Little Havana's Super Pig Timoney

Miami Cops Step Up Anti-terror Plans

Random checks planned to keep terrorists guessing

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- Police are planning "in-your-face" shows of force in public places, saying the random, high-profile security operations will keep terrorists guessing about where officers might be next.

Deputy Police Chief Frank Fernandez, who announced the program Monday, said officers might, for example, surround a bank, check the IDs of everyone going in and out, and hand out leaflets about terror threats.

"People are definitely going to notice it," he said. "We want that shock. We want that awe. But at the same time, we don't want people to feel their rights are being threatened. We need them to be our eyes and ears."

Howard Simon, executive director of ACLU of Florida, said the Miami initiative appears aimed at ensuring that people's rights are not violated.

"What we're dealing with is officers on street patrol, which is more effective and more consistent with the Constitution," Simon said. "We'll have to see how it is implemented."

The operations will keep terrorists off guard, Fernandez said. He said al Qaeda and other terrorist groups plot attacks by putting places under surveillance and watching for flaws and patterns in security.

Police Chief John Timoney said there was no specific, credible threat of an imminent terror attack in Miami. But he said the city has repeatedly been mentioned in intelligence reports as a potential target.

Timoney said 14 of the 19 hijackers who took part in the September 11 attacks lived in South Florida at various times and that other alleged terror cells have operated in the area.

Under the program, both uniformed and plainclothes police will ride buses and trains, while others will conduct longer-term surveillance operations.

Mary Ann Viverette, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the Miami program is similar to those used for years during the holiday season to deter criminals at busy places such as shopping malls.

"We want people to feel they can go about their normal course of business, but we want them to be aware," said Viverette, the police chief in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

At Monday's Heat game against the New York Knicks, season ticket holder Tony Gonzalez, 34, said he wasn't worried about any potential violation of civil liberties.

"When you enter an arena or stadium at full capacity you just don't know who is going through the turnstiles," said Gonzalez, an attorney. "Everything that helps our security, I'm for it."

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

A FEW FACTS ABOUT POLICE CHIEF TIMONEY

Dorina , 11.25.2003 03:17

According to Amnesty International's June 1996 report on the NYPD, which used official police statistics, in 1994, the first year that Timoney was second in command at the NYPD, the city saw "a 34% increase in civilians shot dead." In the same year, there was also a "53.3% increase in civilians shot dead in police custody" as well as "an increase in the number of civilians injured from officers' firearms discharge during the same period." Amnesty also reports that the New York City Civilian Review Board "reported that it received 4,920 new complaints in 1994, an increase of 37.43 percent over the previous year" (Amnesty International, Police Brutality in the New York City Police Department).

When Timoney was the First Deputy to New York City's Police Commissioner, civilian complaints about police abuse rose by 50 percent in communities of color.

Timoney then moved on to become first in command of the Philadelphia Police Department.

According to USA Today, in the time Timoney was commissioner of Philadelphia, "Philadelphia County has lost more people than any other in the USA" (8/13/00).

Complaints of police misconduct reached record levels in Timoney's Philadelphia: according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, reports to the city's Police Advisory Commission for the fiscal year 2000 were "the most the commission had had received in a single year."

Disciplinary recommendations by the Police Advisory Commission, which has no enforcement power, have been virtually ignored by Timoney. Of the 13 recommendations and 17 opinions the commission has issued, Timoney has implemented one; a meager one-day suspension. He has rejected even the most symbolic forms of punishment, such as ten-day suspensions. Commission members have publicly complained that Timoney has rendered their work completely useless. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 11/17/00, AP 11/17/00).

Timoney has adopted tactics like issuing decisions before he even receives the Advisory Commission's recommendations. The Police Advisory Commission's Executive Director Hector Soto has called Timoney's behavior "an attack on the concept of our commission" (Philadelphia Weekly, 11/29/00).

Timoney claims that he won't tolerate abusive cops, and has said that he's "got to be held responsible for the integrity of the department." What has he done to prevent police violence?

When he first took office, Timoney restructured the department's Internal Affairs division, giving himself the ability to fire officers who were found guilty by the division. But Timoney has only acted when forced to. In the case of officer Christopher Di Pasquale who killed the unarmed Donta Dawson, the Commissioner refused to fire the officer until after Philadelphia's District Attorney brought him up on manslaughter charges. Timoney also refused to act on an Internal Affairs report that found that officers who paralyzed 21 year-old Calvin Saunders engaged in brutality, conspiracy, and perjury. One of the guilty officers has even been promoted to detective. The commissioner justifies his inaction with the excuse that "Just because I.A. [Internal Affairs} sustains the allegations doesn't mean the men are guilty" (Philadelphia Magazine, 10/3/00).

In the case of Thomas Jones, where 10 officers were videotaped kicking and hitting the suspect 59 times in 29 seconds, Timoney told the media "When somebody doesn't want to get arrested there really isn't an easy way of doing it." Even after charges were dropped against the suspect, Timoney was adamant about the need to "look at what was on the officers' minds."

Article from Nov. 23, 2003

Urgent Action and Article on Police Brutality in Miami
Rights Action , 11.23.2003 11:17

A comprehensive article and Urgent Action on police brutality in Miami. Please forward

Urgent Call to Action: FTAA Protesters Brutalized in Miami!

This week thousands of protestors came to Miami to oppose The Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), an international trade agreement that aims to expand and extend corporate power throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Prior to the mass action there was a calculated campaign to intimidate protestors and legitimize forthcoming acts of violence against them, including outrageous city ordinances prohibiting Â?materials or substances that are capable of being thrown,Â? unmerited harassment and detainment and repeated statements published in the local press vilifying the demonstrators and their political beliefs. The excessive show of state force, backed by $8.5 million in US Government funding as part of the recent Iraq spending bill, demonstrated the Bush administrationÂ?s support of these tactics and encouraged Miami Police Commissioner John Timoney to orchestrate a massive, paramilitary assault on our constitutional and human rights.

At approximately 4:20 pm on November 20, as union members, students, human rights and economic justice activists, religious leaders and other concerned citizens meandered in the open space in front of the permitted rally, they were attacked without warning in a violent display of police brutality. Police officers dressed in riot gear used batons, wooden poles, concussion grenades, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber, wooden, and plastic bullets and other chemical agents against the protestors indiscriminantly.

As many of the protestors fled the scene and helped each other out of harmÂ?s way, one officer targeted the Â?Wellness Center,Â? a free clinic ran by volunteer doctors. As medics ran to close the door to the harmful gas permeating the air outside, one policeman purposefully sprayed pepper spray directly into the building, contaminating the space. According to Eowyn Rieke, MD and family physician, the Â?cops [were] completely out of control and in total disregard for the safety and well being of health care workers and the patients they [were] treating.Â? Rieke reported that the center treated over 125 for injuries that day, among them serious facial lacerations, bone fractures, head wounds and exposure to chemical ailments. Twelve were hospitalized. Â?IÂ?m a MD,Â? she said, Â?and IÂ?ve worked in emergency rooms, but this is really the worst onslaught of injuries I have ever seen.Â? Another volunteer medic identified only as Daniel, said Â?instead of swinging below the knees so as to demobilize the protestors, police were deliberately hitting their heads.Â? Daniel, who was among the crowd, but wearing clear insignia to identify himself as a medic, was himself shot no less than twenty times by rubber bullets. Some of the bullets contained chemical irritants that continued to burn his skin into the evening.At least 150 arrests were made during the attack, and other demonstrators were targeted later that evening.

Chief of Police Timoney was quoted the following day in the Miami Herald saying, Â?I thought the officers showed remarkable restraint.Â?

A group of approximately 300 people gathered outside of the jail in a peaceful protest the following afternoon to demand the liberation of the prisoners. When the police arrived, guns in hand, the protestors turned their backs to them in a display of non-violence. They were told by a Miami-Dade police sargeant that they had three minutes to disperse. Although some chanted Â?we are dispersingÂ? as they attempted to exit the area, police chased them in another unecessary show of force.

Approximately 60 more arrests were made. In total, over 250 arrests are estimated.

We are now receiving reports from people being released or calling from jail that there are cases of excessive brutality, sexual assault and torture inside. People of color, queer and transgender prisoners are particularly being targeted. Many are being subject to cavity searches. At least one Latino man is currently in Intensive Care for an injury he received after being beaten in the head by an arresting officer. One woman claims that while being processed, four male officers dressed in biohazard suits cut off all of her clothing.

People have also been denied access to attorneys, visitation rights, vegetarian or vegan food, and access to essential medication and medical attention.

The state-sponsored violence and exaggerated police presence in Miami this week is consistent with the FTAAÂ?s history of attempting to forcefully silence dissent in Buenos Aires, Quebec, Sao Paulo and Bolivia in 2001, where two protestors were killed during an anti-FTAA demonstration.

