Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear

By James Corbett
corbettreport.com

“If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.”

We’ve all heard this argument a million times when talking to people about the latest revelations of government snooping or the latest roll-out of creepy Orwellian technology. The implication is that the only people who complain about having their privacy violated are criminals who deserve to have their privacy violated. It is a simple phrase, learned by rote, that is meant to bring the conversation to a close.

We all know that this is argument is fundamentally flawed, but sometimes it is difficult to argue the point with someone who insists that they are fine with seemingly any level of government intrusion in their personal lives. Recently, Dan Dicks ofPressForTruth.ca, a Canadian alternative media outlet, demonstrated in a simple, fun way, the limits of people’s willingness to abide by the maxim that they have nothing to fear because they have nothing to hide. Setting up his camera on a busy thoroughfare, he asked a number of passersby a series of increasingly invasive questions. “What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “How old are you?” “Who was the last person you phoned?” “What was the last thing you Googled?” “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” “What’s your bank account number?” Somewhere in the line of questioning, the person answering would inevitably claim that the question was too personal and would decline to answer. They had reached the limit of what they were willing to reveal about themselves to a total stranger.

So why are people (sometimes the very same people who argue that they have nothing to hide) reluctant to give away all of their personal information to a random person on the street? Obviously because they do not know that person or his intentions. He could be a criminal attempting to steal the information so he can access their bank account or steal their identity. Even if he wasn’t a criminal, who’s to say where the information would end up, and whether it may eventually end up in the hands of some nefarious criminal?

For some reason, people believe that allowing the government to spy on all of their electronic communications is somehow different. These aren’t random criminals on the street, after all, but government agencies. The information is not being accessed randomly, it is being used for official investigations into terrorism or wrongdoing. Our personal data, even our bank account numbers and personal histories, are surely safe with these government agencies and their trusted employees.

But think for a moment about the recent NSA spying scandal and what it has taught us. As much as Edward Snowden’s critics attempt to demonize him by pointing out that he is a high school dropout, an Army quitter, a lowly security guard who somehow or other flubbed his way into a job where he gained access to this top secret information, what these critics don’t realize is that they are making the very point for why we should not be happy entrusting our most personal information to a bunch of faceless government agencies. Because the faceless government agencies aren’t really faceless at all; they are populated by the very same types of potential criminals and nogoodniks that we would avoid sharing our personal information with on the street. Think about the extraordinary amount of data that someone like Snowden—a lowly employee of a subcontractor of the NSA—can access about you personally at any time he desires. As he himself stated: “I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, to your accountant, to a federal judge to even the President if I had a personal email.”

You have something to fear about giving up private data to faceless individuals precisely because you have no idea how these people are going to use that information, or whether it will ever be misused. And when you realize that with the construction of the NSA’s new 1.5 million square foot data center in Utah the US government now has the ability to essentially store all of this data forever, you are entrusting your personal information not just to one potential criminal on the street, but to every single federal employee who ever has access to that data, and to anyone who might gain access to that data illegally. The government is essentially creating a trough of information that would be almost literally invaluable to any potential criminal or group of criminals, and making every effort to ensure that that trough is never emptied. How can anyone possibly be OK with this?

Think about this the next time someone tries to tell you they have nothing to hide.

IRS Targeted Groups That Criticized The Government

Juliet Eilperin reports in The Washington Post:

At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.

The documents, obtained by The Washington Post  from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, 

IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” 

But six months later, the IRS applied a new political test to groups that applied for tax-exempt status as “social welfare” groups, the document says. 

On Jan. 15, 2012 the agency decided to target “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government, educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights, social economic reform movement.,” 

The new revelations are likely to intensify criticism of the IRS, which has been under fire since agency officials acknowledged they had deliberately targeted groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their name for heightened scrutiny.

During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) described the practice as “absolutely chilling” and called on President Obama to condemn the effort.

The agency did not appear to adopt a more neutral test for social welfare groups — which file for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code — until May 17, 2012, according to the timeline in the inspector general’s report.

The Dark Side Of The Obama White House

In "Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power," New York Times reporter David E. Sanger describes in quite extraordinary detail the Obama administration’s hitherto secret cyberwar campaign against Iran, its targeted drone strikes against Al Qaeda and affiliates, and any number of other covert ops, including of course the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. As he indicates in his subtitle, Sanger concludes that the biggest surprise of the Obama presidency is just how aggressive he has been in his application of military power.

But a case can be made that what’s even more surprising is Obama’s abuse of secrecy. Publicly an advocate of government transparency and oversight, Obama has nevertheless hidden the most controversial and unilateral aspects of his presidency — including new ways of waging acknowledged and unacknowledged wars — more thoroughly and effectively than anyone might have imagined.

