CIA’s Drone Lies and Congressional Oversight

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Remember when House Intelligence Chair Mike Rogers said that public reports of civilian drone casualties are wildly wrong?

“I think that you would be shocked and stunned how wrong those public reports are about civilian casualties,” Rogers said on the House floor.

“Those reports are wrong. They are not just wrong, they are wildly wrong. And I do believe that people use those reports for their own political purposes outside of the country to try to put pressure on the United States,” Rogers said.

Remember when Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein said that civilian casualties have been in the single digits (and then went on to admit that she didn’t know about the “military aged male” standard)?

I’ve also been attempting to speak publicly about the very low number of civilian casualties that result from such strikes. I’ve been limited in my ability to do so. But for the past several years, this committee has done significant oversight of the government’s conduct of targeted strikes, and the figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes each year has typically been in the single digits.

These statements from members of the Gang of Four who have gotten the most unfettered sharing of intelligence on the drone strikes are why Jonathan Landay’s reports on what CIA’s own reporting shows are so important.

As I noted, Landay’s confirmation that CIA self-reported only one civillian casualty in the 12 months before September 2011 make it clear that CIA did not count any of the 40-something dead killed on May 17, 2011 at Datta Khel as civilian casualties.

At least 265 of up to 482 people who the U.S. intelligence reports estimated the CIA killed during a 12-month period ending in September 2011 were not senior al Qaida leaders but instead were “assessed” as Afghan, Pakistani and unknown extremists. Drones killed only six top al Qaida leaders in those months, according to news media accounts.

Forty-three of 95 drone strikes reviewed for that period hit groups other than al Qaida, including the Haqqani network, several Pakistani Taliban factions and the unidentified individuals described only as “foreign fighters” and “other militants.”

During the same period, the reports estimated there was a single civilian casualty, an individual killed in an April 22, 2011, strike in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

CIA reported no civilian casualties at Datta Khel even in spite of Mark Mazzetti’s report that “many American officials believed that the strike was botched, and that dozens of people died who shouldn’t have.”

Nor did the CIA count any of the (by my count) 51-176 civilian casualties reported by The Bureau on Independent Journalism for that period (2010; 2011; note, I counted September 1 to September 1).

In short, these reports prove that the CIA — and the intelligence community generally, given that these are described as US intelligence reports — are doing precisely what they did with the torture program: “repeatedly provid[ing] inaccurate information” to Congress.

Nevertheless, even as DiFi, at least, was seeing volumes and volumes of evidence that CIA had lied to Congress about torture in the very recent past, Gang of Four member staffers apparently didn’t read the public reporting on drones closely enough to realize that that public reporting was more credible than CIA reporting.

As a result, in spite of all the boasts of close oversight, CIA’s lies have turned the Gang of Four into propagandists for a program that they’re less well-informed about than many outside observers.

The intelligence oversight committees have become a classic case of Garbage In, Garbage Out, not only defying the entire point of oversight, but serving instead as a legally protected source of propaganda.

As we discuss releasing the torture report, we should also be discussing the larger issue of how CIA has perverted the only oversight structure it has. Because it has clearly become a pattern.

Pulling Weeds for Think Tank Employees: My Response to Wittes’ Response

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Ben Wittes, an employee of the Brookings think tank, had this to say about my post showing how disingenuous his buddy Jonathan Fredman’s defense of his statements at Gitmo in 2002 is.

Responding to her in detail is difficult, because her account is so weedy;

His entire piece is worth reading, because in key ways it reinforces my argument (though Wittes, the think tank employee, appears not to understand that). His refutation consists of:

  • 189 words effectively saying, “sure I wanted to debate interrogation [sic] history that is a decade old two days ago, but now that you’re presenting facts about my buddy I find it boring.”
  • 444 words admitting that Fredman did not specifically disavow the quote that Wittes claims he did, and shifting the emphasis slightly on what he says Fredman’s memo was disavowing.
  • 1238 words that at times seems to miss the entire headline of my post–which is that Fredman’s actions prove his memo is false–but ultimately seems to accept all the evidence that it is false, though he finds that uninteresting.

Wittes claims Fredman tried to refute his perception comment, not his dead detainee comment

Wittes deems it “bizarre” that I would expect a lawyer to deny a statement explicitly if he were really denying it, especially if he were going to spend 6 pages purportedly denying it. That, in spite of that fact that he admits that Carl Levin and other Senators at the hearing to which Fredman responded referenced a number of other things Fredman allegedly said at the meeting.

