dismissal of the case, but would raise a series of legal objections that would make it impossible for it to proceed in its current form.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Coming less than three months after the Bush administration left office, the case was the first of several international efforts to indict former administration officials. Human rights groups have also tried to bring suit against Bush officials in a German court.

In addition to Gonzales, the complaint named ex-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee; and Pentagon lawyer William Haynes.

It alleged that the men — who have become known as “The Bush Six” — cleared the path for torture by claiming in advice and legal opinions that the president could ignore the Geneva Conventions, and by adopting an overly narrow definition of which interrogation techniques constituted torture.

But Conde-Pumpido rejected that argument, saying the case had no merit because the men did not themselves commit the alleged abuses.

“If one is dealing with a crime of mistreatment of prisoners of war, the complaint should go against those who physically carried it out,” Conde-Pumpido said.

Gonzalo Boye, one of the human rights lawyers who brought the case in Spain, said the decision by Conde-Pumpido was politically motivated and set a terrible course for Spanish justice.

“The attorney general speaks of the court being turned into a plaything. Well, I don’t think the attorney general’s office should be turned into a plaything for politicians,” Boye told AP. “It is a terrible precedent if those intellectually responsible for crimes can no longer be held accountable.”

The court official told AP that in addition to raising legal doubts, prosecutors will say that Garzon should be replaced by another judge who is already investigating whether secret CIA flights to or from Guantanamo entered Spanish airspace or landed at Spanish airports.

Such a move would make it difficult for Garzon to try to keep the case alive despite prosecutors’ objections, as he did in the Pinochet case.

Observers say the removal of Garzon would be another serious blow for the hopes of human rights lawyers, who saw him as being sympathetic to their cause.

Most of the American officials named in the case have remained silent since the allegations first surfaced in March. Feith, however, has called Spain’s claim of jurisdiction “a national insult with harmful implications.”

Former President George W. Bush has steadfastly denied the U.S. tortured anyone. The U.S. has acknowledged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described plotter of the Sept. 11 attacks, and a few other prisoners were waterboarded at secret CIA prisons before being taken to Guantanamo. But the Bush administration insisted that all interrogations were lawful.

Associated Press writer Jorge Sainz contributed to this report.

The Bush Six to Be Indicted
Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo.
by Scott Horton
April 13, 2009
The Daily Beast

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

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Leading lawyer calls for Rumsfeld prosecution
by John Byrne
Friday, December 12, 2008
rawstory.com

The President of the legal nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, has resumed calls for a formal prosecution of ex-Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld following revelations by a Congressional report that Rumsfeld was to blame for the Pentagon’s policy allowing torture.

In a statement, he said that the report reaffirms findings he spelled out in his book published this September, The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution. Ratner’s group was the first to volunteer an attorney to meet with one of the CIA’s “ghost detainees.”

“The Committee’s report reaffirms that high-ranking administration officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, were directly responsible for the abuse and torture of detainees in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Ratner said in a statement to RAW STORY. “The brutal interrogation techniques used on our clients and many others were carried out despite well-documented opposition from military lawyers and others concerned by the illegality and ineffectiveness of the techniques.”

“There is no question that Rumsfeld and the others must be held individually accountable, and it must be before a court of law. There must be consequences for their illegal activities,” he said. “A special prosecutor should be appointed. To do otherwise is to send a message of impunity that will only embolden future administrations to again engage in serious violations of the law.”

A Senate Armed Services report issued Thursday asserted that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

According to the committee, prisoners were tortured in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other US military installations. Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ) were responsible for the content of the Senate’s findings.

The report determined that placing the blame on “a few bad apples,” as Bush administration officials attempted to do in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, is inappropriate.

The policies were adopted after government assessments determined waterboarding and other torture techniques were “100 percent effective” at breaking the wills of US officers who underwent the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape program.

Ratner says Rumsfeld’s being singled out is no coincidence.

“After reviewing thousands of documents, this bi-partisan committee confirmed that senior officials are directly responsible for ushering in one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history and the loss of our moral authority in the eyes of the world,” Ratner said. “The report re-asserts that the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody was the result of deliberate decisions made at the top, with explicit approval given by Rumsfeld and other officials for inhumane treatment of prisoners, and was not merely the work of a few bad apples way down the chain of command.”

He addds that report notes that techniques used by the Pentagon were “based on Communist Chinese methods employed to obtain false confessions for propaganda. Professional interrogators agree that the fastest way to get the best information from a prisoner is through building trust and rapport, not torture. The recognition of the illegality and unreliability of this kind of evidence is critical in the cases of some of our clients, like Mohammed al Qahtani. Time and time again, we have seen that torture simply does not work, and only undermines our commitment to basic human rights.”

“We hope the courts and the next administration take notice and take action,” he concludes.

Original article here.

JURIST Contributing Editor Mary Ellen O’Connell of Notre Dame Law School and panel colleagues at a recent Washburn University School of Law symposium on “The Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism” offer their consensus on the appropriate way forward on critical issues in international law and policy that will confront President Barack Obama’s Administration when it takes office on January 20, 2009…

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Within hours of the attacks of 9/11 the Bush Administration decided to treat the attacks as part of a worldwide war–a new kind of war that would free the Administration to re-write the rules. A “global war on terrorism” was declared and new rules for the targeting, detention and trials of persons suspected of acts of terrorism or membership in terrorist organizations were created. Seven years later, upon the election of a new president, there is an intense debate under way in the United States as to what to do about the “global war” and the laws and institutions resulting from it.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey expressed his views at a meeting of the Federalist Society November 20 and had this to say about the future:

The next Administration will have the opportunity to review the institutions and the legal structures that this Administration has relied upon in keeping the nation safe over the past seven years. I am neither so proud as to think that the next Administration will be unable to make improvements, nor so naïve as to think that the policy choices, or even the legal judgments, that they make will be identical to ours.