Sanger does end up raising some profound questions here and there. For instance, Sanger asks:

“What is the difference — legally and morally — between a sticky bomb the Israelis place on the side of an Iranian scientist’s car and a Hellfire missile the United States launches at a car in Yemen from thirty thousand feet in the air? How is one an ‘assassination’ — condemned by the United States — and the other an ‘insurgent strike’? What is the difference between attacking a country’s weapon-making machinery through a laptop computer or through bunker-busters? What happens when other states catch up with American technology — some already have — and turn these weapons on targets inside the United States or American troops abroad, arguing that it was Washington that set the precedent for their use? These are all questions the Obama team discusses chiefly in classified briefings, not public debates.”

Via: "The Huffington Post"

Capitalism’s Sacrifice Zones

By Bill Moyers

There are forgotten corners of this country where Americans are trapped in endless cycles of poverty, powerlessness, and despair as a direct result of capitalistic greed. Journalist Chris Hedges calls these places “sacrifice zones,” and joins Bill this week on Moyers & Company to explore how areas like Camden, New Jersey; Immokalee, Florida; and parts of West Virginia suffer while the corporations that plundered them thrive.

“These are areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. We're talking about environmentally destroyed, communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed,” Hedges tells Bill. “It's the willingness on the part of people who seek personal enrichment to destroy other human beings… And because the mechanisms of governance can no longer control them, there is nothing now within the formal mechanisms of power to stop them from creating essentially a corporate oligarchic state.”

The broadcast includes images from Hedges' collaboration with comics artist and journalist Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, which is an illustrated account of their travels through America’s sacrifice zones. Kirkus Reviews calls it an "unabashedly polemic, angry manifesto that is certain to open eyes, intensify outrage and incite argument about corporate greed."

A columnist for Truthdig, Hedges also describes the difference between truth and news. “The really great reporters -- and I've seen them in all sorts of news organizations -- are management headaches because they care about truth at the expense of their own career,” Hedges says.

DHS Emergency Power Extended

The Obama administration has given the Department of Homeland Security powers to prioritize government communications over privately owned telephone and Internet systems in emergencies.

An executive order signed June 6 “gives DHS the authority to seize control of telecommunications facilities, including telephone, cellular and wireless networks, in order to prioritize government communications over private ones in an emergency,” said Amie Stephanovich, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

The White House says Executive Order 13618, published Wednesday in the Federal Register, is designed to ensure that the government can communicate during major disasters and other emergencies and contains no new authority.

“The [order] recognizes the creation of DHS and provides the Secretary the flexibility to organize the communications systems and functions that reside within the department as [she] believes will be most effective,”White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said in an email. “The [order] does not transfer authorities between or among departments.”

She said the order replaced one originally signed in 1984 by President Reagan and amended in 2003 by President George W. Bush after DHSwas set up and took responsibility for emergency response and communications.

When the original order “was written during the Cold War, the motivating national security concern was maintaining communications capability following a devastating nuclear strike,” Ms. Hayden said.

The new order “address[es] a world in which our economy and government are far more reliant on communications technologies to maintain essential functions than we were then,” she wrote.

At issue is a provision of the four-page order that says Homeland Security Secretary Janet A. Napolitano “shall … satisfy [federal] priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, government, and privately owned communications resources.”

“The previous orders did not give DHS those authorities over private and commercial networks,” Ms. Stepanovich said. “That’s a new authority.”

“This should have been done by Congress, so there could have been proper debate about it,” she added. “This is not authority that should be granted by executive order.”

Ms. Hayden said the legal basis for the order is Section 706 of the 1934 Communications Act. The section authorizes the president to “cause the closing of any facility or station for wire communication” and gives him “control of any such facility or station” if a state of war, or the threat of one, exists.

The new order “extends Section 706 powers to the Internet,” said James Harper, an electronic-privacy advocate at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

The authorities “might have made sense in the 1930s,” but now the communication networks are too complex and interdependent, he said. “If you try to seize control of the Internet that way, you will break it.”

Under the previous executive orders, communications providers have long established priority access programs for federal users. In the telephone system, a special code the user inputs before dialing a number automatically tells the phone companies’ equipment to give the call priority.

“Mobile phones, the Internet, and social media are all now integral to the communications landscape,” Ms. Hayden said.

Via: "The Washington Times"

Predictive Policing

Predictive Policing Helps Police Protect Citizens. It Could Also Be Used To Oppress Them.

By Ronald Bailey

In the 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report (based on a dark Philip K. Dick tale), Pre-Crime Unit Captain John Anderton is on the run from police because the mutant pre-cog psychics used by his unit predict that he will murder a man in the next 36 hours. More recently, the hit CBS television series Person of Interest posits a secret all-seeing computer surveillance system developed by a reclusive billionaire genius for the U.S. government that can predict that a specific person will be involved in a violent crime. For now, these are fiction. Researchers are, however, claiming to have developed computer programs that can predict not who will commit a crime, but at what locations they are likely to occur. Welcome to the brave new world of predictive policing.