Yes, Levin and other senators also quoted a few other alleged Fredman comments from the minutes.

As I noted in my post, several of the things Fredman allegedly said at the Gitmo meeting — claiming the CIA decided which torture techniques to use for most techniques and discussing the use of extreme weather in torture — would have been far more legally troubling in light of Gul Rahman’s subsequent death, by freezing to death after CIA used unapproved water dousing on him, than the “if a detainee dies” comment.

And the “perception … detainee dies” wasn’t even the first quote from Fredman that Levin mentioned at the hearing (which Ben obscures with an ellipsis). First, he raised Fredman’s alleged support for exploiting phobias, including insects which — in 2008 we didn’t know but we now do — appears in the list of techniques approved by DOJ. He also raised Fredman’s description of how waterboarding worked before the “detainee dies” comment.

Claire McCaskill (and Hillary Clinton) focused on Fredman’s alleged comment about hiding detainees from ICRC. McCaskill  also raised Fredman’s alleged comment that videotaping interrogations would be ugly (the latter of which, considering someone in Fredman’s immediate vicinity altered the record of a Congressional briefing just as CIA decided to destroy their tapes, might have been particularly damning given the then ongoing John Durham investigation into that destruction). So in fact, the focus on Fredman at the hearing wasn’t at all exclusively on that detainee dies comment, nor was it the most legally dangerous one for him.

But Ben insists — and he may know this from talking to Fredman personally — that Fredman wrote the memo specifically in response to these comments from Levin, and therefore we shouldn’t expect him to specify that directly:

And Mr. Fredman presented the following disturbing perspective [on] our legal obligations under our anti-torture laws, saying, quote, “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” How on earth did we get to the point where a senior U.S. Government lawyer would say that whether or not an interrogation technique is torture is, quote, “subject to perception,” and that, if, quote, “the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong”?

Look, however, at how Wittes summarizes Fredman’s response:

In that memo, Fredman described the comments he provided at the Guantanamo meeting. And he described them in specific response to these alleged quotations. Far from saying that torture is “subject to perception,” as he described his remarks, he “emphasized that all interrogation practices and legal guidance must not be based on anyone’s subjective perception; rather, they must be based upon definitive and binding legal analysis from the Department of Justice.” And he then went on to flatly deny the statements attributed to him: “I did not say the obscene things that were falsely attributed to me at the Senate hearing. . . . The so-called minutes misstate the substance, content, and meaning of my remarks.” His denial could hardly be clearer. [my emphasis]

Note, first of all, that Wittes uses the plural, “quotations,” in this passage. That’s interesting, because at least some of the journalists Ben wants to shut up shut up shut up used the “if the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong” quotation without the “subject to perception” bit. The two sentences appear together in the notes and I agree they can be treated as one, but the truly shocking quote — the one Ben wants everyone to stop using — is the “if the detainee dies” one, which is utterly consistent with everything Fredman says in his disingenuous memo, which says repeatedly that detainee deaths are bad things.

More interesting though is that Wittes lays out very clearly what he says Fredman was refuting: that he said torture is subject to perception. And his response to that — Ben’s evidence the memo should be accepted as refutation of that comment — is Fredman’s claim that all torture must be based on definitive and binding legal analysis from DOJ.

Wittes seems to accept that Fredman did not base torture on definitive and binding legal analysis from DOJ

Here’s where Ben’s professed difficulty with weeds seems to have utterly sunk his efforts to defend his buddy. Because if it can be proved that Fredman did not, in his actions, ensure that torture be limited by definitive and binding legal analysis from DOJ, then it is clear that his memo is false, a lie, issued to refute some very damning evidence made worse by subsequent events, but not in any way an honest reflection of what Fredman believed or how he acted.

For any think tank employees or others who have difficulty with weeds, here’s what the evidence I laid out showed:

  • The torturers started using sleep deprivation, with the approval of Fredman’s office, months before DOJ got involved.
  • When the torturers exceeded Fredman’s office’s original limits on sleep deprivation, his office just retroactively authorized what they had already done, apparently without any input from DOJ.
  • When Fredman translated DOJ’s guidance for the Abu Zubaydah torturers, he used not the definitive and binding legal analysis from DOJ, but instead a fax John Yoo had sent, one he purportedly wrote without the input or approval of Jay Bybee.
  • After a detainee died after being subjected to a torture technique that had not been approved by DOJ, CIA’s lawyers — including Fredman’s office — tried to snooker OLC into accepting that another document crafted with Yoo outside official channels constituted “definitive and binding legal analysis.” That effort failed.

