Psyche, Science, and Society

New York Times archive of documents on Guantanamo detainees

The New York Times has an archive of documents (16,000 pages so far) about the 779 Guantanmo detainees, organized by detainee. The best thing is that it is searchable. Thus, one can search for “torture” and find all documents with that word in it.

Here is the Times description of the archive:

The Guantánamo Docket is an interactive database of Pentagon documents and New York Times research regarding 779 men who have been detained at Guantánamo as enemy combatants since January 2002. For the first time, these documents are organized by detainee name and are searchable.

The Pentagon has declined to release a list of the detainees currently at Guantánamo or a precise number of the remaining suspects. But by reviewing thousands of pages of government documents released in recent years, as well as court records and media reports from around the world, The Times was able to compile its own approximate list. In this database, the status determined by The Times is shown as Held, Transferred or Dead.

This database provides access to information on individual detainees from previously released Pentagon documents relating to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and subsequent Administrative Review Boards. Additional data on individual detainees has been included to provide a fuller understanding of the past and present population of the detention center.

In March 2006, the Defense Department began to release documents from military proceedings in response to a lawsuit brought under the Freedom of Information Act by the Associated Press. These documents and other records relating to Guantánamo are posted on the Defense Department web site.

The Times will update the database with ongoing research. Watch for additional data, documents and features.

1 comment November 19th, 2008

Obama’s victory, a 16 year old Wasilla girl’s view

A 16 year old girl in the Wasilla, Alaska  area has written a moving and disturbing account of the reaction to Obama’s victory in her community. It seems to have stuck a cord as the article has over 600 comments:

Valley teen has some big questions

By Waverli Rainey

Being a Caucasian high school girl sometimes makes me forget a few things.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in social life, school projects, homework, and studies.

Sometimes I can forget what America looks like. Sometimes it takes a hateful word, a racial slur, or an act of disrespect to bring me to realization and clear my eyes and see. Sometimes it takes acts and images of hate to penetrate my daily thoughts and clear my mind of its clutter.

In 1955, a Baptist preacher by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. boycotted buses because a brave black woman refused to get up and move for a white man. In 1963, people came together to march to Washington in protest of segregation; and in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial that man uttered the words “I have a dream.” Then, on April 4, 1968, the same man was shot to death. Now on Nov. 4, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States of America.

Nov. 4 was a momentous moment for me. I went to the Wasilla Sports Complex for what was called a community event. We were told it was non-partisan because it’s a city building. However, once inside, it seemed as if it was a Republican-only event. Despite this, we stayed. Although I am too young to vote, I sat at the Sports Complex to see who would be the new president. I felt joy as I saw Sen. Barack Obama’s electoral points grow and grow. I clapped for and was impressed by Senator McCain’s graceful speech and his call for unity and support for the new president-elect.

I anxiously awaited what Present-elect Obama would say. Between speeches, a live band played music. However, when President-elect Obama began to speak, those running the event had to be asked to have the band stop so we could hear him speak. Eventually, they stopped playing, but we missed the beginning of the speech. Then half way through this historic speech, former Mayor Keller turned down the audio of President-elect Obama and put on a call from Governor Palin. I certainly understand the desire of Valley residents to hear from the governor, but if this was a non-partisan event, I feel that interrupting the next president was disrespectful. I also feel it did not represent the coming together of America that Senator McCain had only moments before asked his supporters to do.

The event was supposed to be for all parties, for all people, but it didn’t feel like it. I was shocked and offended. The event was supposed to be for supporters of Senators Obama and McCain and no one paid respect to President-elect Obama’s historic moment. Finally, another step toward complete equality and it seemed no one cared.

So the next day I borrowed my mother’s Obama shirt and walked into school wearing my pride on my chest. Finally the campaign was over and I was actively supporting our new president, even though I knew I would be vastly out numbered at school. I expected complaints and qualms about the new president, but I was not prepared for the flat-out racist remarks said openly in the halls and classrooms. I was appalled. While I sat at my desk trying to do my work I could hear my fellow classmates:

“I think we should kill Obama,” one said.

“I hope someone comes up and shoots him in the head,” another would say.

“I hate Obama … he’s black.”