Predictive policing goes beyond the celebrated CompStat system that was widely adopted by many cities as a national crime wave crested in the 1990s. In CompStat recent crime data are plotted on a city map as a way to identify crime “hotspots” to which more police are deployed. CompStat is credited with dramatically reducing crime in cities where it was implemented.

Now comes predictive policing, which proponents claim is even more effective in reducing crime. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) recently reported in a randomized controlled trial that one such program has reduced property crimes by 13 percent in precincts where it has been implemented compared to a slight overall increase in those crimes in the rest of the city. “We have prevented hundreds and hundreds of people coming home and seeing their homes robbed," said police LAPD Capt. Sean Malinowski to the AP. Malinowski is the Commanding Officer of Real-time Analysis and Critical Response of the LAPD and the principal investigator on the National Institute of Justice funded “Los Angeles Predictive Policing Planning Project.” The LAPD is now rolling out the program to more of the city.

The particular program used by the LAPD is called PredPol, which has been devised by a team of researchers led by University of California, Los Angeles anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham. PredPol is relatively new; other cities have been using predictive crime analytics programs by IBM for several years. In addition, using PredPol the City of Santa Cruz experienced a reduction in burglaries by 27 percent in July of 2011 compared with July 2010. PredPol’s algorithm was able to predict crime time and location (hotspots) in Los Angeles with twice the accuracy of trained crime analysts.

In Los Angeles, predictive policing is currently applied to forecasting the likelihood of burglaries, auto theft, and theft from autos. Crunching weighted crime data from the past three years, the PredPol algorithm produces a daily list of hotspot boxes measuring 500 feet by 500 feet and along with times when the crimes are predicted to be most likely to take place. Between responding to specific calls for assistance from the public, officers are directed to go into the boxes identified by the program. The idea is not to make arrests but to disrupt law-breaking before it occurs.

How does predictive policing work to reduce property crimes? Crime does not randomly disperse through cities. For example, research has shown that half the crime in Seattle occurs on 4.5 percent of that city’s streets; just over 3 percent of street addresses and intersections generated half the crimes in Minneapolis; and 8 percent of street blocks accounted for 66 percent of robberies in Boston.

Researchers have developed two theories for why some areas are subject to higher rates of crime; near repeat theory and risk terrain modeling. Near repeat theory hypothesizes that once a particular location has been hit by a crime it is more likely nearby locations will be hit too. For example, studies have shown that burglaries are “contagious.” One study found that “houses within 200 meters of a burgled home were at an elevated risk of burglary for a period of at least two weeks.” Why? Possibly because a successful burglary advertises similar vulnerabilities in other properties in a neighborhood.

Risk terrain modeling maps various risk factors to identify areas where crimes are more likely to occur. For example, Rutgers University computational criminologist Joel Caplan mapped for Irvington, New Jersey four crime risk factors correlated with shooting incidents. The risk factors were the locations of gang member residences, public bus stops, schools, and facilities like bars, clubs, fast food restaurants, and liquor stores. He found that “the likelihood of a shooting happening at particular 100-foot-by-100-foot places in Irvington during 2007 increases by 143 percent as each additional risk factor affects that place.”

In June, Brantingham and his colleagues published a study that applied Lotka-Volterra equations used by biologists for decades to determine the hunting ranges of animals in the wild to map the territories of street gangs [PDF]. Their model predicted that 59 percent of gang crimes would occur within two blocks of a border between two gangs and 87.5 percent would occur within about three blocks. When the researchers mapped more than 500 crimes attributed to 13 gangs in a specific area of Los Angeles, they found in fact that 58 percent and 83 percent occurred within two blocks and three blocks of a border respectively.

"You would think that we're more complicated than other animals, so a model this simplistic shouldn't work, but I was surprised that it fit as well as it did," said study co-author Martin Short, an assistant adjunct professor of mathematics at UCLA in Wired UK. This research may eventually be used to identify zones to be more intensively patrolled by police with the goal of disrupting assaults and murders perpetrated by gangs.

The accuracy of predictive policing programs depends on the accuracy of the information they are fed. Lots of crimes are not reported, skewing the computer forecasts. According to near repeat theory, the probability that a crime will be committed decays with time, so moves toward real-time data input would boost the accuracy of forecasts. Finally, it is early days yet for predictive policing so the algorithms must be validated by outside experts. Some police departments have become notorious forcooking their crime statistics books, so an independent oversight board is a good idea to keep them honest. One possible downside of transparency is that savvy criminals or terrorists could use predictive policing programs to figure out likely police deployments as a way identify unprotected targets.

How might predictive policing interfere with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee that Americans are to be free unreasonable searches and seizures? Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia notes in an article, "Predictive Policing: The Future of Reasonable Suspicion," forthcoming in the Emory Law Journal, that police must have either “probable cause” to search or “reasonable suspicion” to seize an individual. Such determinations are actually predictions by law enforcement officials about the likelihood they will find evidence of a crime when they search a premise or detain a suspect. Can computer programs improve these predictions and thus help police identify would-be perpetrators while excluding the innocent?