There are at least four pieces of evidence in the public record that Fredman authorized torture in ways outside of DOJ’s definitive and binding legal analysis. Now, Ben doesn’t refute a single one of these points. Indeed, he actually uses the Yoo fax in his response (he doesn’t, however, mention the retroactive effort to snooker OLC, perhaps because his blogmate was involved in refusing to be snookered).

From which I take it that Ben accepts that Fredman’s office, and Fredman personally, repeatedly found ways around relying on the definitive and binding legal analysis DOJ developed. Read more →

Military’s Information Operation Against Gitmo Hunger Strike Breaks Down

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It has been clear from the start of the current hunger strike at Guantanamo that the military is carrying out its own information operation against a strike that it views as an information operation carried out by the prisoners. Back on March 17, Carol Rosenberg reported that commercial flights to Guantanamo will be terminated as of Friday of this week, and I asked whether the flights were terminated in order to quash coverage of the strike. Just a few days later, attorneys for Guantanamo prisoners made the same accusation to CNN:

“We are very concerned that the commercial flights have ended at a time when it’s critical to have more regular contact with our clients (not less!) in light of the hunger strikes and their potentially perilous health conditions,” Ranjana Natarajan, one of the lawyers representing Obaydullah, wrote to CNN.

Navy officials said lawyers and others who regularly take the commercial flights from Florida to the base may now take a once-a-week military flight from Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington.

But Anne Richardson, also with Hadsell Stormer Richardson & Renick, said the flights “are also capable of being canceled, at the last minute, without warning and at DOD’s discretion.”

David Remes, a Washington-based lawyer who represents 15 clients held at the detention facility, said authorities “are canceling these flights because they want to keep the public in the dark about the mayhem in the prison.”

“For the past several months, bad news has been streaming out of the camps,” Remes said. “The authorities are taking one hit after another for the way they’re running the camps, so they’re doing what comes naturally – choking off the flow of information.”

In that same March 17 report from Carol Rosenberg, we have this statement from Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale:

“That there is any concrete, mass hunger strike — that is an utter fabrication,” Breasseale said. “Some who claim to be hunger striking are in fact eating handfuls of trail mix, nuts, and other food. They are taking in plenty of calories.”

Reality is beginning to catch up with Breasseale and the military jailers at Guantanamo. As Rosenberg reported yesterday, the military now admits to 39 hunger strikers (making 23% of the 166 prisoners now held):

At Guantánamo, officials counted nearly a fourth of the captives, 39 of the 166 prisoners, as meeting the minimum U.S. military definition of a hunger striker for having lost enough body weight and skipped at least nine meals in a row. Eleven of the captives were being fed nutritional supplements by tubes snaked up their nose and into their stomach. Two were hospitalized for intravenous drips as well as the tube feedings.

But the military most likely still is lowballing the number of hunger strikers. The next three paragraphs from Rosenberg:

Lawyers for the detainees described a much more dire situation, with one of the best known cleared-for-release captives, Shaker Aamer, telling his attorney on Friday that about 130 of the 166 captives were taking part.

Aamer estimated he had lost 32 pounds, according to Stafford Smith, who quoted him as saying, “You can see the bones in my chest.”

“Shaker understands that one detainee is reportedly 85 pounds, another 107 pounds and a third 117 pounds,” said Clive Stafford Smith, who spoke via a monitored telephone line between the camps and Britain, where Stafford Smith is based.

That there is an ongoing battle over whose reports can be believed is quite clear from Jason Leopold’s thorough article posted yesterday, where we learn that the military is following the same script it used during the last major hunger strike by Guantanamo prisoners: Read more →

The Moral Rectitude Torture Cover-Up Promotion Czar

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Oh hi! Are you folks still here? Missed you!

First off, thanks to bmaz and Jim and Rayne for holding down the fort while Mr EW, McCaffrey the MilleniaLab, and I explored Kentucky. There are many wonderful aspects of the state: the sandstone arches, the ham, and I think we’re even finally beginning to get this Bourbon thing!