November 2003 will go down in history as the day the US proved that it is willing to resort to the same policies of violent repression of dissent that it has supported for decades throughout the global south. Whether it will mark an embarrassing isolated tragedy or a turning point in how the US government relates to its citizenry depends on how civil society responds right now to this outrageous and blatant violation of their constitutional and human rights.

TAKE ACTION NOW ON BEHALF OF THE MIAMI 250!!

1) Call, fax, email elected officials with the demands listed below.

2) Money is urgently needed to get people out of jail. They are making everyone post between $100 - $5000. Send money to cover legal and jail-support expenses to: United for Peace and Justice. Online donations are possible at www.unitedforpeace.org/ftaadonate, or you can mail a check or money order to: United for Peace and Justice/FTAA Fund P.O. Box 607, Times Square Station, New York, NY 10108. Please specify Legal Fund in the memo field:

3) Global Day of Action on Monday at any time and any appropriate location (e.g., US Embassies, Departments of Justice, FBI offices..). T

THESE ARE OUR DEMANDS:
Drop all charges.
Release all political prisoners.
Meet basic human needs: no more brutality, provide appropriate food, access to medicine and medical attention, warm clothing.
Provide access to attorneys and visitation rights.
Provide equitable treatment to all prisoners.
Do not share information collected with the INS.

Fire Chief Timoney

To send a free fax: http://www.citizen.org/fax/background.cfm?ID=245&source=19

PLEASE CALL AND WRITE:

MANUEL A. DIAZ, Mayor, City of Miami 305.250.5300 305.375.5071 mayor@miamidade.gov OR mannydiaz@ci.miami.fl.us
ALEX PENELAS, Mayor, Miami-Dade County, 305.829.9336 home, 305.375.5071 office Chief of Staff: Francois Illas Fillas@ci.miami.fl.us

KATHERINE FERNANDEZ RUNDLE, State Attorney, 305.547.0100

JOHN TIMONEY, Chief of Police, 305-673-7925 305-579-6565

Please distribute this information widely.

Jesus, Be Our Guest

Before the meal we pray:
Come Lord Jesus,
Be our guest,
And let these gifts
To us be blest.

Amen

A DEADLY INTERROGATION

Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?

At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.

The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.

After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.

This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their “nationality or physical location.” On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain’s proposal, the Senate voted 90–9 in favor of it.

Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.’s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the “flexibility” to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain’s bill, permitting brutal methods when “such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney’s visit, calling him the “Vice-President for Torture.” In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain’s proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee.

The outcome of this wider political debate may play a role in determining the fate of Swanner, whose name has not been publicly disclosed before, and who declined several requests to be interviewed. Passage of the McCain legislation by both Houses of Congress would mean that there is strong political opposition to the abusive treatment of prisoners, and would put increased pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute interrogators like Swanner—who could conceivably be charged with assault, negligent manslaughter, or torture. Swanner’s lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, declined to discuss his case on the record. But he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year.

Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by Navy SEALs at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2003, after a violent struggle at his house, outside Baghdad. Jamadi savagely fought one of the SEALs before being subdued in his kitchen; during the altercation, his stove fell on them. The C.I.A. had identified him as a “high-value” target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October, 2003. After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to C.I.A. custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead.

For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as “Clint C.” He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his coöperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.

In the spring of 2004, the fact of pervasive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib became public, on “60 Minutes II” and in a series of articles in these pages by Seymour M. Hersh. Photographs, taken by U.S. soldiers, that showed Iraqi prisoners being hooded, sexually humiliated, and threatened with dogs were published around the world. One of the most harrowing images was of Jamadi’s severely battered corpse, which had been wrapped in plastic and put on ice; he became known in the media as the Ice Man.

Around this time, John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, sent investigators to Iraq and San Diego to interview witnesses about the agency’s role in Jamadi’s death. These investigators determined that there was the possibility of criminality—the threshold level required by the intelligence agency in order for the case to be referred to the Justice Department. The agency did so, and officials in the Justice Department then forwarded the case to the office of Paul McNulty, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over C.I.A. headquarters. The dossier has been there for more than a year. A lawyer familiar with the case, who asked not to be named, said that the Swanner file seemed to be “lying kind of fallow.”

A spokeswoman for McNulty said that he would have no comment on the case, because it was still under investigation. (Last month, President Bush nominated McNulty to the position of Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful job in the Justice Department.) No other official in the Justice Department would discuss on the record why, more than two years after Jamadi’s death, no decision has been made about pressing charges against anyone.

A government official familiar with the case, who declined to be named, indicated that establishing guilt in the case might be complicated, because of Jamadi’s rough handling by the SEALs before he entered the custody of the C.I.A. Yet, in the past two years, several of the Navy SEALs who captured Jamadi and delivered him to C.I.A. officials have faced abuse charges in military-justice proceedings, and have been exonerated. Moreover, three medical experts who have examined Jamadi’s case told me that the injuries he sustained from the SEALs could not have caused his death.

Fred Hitz, who served as the C.I.A.’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, and who is now a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, said of Bush Administration officials, “I just think they’re playing stall ball.” He told me that he had no inside knowledge of the Swanner case, but he believes that, for numerous reasons, ranging from protecting national security to avoiding political embarrassment, Administration officials “would be opposed to any accountability in this case. They want it to disappear off the screen.” (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said that its internal investigation into Jamadi’s death was “nearly complete,” making it “inappropriate to discuss any of the details.”)

John Radsan, a lawyer formerly in the C.I.A’s Office of General Counsel, says, “Along with the usual problems of dealing with classified information in a criminal case, this could open a can of worms if a C.I.A. official in this case got indicted—a big fat can of worms about what set of rules apply to people like Jamadi. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What has been authorized? Can the C.I.A. torture people? A case like this opens up Pandora’s box.”

Since September 11, 2001, the C.I.A.’s treatment and interrogation of terrorist suspects has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. Human-rights groups estimate that some ten thousand foreign suspects are being held in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and other countries. A small but unknown part of this population is in the custody of the C.I.A., which, as Dana Priest reported recently in the Washington Post, has operated secret prisons in Thailand and in Eastern Europe. It is also unclear how seriously the agency deals with allegations of prisoner abuse. The C.I.A. tends to be careful about following strict legal procedures, including the briefing of the top-ranking members of the congressional intelligence committees on its covert activities. But experts could recall no instance of a C.I.A. officer being tried in a public courtroom for manslaughter or murder. Thomas Powers, the author of two books about the C.I.A., told me, “I’ve never heard of anyone at the C.I.A. being convicted of a killing.” He added that a case such as Jamadi’s had awkward political implications. “Is the C.I.A. capable of addressing an illegal killing by its own hands?” he asked. “My guess is not.” Whereas the military has subjected itself to a dozen internal investigations in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has punished more than two hundred soldiers for wrongdoing, the agency has undertaken almost no public self-examination.

The C.I.A. has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, including that of Jamadi, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases involving abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department. In March, Goss, the C.I.A.’s director, testified before Congress that “we don’t do torture,” and the agency’s press office issued a release stating, “All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture. . . . C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice. If an individual violates the policy, then he or she will be held accountable.”

Yet the government has brought charges against only one person affiliated with the agency: David Passaro, a low-level contract employee, not a full-fledged C.I.A. officer. In 2003, Passaro, while interrogating an Afghan prisoner, allegedly beat him with a flashlight so severely that he eventually died from his injuries. In two other incidents of prisoner abuse, the Times reported last month, charges probably will not be brought against C.I.A. personnel: the 2003 case of an Iraqi prisoner who was forced head first into a sleeping bag, then beaten; and the 2002 abuse of an Afghan prisoner who froze to death after being stripped and chained to the floor of a concrete cell. (The C.I.A. supervisor involved in the latter case was subsequently promoted.)

One reason these C.I.A. officials may not be facing charges is that, in recent years, the Justice Department has established a strikingly narrow definition of torture. In August, 2002, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent a memo on interrogations to the White House, which argued that a coercive technique was torture only when it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer. By implication, all lesser forms of physical and psychological mistreatment—what critics have called “torture lite”—were legal. The memo also said that torture was illegal only when it could be proved that the interrogator intended to cause the required level of pain. And it provided interrogators with another large exemption: torture might be acceptable if an interrogator was acting in accordance with military “necessity.” A source familiar with the memo’s origins, who declined to speak on the record, said that it “was written as an immunity, a blank check.” In 2004, the “torture memo,” as it became known, was leaked, complicating the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General; as White House counsel, Gonzales had approved the memo. The Administration subsequently revised the guidelines, using language that seemed more restrictive. But a little-noticed footnote protected the coercive methods permitted by the “torture memo,” stating that they did not violate the “standards set forth in this memorandum.”