To find analogies to how predictive policing might affect Fourth Amendment protections, Ferguson reviews various Fourth Amendment court cases involving anonymous tips, informant tips, profiling, and high crime area designations. Tips refer to the activities of particular individuals. Predictive policing forecasts do not. Consequently, Ferguson argues, “Because predictive policing does not provide personal knowledge about an ongoing crime, or particularized identification of the suspect involved, it cannot support the weight of reasonable suspicion.”

On the other hand, if a specific area has been identified by the computer program as being at higher risk for an outbreak of, say, burglaries, then courts would likely accept reasonable suspicion arguments by police who had stopped a suspect in that area fitting a burglar “profile,” e.g., carrying duffel bags, tools, ropes, gloves in warm weather, etc. Ferguson concludes that “predictive policing forecasts, alone, will not constitute sufficient information to justify reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” but instead will be seen by courts as a “plus factor” in making such determinations.

Ferguson also expresses the hope that the advent of predictive policing might “cause courts to rethink the current overly flexible approach to reasonable suspicion.” One possible liberty-enhancing benefit from predictive policing might be that by focusing law enforcement attention on specific city blocks that innocent citizens living in higher crime neighborhoods (often inhabited by members of ethnic minorities) may experience less intrusive police contact. Is it too much to hope that better crime forecasts will not only lead to fewer crimes, but also to less police interference with our liberties? Maybe not. But we should always keep in mind that any new technology that helps the police to better protect citizens can also be used to better oppress them. 

Via: "Reason Online"

Understanding The US Torture State

By Anthony Gregory, 
October 28, 2011 
Courtesy Of "Anti-War"

The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse edited by Marjorie Cohn (New York University Press: 2011), 342 pages.

When I was a child in Reagan’s America, a common theme in Cold War rhetoric was that the Soviets tortured people and detained them without cause, extracted phony confessions through cruel violence, did the unspeakable to detainees who were helpless against the full, heartless weight of the communist state. It was torture as much as any evil that differentiated the bad guys, the commies, from the good guys, the American people and their government. However imperfect the U.S. system was, it had civilized standards rejected by the enemy.

In April 2004, the world was shocked to see photos exposing the torment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, one of Saddam Hussein’s most infamous prisons, which was taken over and used by the United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Well, most of the world was shocked. Some, mostly conservative commentators, dismissed or defended the barbarity, even comparing it to frat-boy hazing. Others were disgusted but shrugged it off as the work of a few bad apples, not something that should draw judgment down on the whole of U.S. policy and the brave men and women in uniform. Still others of us were horrified but did not see the mistreatment as any sort of aberration — we expected such torture to occur in a war of aggression, figured we had not seen the worst of it, and even argued that what goes on in America’s domestic prisons easily compares with some of the milder photos dominating the nightly news.

A national debate arose out of that scandal. More than one question was pondered: Do these photos depict torture? Is this an anomaly or a systemic problem? Who should be held accountable? Should torture always be illegal?

Over the next few years, more torture controversies came up. The question of whether water-boarding actually constitutes torture was particularly disheartening. Some defenders of the U.S. government said the United States should not and does not torture, but waterboarding doesn’t count. Others said that even if the United States does torture, it is doing so in service of a greater good.

We have actually come to the point where the rhetoric of Reagan’s day no longer holds: American exceptionalists and conservatives no longer claim emphatically that the United States does not and never will torture, as they did before (however disingenuously). An AP poll in June 2009 found that 52 percent of Americans thought torture was justified in some situations — up from only 38 percent in 2005. In Obama’s America, torture is now normalized.

But Americans should recoil from torture absolutely, should recognize it is not an anomaly of the Bush war in Iraq but a practice with decades of U.S. precedent, should understand that responsibility for the Bush-era torture went all the way to the top, should know that domestic and international laws were unambiguously violated in the war on terrorism, should understand and oppose torture even when it’s “only” psychological or used against domestic criminal convicts, and should recognize that Obama has not put a stop to the abuse. A single book will offer a crash course in all these elements of the U.S. torture state: The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse, a remarkable and multidisciplinary collection of chapters by scholars, lawyers, and journalists, all compiled by Marjorie Cohn, past president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Not Just Bush

It is crucial to recognize that torture is not a new policy that began with George W. Bush’s war on terrorism. Despite the Cold War rhetoric, the U.S. government has been responsible for torture for decades, particularly in Latin America. The preface to the book is written by Dianna Ortiz, a nun who was raped, burnt, beaten, and otherwise tortured in Guatemala in 1989, all under the auspices of a U.S. commander, she is sure. There is no reason to doubt her. A chapter by Bill Quigley surveys the legacy of the School of the Americas (SOA), a U.S. Army installation with origins in Panama in 1946 that was moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984 and renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001. “Together these schools have trained more than 60,000 members of the military from 22 Central and South American countries.”

