Talking rights

Guantanamo Human Rights Robin Kirk torture war on terror

The black hole of Guantánamo

April 29, 2013 – 7:44 pm

Margaret Thatcher’s death reminded many of her more outrageous policies, including the failure to constructively deal with prison-based protests, like hunger strikes. In Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh prison, also known as the Maze, ten men who belonged to the Irish Republican Army and Irish National Liberation Army went on hunger strike and died in 1981, to protest their change of status from political to common prisoners.

One of them was Bobby Sands, who from prison ran for and won a seat in the House of Commons. Sands lasted 66 days; the fellow prisoner who lasted longest was Kieran Doherty at 73 days. The hunger strike remains a highly contested and fraught piece of Ulster history, celebrated by one side and vilified by the other. But what no one disputes is that it was a turning point in the conflict, helping to launch the IRA onto the path of electoral politics and forever tarnishing Thatcher’s record.

What will the ongoing hunger strike at Guantánamo mean for the United States? Propublica recently published an update that is chilling. Over half of the 166 men still detained there are on hunger strike. Many of them have already been cleared to be transfered to their own or a third country, having been found to pose no danger to the United States. Of course, there are dangerous men kept prisoner, among them Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks.

But most had nothing to do with 9/11 or other terror attacks. They are innocent.

Several of the men who are refusing to eat have been on strike longer than any of the Irish strikers. They may be surviving because the authorities are force-feeding them, against their wishes and international law.

As has been widely reported many of those picked up, tortured and sent to Guantanámo were the victims of bounty hunters, were in the wrong place at the wrong time or were associated with the Taliban and not involved in 9/11 or attacks on the US.

Since the identity of the hunger strikers has not been released, it’s not clear who is protesting. However, Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald says she has been told that the 9/11 defendants and the rest of the 16 “high-value” detainees, who were brought to the island from the CIA’s black-site prisons, are not participating in the hunger strike. They are held in a separate, secret section of the camp.

English: A photograph of Shaker Aamer with his...

Shaker Aamer and his children

So who is striking? Men like Shaker Aamer, who was tortured, accused without evidence and then denied the ability to defend himself or even get in front of a judge. According to his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, Aamer has been outspoken about the injustices of Guantánamo and is “definitely viewed as a threat by the US. Not in the sense of being an extremist but in the sense of being someone who can rather eloquently criticise the nightmare that happened there.”

Some detainees can’t be released to their home countries, since they would face abuse or even death there. As the panelists on a recent Diane Rehm show noted, there are serious issues involved that need to be untangled.

But seriousness cannot be an obstacle to justice. President Obama is no Margaret Thatcher, but the rank injustice that now is status quo at Guantánamo can’t continue. Men who the US knows had no involvement in attacks on the United States need to be released and given the means to recover from their wrongful imprisonment and once again be allowed to live their lives.

It’s only fair.

Tags Bobby Sands, Clive Stafford Smith, Guantanamo, hunger strike, Irish National Liberation Army, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Margaret Thatcher, Shaker Aamer, torture, war on terror | Permalink | Comment (0)

Human Rights Robin Kirk torture

Bergoglio and human rights

March 15, 2013 – 11:55 am

There’s a fascinating and necessary debate emerging over the past of the new Pope, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who took the name Francis. On one side is Nobel Laureate Alfredo Pérez Esquivel, a fellow Argentine and principled human rights defender, who is saying that as a leader of the church in his country, Bergoglio “did not have ties to the dictatorship.”

But Horacio Verbitsky, a ferocious investigative reporter who has written the best book and magazine reporting on Argentina’s murderous military junta, says Bergoglio not only failed to take a principled position in favor of human rights, but withdrew his support for

Orlando Yorio

members of his own order, who were kidnapped and tortured. In a column in Página 12, which he edits, he transcribed this email from Graciela Yorio, the sister of a Jesuit priest, Orlando, who was imprisoned and brutally tortured in the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA) in 1976. Orlando died in 2000:

I can’t believe it. I feel such anger and rage that I don’t know what to do. He got what he wanted. o creer. I can remember Orlando sitting in my kitchen several years ago and saying, “He [Bergoglio] wants to be the Pope.” He’s just the person to cover up the rot. That’s his expertise.

(my translation)

Verbitsky also was crucial in documenting the “flights,” how the military drugged their detainees, then flew them in military airplanes over the Atlantic, shoving them out to their deaths. Argentina’s Catholic hierarchy approved this method as “humane” and Christian. Verbitsky’s book, The Silence (2005), chronicles the much deeper engagement of the Catholic Church in the “dirty war,” something that went well beyond a case or two and involved the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires, which Bergoglio worked as the head, or “Provincial,” of the Jesuit Order from 1973-1979.

One of my rotating banners is a spooky looking garage. I took it al “The Olimpo,” a municipal bus dept used during the “dirty war” to imprison suspected subversives, many of whom were later killed on “flights.” As Argentina continues to come to terms with its past — including through active prosecutions as well as the DNA testing that may reunited more abducted children with the families they were taken from after their parents were “disappeared” — this process has now stepped onto a much grander international stage.

Tags Argentina, Bergoglio, Catholic Church, Horacio Verbitsky, Jorge Bergoglio, Society of Jesus | Permalink | Comment (0)

Human Rights North Carolina Robin Kirk torture war on terror

The Oscars and human rights

February 25, 2013 – 5:47 am

The Oscars have ignited important human rights debates linked to two prize-winning movies: “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Lincoln.” Love or hate the movies, the discussion swirling around them has made this one of the most human rights-centric Oscars since “Taxi to the Dark Side” (about the decision and effect of the Bush Administration’s use of torture) won Best Documentary in 2008.