The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. Like the torture memo, these documents are believed to have been signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, but written by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who is now a professor of law at Berkeley.

For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. “We need to know what was authorized,” Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. “Was it waterboarding? The use of dogs? Stripping detainees? . . . The refusal to give us these documents is totally inexcusable.” Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. “The Administration is getting away with just saying no,” he went on. “There’s no claim of executive privilege. There’s no claim of national security—we’ve offered to keep it classified. It’s just bullshit. They just don’t want us to know what they’re doing, or have done.”

By the summer of 2003, the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had grown into a confounding and lethal insurrection, and the Pentagon and the White House were pressing C.I.A. agents and members of the Special Forces to get the kind of intelligence needed to crush it. On orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Geoffrey Miller, who had overseen coercive interrogations of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo, imposed similar methods at Abu Ghraib. In October of that year, however—a month before Jamadi’s death—the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Iraqi insurgents were covered by the Geneva Conventions, which require the humane treatment of prisoners and forbid coercive interrogations. The ruling reversed an earlier interpretation, which had concluded, erroneously, that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law.

As a result of these contradictory mandates from Washington, the rules of engagement at Abu Ghraib became muddy, and the tactics grew increasingly ad hoc. Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., told me, “Abu Ghraib has its roots at the top. I think this uncertainty about who was and who was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and all this talk that they’re all terrorists, bred the climate in which this kind of abuse takes place.”

At Abu Ghraib, the confusion over interrogation and detention methods was compounded by the fact that C.I.A. officials worked side by side with U.S. military people. Colonel Janis Karpinski, a former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the administration of Abu Ghraib during the period of widespread abuse, has said that C.I.A. officers, along with contract interpreters and some military-intelligence officers, did not wear uniforms when they visited the prison, and it was not clear, even to her, what they were doing there. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians I didn’t know,” she told Seymour Hersh. “I called them disappearing ghosts. . . . They were always bringing in somebody for interrogation, or waiting to collect somebody going out.” C.I.A. officials, unlike members of the Army and the Navy, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of” prisoners.

Walter Diaz, a military policeman, was on guard duty at Abu Ghraib the morning that Jamadi was delivered to the prison. He told me, “The O.G.A.”— “other government agencies,” initials commonly used to protect the identity of the C.I.A.—“would bring in people all the time to interview them. We had one wing, Tier One Alpha, reserved for the O.G.A. They’d have maybe twenty people there at a time.” He went on, “They were their prisoners. They’d get into a room and lock it up. We, as soldiers, didn’t get involved. We’d lock the door for them and leave. We didn’t know what they were doing.” But, he recalled, “we heard a lot of screaming.”

Considering this level of secrecy, it’s doubtful that any details would have emerged about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death had it not been for a strange and tangential chain of events. Three months after Jamadi died, Jeffrey Hopper, a Navy SEAL who had been assigned to carry out joint operations with the C.I.A. in Baghdad, was accused of stealing another SEAL’s body armor. Hopper, who had been nicknamed Klepto by the unit, was expelled from the Special Forces. When he was dismissed, he told authorities that he knew of far worse offenses committed by other SEALs, and he cited the abuse of several prisoners, including Jamadi. His accusations formed the basis of multiple charges against several SEALs, which led to the court-martial of Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, the commander of the platoon that captured Jamadi, for, among other things, allowing his troops to assault the prisoner. Last May, Ledford was acquitted of any wrongdoing; but during the hearings, which were open, a number of troubling facts spilled out, hinting at the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death.

Seth Hettena, an Associated Press reporter based in San Diego, California, attended the hearings. The courtroom testimony, he reported, indicated that Jamadi, before arriving at Abu Ghraib, was interrogated “in a rough manner” by a combination of SEALs and C.I.A. personnel in “the Romper Room,” a tiny space in the Navy camp at Baghdad International Airport. Swanner was among those present. One of the SEALs testified that after Jamadi was handcuffed a C.I.A. interrogator rammed “his arm up against the detainee’s chest, pressing on him with all his weight.” According to a recent report by John McChesney on National Public Radio, a C.I.A. guard who witnessed the scene later told investigators that, after stripping Jamadi and dousing him in cold water, a C.I.A. interrogator threatened to “barbecue” him if he didn’t talk. Jamadi reportedly moaned, “I’m dying, I’m dying.” The interrogator replied, “You’ll be wishing you were dying.”

Court testimony also established that Jamadi was “body-slammed” by the SEALs into the back of a Humvee before being delivered to Abu Ghraib. During this time, he was handcuffed. “Was he a threat?” a Navy prosecutor asked one of the SEALs on trial. “No, ma’am,” the SEAL conceded.

Soon after the Associated Press published Hettena’s Romper Room story, two unidentified officials, evidently from the C.I.A., appeared in the courtroom. From that point on, Hettena told me, the officials, who did not give their names, protested when the testimony touched on matters sensitive to the C.I.A. In many instances, reporters and other members of the public were required to leave the courtroom. On another occasion, an unidentified C.I.A. witness testified from behind a blue curtain. Several areas of questioning by defense lawyers for the SEALs were ruled off limits. When one of the defense lawyers, Matthew Freedus, asked a witness, “What position was Jamadi in when he died?,” the C.I.A. representatives protested, saying that the answer was classified. The same objection was made when a question was asked about the role that water had played in Jamadi’s interrogation.

By late last spring, the SEALs’ reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their rough treatment of Jamadi, but they were cleared of the gravest abuse charges. The question of who was responsible for Jamadi’s death remained unanswered. Milt Silverman, one of the defense attorneys, told me, “Who killed Jamadi? I know it wasn’t any of the SEALs. . . . That’s why their cases got dismissed.” Frank Spinner, a civilian lawyer who represented Ledford, said, “There’s a stronger case against the C.I.A. than there is against Ledford. But the military’s being hung out to dry while the C.I.A. skates. I want a public accounting, whether in a trial, a hearing before a congressional committee, or a public report. There’s got to be something more meaningful than sticking the case in a Justice Department drawer.”

Spinner and several of the other defense lawyers learned more about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death than they were supposed to know, owing to a classification error made by the agency. The C.I.A. sent hundreds of pages of material on Jamadi’s death to the Navy; much of it was classified, and all of it was marked unclassified. The pages were passed on to the civilian lawyers, who read them carefully. The agency, after realizing its mistake, demanded that the lawyers return the classified material, and subsequently sealed virtually all the court records relating to the case. Some of the C.I.A. documents, however, were seen by a source familiar with the case, who shared their contents with me.

Manadel al-Jamadi arrived at Abu Ghraib naked from the waist down, according to an eyewitness, Jason Kenner, an M.P. with the 372nd Military Police Company. In a statement to C.I.A. investigators, Kenner recalled that Jamadi had been stripped of his pants, underpants, socks, and shoes, arriving in only a purple T-shirt and a purple jacket, and with a green plastic sandbag completely covering his head. Nevertheless, Kenner told C.I.A. investigators, “the prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine, and his speech was normal.” The plastic “flex cuffs” on Jamadi’s wrists were so tight, however, that Kenner had trouble cutting them off when they were replaced with steel handcuffs and Jamadi’s hands were secured behind his back.

Staff Sergeant Mark Nagy, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, was also on duty at Abu Ghraib when Jamadi arrived. According to the classified internal documents, he told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi seemed “lucid,” noting that he was “talking during intake.” Nagy said that Jamadi was “not combative” when he was placed in a holding cell, and that he “responded to commands.” In Nagy’s opinion, there was “no need to get physical with him.”

Kenner told the investigators that, “minutes” after Jamadi was placed in the holding cell, an “interrogator”—later identified as Swanner—began “yelling at him, trying to find where some weapons were.” Kenner said that he could see Jamadi through the open door of the holding cell, “in a seated position like a scared child.” The yelling went on, he said, for five or ten minutes. At some point, Kenner said, Swanner and his translator “removed the prisoner’s jacket and shirt,” leaving him naked. He added that he saw no injuries or bruises. Soon afterward, the M.P.s were told by Swanner and the translator to “take the prisoner to Tier One,” the agency’s interrogation wing. The M.P.s dressed Jamadi in a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, keeping the sandbag over his head, and walked him to the shower room there for interrogation. Kenner said that Jamadi put up “no resistance.”

On the way, Nagy noticed that Jamadi was “groaning and breathing heavily, as if he was out of breath.” Walter Diaz, the M.P. who had been on guard duty at the prison, told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi showed “no distress or complaints on the way to the shower room.” But he told me that he, too, noticed that Jamadi was having “breathing problems.” An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The C.I.A. officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive “medical attention.”

