{"id":15411,"date":"2013-01-07T10:04:53","date_gmt":"2013-01-07T17:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=15411"},"modified":"2013-01-07T10:04:53","modified_gmt":"2013-01-07T17:04:53","slug":"obama-and-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=15411","title":{"rendered":"Obama and torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Obama and torture<\/strong>
\n4 January, 2013 – WSWS<\/p>\n

As the Obama administration prepares to begin its second term, with its liberal and \u201cleft\u201d apologists speculating on prospects for progressive action, events have once again made clear that the Democratic president is continuing and deepening the crimes of his predecessor.<\/p>\n

In his first four years in office, Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, worked aggressively to shut down all investigations into CIA torture and other crimes committed in the name of the \u201cwar on terrorism.\u201d It intervened in case after case to quash lawsuits seeking to hold accountable those who had illegally abducted and tortured thousands of individuals. It sought dismissal of legal actions seeking to uncover information about these crimes by invoking state secrecy.<\/p>\n

The result of this sordid policy is that the torturers and those who gave them orders, from the CIA interrogators all the way to the White House, have enjoyed complete immunity. This is the foul political climate in which a fascistic film like Zero Dark Thirty, implicitly justifying torture and implicating the entire American people in this crime, can receive multiple awards and critical acclaim.<\/p>\n

But, as a report this week in the Washington Post makes clear, the actions of the Obama White House have not been directed merely at covering up and exonerating the crimes of the past, but of making it possible to continue them on a qualitatively new level.<\/p>\n

The Post recounts the fate of three men\u2014two of them Swedish citizens and the third a longtime British resident, all of Somali origin\u2014who were detained as they traveled through the African country of Djibouti and thrown into prison cells, where they were subjected to repeated interrogations by US intelligence operatives over the course of several months.<\/p>\n

The supposed crime of these secret detainees was supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia that has controlled large swathes of southern Somalia. While the organization has been implicated in no attacks against the US, it has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by Washington, which has placed bounties on the heads of al-Shabab leaders.<\/p>\n

Underlying this designation is the US government\u2019s bid to exploit the \u201cwar on terrorism\u201d pretext to tighten American control over Somalia, a strategic territory whose coastline abuts the Bab al-Mandab Strait, the link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean through which much of the world\u2019s oil is shipped.<\/p>\n

Entitled, \u201cRenditions Continue Under Obama, Despite Due-Process Concerns,\u201d the Post article states: \u201cThe men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition\u2014the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process\u2014despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Arrested last August, the three men were produced in a New York federal court only on December 21. What had happened to them over the course of the intervening four months was not disclosed by federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n

The report cites a 2011 case against another alleged al-Shabab supporter, an Eritrean, who was rendered to a Nigerian jail for US interrogation. Testimony of an American interrogator in his case described how the individual was first subjected to illegal methods of interrogation by a \u201cdirty team\u201d of US agents before being turned over to a \u201cclean team\u201d that read him his Miranda rights against self-incrimination and then sought to obtain a confession that could hold up in a US court of law.<\/p>\n

Depicted here is what former Vice President Dick Cheney once described as going over to the \u201cdark side,\u201d a euphemism that encompassed rendition, torture and extra-judicial killings.<\/p>\n

The report on the three men charged as al-Shabab supporters comes just weeks after the European Court of Human Rights issued a stinging decision ruling that the abduction, rendition and protracted \u201cforced disappearance\u201d of Khaled El-Masri, who was grabbed by the CIA in Macedonia nearly nine years ago, in and of themselves \u201camounted to torture.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the years he was held incommunicado, El Masri was subjected to multiple acts of torture, including sodomy, sensory deprivation, physical assaults, forced feeding and denial of medical care. This is the point of rendition and secret detention: to create the conditions for \u201cbreaking\u201d a detainee. This was the case under Bush, and it remains so under Obama.<\/p>\n

What has changed? According to the Post article, an \u201cimpasse\u201d with Congress over the fate of the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and barriers to the administration\u2019s proposal to try alleged terrorists in US courts \u201chave led to a de facto policy under which the administration finds it easier to kill terrorism suspects\u201d by means of drone missile attacks, while rendition \u201chas become even more important than before.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the same day as the Post report, a New York federal judge rejected a lawsuit demanding that the US government make public a memorandum spelling out the Obama administration\u2019s legal justification for claiming the right to assassinate US citizens, including New Mexico-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen.<\/p>\n

Judge Colleen McMahon\u2019s decision amounted to a statement of impotence on the part of the judiciary in the face of the decade-long assault on democratic rights and the gross criminality of the executive branch. …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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Obama and torture 4 January, 2013 – WSWS As the Obama administration prepares to begin its second term, with its liberal and \u201cleft\u201d apologists speculating on prospects for progressive action, events have once again made clear that the Democratic president is continuing and deepening the crimes of his predecessor. In his first four years in more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[3892],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15411"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15411"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15412,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15411\/revisions\/15412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}