As predicted, “Zero Dark Thirty” was shut out of best picture, which shared a single award (with “Skyfall”) for sound editing. I found the movie riveting, disturbing (making the implicit argument, false by all reliable accounts, that torture played a role in Osama Bin Laden’s death) and ultimately a story-telling failure. The snub for what began as an Oscar sure thing seemed very intentional.

Tellingly, in his confirmation hearings, new CIA chief John Brennan told senators

A torture scene in “Zero Dark Thirty”

that torture (or in his rhetorical evasion “enhanced interrogation techniques” including nudity and stress positions) produced little if any (he wasn’t specific on this) valuable intelligence. In his words, a 300-page summary of a recently completed 6,000-page classified report by committee Democrats was “rather damning” on the supposed utility of torture.

Yet “Zero Dark Thirty” does leave viewers with the impression that torture helped lead the US to Osama Bin Laden. I agree with Tim Egan’s critique of the movie that ”several larger truths — the many intelligence mistakes, the loss of focus and diversion of resources, and the fallout from the folly of the Iraq war — are missing. This is a crucial point, because the film is likely to end up as the most popular version of the singular trauma in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s obvious, now, why the C.I.A. was cooperative with the filmmakers: it couldn’t have asked for better product placement.”

Also, I was struck by how none of the Americans had families while many of the Muslims, including Osama, did. It’s as is we exist only to work and hunt while “they” actually have personal lives that they defend with their (in the movie) detestable embrace of terrorism.

In early February, the Open Society published Globalizing Torture, a comprehensive and staggering report on the US program to fly suspects around the world to be tortured either directly or by proxy. The 54 governments identified in the report as having taken part in the extraordinary rendition program spanned Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and include: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

It’s sounds like the most awesome study abroad tour ever. Except it wasn’t.

Many of the flights originated in North Carolina, where the CIA contractor AeroContractors works out of the Johnston County Airport.

Tarheels Against Torture (Photo credit: gnuru)

So far we’ve done nothing to account for what we’ve done. When victims try to sue, they are blocked by the Administration, which argues that the CIA’s rendition program is a “state secret.” Even if the torture program existed (which of course it did) the argument goes, there can be no trial because this would risk information that could compromise national security. As David Cole wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, “President Obama has also resisted even the appointment of a bipartisan commission to investigate and report on our descent into torture and cruel treatment; apparently he thinks such an inquiry would be too divisive.”

Our torture policy has parallels to a new and equally disturbing US policy: the use of drones to kill suspected operatives in the “war on terror.”

Reaper Pilots Take Control at Kandahar Airfield (Photo credit: Defence Images)

The debate over the rights implications of drone strikes is heated, and that’s where most current attention has been focused. It seems clear that the Obama Administration is under-reporting the number of people killed in drone strikes, and so far has refused to make public the legal justification for targeting individuals or criteria for when and how drone strikes are authorized, raising serious concerns about legality. According to the Drones Team at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as many as 2,629 people have been killed in CIA drone strikes in Pakistan since the program started, and as many as 475 were likely civilians.

If we do the math of proportionality required by international humanitarian law, 1 of every 18 “kills” are non combatants. Is that considered an “acceptable” ration by most Americans? What is that one is a citizen? Or a child? According to Eyal Weizman, at Duke recently for a series of talks, Israel considers 1 in 29 acceptable. Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture - a “laboratory for critical spatial practices,” has written movingly on human rights in the Middle East and has documented the architectural effects of things like the wall between Israel and the West Bank and the destruction of Palestinian homes.

We are not the only ones using drones — and not everyone is using their drones in the context of the “war on terror.” China’s official newspaper, the Global Times, reported that the authorities considered using drones to kill alleged Burmese kingpin Naw Kham in early 2013, planning to ”carry 20 kilograms of TNT to bomb the area.” Not exactly a precise methodology, to be sure.

A new study reported in the New York Times has opened a new challenge to the drone program. “According to a Defense Department study, pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq orAfghanistan.”

One of the study authors, Jean Lin Otto, told the Times that she expected stress levels to be even higher than for traditional combat pilots.

“Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,” said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. “They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.”

Currently, the Air Force trains more pilots for drones than for fighter jets and bombers combined. Within 2 years, the USAF will have more drone pilots than bomber pilots (fighter pilots remain the largest single group). The figures leave out the drones and pilots operating under Central Intelligence Agency command.

And what of “Lincoln” ? I loved this movie and was profoundly moved by it, not the least the result of Daniel Day Lewis’s inhabiting of the character of this complex man. Yet this movie, too, has fallen short on its history-telling and fidelity to the rights drama at the core of this period.

If the narrative penned by Tony Kushner is to be believed, white men were responsible for freeing the slaves, with no assist from the slaves themselves or free African-Americans. Ross Douthat did a very good summary of the debate, and linked to Corey Robin’s “Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy,” which argues that the fight for the 13th amendment was a collective effort – but of white men, and did not include African Americans:

For all the decentering of Lincoln, for all the inclusion of multiple voices, the film studiously keeps black people in the audience—literally in the gallery, in one of the closing scenes, or in the bedroom or in the foyer, waiting, watching, attending. Black characters are almost always either looking up at their saviors (even allowing for the fact that Lincoln was tall) or wistfully after their saviors, as the latter depart for the halls of power. It’s true that the film opens with black soldiers telling Lincoln all they have done in the war, and telling him all that he should still do. Mary Todd Lincoln’s black servant speaks up every once in a while, as do some other servants. But that’s pretty much it.

So after the glamor of the dresses and the sparkle of the diamonds and the repercussions of the jokes fades, these questions — torture and the legacy of slavery and the movement that ended it — will likely remain lively.