“Jamadi was basically a ‘ghost prisoner,’ ” a former investigator on the case, who declined to be named, told me. “He wasn’t checked into the facility. People like this, they just bring ’em in, and use the facility for interrogations. The lower-ranking enlisted guys there just followed the orders from O.G.A. There was no booking process.”

According to Kenner’s testimony, when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that “he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall.” (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi’s arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window.

The Associated Press quoted an expert who described the position in which Jamadi died as a form of torture known as “Palestinian hanging,” in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms. (The technique has allegedly been used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) The M.P.s’ sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn’t kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.

Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, “This guy doesn’t want to coöperate.” According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi’s knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, “At first I was, like, ‘This guy’s drunk.’ He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He’s got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists—it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets.”

Swanner, whom Diaz described as a “kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy,” who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. “He was saying, ‘He’s just playing dead,’ ” Diaz recalled. “He thought he was faking. He wasn’t worried at all.” While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner “just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer.”

Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just “playing possum.” But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi’s body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he “had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”

Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi’s hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi’s open eyes, which didn’t move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”

Swanner, who had seemed so unperturbed, suddenly appeared “surprised” and “dumbfounded,” according to Frost. He began talking about how Jamadi had fought and resisted the entire way to the prison. He also made calls on his cell phone. Within minutes, Diaz said, four or five additional O.G.A. officers, also dressed in black, arrived on the scene.

Dr. Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota, who is writing a study of U.S. medical practices during the war on terrorism, has examined the Jamadi incident extensively. He recently recounted to me what happened that morning: “An Iraqi medical doctor working with the C.I.A. confirmed Jamadi’s death. Captain Donald Reese, the commander of Abu Ghraib M.P.s, came to the shower room and heard Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of military intelligence at the prison, say, ‘I am not going down for this alone.’ ”

C.I.A. personnel ordered that Jamadi’s body be kept in the shower room until the next morning. The corpse was packed in ice and bound with tape, apparently in an attempt to slow its decomposition and, Miles believes, to try to alter the perceived time of death. The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for pictures while stooping over Jamadi’s body, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. The next day, a medic inserted an I.V. in Jamadi’s arm, put the body on a stretcher, and took it out of the prison as if Jamadi were merely ill, so as to “not upset the other detainees.” Other interrogators, Miles said, “were told that Jamadi had died of a heart attack.” (There is no medical evidence that Jamadi experienced heart failure.) A military-intelligence officer later recounted that a local taxi-driver was paid to take away Jamadi’s body.

Before leaving, Frost told investigators, Swanner confided that he “did not get any information out of the prisoner.” C.I.A. officials took with them the bloodied hood that had covered Jamadi’s head; it was later thrown away. “They destroyed evidence, and failed to preserve the scene of the crime,” Spinner, the lawyer for one of the Navy SEALs, said.

The next day, Swanner gave a statement to Army investigators, stressing that he hadn’t laid a hand on Jamadi, and hadn’t done anything wrong. “Clint C.,” the translator, also said that Swanner hadn’t beaten Jamadi. “I don’t think anybody intended the guy to die,” a former investigator on the case, who asked not to be identified, told me. But he believes that the decision to shackle Jamadi to the window reflected an intent to cause suffering. (Under American and international law, intent is central to assessing criminality in war-crimes and torture cases.) The C.I.A., he said, “put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals coöperation.”

The autopsy, performed by military pathologists five days later, classified Jamadi’s death as a homicide, saying that the cause of death was “compromised respiration” and “blunt force injuries” to Jamadi’s head and torso. But it appears that the pathologists who performed the autopsy were unaware that Jamadi had been shackled to a high window. When a description of Jamadi’s position was shared with two of the country’s most prominent medical examiners—both of whom volunteered to review the autopsy report free, at the request of a lawyer representing one of the SEALs—their conclusion was different. Miles, independently, concurred.

One of those examiners, Dr. Michael Baden, who is the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, told me, “What struck me was that Jamadi was alive and well when he walked into the prison. The SEALs were accused of causing head injuries before he arrived, but he had no significant head injuries—certainly no brain injuries that would have caused death.” Jamadi’s bruises, he said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.” Baden, who had inspected a plastic bag of the type that was placed over Jamadi’s head, said that the bag “could have impaired his breath, but he couldn’t have died from that alone.” Of greater concern, he thought, was Jamadi’s position. “If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there’s less oxygen entering the bloodstream.” A person in such a state would first lose consciousness, he said, and eventually would die. The hood, he suggested, would likely have compounded the problem, because the interrogators “can’t see his face if he’s turning blue. We see a lot about a patient’s condition by looking at his face. By putting that goddam hood on, they can’t see if he’s conscious.” It also “doesn’t permit them to know when he died.” The bottom line, Baden said, is that Jamadi “didn’t die as a result of any injury he got before getting to the prison.”

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical doctor and a lawyer who is the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, independently reached the same conclusion. The interpretation put forward by the military pathologists, he said, “didn’t fit with their own report. They said he died of blunt-force trauma, yet there was no significant evidence of trauma to the head.” Instead, Wecht believes that Jamadi “died of compromised respiration,” and that “the position the body was in would have been the cause of death.” He added, “Mind you, I’m not a critic of the Iraq war. But I don’t think we should reduce ourselves to the insurgents’ barbaric levels.”

Walter Diaz told me, “Someone should be charged. If Jamadi was already handcuffed, there was no reason to treat the guy the way they did—the way they hung him.” Diaz said he didn’t know if Swanner had intended to torture Jamadi, or whether the death was accidental. But he was troubled by the government’s inaction, and by what he saw as the agency’s attempt at a coverup. “They tried to blame the SEALs. The C.I.A. had a big role in this. But you know the C.I.A.—who’s going to go against them?”

According to Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the C.I.A., now a private-practice lawyer who handles national-security cases, a decision to prosecute Swanner “would probably go all the way up to the Attorney General.” Critics of the Administration, such as John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, question whether Alberto Gonzales, who became Attorney General last year, has too many conflicts of interest to weigh the case against Swanner fairly. Sifton said, “It’s hard to imagine the current leadership pursuing these guys, because the head of the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, is centrally implicated in crafting the policies that led to the abuse.” He suggested that the prudent thing for Gonzales to do would be to “recuse himself from such a decision, and leave it to a deputy, or a career officer.”

But there are political conflicts here, too. It is in the office of Paul McNulty—whose nomination to become Gonzales’s deputy will soon be presented to Congress, and who was a Republican congressional staff member before being named a U.S. Attorney—that the Jamadi case has stalled. And Alice Fisher, the new head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, got that job only under a recess appointment; during her confirmation hearings, Fisher, who previously handled counter-terrorism cases for the department, refused to provide all the information requested about her knowledge of C.I.A. prisoner abuse, and Congress did not approve her nomination.

Even more troubling is the possibility that, under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws. Jeffrey Smith says it’s possible that the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos may have opened too many loopholes for interrogators like Swanner, “making prosecution somehow too hard to do.” Smith added, “But, even under the expanded definition of torture, I don’t see how someone beaten with his hands bound, who then died while hanging—how that could be legal. I’d be embarrassed if anyone argued that it was.”

Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. Before his tenure ended, he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left.” He went on, “It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy.”

Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass. Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin’s cause—which led to last month’s confrontation with Cheney and Goss. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American.

“I’m concerned that the government isn’t going forward on these prosecutions,” Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases. “It’s really hard to follow the Administration’s policies here. I think the world was very simple before 9/11. We knew what the law was, and I understood it to apply to everyone in the government. Now there’s real uncertainty. There’s a shadow over our nation that needs lifting.”

by JANE MAYER
The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/051114fa_fact

Shut Down Guantanamo

One prisoner got hypothermia after 10 hours. Two others wet their pants while another pair barfed up their dinners fol lowing harsh interrogations.

Welcome to Guan tanamo Bay - reality TV-style.

Earlier this year, Channel 4 in Britain aired "The Guantanamo Guidebook" as part of a three-part series on torture. The show featured seven volunteers who spent two days locked up in cages and subjected to treatment such as sexual humiliation and temperature extremes allegedly culled from the "milder forms of alleged abuse" at the U.S. naval station lockup in Cuba. The Associated Press said three quit before the 48 hours were up.

OK, so there's nothing very "real" about this docudrama.

Yet Guantanamo TV is just one of the many signs that rising anti-Americanism around the world is driven less by the war in Iraq than by allegations of U.S. maltreatment and human-rights violations in handling detainees in the war on terror.

Call it the Abu Ghraib syndrome - or just the propaganda of our enemies.

Either way, there's only one remedy: Close down Guantanamo. Repudiate the president's February 2002 decision denying that Geneva Conventions apply to al-Qaida detainees. Lift the veil of secrecy on the alleged network of CIA "dark prisons" and off-the-books prisoners.

