Unlawful, yet unstoppable

 

Government efficiency

 

UPDATE 03/17/2025:

Jesus, Joseph, & Mary!

I spent one day off the doom machine, and, as for each day since Trump went to the White House, that day was worse than all the ones before it.  

Trump is talking about ethnic cleansing of Gaza - but more than that - about going in to "take ownership" of the Strip!  What in blue blazes!  The man is a certified madman.  Is he perhaps syphilitic?  Just asking questions.

Let's see.  What else did I learn last night?  He's also cleaning out the CIA.  He's shutting down the Department of Education and NOAA, the weather service!

Trump insanely said the US is going to occupy Gaza at a joint press conference with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu tonight: “The US will take over the Gaza Strip - and we will do a good job with it too. We’ll own it. We’ll level the site.” He then said we are going to go in there and develop it with new properties - it is oceanfront property after all.

When asked by a reporter if he was talking about a permanent occupation of Gaza by the US: “I do see a long-term ownership position” for the US. He then said he would use military force if necessary.

Trump in the Oval Office earlier today: “The Gaza has not worked. It has never worked. I think they should get a good fresh piece of land. I don’t know how they could want to stay. It’s a demolition site. If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some nice places - could be Jordan, could be in Egypt.”

  Meidas Touch

Hmmmm...kind of like moving the decimated Jewish populatios to a piece of land and calling it Israel? ("The Gaza.")

Earlier today, demented Trump said if Iran assassinates him he “left instructions” to “obliterate” their country. He said this from the Oval Office while announcing new sanctions against Iran and warning them not to try and retaliate that way: "If they did that, they would be obliterated. I left instructions.”

An honest to goodness madman. Joined in federal office by other madmen...

But Trump’s new right-wing white nationalist conspiracy theorist State Department Spokesman Darren Beattie said last September that he really thinks our own intelligence agencies have been trying to have Trump killed, not Iran: “It's more likely that the intelligence officials telling Trump that Iran is behind assassination attempts are actually the ones behind the assassination attempts, than it is for Iran being behind the assassination attempts.”

[...]

Axios reported that about 20,000 federal employees have accepted the buyout offered to them last week by Musk, which is only about 1% of the federal government workforce. That number is way lower than he expected, as Musk reportedly predicted that 5-10% would accept the offer. However, the offer is open until this Thursday so we will see if more people fall for this.

Total insanity. And if those people think they're going to get paid without going to court, god bless 'em.

Trump nominated right-wing podcaster Sean Parnell to be Pete Hegseth’s Chief Pentagon Spokesperson and Asst. Sec Def. Trump endorsed Parnell for Senate in PA in 2022, but he dropped out of the race when he lost custody of his children after his wife testified in court that Parnell abused her and their children by choking her and pinning her down, and also struck one of their children in a fit of rage.

Trump's type.

Hegseth announced that the first flights of migrants to Guantanamo Bay started today. Trump’s executive order allows for up to 30,000 to be housed there while their deportation cases are litigated.

[...]

Trump said that he wants other countries to start housing our prison inmates, and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador said he is willing to accept the offer: "We have offered the US the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system. We are willing to take in convicted criminals (including convicted US citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable."

What a fantastic idea! Holy Mary, Mother of God.

Immigration Law expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick: “Okay, but that's not a thing. I don't care what Bukele says, the US cannot legally banish Americans - such authorities died centuries ago and are the relic of a time of terra nullius. It just is not legal under any modern international laws either.”

You people need to find some other cry. Illegal! is't working. He just keeps doing illegal - and unconstitutional - shit.

Canadian MP Charlie Angus told Meidas Touch that Trump lost the tariff battle: “He blinked. He choked. Two days ago, he was telling us that if we didn’t give up our nationhood, the tariffs would stay on. Then we hit him with $125 billion in tariffs. We pulled KY booze off our shelves. Then we said, ‘You’re getting another $25 billion right after that.’ The market started to tank, and suddenly, he said, ‘Oh, didn’t you guys already have a plan to deal with the border back in December? I love that—I’ll take that.’ This is Mr. Art of the Deal.”

[...]

WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell on CNN: “Trump is trying to repackage the status quo as a victory. That's what the leaders of these foreign countries are learning. You don't actually have to give Trump anything. You just have to let him announce victory on TV.”

[...]

NYT reports that a DC judge just awarded the Proud Boys’ trademarks to the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Proud Boys can’t legally use the name and the church can seize the proceeds of any merchandise sold with that name or logo. The church sued the Proud Boys after they destroyed Black Lives Matter signs outside their building. They got a $1 million judgment which PBs refused to pay, so the judge ordered this as an alternative.