What I do hope, however, is that the next Administration understands the threat that we continue to face and that it shares the priority we have placed on remaining on the offense to prevent future terrorist attacks. Remaining on the offense includes not simply relying on the tools that we have established, but also encouraging a climate in which both legal and policy issues are debated responsibly, in a way that does not chill the intelligence community and deter national security lawyers from making the decisions necessary to protect us.

And I am hopeful that some time from now, after the next Administration has had the chance to review the decisions made and the legal advice provided, it will acknowledge that despite any policy differences, the national security lawyers in this Administration acted professionally and in good faith and that the country was safer as a result.

Three of us, all specialists in international law, especially International Humanitarian Law, take a very different view, which we expressed at a recent Washburn University School of Law symposium on “The Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism”. The members of the Symposium’s final panel on “The Way Forward”[1], considering important legal issues that will confront President Obama’s Administration when it takes office on January 20, 2009, have framed the following:

Washburn Consensus on Post-9/11 Principles

1. The phrase “Global War on Terrorism” should no longer be used in the sense of an on-going “war” or “armed conflict” being waged against “terrorism”. Nor should it serve as either the legal or security policy basis for the range of counter- and anti-terrorism measures taken by the Administration in addressing the very real and present challenges faced by the United States and other nations in addressing terrorism.

2. The Administration should announce that it is taking immediate steps to close the interrogation and detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with a view to removing all remaining detainees by July 1, 2009.

3. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 should be repealed in its entirety, and all activities currently being conducted under the Military Commission process constituted by the Act should be terminated.

4. Persons accused of committing acts of terrorism, war crimes or other serious human rights violations should be tried, as appropriate, before Article III courts or, as provided for in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, by courts-martial or military commission.

5. The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 should be amended to ensure the application of one standard of treatment and interrogation to all detainees held in U.S. custody or control.

6. The single standard for the treatment and interrogation of all detainees held in U.S. custody or control should be that reflected in Army Field Manual 2-22.3, Human Intelligence Collector Operations.

7. Any presidential findings, statements, Executive Orders, or other forms of authorization related to detainee treatment and interrogation that sanction or authorize methods inconsistent with Field Manual 2-22.3 should be withdrawn.

8. A comprehensive investigation of alleged post-9/11 U.S.-held detainee abuse should be undertaken by an independent, expert commission with the goal of producing a 2009 report detailing both the findings and recommendations of this commission.
David E. Graham, Colonel (ret’d)
Executive Director, The Judge Advocate General’s
Legal Center and School, U.S. Army [2]

Professor Mary Ellen O’Connell
Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law
University of Notre Dame

Professor Philippe Sands QC
University College London
Barrister, Matrix Chambers

1. The Panel was chaired by Dean of the Washburn Law School and former Judge Advocate General of the Army, Thomas J. Romig
2. These views are expressed in Mr. Graham’s private capacity.

Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Power and Purpose of International Law (OUP 2008); International Law and the Use of Force (Foundation 2005, 2008). For the ILA Use of Force Committee initial report on “The Meaning of Armed Conflict in International Law” (2008), see http://www.ila-hq.org/en/committees/index.cfm/cid/1022

Source URL: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2008/11/way-forward-post-911-principles.php

For more information on the event, see this link: Washburn University School of Law symposium on “The Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism” and the Selected Works Relating to The Rule of Law and the Global War on Terrorism Presenter and Panelist Bibliographies

9/11 kin barred from Gitmo trial

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
source: New York Daily News
Tuesday, June 3rd 2008, 4:00 AM

WASHINGTON – When the architects of the 9/11 attacks are charged this week at Guantanamo Bay for killing nearly 3,000 Americans, the victims’ families won’t be allowed to witness it.

The Defense Department outraged 9/11 families by belatedly disclosing that just one victim’s relative – GOP loyalist Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles died in the attacks – was secretly invited to attend.

“This government cannot be upfront and honest,” said Rosemary Dillard of Detroit, whose husband, Eddie, died aboard the hijacked jet that struck the Pentagon. “It was very underhanded.”

The stunned families learned of Burlingame‘s invitation to the arraignment of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four of his henchmen at the U.S. naval base in Cuba only after the Daily News made inquiries on Friday.

Widow Monica Gabrielle, whose husband, Rich, died in the twin towers, said, “They’re pitting family against family. It’s outrageous.”

Several relatives, such as Dillard, told the Pentagon and Justice Department during a Feb. 25 meeting that they wanted to go. Instead of creating a lottery, Pentagon victim-liaison officer Karen Loftus left them in the dark.

Dillard burst into tears when Loftus told her Friday about Burlingame’s covert ticket to Gitmo.

“I’m angry, I’m very upset about it,” said Dillard, who attended 9/11 commission hearings and never missed a day of Al Qaeda goon Zacarias Moussaoui‘s death penalty trial.

Burlingame, a staunch defender of the Bush administration, spoke in support of the President at the 2004 GOP convention and has personally savaged other 9/11 family members who questioned his decisions.

She was invited as an “observer” to offer a political counterpoint – alongside conservatives from the American Legion and Judicial Watch – to human rights watchdogs critical of the untested military system for trying terrorists, a red-faced defense official said. She did not respond to a request for comment.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon denied the Pentagon was playing politics at the expense of 9/11 families. He promised officials “will come up with a solution” that addresses how 9/11 families can watch future proceedings.

jmeek@nydailynews.com