Students were trained in “the systematic use of torture and executions to neutralize dissidents.” In 1996 the Pentagon admitted using torture training manuals in the SOA. The manuals “were based on materials used in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.”

Some of the worst graduates include Bolivian Gen. Hugo Banzer, who seized the country in a violent coup in 1971; the dictator of Guatemala, Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, who is implicated in “5,000 political murders and up to 25,000 civilian deaths”; Panama’s famed dictator, Manuel Noriega; and “most of the Chilean military who overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.”

El Salvador was probably the scene of most of this U.S.-sponsored barbarity. American support for the death squads is the focus of Terry Lynn Karl’s chapter. The Reagan administration repeatedly defended the regime in El Salvador, despite its outright murder of moderate reformers, Jesuit priests and nuns, and other innocent men, women, and children. “On December 10, 1981, units of the Atlactl Battalion and the Third Infantry Brigade detained between 500 and 900 people in the village of El Mozote and the surrounding area, then executed them in groups, first the men, and then the women and children.” It is telling that “U.S. aid totals in the two years of greatest repression (1980–1981) were far greater than the total for the previous 33 years.” This is one great shame of both the Carter and the Reagan administrations.

Even before George W. Bush took office, what became one of his most scandalous torture programs — the outsourcing of abusive interrogation to foreign thugs, known as “extraordinary renditioning” — was already being developed. Jane Mayer tells of its fledgling beginnings in the Clinton years, when it was also used in the war on al-Qaeda, with most of the renditioned detainees handed over to Egypt, “the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel.” At the hands of Mubarak’s brutal regime, Shawki Salama Attiya claims “that he suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees.” The abuses only expanded under Bush, who renditioned at least dozens of terror suspects. At least some of them, such as Canadian citizen Maher Arar, tortured in Syria, appear to have been completely innocent of any terrorist-related activities.

Just as U.S.-sponsored torture didn’t begin with Bush, it didn’t end with him. The last chapter, written by Thomas Ehrlich Reifer, points out that the Obama administration has “implied that it would continue the practice of extraordinary rendition” and as of his writing Obama “is not complying with the UN Convention Against Torture, the Geneva Conventions, or other obligations under international and domestic law, as reports from the Washington Post and other reputable news organizations indicate that torture continues at various U.S. prisons oversees.” Of course, indefinite detention without charge has also continued and Obama has shielded Bush officials from legal recourse.

Psychological Abuse and Solitary Confinement

One misconception about torture is that it has to leave a physical mark, or be physical at all. Alfred W. McCoy’s chapter, “The CIA’s Pursuit of Psychological Torture,” dispels this myth, detailing the agency’s most disturbing past in attempting to master the art of mind control. Starting in the late 1940s and early 1950s and guided by a report on Nazi experiments, chemist Henry Beecher consulted for the CIA in psychological experiments in postwar Germany. Later, “Beecher won a classified military contract to test heavy LSD doses on unwitting human subjects at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1953-4 — a clear violation of the Nuremberg medical code.” McCoy explains how severe psychological torture techniques can be and traces their propagation “among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America” and their link to the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam.

The importance of psychological torture is not lost on U.S. officials, who have in the war on terrorism cooperated with professional psychologists to hone this diabolical craft. “[Psychologists] helped to define what constitutes ‘torture’ in general terms of detainee breaking points” to help the administration find the threshold of what would “officially constitute illegal torture,” writes Stephen Soldz. The psychologists “were not just monitors of abuse.” They helped design it. U.S. troops are put through abusive conditions to “evaluate how much stress an individual could tolerate. It was these psychologists on whom the government relied, when it ‘reversed engineered’ … techniques to design ‘counterresistance techniques’ to break down detainees.” Soldz is highly critical of the American Psychological Association for what he says is complicity in this shameful collaboration between members of the profession and the torture state.

Just as physical torture is not the only kind of torture, so wartime enemies are not the only victims. Lance Tapley indicts the entire institution of solitary confinement in America’s supermax prisons as a form of torture. But is he exaggerating?

Severe pain and suffering as punishment are plainly the norm in a supermax. Even when mental suffering alone is considered — ignoring, for example, the coordinated beatings and violent subjugation of recalcitrant prisoners known as “cell extractions” — the prolonged solitary confinement of prisoners has increasingly been described by UN agencies and human-rights organizations as cruel, inhuman, degrading, or torturous.

You don’t have to take the UN’s word for it. Tapley describes compellingly a totalitarian hell for domestic prisoners. Nothing like it can be found in the world of criminal justice, especially the so-called civilized world. And what are “cell extractions”? The author describes one prisoner who endures them “up to five times a day”:

Five hollering guards wearing helmets and body armor charge into a cell. The point-man smashes a big shield into the prisoner, knocking him down. The others spray Mace into his face, push him onto the bed, and twist his arms behind his back to handcuff him, connecting the cuffs by a chain to leg irons. Then they haul him into the corridor, cut off all his clothes, and carry him screaming through the cell block while they continue to Mace him. They put him in an observation room, and bind him to a special chair. He remains there for hours, naked and cold, yelling and mumbling.