Most importantly, instead of fighting to give the CIA a free pass to torture under U.S. law, declare that torture is abhorrent and illegal, and that cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners never should be allowed, ever, anywhere.

Guantanamo is a blot and a burden on our military's ability to succeed in Iraq and elsewhere.

There never was justification for the Pentagon's decision to lock up hundreds without evidence. Five hundred are still at Guantanamo nearly four years after they were picked up on Afghanistan's battlefields and elsewhere, most without ever being able to hear the case against them.

America puts itself on the same level as Uzbekistan and Syria when it continues to deny U.N. human-rights rapporteurs unrestricted access to these prisoners.

A hunger strike already has put 22 inmates on forced feeding tubes. It could well widen now that Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, is over.

The game is up, Mr. Rumsfeld.

It always was a ghastly idea to shunt these guys off to Cuban soil simply to give the military a free pass to experiment with extreme interrogation techniques.

That's hurt the war effort and remains fundamentally at odds with international law, U.S. military custom and the need to marshal international public opinion against those still plotting terrorist atrocities.

As one expert told the New York Times a year ago, it's also created America's own madrassa - a place where inmates get immersed in extremist anti-U.S. feelings.

Yet the decision to maroon these fighters as "unlawful combatants" denied fundamental legal rights was made by a narrow clique of officials divorced from the mainstream of international and military jurisprudence.

The cases of injustice speak for themselves.

Last summer, a wheelchair-bound Egyptian who'd been locked up for more than three years finally was unmasked for who he was: a professor at Kabul University who had worked for democracy causes most of his adult life, according to the Washington Post.

Yet after that vindication, what happened to Sami Al-Laithi?

In the dead of night early last month, without notice to his lawyer, Al-Laithi was summarily sent back to the Egypt he'd fled 17 years before.

Luckily, according to Amnesty International, there was a happy ending when Al-Laithi was reunited with his family rather than imprisoned by Egyptian authorities.

There is a simple answer: Shut Guantanamo down.

Military officials concede only a small number of its inmates ever will face charges. Identify them, specify their misdeeds, and then release the rest.

It's not an ideal solution, given that a dozen previously released inmates are known to have rejoined militants. But it's the only practical solution for this nasty canker eating at the ability of the nation's military to continue to take the fight to the enemy without enhancing al-Qaida's ability to gain in strength and adherents.

Elizabeth Sullivan
Plain Dealer Columnist

Sullivan is The Plain Dealer's foreign-affairs columnist and an associate editor of the editorial pages.

Contact her at:
bsullivan@plaind.com, 216-999-6153

http://www.cleveland.com/search/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1131273014101500.xml?ocsul&coll=2&thispage=1

The Next CIA Leak Case

WASHINGTON – A CIA leak to be investigated and maybe punished ... What! Not again!

Now, as with the leak of the identity of covert agent Valerie Plame, the offense is the leak, not what was leaked. In the case of Valerie Plame, the news was that her husband, Joseph Wilson, had been sent to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium to make a nuclear weapon, and had returned with word that there was no evidence of this.

This was embarrassing to a White House, which had taken America to war on the assertion that we were in imminent danger from unconventional, possibly nuclear, arms. But that issue was buried in the quest to find out who had leaked.

After a two-year investigation by a special counsel, vice presidential aide I. Lewis Libby was indicted, and Judith Miller lost her job with the New York Times. But the Bush administration still has not provided a convincing rationale for a war for which America is still paying in money and lives.

So now the latest lethal leak: a Washington Post story on Nov. 2 saying that the CIA is maintaining a network of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere where suspected terrorists can be interrogated, free of whatever rules would apply to interrogations in this country. The story caused a commotion, not so much about the secret prisons as about how the story got out. The leak even became an issue in the US Senate.

The CIA has asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the leak. House speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate majority leader Bill Frist have asked for an investigation by the intelligence committees of both houses. Senate committee chairman Pat Roberts was asked how long such an inquiry would take. "Decades!" he joked.

But what about the secret prisons - "black sites" as they are called in the intelligence business? The Republican leaders in Congress have not addressed the issue of why the CIA has these prisons in the first place.

• Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1118/p09s01-cods.html

How the Poor Save Us

Prison visitation programs help families stay together and keep inmates from violating parole.

Carol Fennelly woke up one morning in her Delaware beach house a couple of years ago to a divine commandment. "Go to Youngstown," the voice told her.

"I was really pissed off," Fennelly says. "You know, I'd spent 17 years working in a homeless shelter. I figured I'd done my part. I had worked really hard to buy a house, on the beach, and it was like, 'God, it's not fair.' But I had learned, as Tina Turner would say, `You can do it the rough way, or you can do it the easy way.' And I decided that rather than go out kicking, I would do it myself. I visited Youngstown."

The city that inspired so much dread in Fennelly is hub to five prisons, including one run by the Corrections Corporation of America. After Washington, D.C.'s one prison, which had been plagued with mismanagement problems for years, was ordered closed by the court order that federalized the district's public works, CCA's Youngstown facility absorbed some 1,300 of the district's inmates. Fennelly, a political commentator for the local National Public Radio in D.C., wrote about how being moved a six hours' drive from home had devastated the inmates' family relations.

From the mid-'70s to the mid-'90s, Fennelly had lived in and operated D.C.'s federal homeless shelter. She had finally wanted to taste the comforts most of her middle-aged peers had enjoyed for much of their adult lives.

The voice, however, was clear. So she drove to the former steel town, with its boarded up storefronts and ragged blocks with houses missing like a boxer's teeth. "When I first drove through that town, I could not breathe," she recalled. "I knew it was economically depressed, but I was not prepared for the visual desperation of this place."

That night, at a hotel dingier than any she had endured on her political road trips, she prayed to the God who had sent her there: "Let me see this place with new eyes." In the morning, she came across one sweet house in the midst of the desolation. That beauty convinced her that the difficulties could be endured, and inspired the name for her new project, Hope House.

With a $20,000 grant from the D.C.-based Cafritz Foundation, Fennelly set up programs directed at building and sustaining relationships between imprisoned fathers and their children on the outside. All of the projects have won media accolades for innovation and compassion. Inmates' children are given books-on-tape read by their fathers in lieu of bedtime reading. She links the families through real-time Internet teleconferencing. Each summer, she ferries almost a dozen kids to Youngstown for a one-week camp; in four-hour sessions each morning, the 8- to 14-year-olds play with their fathers and get the extract of affection they desperately need. She plans theater projects that tell the fathers' stories, support programs for the mothers, and on.

According to Fennelly, inmates who don't participate in visitation programs violate parole 60% of the time. Figures like that make her programs appeal to both bleeding hearts and bottom-line incarceration specialists.

In most of the articles about her programs, Fennelly, who in person comes across like a brunette version of her friend Tipper Gore, appears only fleetingly, offering whispered words of comfort, or a hug when children's intense feelings for their fathers and longing for a real life together become too much. But until very recently, when she hired her first employee, Fennelly was Hope House's sole year-round volunteer. (Seven teachers help with the summer camp.) The driving alone--she treks on alternate weeks between D.C. and Ohio--is grueling.

Her undeterrable motivation is best depicted by what she says is her favorite Bible passage--Matthew 25, which she jokingly paraphrases: "Where Jesus says: Feed the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked, or go to hell, basically."

Once upon a time, Fennelly was a fairly conventional mother of two young children, living near Oakland, California. She had grown up playing organ in the church her family attended, Reorganized Latter-day Saints, but she abandoned that faith as soon as she left home. "The lives of the people in churches looked no different than the lives of the people outside the churches, and the people outside the churches were clearly having more fun, so I went for the fun," she says.

When she and her husband separated in 1976, she began reading the Bible for comfort. "I realized the gospel I was reading had nothing to do with the gospel I learned in church as a kid," she says. "That in fact this Jesus was a pretty radical guy, a revolutionary. The Vietnam War was going on, and I looked at the anti-war activists and I thought, wow, they've got nothing on this guy. And I got very excited."

One day, when folding clothes in her kids' room, Fennelly experienced her first vision. She saw a brilliant light and a voice told her, "I have something very special for you and for your children, but not for your husband, not for Jim."

The event hit her hard emotionally, but she tried to summon all her 20th-century cynicism. "I went, `Right, God. Sure,'" she recalls. "I immediately reunited with my husband because I thought it was too weird."

The reunion did not take. She moved to D.C., joined a Christian community, and eventually met a charismatic and outspoken activist named Mitch Snyder, founder of the Community for Creative Nonviolence. It's reasonable to credit America's awareness of the homeless crisis in the 1980s--when popular outcry forced the federal government to address the issue--to the work, and rage, of Fennelly and Snyder. The couple fell in love as they fought the feds together and eventually won the right to operate a 1,400-bed shelter. "I was always aware I was living an alternative lifestyle," says Fennelly. "My children never failed to remind me of that because they so resented it. My children longed to be middle-class."