Well, thank whatever gods there be for one small bit of good news. Oh, and this...

Italian Green Party politician Andrea Zanoni filed a complaint with a court in Italy accusing Donald Trump Jr. of illegally killing an endangered Ruddy Shelduck bird near Venice, Italy during a recent hunting trip. Local environmentalists and Italian MPs have joined the formal complaint and called for an investigation.

Lock him up and keep him. You'll be protecting the world.

Do we get to know which ones those are?

Are we sure Elon is not simply implementing Project 2025 for Russ Vought and Stephen Miller?  

At any rate, it does seem like the country is being hijacked by a vengeful madman and a Bond villain.  

YOU own this, Rand Paul.  You and your greedy, soulless colleagues in the GOP Congress.

ASSHAT.

Do Democrats STILL not get it?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 05:58 pm:

Trump 2.0 - Gitmo concentration camp

Yep.  Not even on American soil.

UPDATE 01/30/2025:

There's enough blame to go around.

In August 2024, the Biden administration granted a private prison company a $163.4 million contract to run the facility.

"For decades, the Guantanamo migrant detention center has been the hallmark of the most inhumane, racist, and brutal U.S. policies against people seeking refuge," said Jesse Franzblau, senior policy analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center. "The Biden administration could have shut down the facility but tragically renewed and entered into new contracts to keep it up and running."

[...]

“We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately,” Trump said.

But according to Department of Homeland Security and Navy documents from 2021 and 2022 reviewed by Drop Site News, the Trump administration may not be able to detain that high of a number of migrants at the facility — at least not immediately. Documents show the Guantánamo migrant detention center only has the capacity to expand to hold 400 people.

[...]

“The idea that the Trump administration is going to send 30,000 migrants to Guantánamo is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard all week. It’s utterly absurd,” said J. Wells Dixon, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents detainees at the Guantánamo military prison and frequently visits the base. “It’s purely performative. President Trump is trying to use the image of Guantánamo to project toughness towards refugees and asylum seekers.”

  DropSite

It works.

Meanwhile..Gitmo trials still drag on

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Meanwhile in other legal proceedings

Giving evidence at a military commission on Guantánamo Bay, James Mitchell [a CIA contract psychologist who helped draft the US programme of “enhanced interrogation”] gave a detailed account of the 2002 decision to interrogate suspected al-Qaida leaders using waterboarding and other techniques which the US later admitted constituted torture.

[...]

In testimony which veered from the gruff to jokey to tearful, Mitchell said the methods he had recommended were based on a course given to US armed services to help them withstand enemy interrogation, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE).

The measures [...] had been approved by the justice department in July 2002 under the George W Bush administration.

Mitchell claimed those measures were within the limits of what was legal, and were designed to force detainees to give up information rapidly that could help prevent a further attack, possibly involving a nuclear weapon.

“The CIA was never interested in prosecution,” he told the court. “They were going to go right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it, and lean forward.”

  Guardian

And small but important detail he left out - he helped.

Mitchell, who was recruited by the CIA in 2002 to first observe and then apply coercive measures, said the agency was determined to “get tough” and he wanted to make sure it was done within limits.

“What I was told was: ‘The gloves were off’,” Mitchell.

Doesn't sound like much limitation.

“They were going to use some form of physical coercion ... My concern was that they were going to make it up on the fly.”

Which is where Mitchell came in...to design something they could get away with.

Mitchell has accused other CIA interrogators of using waterboarding far in excess of guidelines as well as other unauthorised interrogation techniques. In court on Tuesday he described these excesses as “abusive drift”.

“When people are left to make up coercive measures, it tends to escalate over time,” Mitchell said. “They dehumanise the detainees. They think they are justified in using a higher level of pressure. They think: If a little is good, a lot is better.”

He said he had tried to stop several interrogations that had got out of hand, in particular by the head of CIA interrogations of the CIA’s newly formed rendition, detention and interrogation group, an unnamed officer he referred to by the nickname, the “new sheriff”.

A case of Einstein's remorse.

“The agency had not approved the techniques he was using,” Mitchell said. He described the approach underlying the abuses as: “Hurt the person until they tell you what you want to know and then you hurt them some more, to find out if they are lying to you.”

[...]

On entering the plain square courtroom lined with military police guards, Mitchell appeared to make eye contact with [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed who he had subjected to multiple waterboarding sessions and with whom he claimed to have long discussions about Islam.

[...]

[Mohammed's] fellow defendants, Walid bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, sat in successive rows behind him, each with their own bench of lawyers. The pre-trial hearing have been underway since May 2012 and the trial itself is not expected to start until 2021 at the earliest.

[...]