Estimates of how many American prisoners sit in supermaxes range between 36,000 and 100,000. Not all inmates are violent rapists and murderers. Many are mentally troubled. Their terrible treatment is one reason some of us were not so shocked by the photos at Abu Ghraib.

Legal Violations and Philosophical Dilemmas

Yet there was something particularly evil about the Bush administration’s torture policies. Many thousands were detained without due process and were exposed to particularly disturbing cruelties. Up to a hundred died in detention, many tortured to death.

The chapter by Marc D. Falkoff, a lawyer for a Guantánamo inmate, humanizes such prisoners, many of whom were swept up in the war in Afghanistan, called the “worst of the worst” by American officials, and deprived of due process for years, even as the Supreme Court struck down one administration attempt after another to circumvent habeas corpus. Falkoff’s client, Adnan, appears to be an innocent victim of circumstance, deprived of the right to see the evidence against him, accused of connections with al-Qaeda, an organization he seems not to know anything about. He suffers from chronic headaches and inner ear pain, the results of a 1994 car accident. He is denied suitable food or anywhere near adequate medical attention for his many health problems. The water he is given has bugs in it. Excerpts from the proceedings and interrogations indicate a code of justice reaching Kafkaesque absurdity. After years of torturous confinement, Adnan went on a hunger strike. In response, “twice a day, soldiers force-feed Adnan a liquid nutrient by inserting a tube up his nose and into his stomach. His arms and legs are strapped to a special restraint chair during the feedings.” Force-feeding is considered torture by the UN.

The legal questions surrounding Bush’s detention and torture policies are discussed at length, in multiple chapters. His narrow redefinition of torture to escape the sanctions of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law is exposed as a despicable yet still technically failing undertaking. The book confronts the extremist argument that the president could inflict even deadly abuse or torture on a child without being in violation of the law.

Michael Ratner writes about attempts to bring U.S. torturers to justice outside of U.S. borders, in other nations’ courts. Jeanne Mirer makes a comprehensive case that the lawyers who guided Bush administration torture policy are legally culpable. Phillippe Sands demonstrates starkly that the arguments of John Yoo and others that the president was above all international law were completely without merit. According to Jordan J. Paust’s chapter, the various legal memos of infamy, from Yoo, Jack Goldsmith, Steven G. Bradbury, and Jay Bybee, far from providing a legal shield for the administration, demonstrate their authors’ complicity in the U.S. torture state. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are also exposed for their involvement in “the Bush legacy of serial and cascading criminality.”

Some philosophical issues are also tackled in the book. John W. Lango has an interesting chapter grappling with the common, yet seemingly absurd, argument that torture might be necessary to stop a ticking time bomb and save thousands or millions of innocent lives. After a thoughtful discussion of the potential ethical dilemmas, he convincingly concludes, “Despite real-world counterexamples to moral absolutism about informational torment, torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment must be legally prohibited absolutely.” Richard Falk’s chapter criticizes the left-liberal mind-set that appropriately recoils in horror at the prospect of torture, but not in such completely asymmetrical wars as Vietnam, Kosovo, and Iraq. Although “the prohibition of ‘torture’ has been benevolently inscribed in the political mentality of liberal legality … the reliance on one-sided warfare stirs no comparable moral concern.” He traces that disconnect back to World War II and the reliance on weapons of mass destruction in the Cold War and calls on people to see wars against the defenseless as deserving condemnation in moral terms and not just in practical ones.

Understanding America’s Torture State

Abu Ghraib was no aberration. It was the result of policies approved by George W. Bush and his immediate executive, military, and legal subordinates. It was also morally consistent with policies pursued by the U.S. government since at least the dawn of the Cold War. American officials have used torture domestically and internationally, directly and by proxy, through methods both physically brutal and psychologically crippling. It is express U.S. policy, even when the government denies what it is doing is torture, for it has explicitly endorsed techniques long recognized internationally to be forms of torture. Torture is also a predictable outcome of U.S. wars of aggression.

At the center of American government is an ethical bankruptcy. There is a rot at the center of the U.S. warfare and welfare state. But aside from the mass looting and mass killing there is also systematic abuse of helpless detainees — in U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, at Guantánamo, in the dungeons of U.S.-backed and U.S.-sponsored foreign dictatorships, in the hands of terrorists trained by the U.S. Army, in the practice of thugs in league with the CIA, and even in America’s state and federal prisons.

Nothing better demonstrates the moral degeneracy of American political culture than the U.S. torture state. Read Marjorie Cohn’s chilling book and learn about the cruelty inflicted in your name, with your tax dollars, on the guilty and innocent, foreigners and American citizens alike.