Fennelly and Snyder's relationship was passionate and volatile. In July 1990, soon after she had walked out, Snyder killed himself. "If I hadn't left that day, he would probably still be alive," she says. "I don't spend my life focusing on that. [But] when someone commits suicide like that, you never get over it. You never stop feeling guilty, no matter how many therapists you see."

"He inspired me more than anyone else in my life," she says later. "No one shaped me or formed me in ways greater than he did. My life changed the day I met him, and it changed forever the day he died. I am forever grateful for it, despite how difficult he was to be with. Because I learned so much from him. He was just a genius."

Fennelly went on to run the CCNV through 1994, when she was aggressively voted out and replaced by Gregory Keith Mitchell, who eventually fled the organization amid accusations that he had mishandled funds. (He later admitted to absconding with HUD money.)

Fennelly embodies a liberal's daredevil streak with a moderate's pragmatism. Though she doesn't dream of accepting federal funds herself, she thinks the Bushian concept of underwriting faith-based programming is perfectly fine. She desperately wanted Gore to get the White House, but she "learned in the Reagan administration that not all Republicans are bad. Some of them do the wrong things for the right reasons." She admires major Republicans like Jim and Susan Baker and the elder Bushes. "George and Barbara Bush cared about homelessness and visited our shelters," she recalls. "I liked them personally. I didn't like all of their policies. It was important for me to spend years in D.C. to learn that lesson."

Likewise, while she still decries private prisons, she has a good relationship with the prisons she deals with, which she feels have improved through pressure and now offer real service to the inmates, without the bureaucratic red tape. Ironically, now that she has learned to love the private prisons, she is forced to deal with a new reality: D.C. won't be using private contractors in 2002, and the inmates she works with will be scattered to federal prisons throughout the country. Undaunted, she has already started holding meetings to ensure the programs follow her clients and is facing yet another move, this time to a prison town in North Carolina.

Beneath the surface are all the tolls taken by a life Fennelly modeled on a radical Jesus. She suffers chronic health problems from the hunger strikes of the 1980s. She feels real loneliness as a solitary 50-year-old, shuttling between Ohio and D.C. each week.

It sounds easy to say Fennelly's work is her payoff, but it's true. "We really liberate people when we let them give back to us, and we so seldom do that."

Besides, as Jesus so eloquently put it in Matthew 25, it's the only way not to go to hell. "People think that they'll go in and save the poor for Jesus," Fennelly says, "when in fact I think the poor save us for Jesus. Our salvation depends on them."

By Elizabeth Mitchell
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/67/story_6721_1.html

The Prison Angel

A Catholic woman's inspiring ministry to prisoners in a notorious Mexican jail.

At the age of fifty, a California housewife named Mary Brenner Clarke left her comfortable suburban world and began to serve the poor inmates of La Mesa, one of Mexico's worst prisons. Living in one of the prison's cells, "Mother Antonia" serves everyone from rapists to drug dealers to petty thieves. Excerpted from "The Prison Angel" with permission of the Penguin Press.

The more inmates Mother Antonia met, the more she was struck by how many of them didn't deserve to be locked up. She often meets people who believe that everyone in prison probably deserves to be there, but in La Mesa she discovered that is anything but the truth.


She found the prison was choked with inmates who had committed the slightest of crimes, many of whom had stolen food to eat. She met some serving long sentences for stealing a jacket or a pair of shoes. Many were simply awaiting trial and didn't have bail money, and hundreds more had been convicted of misdemeanors and ordered to pay as little as a twenty-five-dollar fine in lieu of jail. They didn't have the money, so they had to do the time. Others were lost in the system, stuck in prison beyond their release dates because of abysmal record-keeping or other administrative blunders. A Guatemalan house painter spent more than a year in La Mesa because police were sure he was a Mexican man wanted for robbery. A sympathetic human rights group finally proved that he was the wrong man-their photos looked nothing alike-and he went free after losing fifteen months of his life.

The Mexican justice system, like many around the world, is stacked against the poor. The wealthy use high-priced lawyers and political connections to stay out of prison, while poor people who commit petty crimes are locked up. Bankers and politicians who have embezzled millions walk around free, but the system comes down like a sledgehammer on minor offenders. We have come across many such cases, including a man sentenced to three years for stealing a Gansito, a sweet roll like a Twinkle, and another who served six years for stealing bread. A college student who used a fake ID to get on the Mexico City subway, instead of paying the twenty-cent fare, served two months in prison and paid a fifteen-hundred-dollar fine. Poorly trained police tend to focus on the easiest crimes to solve, like street robberies, while legislators under political pressure to combat rising crime rates set tough minimum sentences for the smallest of offenses. The inequality reminds Mother Antonia of a quote from Bishop Oscar Romero, a personal hero of hers who was murdered in El Salvador in 1980: "The law is like a serpent. It bites the feet which have no shoes on."

Mother Antonia quickly realized after moving into La Mesa that she could free many prisoners, mainly first offenders convicted of nonviolent crimes, by paying their bails or fines. She looks at a donated hundred-dollar bill and sees four free men. So she started visiting courthouses all over Tijuana and the rest of Baja California state, pleading for mercy and paying the fines of thousands of men and women.

She also started representing prisoners at their court appearances. The first time was to plead the case of a young couple who had been convicted of helping smuggle people across the border into the United States. The couple, who were raising a baby in La Mesa, worked at the prison cleaning and ironing for wealthier prisoners to raise money to pay their fine. They were still about a thousand dollars short when Mother Antonia went to court to plead for their freedom, telling the judge that they had never broken the law before, they were never violent, and they had been exemplary prisoners. The judge waived the rest of their fine, and they were released.

As she became a familiar sight in the courthouses and got to know the judges better, Mother Antonia began raising the issue of the unfairness she saw in sentencing. She repeatedly saw those who killed a wealthy person sentenced to twenty-five years or more, while those who killed a poor person got off with as little as four years.

"Isn't everybody's life just as valuable?" she asked Miguel Angel Barud, a judge in Tijuana.

Barud, who calls Mother Antonia a "refreshing Coca-Cola in the desert," says her persistent arguments changed the way he sentences people and reminded him that a victim's social standing must be irrelevant. "There are fewer and fewer people who worry about others in this world," the judge says. "I wish there were more Mother Antonias."

By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan
http://www.beliefnet.com/story/173/story_17354_2.html#cont

Renditions: Public Discourse, Covert Practice

The Spanish government announced on television earlier this week that it is investigating claims that CIA aircraft secretly made stopovers on the island of Majorca several times during 2004 while transferring terrorism suspects to various countries. The discussion is the latest in a growing series of reports -- which have increased in tempo in recent weeks -- focusing on aspects of the United States' controversial "rendition" program, in which terrorist suspects are forcibly extracted from foreign countries and transported elsewhere for questioning and/or imprisonment.

Whether the Spanish government knew, or pretended not to know, or simply was never told, about any CIA stopovers in Majorca is subject to debate, as are the Spanish interior minister's televised statements that the activities, if confirmed, would harm political ties between Madrid and Washington. That may or may not be the case: Western governments, frequently close allies of the United States, have professed outrage over covert intelligence operations before, even when no actual rage existed, as a means of creating plausible deniability in the eyes of the public. Diplomatic notes and public barbs might be exchanged, but frequently, that is simply part of the covert intelligence game.

What is, perhaps, most interesting about the outcry in Spain is that it is adding to the volume of public discussions, criticism and warnings about the U.S. government's program -- and that volume itself, when it comes to covert operation tactics, is noteworthy.

Renditions have been more or less publicly discussed for some time, as the U.S. intelligence community seeks long-term strategies to replace the patchwork options strung together for dealing with terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11 attacks. But the issue has become much more prominent in the media during the past few months -- sparked, in part, by actions in Italy, where in June arrest warrants were issued for the first time against U.S. citizens who were linked to a rendition (in that case, an extraction out of Milan that occurred in 2003). The greater degree of public scrutiny also stems, in part, from more general interest in the interrogation methods used against terrorism suspects (following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal) and in the public manifestations of turmoil at the CIA, where family feuds have spilled out into the open since Director Porter Goss took office. Indeed, a great many of the most prominent news articles circulating about renditions draw on interviews with both veteran and current intelligence officials who are openly critical of the program as it is conducted today.

Concerns about the program are widely known: Terrorist suspects are snatched, transported to countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Uzbekistan and other, lesser-known locales for questioning and then held in secret prisons, frequently without any form of legal due process. Interrogations often are conducted by foreign intelligence services -- some of which allegedly use torture methods -- and suspects' statements are shared with U.S. counterterrorism agencies. Obviously, this sets up a host of legal, moral, political and practical issues for all involved. Moreover, it could be argued that the more controversial aspects of renditions contribute to the ideological challenges that lie at the heart of the U.S. war against militant Islamism. (By way of example, Ayman al-Zawahiri was once brutally tortured by Egyptian security services as a political prisoner. It is not the sort of memory that softens over time.)