I’ll be catching up for a few days, probably commenting on things that broke while I’m away. Such as this news, that John Brennan is showing his leadership at CIA by having three former CIA people weigh in on whether he should retain the woman who destroyed the torture tapes as the head of the clandestine service (she’s the acting head now, Brennan is considering making her appointment permanent; Mark Mazzetti has more details on her career here).

To help navigate the sensitive decision on the clandestine service chief, Brennan has taken the unusual step of assembling a group of three former CIA officials to evaluate the candidates. Brennan announced the move in a previously undisclosed notice sent to CIA employees last week, officials said.

[snip]

“Given the importance of the position of the director of the National Clandestine Service, Director Brennan has asked a few highly respected former senior agency officers to review the candidates he’s considering for the job,” said Preston Golson, a CIA spokesman.

The group’s members were identified as former senior officials John McLaughlin, Stephen Kappes and Mary Margaret Graham.

Note that at least two of these three were deeply implicated in the torture program, with McLaughlin involved in decisions and briefing of the program itself (and also vouching for Brennan’s claimed opposition to torture back when it mattered, solely because he’s “honest”), and Kappes involved in covering up the Salt Pit killing of Gul Rahman, among other things. So they’re not exactly neutral on the contributions of people who cover up the CIA’s torture program. While the selection of these three is being spun as expertise (I suspect they were also selected because Dianne Feinstein respects them, though that’s a guess), it should be clear that they are not neutral on torture.

But I’m just as amused at how this process — Brennan’s fairly transparent attempt to outsource the morally repugnant decision to promote someone involved in torture and its cover-up — undermines all the carefully cultivated claims about Brennan’s role as the priest serving as a moral compass for others, at least on the drone program.

Among other descriptions offered of the guy in charge of drone assassinations, Harold Koh described him as a priest.

“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”

That same formulation–moral rectitude–shows up in Karen DeYoung’s profile of John Brennan today.

Some White House aides describe him as a nearly priest-like presence in their midst, with a moral depth leavened by a dry, Irish wit.

One CIA colleague, former general counsel John Rizzo, recalled his rectitude surfacing in unexpected ways. Brennan once questioned Rizzo’s use of the “BCC” function in the agency’s e-mail system to send a blind copy of a message to a third party without the primary recipient’s knowledge.

“He wasn’t joking,” Rizzo said. “He regarded that as underhanded.”

Back when Brennan’s boosters were promising he’d be a controlling figure at CIA, they suggested he’d make these decisions based on a priest-like moral compass.

Yet, just weeks into the job, he has instead asked those who benefitted from this woman’s cover-up to bless her promotion, thereby dodging the responsibility himself.

I warned that this moral rectitude thing was just a myth when Brennan was nominated. It sure didn’t take long to be proven right.

 

ICRC Visits Gitmo Early in Midst of Hunger Strike, New Controversy Over Drinking Water

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On Tuesday, Carol Rosenberg reported that the hunger strike at Guantanamo prison camp has become serious enough that the International Committee of the Red Cross has arrived at Guantanamo a week earlier than had previously been planned:

Two delegates from the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of them a physician, are at Guantánamo this week in an accelerated trip moved up from next month to check out the ongoing hunger strike at the war on terror prison.

Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno said Tuesday morning that the regularly schedule two-week mission was meant to start April 1.

“However, in an effort to better understand current tensions and the ongoing hunger strike, we have decided to start this visit one week earlier,” said Schorno.

Yesterday, the controversy at the prison expanded. Jason Leopold broke the news via Twitter that attorneys for some of the prisoners have filed an emergency court petition in response to claims that guards at the prison have cut off bottled drinking water and that the tap water prisoners have been told to drink is not potable. Leopold provided links to both the court petition and a declaration from a doctor for one of the prisoners. From the filing requesting an emergency motion:
pdf cut 1
As if that is not punishment enough, the document continues on the next page (apologies, the form of the document I can access doesn’t allow lifting text, so I have to use images):
pdf cut 2

The White House said Wednesday it was keeping an eye on the hunger strike at the Pentagon’s war on terror prison at Guantánamo and once again blamed Congress for its inability to close the detention center containing 166 captives.

“The White House and the president’s team is closely monitoring the hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay,” Joshua Earnest, principal deputy press secretary, told reporters in response to a question.