Reprinted with permission courtesy of the Future of Freedom Foundation

New Target Of Rights Erosions: U.S. Citizens

BY GLENN GREENWALD
THURSDAY, MAY 13, 2010 06:14 ET
Courtesy Of The Salon Media Group

A primary reason Bush and Cheney succeeded in their radical erosion of core liberties is because they focused their assault on non-citizens with foreign-sounding names, casting the appearance that none of what they were doing would ever affect the average American. There were several exceptions to that tactic -- the due-process-free imprisonment of Americans Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, the abuse of the "material witness" statute to detain American Muslims, the eavesdropping on Americans' communications without warrants -- but the vast bulk of the abuses were aimed at non-citizens. That is now clearly changing.

The most recent liberty-abridging, Terrorism-justified controversies have focused on diluting the legal rights of American citizens (in part because the rights of non-citizens are largely gone already and there are none left to attack). A bipartisan group from Congress sponsors legislation to strip Americans of their citizenship based on Terrorism accusations. Barack Obama claims the right to assassinate Americans far from any battlefield and with no due process of any kind. The Obama administration begins covertly abandoning long-standing Mirandaprotections for American suspects by vastly expanding what had long been a very narrow "public safety" exception, and now Eric Holderexplicitly advocates legislation to codify that erosion. John McCain and Joe Lieberman introduce legislation to bar all Terrorism suspects, including Americans arrested on U.S. soil, from being tried in civilian courts, and former Bush officials Bill Burck and Dana Perino -- while noting (correctly) that Holder's Miranda proposal constitutes a concession to the right-wing claim that Miranda is too restrictive --today demand that U.S. citizens accused of Terrorism and arrested on U.S. soil be treated as enemy combatants and thus denied even the most basic legal protections (including the right to be charged and have access to a lawyer).

This shift in focus from non-citizens to citizens is as glaring as it is dangerous. As Digby put it last week:

The frighting reality is that not even Dick Cheney thought of stripping Americans of their citizenship so that you could torture and imprison them forever --- even right after 9/11 when the whole country was petrified and he could have gotten away with anything. You'll recall even John Walker Lindh, who was literally captured on the battlefield fighting with the Taliban, was tried in civilian court. They even read him his rights.

I think this says something fairly alarming about the current state of our politics.

There is, of course, no moral difference between subjecting citizens and non-citizens to abusive or tyrannical treatment. But as a practical matter, the dangers intensify when the denial of rights is aimed at a government's own population. The ultimate check on any government is its own citizenry; vesting political leaders with oppressive domestic authority uniquely empowers them to avoid accountability and deter dissent. It's one thing for a government to spy on other countries (as virtually every nation does); it's another thing entirely for them to direct its surveillance apparatus inward and spy on its own citizens. Alarming assaults on basic rights become all the more alarming when the focus shifts to the domestic arena.

It is not hyperbole to observe that all of the above-cited recent examples are designed to formally exempt a certain class of American citizens -- those accused of being Terrorists and arrested on U.S. soil -- from the most basic legal protections. They're all intended, in the name of Scary Terrorists, to rewrite the core rules of our justice system in order to increase the already-vast detention powers of the U.S. Government and further minimize the remaining safeguards against abuse. The most disgraceful episodes in American history have been about exempting classes of Americans from core rights, and that is exactly what these recent, Terrorism-justified proposals do as well. Anyone who believes that these sorts of abusive powers will be exercised only in narrow and magnanimous ways should just read a little bit of history, or just look at what has happened with the always-expanding police powers vested in the name of the never-ending War on Drugs, the precursor to the never-ending War on Terrorism in so many ways.

What's most amazing about all of this is that even 9 years after the 9/11 attacks and even after the radical reduction of basic rights during the Bush/Cheney years, the reaction is still exactly the same to every Terrorist attack, whether a success or failure, large- or small-scale. Apparently, 8 years of the Bush assault on basic liberties was insufficient; there are still many remaining rights in need of severe abridgment. Even now, every new attempted attack causes the Government to devise a new proposal for increasing its own powers still further and reducing rights even more, while the media cheer it on. It never goes in the other direction. Apparently, as "extremist" as the Bush administration was, there are still new rights to erode each time the word Terrorism is uttered. Each new incident, no matter how minor, prompts new, exotic proposals which the "Constitution-shredding" Bush/Cheney team neglected to pursue: an assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens, formal codification of Miranda dilutions, citizenship-stripping laws, astatute to deny all legal rights to Americans arrested on U.S. soil.

The U.S. already has one of the most pro-government criminal justice systems in the world. That (along with our indescribably insane drug laws) is why we have the world's largest prison population and the highest percentage of our citizenry incarcerated of any country in the Western world. It is hard to imagine a worse fate than being a defendant in the American justice system accused of Terrorism-related crimes. Conviction and a very long prison sentence are virtual certainties. Particularly in the wake of 9/11 and the Patriot Act era, therules have been repeatedly rewritten to provide the Government with every conceivable advantage. The very idea that the Government is hamstrung in its ability to prosecute and imprison Terrorists is absurd on its face. Decades of pro-government laws in general, and post-9/11 changes in particular, have created a justice system that strangles the rights of those accused of Terrorism. Despite that, every new incident becomes a pretext for a fresh wave of fear-mongering and still new ways to erode core Constitutional protections even further.