[Mitchell] was initially asked to observe Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation by CIA officers and FBI agents and make suggestions. But when he returned to CIA headquarters at the beginning of July, he was asked to carry out the “enhanced” interrogations himself.

He said he was highly reluctant but there was a prevalent fear of an imminent second wave of attacks, possibly including an nuclear weapon.

Choking his words and tearing up as he defended his actions, he told the court: “I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had taken up arms against America.”

Awwww, poor baby. I wonder...did he shed a tear for the men he was torturing?

If you haven't already, check out "The Report" on Amazon Prime.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Another Rejection

The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping executive order that would clear the way for the C.I.A. to reopen overseas “black site” prisons, like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects before former President Barack Obama shut them down.

President Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” and obtained by The New York Times, would also undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Mr. Obama put in place in response to policies of the George W. Bush administration.

If Mr. Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Mr. Obama’s directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in American custody.

  NYT

[C]areer military and intelligence officials rejected a draft executive order that would have resurrected the torture regime that existed immediately after 9/11, reflecting campaign promises by President Trump to bring waterboarding (and “much worse”) back into America’s interrogation arsenal.

[...]

The order directed Defense Secretary James Mattis to keep Guantanamo Bay open and use it not just for existing detainees but new ones, too. Trump’s order also directed the military to review its interrogation manual to determine whether it needed more enhanced interrogation tools. And, most notably, the order asked the CIA to consider restarting its “black sites” program for retention, detention, and interrogation of terror suspects, which was shut down by President Bush in late 2006.

[...]

Career professionals in the Defense Department, the CIA, and elsewhere don’t want torture because it doesn’t work, corrodes their integrity, makes it harder to work with allies, and carries enormous risk for strategic blowback. The value of human intelligence has also diminished in relative terms as other American intelligence tools have improved, so there is less incentive for intelligence agencies to want torture in their kits.

[...]

In response, the Trump White House developed a more milquetoast order, keeping Guantanamo’s prison open but jettisoning plans to revive the CIA’s torture program and the military’s more aggressive interrogations, too.

[...]

In the past, America’s torture regime made it very difficult for our allies and partners to work with us or share intelligence with us. The career professionals in Defense, CIA and other agencies know this better than President Trump. They understand all too well that foreign are far more likely to work with the U.S. without the antagonism of torture in the mix. Two recent high-profile cases illustrate this—with cooperation flowing from Turkey, Jordan, and Italy precisely because the U.S. provided assurances it would not use Guantanamo for certain detainees, let alone enhanced interrogation, let alone torture.

[...]

Implicit in the statements on torture by then-Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. James Mattis in the counterinsurgency manual they co-authored is a sense that torture degrades the honor of those who practice it. Discipline and integrity are paramount to being effective in war, or clandestine operations in the shadow of war. Mattis, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, and Sen. John McCain understand this better than the president and do not want an executive order that undermines the ethics of their forces or agencies.

  Slate

No Muslim ban, no torture, and most probably no wall. Sorry, Trumpers.

[T]he deep state is our best hope for putting the Trump administration on a better path.

Whoa. Whoa. You had me until that shit. If the deep state is our best hope for anything, we are totally lost.  I am not going to be rooting for the deep state under any circumstances.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Add This to Obama's Legacy

The Obama administration’s latest overuse of executive authority at Guantánamo Bay is a decision not to let lawyers visit clients in detention under terms that have been in place since 2004.

[...]

In one case, the administration is saying that the Yemeni national Yasin Qasem Muhammad Ismail no longer has the right to meet with his counsel, David Remes, because his plea to be released was “terminated.” The Justice Department will only let them meet, it said in an e-mail to Mr. Remes, if he signs a new memorandum giving the government what Mr. Remes calls “absolute authority over access to counsel.”

[...]

Mr. Remes could not use classified information he developed for the client without permission. He could not share what he learned from his client with other lawyers of detainees, as he could previously. He could not use it to help defend his client against criminal charges if the government brings them. He could not advocate for him with human rights groups.

Mr. Remes refused to sign. He and colleagues filed a motion this month with the federal magistrate handling disputes about lawyer-client visits at Guantánamo Bay.

  NYT

[E]very time the issue of ongoing injustices at Guantanamo is raised, one hears the same apologia from the President’s defenders: the President wanted and tried to end all of this, but Congress — including even liberals such as Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders — overwhelming voted to deny him the funds to close Guantanamo. While those claims, standing alone, are true, they omit crucial facts and thus paint a wildly misleading picture about what Obama actually did and did not seek to do.