Rosenberg went on to provide denials from a Guantanamo spokesman about the allegations in the court filing:

Separately, attorneys for a Yemeni captive made an emergency court filing on Tuesday night in Washington, D.C., alleging that guards at Guantánamo’s communal camp had denied two cellblocks bottled water since Sunday. The motion also claimed that the temperature in the prison were lowered to “extremely frigid” levels — claims the prison camps spokesman, Durand, denied.

Bottled water continues to be provided, Durand said, adding that tap water is potable at the prison called Camp 6 built of cement blocks at a site that once housed tent cities for Haitian and Cuba migrants. He added that, if Camp 6 captives feel cold, they can walk into the open-air recreation yards, where the temperatures this time of year reaches the high 80s.

“We are assisting the Department of Defense in preparing a response to these allegations via the Department of Justice,” Durand said, “but they are absolutely false.”

AP’s reporting on the situation carries a more extensive denial from Durand:

The U.S. government has not filed a response to the motion. Navy Capt. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the prison, said prisoners are provided with bottled water and that the tap water is safe to drink.

“It’s potable water. It’s the same water I make my coffee with and that they make lunch with,” Durand said. He also denied that there had been any change to the air conditioning settings inside the prison camps.

Complaints about water quality and access to bottled water during hunger strikes are not new at Guantanamo, as similar claims from prisoners surfaced in 2005. Durand had better hope that he is correct in his claims regarding water quality and water sources, since the ICRC has the expertise to test water quality and has a history of doing so at prisons, so there is an independent entity onsite now that can directly assess the accuracy of his claims. Will ICRC be given access to water samples?

Military Continues Efforts to Hide True Scope of Guantanamo Hunger Strike

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[youtuber youtube=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHelLZQR_Oc’]

 

On Monday, I asked the question of whether the cancellation of regular commercial flights to Guantanamo was part of an effort by the military to cut off coverage of the hunger strike there. Yesterday, CNN obtained quotes from Guantanamo defense attorneys where they answer that question in the affirmative. The military also has grudgingly admitted that the strike is growing, but they still claim a much lower number of hunger strikers than the attorneys say are taking part in the strike. Head of Southern Command General John Kelly appears to be the chief military spokesperson spearheading the efforts to minimize the impact of the hunger strike. He has made multiple statements this week, appearing both in a press availability and in Congressional testimony.

From the CNN story, we have this regarding the military’s actions in cancelling flights and the impact this has on dealing with the hunger strike:

Lawyers from the firm Hadsell Stormer Richardson & Renick told CNN they had DoD approval for a meeting with Obaydullah next week but were told that the scheduled flight has been canceled.

“We are very concerned that the commercial flights have ended at a time when it’s critical to have more regular contact with our clients (not less!) in light of the hunger strikes and their potentially perilous health conditions,” Ranjana Natarajan, one of the lawyers representing Obaydullah, wrote to CNN.

Navy officials said lawyers and others who regularly take the commercial flights from Florida to the base may now take a once-a-week military flight from Andrews Air Force Base just outside of Washington.

But Anne Richardson, also with Hadsell Stormer Richardson & Renick, said the flights “are also capable of being canceled, at the last minute, without warning and at DOD’s discretion.”

David Remes, a Washington-based lawyer who represents 15 clients held at the detention facility, said authorities “are canceling these flights because they want to keep the public in the dark about the mayhem in the prison.”

“For the past several months, bad news has been streaming out of the camps,” Remes said. “The authorities are taking one hit after another for the way they’re running the camps, so they’re doing what comes naturally – choking off the flow of information.”

Here is Carol Rosenberg reporting on the military’s admission that the strike is growing: Read more →

Fresh Allegations of Torture in Bahrain

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On a day when President Obama is at least making the admirable move of visiting the West Bank and speaking favorably for Palestinian statehood after his visit to Israel (to lend legitimacy to Netanyahu’s continued desire to attack Iran?), it is easy to overlook a report in the Wall Street Journal in which we see fresh allegations of torture continuing in Bahrain.

Recall that in the aftermath of Bahrain’s brutal crackdown on its citizens trying to join in the Arab Spring movement in early 2011, one of Bahrain’s “reforms” was to hire notorious police thug John Timoney to run its police force and to “implement” the findings of an independent commission that had been brought in to investigate torture and other abuses by the government. Just a few months after taking charge, Timoney took the repressive step of banning all protests while jailing a number of prominent protest figures. A couple of days later, there were mysterious bomb blasts that might well have been the work of Timoney’s known practice of infiltration since they were not directed at government targets as one might expect if they were the work of a developing resistance movement. US actions in response to abuses on the part of Bahrain’s government has been especially lame since the US is so attached to its base for the Fifth Flleet in Bahrain and “security’ for the flow of oil from the region.