It is important not to confuse the issue of renditions -- the actual extraction of a suspect from a foreign country -- with torture, though they frequently are fused together in public discussions. The practices are not synonymous with each other, and in many situations, simple sleep deprivation may be all that is needed to get a suspect to open up to interrogators. However, some have argued that it is the specter of torture -- in countries where human rights are not necessarily a feature of daily life -- that helps to make the rendition program effective. In essence, the argument goes, a hardened al Qaeda operative would scoff at interrogators if he was rendered to a peaceful, law-abiding place like Switzerland; whereas being taken to a place where he might literally be boiled alive could make him talkative.

From a tactical perspective, however, this does not help intelligence operations: Questions about the usefulness and reliability of statements extracted from "rendered" suspects throw a spanner into the entire intelligence system. Sifting actionable intelligence from the heaps of rumors, allegations and false leads is difficult enough as it is -- and it is a crucial aspect of intelligence work and national security.

Discomfort about renditions has grown in the years since Sept. 11, as the practice has become more common. There are some signs that the vetting process for renditions has become lax or sloppy, with a much higher number of terrorism suspects -- whose connections to al Qaeda may indeed be questionable -- being brought in for interrogations at a limited number of facilities around the world. Because the program is so controversial -- and the issue of such forms of intelligence cooperation with the United States is highly politicized -- the number of sites and foreign partners Washington logistically can count on has dwindled somewhat.

The way the program now is being carried out differs in important regards from the format initially devised following the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. At that time, renditions were to be carried out only in cases where suspects had an outstanding arrest warrant or had been tried in absentia for terrorist crimes. Other criteria included the perception that the suspect posed a direct threat to the United States, and there were significant levels of government oversight by both the United States and the "host" country.

As practiced during the 1990s, renditions were predicated on four primary "legs" that were factored into any decision-making process in Washington: foreign policy considerations, security concerns and threat ramifications, the actionable intelligence to be gleaned from the suspect, and law enforcement and prosecution applications. This structure brought a number of agencies into the decision-making process and provided a system of checks and balances.

For instance, on the foreign policy front, the State Department has a say on the diplomatic ramifications or potential outrage over a snatch on foreign soil. Questions to be answered are whether it is in the national security interests of the United States to take such an aggressive action, whether a friendly "third party" country would accept the suspect, and if so, which one?

From a security standpoint, it has been the job of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) to gauge the threat posture generated by any official U.S. presence inside the country, and to estimate any blowback to the U.S. business community following the extraction. Would the capture of an al Qaeda suspect, for example, lead to the deaths of Americans, or spark demonstrations or mob violence within the host country? The implications of a rendition out of Indonesia, say, would generate different security concerns than one out of Italy, where the host government can adequately protect diplomats and the embassy.

On the intelligence front, it is the job of the CIA to determine how valuable the suspect is and what information could be gleaned from him -- for instance, whether he is involved in plotting attacks -- if he is grabbed. The CIA also decides and negotiates with another foreign intelligence service as to where the debriefing should be conducted. And in terms of law enforcement applications, the FBI and Department of Justice have been charged with determining whether the suspect being targeted for rendition is wanted by the United States, is a material witness to a terrorist attack or is the subject of a sealed federal indictment.

It is in these final two areas that the greatest level of discomfort is now being voiced.

Renditions have always been a tricky business, but conducted with sufficient levels of oversight, they can be a valuable tool in the counterterrorism war. Abdel Basit -- more widely known as Ramzi Yousef -- for example, was pulled out of Pakistan in February 1995 on charges stemming from his role in the first World Trade Center bombing and in connection with the Operation Bojinka plot, and two of his Bojinka accomplices were rendered the month before out of Manila. It is a safe bet that these covert operations spared the lives of many potential victims.

However, much of the criticism now being voiced about renditions centers on the CIA's role in vetting the value of a suspect, and on the lack of due process considerations. The questionable interrogation methods that might be used are not the only thing clouding the quality of the intelligence that is gathered; frequently, the suspect's connections to known terrorist groups or plots is open to debate -- and that can lead to pressures and problems throughout the entire system.

Which brings us back to the growing public scrutiny. Certainly, the treatment of terrorism suspects has become an issue for debate on the Hill, where Sen. John McCain and others are pushing legislation to guard the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. But given the way the CIA works with foreign intelligence agencies, it can easily be argued that "rendered" suspects are not actually in U.S. custody, but in the hands of foreign authorities. And it is niceties such as this that seem to be giving birth to critics of the program, on both sides of the intelligence divide. Meanwhile, White House officials have argued that interrogation methods used by the clandestine services should not be subjected to the same levels of oversight as, for instance, those used by the U.S. military, for national security reasons.

Clearly, there are those within the U.S. intelligence community who see value in the renditions program but want it reined in, returned to its more conservative roots. There are others, of course, who don't seem to be wrestling with any moral concerns about the way the program is conducted. It is not at all clear that moral, ethical or even practical concerns are on the verge of forcing a schism within the counterterrorism community, but the growth of public concerns about such issues could generate uncomfortable political pressures for Washington.

There is a practical conundrum to consider as well: Public knowledge of the rendition program, and even of some of the more controversial aspects, can serve as an effective form of psyops against terrorists. Much like the long arm of the MOSSAD, awareness of the risk and the reach can force suspects to sleep with one eye open, never knowing when they might wake with a bag over their heads as they are whisked into a black van.

On the other hand, wider recognition of the practice amongst the public -- in foreign countries, where anti-American sentiment might run high or spike at times for various reasons, or within the United States -- might not always be in the government's best interest. There is growing opposition within the country to the Bush administration's management of the war against jihadists, as well as heightened receptivity to criticism of the behavior of the military and counterterrorism agencies. This political audience currently is poorly organized and badly led, but with a certain level of media controversy and allegations -- even if inaccurate or unfounded -- tying human rights abuses to renditions, the political ramifications could be substantial, and the future of the renditions program thrown into doubt.

By Fred Burton
http://www.stratfor.com/

A Shocking Controversy

The state should establish clear legal guidelines and training requirements for the use of Taser stun guns.

When consultants hired by the county to do a "cultural assessment" of the jail questioned the use of Tasers on prisoners, Sheriff Steve Oelrich's response, in effect, was: So what?

"The use of Tasers is an agency decision and policy," he retorted. "We will continue to use this management tool with regard to arrestees and inmates within the limits of the Levels of Resistance."

Oelrich's response begs two larger questions.

First, what are the appropriate limits of Taser use?

And second, who should establish those limits? Every sheriff and police chief on a department-by-department basis? Or state lawmakers?

Across the country, law enforcement agencies are having second thoughts about Tasers. Those stun guns - which fire electrified barbs that deliver a 50,000 volt shock - are deemed a non-lethal alternative to the use of firearms. And some 7,000 agencies now use them.

But as officers have come to rely more on Tasers and less on guns, questions about their use - or abuse - have arisen. Nationally, 140 people have died in recent years after being shocked by Tasers. Recent reports of Tasers being used on unruly students in public schools have elicited parental outrage. There is a growing concern that police officers, who hesitate to draw their pistols except in the most extreme situations, will resort to Taser use with much less provocation.

As Pulitzer/Bogard & Associates, the firm hired by the county to do the jail assessment, pointed out: "There is significant controversy throughout the country about this type of weapon . . . Jails throughout the country are either discontinuing the use of Tasers or re-evaluating their policies and procedures in light of published reports of serious injuries and deaths resulting from their use."

The concern is such that some critics are calling for an outright ban on the devices by law enforcement. But a more sensible solution is to combine better training with clear legal guidelines for stun gun use.

Recently, a respected national research group, the Police Executive Research Forum, recommended new limits and restrictions on Taser use. For instance, the group recommends that officers only be authorized to use Tasers when a suspect or prisoner is actively resisting arrest. Conversely, they should not be used on suspects who are passively resisting - say, by sitting on the ground - or refusing to obey orders.

Also, suspects should not be repeatedly shocked. Instead, after one shock, officers should evaluate suspects to determine if another dose is necessary. And all suspects who have been shocked should receive timely follow-up medical evaluation to check for heart problems or other adverse reactions.

The Florida Legislature will consider a bill regulating Taser use in the 2006 session. The Florida Police Benevolent Association has already announced its support of appropriate guidelines while defending Tasers as "an important law enforcement tool." The bill favored by the PBA calls on the state's Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission to set the standards and training requirements.

"By putting these requirements in the law itself, every law enforcement officer in the state - from Pensacola to Key West - would come under the same restrictions and be compelled to get the same training," says the PBA.

