Psyche, Science, and Society

ICRC report increases call for torture investigation

AFP reports that the ICRC that Mark Danner wrote about this weekend is stimulating calls for investigations of US torture:

Leaked Red Cross report renews call for probe of Bush era

Agence France-Presse

A leaked Red Cross report on CIA “torture” of detainees offers fresh ammunition to demands that officials from the Bush administration be prosecuted for their conduct, rights groups have revealed.

President Barack Obama has so far sidestepped calls from some fellow Democrats and from civil liberties activists to go after officials from the previous administration over torture allegations, saying he wants to “look forward.”

But his administration will face renewed pressure to take action following the leaking of the internal document from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which describes abuse in harrowing detail.

“The more these kind of reports come out, the more pressure it puts on the government to do something,” said Sarah Mendelson, director of the human rights and security initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Providing the most detailed account yet of the treatment of detainees under former president George W. Bush, the 2007 report by the ICRC describes beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and “suffocation by water,” of 14 suspected Al-Qaeda members.

The abuse described by the detainees, including being slammed into walls and deprived of sleep and solid food for days, “constituted torture,” the Red Cross document said.

Other methods “constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” it said.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights have both urged an aggressive investigation of officials who allegedly approved the use of torture, citing revelations in court documents and other sources already made public.

“I think there is enough evidence in the public domain to warrant a much more serious investigation than has been conducted thus far,” Jameel Jaffer, director of ACLU’s national security program, told AFP.

“And there’s certainly enough evidence out there to warrant the appointment of an independent prosecutor to look into criminal responsibility for the torture of prisoners in CIA custody,” Jaffer said.

ICRC officials did not dispute the authenticity of the report, but a spokesman at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva regretted that the document was made public. The CIA declined to comment.

The report carried added weight given the neutrality of the ICRC, a humanitarian organization that carefully avoids political comment and works to assist those detained or displaced in war.

At least five copies of the report had been shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007, but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the organization’s policy of neutrality.

Rights activists speculated the document may have been leaked by officials in the current administration amid internal debates about detention policies.

As a signatory to the UN convention banning torture, the United States may be legally obliged to carry out a probe of former officials, Mendelson said.

“I think they are compelled to open some kind of investigation by allegations of torture, under the convention against torture,” she said.

“That investigation does not need to be made public but they need to be doing it.”

Some Democrats in Congress have called for a truth commission to look into a range of alleged abuses by the former administration as part of the “war on terror,” including CIA interrogations at secret sites and warrantless wiretapping.

Obama has offered a cool reception to calls for truth commissions but has not ruled out possible prosecutions, saying no one should be above the law.

The president said last month that “my general orientation is to say let’s get it right moving forward.”

Since Obama took office, government departments have released documents that have shed light on how the previous administration carried out controversial policies, such as the transfer of prisoners for secret interrogations.

Republican lawmakers meanwhile have condemned the truth commission proposal as a witch-hunt.

Some critics of the Bush administration say even a truth commission inquiry would be a half-measure.

“This is not about mistakes. This is about fundamental lawbreaking, about the disposal of the Constitution, and about the end of treaties,” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said in a radio interview earlier this month.

March 17th, 2009

Tax the bonuses at 100%, say Rep.

Rep. Gary Peters has a neat way to get those AIG bonuses back:

“It is beyond outrageous that the very people who brought AIG to its knees and helped create the current financial crisis are scheduled to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses while tax dollars keep their company afloat,” said Rep. Peters, a Member of the House Financial Services Committee. “These bonuses are in effect a raid on taxpayer dollars. The legislation I’m proposing will get taxpayers their money back. Congress must act swiftly on this matter to show AIG, other companies receiving federal support and taxpayers that we mean business when we say that tax dollars are not to be used to enrich company executives.”

Congressman Peters’ bill would create a 60 percent surtax on bonuses over $10,000 to any company in which the U.S. government has a 79 percent or greater equity stake in the company. Currently, AIG is the only company that meets this threshold. The 60 percent surtax would be added to the normal income tax rate, meaning that bonuses received this year by AIG executives paying the top 35 percent tax rate would be taxed at 95 percent. The remaining 5 percent would likely be paid in state and local taxes, so taxpayers would fully recover any AIG bonuses paid in 2009.

Will the Congressional leadership, and the Obama administration, who are so outraged, support this measure? After all, they claim to bee willing to use “all Legal means” and this is certainly legal.

However, Josh Marshall calls attention to information indicating that our friends in the administration have a different plan to “get the bonus money back”, let us pay more to be refunded, while they keep it. First Marshall:

I was reading this very dispiriting article in the Times about how folks in the administration have known about the AIG bonuses for months, how the folks at AIG are now saying they’d never have done any of it without the go-ahead from the Treasury and — best of all — how the plan to get AIG to pay the bonus money back appears to involve giving AIG still more taxpayer money which they can then hand back to us as ‘repayment’, while the new bonused execs (bonees?) get to keep the money anyway.

Here’s what the Times explains:

White House officials said the Treasury would recapture the bonus money by writing new requirements into a $30 billion installment of government aid scheduled to go soon to the ailing insurance conglomerate. The government has already provided $170 billion in taxpayer assistance to keep A.I.G from failing and now owns nearly 80 percent of the company….

For all of the furor since details of the bonuses became public over the last several days, the issue of retention payments to A.I.G. employees globally has been percolating publicly since A.I.G. was bailed out in mid-September. About $1 billion in retention payments for 2008 and 2009 are in question, but the controversy involves about half of that, about $450 million over two years, that was intended for employees of A.I.G.’s financial products unit. That unit was the source of the financial derivatives blamed for the near-collapse at the heart of the economy’s downturn.

The Treasury and Federal Reserve officials said they had known about the bonus program as far back as last fall. The program has provoked public protests from a handful of critics and at least one Democratic lawmaker in Congress — Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, a member of the House Committee on Government Oversight, who demanded without success in December that A.I.G. provide information about the bonuses….

A.I.G. executives said they would never have proceeded with the bonus payments before getting approval from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

“We would never make any important business decisions without discussing them with our government managers and owners,” said one executive, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.

But administration officials conceded that almost all of the most recent round of bonuses, totaling $165 million, had been paid last Friday, one day before the Treasury publicly acknowledged that it had reluctantly approved the payouts. The officials said that people who received the bonuses would probably be able to keep them.

By seeking to link repayment of the bonus money to the coming $30 billion in assistance, the administration seemed to leave open the possibility that the company would effectively be repaying taxpayers with taxpayer money. A Treasury official disputed that taxpayers would be repaying themselves, but could not specify how else the company would give back the money.

March 17th, 2009