The new allegations of torture include torture of suspects arrested for those November 2012 bombings:

Five detainees arrested in Bahrain last year said they were tortured in custody, according to family members, lawyers and an ex-prisoner, accusations that a member of an official inquiry panel said should be formally investigated.

Bahrain security forces used methods including beatings, electrocution and suspension on ropes to force confessions from the detainees, who were accused of involvement in bombings in the capital, Manama, the people alleged to The Wall Street Journal. The Bahrain government said the torture allegations were false.

The claims suggest the Bahrain government has failed to implement some of the changes recommended by the 2011 Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry, according to Sir Nigel Rodley, a human-rights lawyer who took part in the commission.

/snip/

One detainee, Talib Ali Mohammed, 37 years old, was arrested in November on suspicion of involvement in coordinated bombings in Manama that month that killed two expatriate workers.

Over 16 days of interrogation in the Central Intelligence Department building in the Adliya district of Manama, Mr. Talib was beaten repeatedly and tortured, according to his wife, Fatima Ebrahim, and his lawyer, Sayed Hashin Saleh, who have seen Mr. Talib in prison and spoken with him by phone. Mr. Talib eventually confessed to charges including possessing explosive material and forming a group with the intention of harming others.

/snip/

Ahmed Abdullah, a 24-year-old gymnasium worker, was arrested in November and accused by authorities of involvement in the bombings. According to his brother Ibrahim, who has visited him in prison and spoken to him by phone, Mr. Abdullah was blindfolded for nearly 20 days in the CID building in Adliya, where he was beaten repeatedly, and forced to stand for long periods until he signed a confession.

There is now new leadership at the Department of State. Will we see a stronger condemnation of torture by the Bahrain government and support for Rodley’s call for a new commission of inquiry over the new torture accusations, or will we get the same weak platitudes we saw from Foggy Bottom last year?

Bahrain continues to profess its innocence. In one of the most craven, idiotic defenses by a government ever, the Journal carried this denial:

Minister of State for Information Affairs Samira Ibrahim Bin Rajab dismissed the allegations. “This is not our culture, not our attitude or our behavior,” she said. “We are very civilized, educated people.”

Civilized, educated people never torture. They rely on enhance interrogation techniques that are perfectly legal. Just ask John Yoo. He’ll confirm that in an instant and have a follow-up memo for you tomorrow that retroactively authorizes any actions you need approved.

Were Commercial Flights to Guantanamo Ended to Cut Off Coverage of Hunger Strike?

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Allegations of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo have increased since Rear Admiral John W. Smith took over last June.

Allegations of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo have increased since Rear Admiral John W. Smith took over last June.

Carol Rosenberg reported yesterday that the Navy has ruled that commercial flights to Guantanamo can no longer be provided on a regular basis. The timing of this move strikes me as particularly suspect, since these flights are heavily used by defense counsel for Guantanamo detainees and a large group of these attorneys has banded together to ask newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to address the abuse charges prisoners have cited in instituting a widespread hunger strike at the prison. Guantanamo officials deny that a hunger strike is taking place.

From Rosenberg’s report:

The Guantánamo Navy commander is halting commercial air passenger service from South Florida to the remote outpost in southeast Cuba, invoking a federal regulation that the Pentagon had apparently waived for years.

Fort Lauderdale-based IBC Travel said Friday that it will cease its several times a week service to and from the base after April 5, on an order from Navy Capt. John “JR” Nettleton to discontinue service by May 1. It will continue weekly cargo flights to the base, said IBC spokesman Richard Rose, with permission from Nettleton.

/snip/

The small shuttles that carry about 20 passengers had been a vital air bridge to Guantánamo, especially since the U.S. Supreme Court gave attorneys access to the prisoners in August 2004.

Isn’t it interesting that the Navy would end the waiver that allowed passenger flights but they still elect to maintain the waiver for cargo flights? The attorneys have been especially busy of late, as accusations of improper treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo have begun to accelerate again. The attorneys maintain that a hunger strike has been going on for over a month and that over 100 prisoners are taking part. Guantanamo officials dismiss the bulk of those claims:

Attorneys for detainees long-held without charges at the U.S military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, assert that a general hunger strike involving many of the 166 detainees who remain incarcerated there has entered its second month.