Stun gun devices are relatively new to law enforcement, and their use is preferable to firearms. But it's clear that the devices can also be misused and abused. Clear legal standards and training mandates are definitely in order.

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200551117055&source=email

Envision An Imaginary Place

Imagine: Torture and the Geneva Conventions

Imagine if it had been a naked marine on a leash held by an Iraqi woman.

Imagine if it had been American prisoners forced to perform simulated or real homosexual acts and photographed while doing so.

Imagine if it had been US soldiers huddled against the wall, naked, with snarling dogs snapping at their genitals.

Imagine if one of your family, or a friend, or a neighbor was beaten to death by a gang who wanted information about something they didn’t know anything about.

On Sunday, March 23, 2003, captured US pilots were shown on Iraqi TV. They didn’t have hoods over the heads. They were completely dressed. None of them wore leashes. Neither then, nor afterward, were they threatened with sodomy.

American reaction was instantaneous.

Donald Rumsfeld got on CBS and said to the world, “The Geneva Convention indicates that it's not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war. And if they do happen to be American or coalition ground forces that have been captured, the Geneva Convention indicates how they should be treated.”

President George. W Bush, in a press conference said, “I expect them to be treated, the POWs I expect to be treated humanely. And -- just like we're treating the prisoners that we have captured humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be treated as war criminals.”

From this, we at least know that the president and the secretary of defense know what the Geneva Conventions are. Indeed, Mr. Rumsfeld seems to have a very fine appreciation of the niceties and the details, an understanding that even embarrassment and humiliation are wrong, even in such a seemingly innocuous way as photographing them. Both the president and the secretary expected the rules to be observed. In the spirit and in the letter.

The president clearly understood that people who violate the Geneva Conventions could be tried for war crimes and was announcing his intention to do exactly that.

Although, at the moment that they made those statements, they were running a war in the country next door and they had decided that over there the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

Imagine, if you will, that you are an Iraqi. You have a captured American pilot. You know that American jets will be bombing your city later this afternoon. If you could only find out what their targets are you could move the women and children – maybe even the old and the sick – out of harm’s way. You might be able to save hundreds, perhaps thousands if you only knew where the bombs would strike. Your children are in the city. Your grandparents. Your cousins. The girl you loved when you were twelve years old, who married someone else and is now the mother of two lovely twins.

You could save them, if only you could get that American pilot to talk.

Five hundred pound bombs are weapons of mass destruction. They quake the earth. They darken the sky.

They’ve already killed so many of your people. There would be pain in your questioning, but it would stop short of that “accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” You would have taken “taken such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts …” lots in Iraq, and, apparently, in the US too, “ … or reviewing past experience,” living up to the standards that were signed off on by Jay S. Bybee, then US assistant attorney general, afterward appointed to the federal appeals court. What’s some mere discomfort, to one pampered Westerner who murders with impunity from 5,000 feet in the air. You’re doing simply what needs to be done.

In August, 2002, the Justice Department issued a memo to the White House that said if a government employee tortured a suspected terrorist “in order to prevent further attacks … necessity and self-defense could provide justifications and would eliminate any criminal liability.” In addition to the Geneva Conventions, the US has signed an anti-torture treaty and has it’s own war crimes law. However, according to the Pentagon, “in order to respect the President’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority.”

Now envision an imaginary place. Beyond power politics and assumptions about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

There’s a judge there. Almost divine in his wisdom and authority. And all these people – imaginary and real, the torturers and the men who sent them to it – come before him.

Let us imagine what he would say.

Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. All available at nationbooks.org

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1117-34.htm

Why Is The Jail So Crowded?

Misdemeanor and low risk inmates at the Alachua County jail pass the time lying in bunks inside pod 3G Tuesday, July 30, 2003. According to Sgt. Keith Faulk of the Alachua Sheriff's department each pod should hold 72 inmates but are now running with about 85 to 90 inmates on any given day.

Derrick V. Howard, 29, was on probation for stalking when he bounced a $13.83 check, and he ended up in jail.

For Tonya V. Flowers, 23, on probation for possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia, a positive drug test landed her behind bars.

Arvey Q. Bass, 42, was jailed for failing to pay $253 in fines he received for leaving the scene of an accident.

The stories of these Gainesville residents are typical of people jailed for violating probation, in part leading to an Alachua County jail bursting with inmates. The jail set a record last month with 1,081 inmates - 300 above capacity.

Alachua County commissioners voted this month to build a barracks-style addition to the jail, costing up to $2 million. But some officials say overcrowding will continue to be a problem under a statewide policy, which requires probation violators to be jailed for even minor offenses.

The change has meant an additional 100 inmates in the jail each day, County Manager Randy Reid said. The county is asking the area's state lawmakers to consider legislation to change the policy, but he acknowledged it may be a tough sell.

"It's very hard to take a political stand that's anything that appears to be coddling criminals," he said.

The state Department of Corrections ordered the zero-tolerance policy to be enforced after several high-profile murders last year - including 11-year-old Carlie Brucia - were allegedly committed by people who had committed probation violations but weren't jailed.

While judges and probation officers used to have options other than jail for violations such as failed drug tests and missed appointments, violators are now required to be arrested on the spot.

In Alachua County, the policy has caused a jail population that drifted between 750 and 950 inmates on average from 2002-2004 to shoot beyond 1,000 inmates this year.

About one-third of those inmates are there for probation violations, according to a count of the jail provided last month to the local Jail Assessment and Recommendations Task Force, a group of criminal justice officials that studies jail issues.

Overflow inmates must now sleep on portable plastic beds in halls and other available space. Reid said those conditions put the county at risk of a costly lawsuit.

"If someone sues the county for conditions at the jail, it is the residents that pay," he said.

Legal action has forced previous action on the jail. A 1989 court order involving the overcrowded old jail led to the new facility being built in the early 1990s.

"All we did is outgrow our jail," said Jeanne Singer, a jail task force member and chief assistant state attorney for the six-county judicial circuit that includes Alachua County.

She defends the zero-tolerance policy, saying it can be linked to a drop in the county's crime rate in the first six months of this year.

"Probation is a privilege," she said. "Eventually people have to be held accountable."

Others say the policy has cast too wide a net. Retired Circuit Court Judge Larry Turner said the "draconian" policy prevents judges and probation officers from using their judgment, turning them into mere paper-pushers.

"We should go back to having them do their jobs," said Turner, a former task force member who went into private practice after retiring from the bench last year.

But the perception that a judge and probation officers didn't do their jobs in two high-profile cases last year inspired the crackdown.

Brucia was murdered in February in a case that has received national media attention. The man now on trial for committing the crime, Joseph Smith, faced jail the previous month for failing to pay fines and court costs, but a judge allowed him to remain free. The next month, the state Department of Corrections started enforcing its zero-tolerance policy requiring people to be jailed for even minor probation offenses.

In August 2004, four men and two women were killed in a fight in Deltona over a stolen video-game system. One of the men, who has since pleaded guilty for the crime, Troy Victorino, was arrested just weeks before the murders for a fight. But probation officers failed to file paperwork asking that he be jailed until hours after the killings.

Within weeks, the corrections department started pushing for probation officers to have police make warrantless arrests of violators. A failed drug test now means the violator can be sent to jail on the spot, rather than having a probation officer make a recommendation that is considered by a judge.

The policy has had a statewide impact, though some counties say it has affected their jails more than others. In Marion County, officials say longer sentences and a 20-year-old jail are the main reasons for a jail expansion being completed next year.

In Columbia County, Sheriff Bill Gootee said probation violators now make up nearly half the jail population, leading to his request for another judge to hear them.

State Department of Corrections spokesman Robby Cunningham said the program has worked to help protect the public.

"The bottom line is public safety," he said.

But Turner said the policy keeps police officers from dealing with more serious problems by requiring them to arrest minor violators.

"Now you're taking up the parole officer's time, the police officer's time," he said.

Those violators are forced to miss work and often lose their jobs, he said, which makes it more difficult for them to again contribute to society.

Singer counters, "That position allows these offenders to continue to steal, burglarize, use drugs and commit other offenses."

Even something as seemingly minor as a failed drug test is an indicator the person was associating with criminals or committing criminals acts, she said.

Reid said the county should be able to deal with those violations without filling jail beds.

Everything from putting violators on house arrest to sending those with mental health or substance abuse problems to alternative facilities should be looked at to reduce overcrowding, he said.

Turner said no matter how hard the state cracks down on probation violations, high-profile crimes will continue to happen.

"Unless we simply lock up everybody - and it certainly looks like we might be headed in that direction," he said.

Nathan Crabbe can be reached at 352-338-3176 or crabben@gvillesun.com

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200551117005&source=email