On went the racist words for the full 80 minutes of that class. Angered, I began to think of the injustice of it all and the ignorance of the students I was surrounded by. I wondered where they learned to be so hateful, and I wondered why the teacher never stepped in – why no adult, no student, including myself, had the guts to cut in and say it was not OK. Because it’s never OK for intolerance. It is never OK to cut someone down and dehumanize them because they do not look like you, or think like you, or talk like you, or worship the way you do.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

All men are created equal. All men. That does not mean only if you’re the same color as me, think like me, talk like me, or worship who or how I do. It means regardless of age, gender, race, political affiliation, sexual orientation, or religion – we all have the right to life, liberty and happiness. Guilt does not follow race. All Arab-Americans are not Muslim extremists; being Arab-American simply means their family came from a certain part of the world. All Asian-Americans are not all like Kim Il-sung; Asian-Americans come from countries like China, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and Singapore and they are not all the same. All African-Americans are not guilty of the genocide seen in places like Rwanda and Kenya.

If we were all guilty of the sins of our race, then what am I — a Caucasian high school sophomore from Palmer, Alaska — guilty of? Am I guilty of stealing land from their Native owners? Am I guilty of enslaving Africans? Am I guilty of the slaughter of entire races of people? Am I guilty of imprisoning Chinese and Japanese in American interment camps?

As a Causation high school girl, it’s easy to forget things like in America you wear a color — often called black, or white, or yellow, or red, or brown. We do not pick our name or race — we’re not chameleons who can change color at will, it’s how we’re born and raised. Being African-American, or Latino, or Asian-American, or Native American, or Alaska Native, or Arab-American is not a crime. Being Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, or agnostic is not a crime. Wearing a burqa on your head, or glasses on your face, or studying all views of the world and seeing the flaws of all governments is not a crime.

Sometimes I think of a place where all of our languages are mashed together, singing of our own multi-heritage pride; the pride of a truly unified America. A place where we can be proud of our accents because this is how American English sounds, too. A place where there is no more White Power! or Black Power! Where it’s American Power! Or better yet, where it’s Human Power! A place that proudly conjures images of colonists throwing tea into a harbor, Martin Luther King Jr. standing on the steps of Lincoln Memorial, and immigrants working hard to achieve their American dream all at the same time. We are the story of our culture and colors and I’d like us all to take pride in it.

I long for the day when the word American doesn’t bring the world to think only of a white high school football star, but also brings images of each of us as we are. This America would look like both a short blond girl with glasses, and like the son of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother who was raised by his grandparents — a day when an American looks like ourselves — looks like us as individuals and at the same time as a community of all races and all people.

Waverli Rainey is a 16-year-old born and raised in the Mat-Su Valley.

November 19th, 2008

Ghoul’s Glossary: Vice President

From Juan Cole:

Ghoul’s Glossary: Vice President

Vice President: n. Political chief in charge of committing vice.

The official can fulfill his public duties by committing a wide range of sins or crimes, including murder and treason (see Burr, Aaron and Breckenridge, John). Lazier and greedier incumbents have satisfied themselves with mere extortion, tax evasion, bribery, and conspiracy (see Agnew, Spiro). Energetic and conscientious vice presidents have engaged in the whole range of vice, including subverting the constitution, committing war crimes, engaging in treason through betrayal of covert intelligence operatives, or owning shares in abusive private prisons. (See Cheney, Richard Bruce). Some holders of the office have misunderstood its requirements, neglecting to distinguish themselves by any form of criminality and so dooming themselves to complete oblivion rather than the profound obscurity that is generally granted their more venal counterparts.

November 19th, 2008

Valtin: The Forgotten Men: New UC Report on “Guantanamo and its Aftermath”

Valtin, over at Daily Kos, discusses the recent UC Berkeley study of released Guantanamo detainees.

November 19th, 2008

Horton: AP asks wrong questions re: torture prosecutions

Scott Horton responds to the recent AP report I posted the other day:

AP: Obama Will Not Prosecute War Crimes

By Scott Horton

What do journalists do when they have no news to report? They focus on speculation about what might happen. Most of the speculation in transition time focuses on candidates in the inside-the-Beltway quadrennial personnel shuffle. And this is politics as usual: rivals usually connive to plant stories about one another, attempting to get a leg up in the competition. The media routinely floats their stories attributed to unnamed sources. But the latest entry in this series is peculiar. AP reports that two unnamed Obama advisors have stated that there will be no war crimes investigations or prosecutions relating to the Bush Administration’s torture policies.