But the U.S. military strongly denies that claim, calling it “a fabrication,” and instead says only 14 detainees are actively engaged in hunger strikes detrimental to their health.

In a letter of concern sent to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday, a group of 51 detainee attorneys wrote, “at least two dozen men have lost consciousness due to low blood glucose levels.” The Pentagon said it was aware of the letter but declined to discuss it.

/snip/

“That there is any concrete, mass hunger strike — that is an utter fabrication,” Breasseale said. “Some who claim to be hunger striking are in fact eating handfuls of trail mix, nuts, and other food. They are taking in plenty of calories.”

Interestingly, Defense Department spokesman Todd Breasseale claims that Guantanamo is following the US Bureau of Prisons protocol for handling hunger strikers, but the document describing the protocol linked to the CBS News account seems to differ from Breasseale’s claims. In the document (pdf) we have this: Read more →

Ah, But Are You Like George W. Bush?

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I’ve been in an car dealer service waiting room all morning, so I’m late to the story about Barack Obama telling Jello Jay Rockefeller he’s not as bad as Dick Cheney.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) confronted the president over the administration’s refusal for two years to show congressional intelligence committees Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying the use of lethal force against American terror suspects abroad.

[snip]

In response to Rockefeller’s critique, Obama said he’s not involved in drafting such memos, the senators told POLITICO. He also tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush, whom many Democratic senators attacked for secrecy and for expanding executive power in the national security realm.

“This is not Dick Cheney we’re talking about here,” he said, according to Democratic senators who asked not to be named discussing the private meeting.

Aside from the fact that — as I’ve pointed out — Obama is actually worse than the last year of the Bush Administration, when Acting OLC head Steven Bradbury was sharing OLC memos with Congress, I’m struck that Obama seems to forget he is the President, not the Vice President.

The comparison still is inapt. George Bush didn’t write any Executive Orders pretending to be transparent and his classification Executive Order effective empowered Dick Cheney to classify and instadeclassify at will (an authority that John Brennan seemed to use while he was in the White House).

But like Bush, Obama has people working for him who are as allergic to oversight as Dick Cheney. I pointed out yesterday, for example, that Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, thinks he shouldn’t even answer questions in open session and tried to stop publishing the number of people with security clearances.

Under Bush, DOD hid pictures of coffins; under Obama DOD just started hiding numbers of drone strikes.

Cheney went to the mat to hide who he had met with on his Energy Task Force. Obama’s National Security Council went to the mat to hide any mention that the President had authorized the torture program — and they hid it, they explained, because they were still using that very same authorization (though to do thinks like engage in targeted killings).

Obama seems to be hiding behind his own stated good intention (even while he admitted to Democratic Senators he would feel the way they do now if he were still in the Senate) just like Bush hid by his stated good intention that no one would leak the name of a CIA officer. Both, meanwhile, were either ignoring or pretending to ignore the sheer paranoia about secrecy of the men that work for them.

Tommy Vietor and I Exchange On the Record Non-Dickish Comments

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Back in the days, just weeks ago, when Tommy Vietor was the National Security Council Spokesperson, I tended to attribute the dickish comments made by Senior Administration Officials in articles in which he was also quoted to him.

When he left, we had this exchange on Twitter.

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I will say this for him. He’s a good sport.

I don’t envy his position trying to claim the Obama Administration lives up to its self-billing as the Most Transparent Administration Evah™, based on releasing White House visitor logs.

All that said, I would have added two points to the exchange above.

First, the Administration is not conducting counterterrorism exclusively under the AUMF.

Obama’s own Administration went to the mat in 2009 to prevent a short phrase — maybe 6 words — from being released under FOIA making it clear that torture was originally conducted under the September 17, 2001 Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification on President Bush’s authorization alone. And they managed to win that battle by arguing the MON — which authorizes targeting killing, among other things — is still active. So, no, Tommy, the Administration is not operating — not exclusively anyway — under the AUMF.

Also, what the fuck kind of democracy are we if we require lawsuits for basic democracy to take place? It’s all well and good of Vietor to say we (only Trevor Timm of the three of us really has the funds to sue sue sue, and even then, only in selective situations) should just sue our way to democracy. But the law says we shouldn’t have to sue.

Anyway, it was a particularly fun appearance, and great to be on with Kevin Gosztola and Trevor Timm as well.