It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights. Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack. The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we'll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism. For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we'll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit. We're not the target of Terrorist attacks because we have too many rights; we're the target because of our own actions, ones that we never reconsider in light of new attacks because we're too busy figuring out which rights to erode next.

As Robert Wright explained (again) in an excellent New York Times Op-Ed this week, as long as we continue to invade, bomb and occupy Muslim countries, there are going to be people (including within our country) who want to return the violence to us. That will happen no matter how repeatedly we re-write our rules of justice and acquiesce to more core liberties being taken away. But not only do we show no signs of slowing down in the behavior that causes us to be Terrorist targets, each new attack causes us to intensify that behavior through the use of the most circular logic imaginable. President Obama said this week that we must continue to fight in Afghanistan because of the recent Terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S.; of course, a primary reason there are Terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S. is because we continue to kill Muslim civilians around the world, including in Afghanistan. It's a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle: we attack people in the Muslim world, causing Terrorist attacks aimed at the U.S., and then cite those episodes as a reason to further attack people in the Muslim world, etc.

That endless cycle would be bad enough standing alone. But it's accompanied by a relentless and still ongoing transformation of our political system. We never ask what we're doing to cause Terrorism and how we can change our actions to weaken it. We instead ask only one question each time the word Terrorism is uttered: which new rights can we get rid of now? Even after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, Americans are still finding new and creative ways to answer that question, this time by aiming it at themselves.

Iraq's September Eleven

By Nesreen Melek
Monday, Sep 21, 2009
Courtesy Of Axis Of Logic

When people around the world were remembering those who lost their lives on September 11, eight years ago, my thoughts were elsewhere. Memorials were held, speeches were heard, flowers were bought and tears were shed remembering those who never got the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones, who never got the chance to tell their unfinished stories, and who never got the chance to hold their loved ones tight ... to tell them how much they loved them. But my thoughts were with the others on another part of the world.

Iraq's calendar is not the same as the America’s calendar. Since the war started six years ago Iraq's calendar has consisted of one long "September" and the six years have been one long hot day. Iraqis don’t have four seasons; they only have one season ... the “shock and awe season". Bullets fall like rain and bombs are like thunder storms that can occur anytime and in any place.

Iraqis have faced terror every day for 6 long years while people of the U.S. only faced it once - on September 11, 2001. The terrorist who attacked the towers are still at large - just like the terrorists who are still killing the innocent Iraqi people.

The Iraqi’s calendar is marked with one Million Iraqi civilians killed, four million displaced, museums were looted, the infrastructure of the nation destroyed. It is marked by Iraqis raped and tortured in front of their children, children who have lost their parents, women who have lost their husbands and more to come as the invaders are planning to stay for years to come. Apparently, the invaders plan to stay until they drain the Iraq's last drop of oil and even then keep their military bases in Iraq.

Baghdad, beautiful Baghdad, became the city of orphans, widows, and handicapped. The air is polluted, Dijlah is dry, Iraqis aged before their time, agony and pain is what you see on their faces. The unity of the Iraqis and their love to each other were stolen and replaced by walls separating them from each other.

I always wondered if there is any difference between the terror the Americans cause to the Iraqis and the terror which was caused by the people who attacked the towers? Can one form of terror be somehow better than another? Can one be more gentle?

Why do the Americans, killed on September 11, deserve more respect than the Iraqis who have been killed since then and continue to be killed? Everyone is now aware that the Iraqis who are being killed have had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. Yet, the killing continues in the absurd promises of "democracy and freedom".

In Fallujah, a father buried his son in his back yard as he couldn’t reach the cemetery because the American troops were surrounding the city. Deceased were left on the streets of Baghdad and other cities to be eaten by animals. There are no names for the dead innocent Iraqi people, we don’t have names and we don’t deserve to be remembered.

In my last visit to Baghdad, I wanted to visit my mother’s grave and the graves of my aunt and my father. They all died while I was living in exile but I couldn't visit their graves for security reasons. My relatives wanted to take me there but they could not because they were concerned about their safety and mine. Why do Americans have the right to mourn their deaths and we Iraqis do not?

I will never forget a picture of deceased bodies which were stacked in the back of a truck. All were the bodies of children. The Americans bombed their house while they were sleeping. Surely a family member was looking at Him, maybe asking Him, "Why should children pay the price?"

I hope I will live long enough to watch the Iraqi calendar become like the American’s calendar. I hope I will live long enough to see Iraqis smile again and live like others. I hope I will one day be able to plant a Jasmine flower beside my mother's grave in her memory and the memory of all the Iraqi mothers who suffered during this invasion and occupation. Do you think I am asking too much?

READ HER BIO AND MORE ESSAYS AND POEMS BY NESREEN MELEK

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