To start with, the AP piece revolves around a question that is almost insulting in the way it is presented. What president would enter office pledging not to prosecute war criminals, or pledging to prosecute figures from the former administration? Any president who did such a thing would not be worthy of holding the nation’s highest office. Prosecutions should not begin or end on a signal transmitted from the White House. The criminal justice system is supposed to be administered in a fashion that stresses detachment from politics. One of the biggest complaints about the last eight years is that the veneer of political detachment has worn very thin. One thing the voters expect of Barack Obama is that he will rebuild the wall that separates the political side of the government from the law-enforcement side.

But second, it quotes two sources inside the transition team:

Two Obama advisers said there’s little — if any — chance that the incoming president’s Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.

Now as it happens, I agree with the Obama advisors, and almost everyone who has studied the case, that the Justice Department will not bring such charges. Why? First, no one expects that those who carried out instructions from the Bush Administration to use highly coercive interrogation practices, including waterboarding, would be prosecuted. The issue is whether those who made the policies and high-level decisions would be prosecuted. And second, because the Justice Department would be hopelessly conflicted from bringing any prosecution. Justice Department memoranda were concocted, almost certainly in bad faith and after the fact, to authorize and legitimate what happened. In several cases already documented, Justice Department officials were actually in the decision-making process itself. In criminal law terms, they made themselves part of a joint criminal enterprise. We don’t know how extensive Justice’s involvement was, but the current evidence is that it was quite extensive and involved the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, the head of the Criminal Division, the head of the National Security Division and others. It would therefore be impossible for the Justice Department to investigate or bring the appropriate prosecutions, and the change of personnel brought by a new administration would not cure this problem. On the contrary, it would aggravate it because it would add an appearance of retaliation or prosecution motivated by policy differences.

So the AP story sets off asking the wrong question.

But then we have the question of the two anonymous sources. The Obama transition team is enormous and it is peopled, appropriately enough, with a number of figures who have direct experience in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. No problem with that–in fact, Obama would be remiss if he failed to build such experience into his team. But there are a number of names in play right now who have troubling connections to the “dark side” of the intelligence community’s war on terror and who have pressing reasons to lobby against any investigation of any sort. Why? Because their own judgment-calls might come under unpleasant scrutiny. Just some for-instances:

• John Brennan, who regularly surfaces as a key Obama advisor on intelligence issues and is supposedly in the running for a key intelligence community post. Brennan has a completely ambiguous record on the torture issue, depending on whether he speaks from the agency, as a commentator or on behalf of President-Elect Obama.
• Jamie Miscik, another intelligence community careerist who was very close to the WMD in Iraq imbroglio and more recently was a key player at Lehman–and now understandably needs a new roof–is another figure who would clearly rather avoid a probe of the torture issue.
• And finally Jamie Gorelick, a former key Clinton Justice Department official who, according to intelligence community sources, took a whopping retainer from the CIA to counsel and protect the psychologists who crafted the guts of the Bush torture program. Gorelick, a Hillary Clinton partisan, is also a name in play for a senior intelligence post.

But the bottom line is that there should be no call about prosecutions until there has been an investigation. The question is really how should an investigation be conducted, and who should conduct it?

In the end any prosecution would require a special prosecutor, but who should handle the threshold inquiry into whether enough exists to appoint one? Again, the Justice Department has resources for that purpose that cannot properly be put in play. There is one clear answer, which is for President Obama to follow the example of President Ford in his dealings with allegations of intelligence community misconduct with high-level complicity that rocked the mid-seventies. He should appoint a commission to lay bare the facts, putting what the public needs to know on the record. Only then should the call about a special prosecutor be made by the attorney general. He should have the commission’s advice and findings to draw on in the process, and he should take the decision avoiding the political tug-of-war now going down and the dark interests who are driving it.

President Obama shouldn’t be focused on the fate of individual potential defendants. He should care about the nation’s reputation, our commitment to the rule of law, and a process that is worthy of our best traditions and aspirations.

November 19th, 2008