What made Guantanamo controversial was not its physical location [...] . What made Guantanamo such a travesty — and what still makes it such — is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. President Obama’s so-called “plan to close Guantanamo” — even if it had been approved in full by Congress — did not seek to end that core injustice. It sought to do the opposite: Obama’s plan would have continued the system of indefinite detention, but simply re-located it from Guantanamo Bay onto American soil.

  Salon

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Neeeeeext

Trump has chosen his Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

[General John] Kelly, 66, whose military career spanned more than four decades, retired earlier this year as the chief of U.S. Southern Command. In that post, where he oversaw military operations in most of Central and South America, he publicly clashed with the Obama administration on its plans – which were never executed – to close Guantanamo Bay and dismissed as “foolishness” concerns that the military’s treatment of detainees at the facility had cost the U.S. the moral high ground in the War on Terror.

[...]

Kelly [is] the third general tapped by the president-elect, in addition to Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who will serve as Trump’s national security adviser, and retired Gen. James Mattis, who Trump said Thursday he intended to nominate as his Defense Secretary. Concerns about the number of military officials in Trump’s cabinet may harm the prospects of another military man, retired Gen. David Petraeus, whom Trump is considering for secretary of state.

[...]

[Kelly] never endorsed a candidate [in this year's presidential election.] Whoever won, Kelly said, shouldn't doubt they're “getting anything but the absolute best military advice, completely devoid of politics.”

  Politico

Other than the politics of war, that is.

Kelly’s son 2^nd Lt. Robert M. Kelly died in 2010 when he stepped on a landmine on a tour of duty in southern Afghanistan, and Kelly remains one of the most senior U.S. military officers to lose a son or daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan. He has also opposed the Obama administration’s decision to open combat roles to women.

The son's death will surely have an impact on Kelly's willingness to advocate for more war.  Whether negatively or positively isn't clear.

Kelly was in charge of Guantánamo for three years until he retired last year.

As the head of U.S. Southern Command, Kelly’s first and only four-star assignment, he was prepared to carry out a directive to shut down the prison complex. At the same time, the general made no secret of the fact that he believed the president’s goal was misguided. “They’re detainees, not prisoners,” Kelly told Military Times.

[...]

SOUTHCOM, as it’s known, gave Kelly purview not only of Guantanamo Bay but also the massive criminal network that has metastasized from the trafficking of drugs, weapons and people throughout South America, Central America and the Caribbean.

[...]

But perhaps most important to Trump, Kelly is an expert on Latin America — and he is decidedly not one of Obama’s guys.

[...]

And he spoke to Congress in very stark terms about the perceived vulnerability of America’s borders.

[...]

[One] source close to Kelly said the general has “better relationships in Latin American than the State Department does.”

  Military Times

Yeah, that's probably not hard to do.

Actually, Kelly seems like a good fit for DHS. But this concerns me:

“Unless confronted by an immediate, visible, or uncomfortable crisis our nation's tendency is to take the security of the Western Hemisphere for granted,” the general wrote in prepared remarks for the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe this is a mistake.”

Tempered perhaps by this:

Beyond his call to build a wall, Trump has promised to impose an aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration. When asked about those plans earlier this year, Kelly told Military Times that while he supports enhanced border security, that alone won’t address the underlying reasons people flee Latin America en masse.

[...]

"Obviously, some form of control whether it's a wall or a fence. But if the countries where these migrants come from have reasonable levels of violence and reasonable levels of economic opportunity, then the people won’t leave to come here.”

In his final statement to Congress as the head of Southern Command, Kelly addressed the role of human-rights education and training, calling it essential to U.S. objectives not only in Latin America but wherever America seeks to gain influence. Governments should be accountable to their citizens, he said.

Let's hope he thinks that about our government.

On drugs:

The immigration crisis that peaked in 2014, when tens of thousands of women and children streamed to the U.S.-Mexico border, was the direct result of the surge in drug-related violence gripping Central America, Kelly told Congress at the time. And Americans' demand for those drugs was to blame, he said.

[...]

Kelly is fiercely opposed to illegal and recreational use of drugs, though he makes some exception where there is emerging evidence to suggest medical benefits may exist. Notably, marijuana has shown some promise in mitigating the anxiety some military personnel face as a result of post traumatic stress. Kelly is OK with that. But he opposes widespread legalization of pot, saying it undermines efforts to curtail the distribution of hardcore drugs like heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine.

[...]

“We know how to influence people. I just don’t think we have any kind of a drug-cessation program to speak of. Consequently, the drugs are imported and consumed. I think if Americans understood that doing a little blow on the weekend — on a college campus or here on Capitol Hill — isn’t harmless, if they understood what it’s doing to Honduras or El Salvador, or what it was doing to Colombia, I think they’d responsibly realize that this is not a good thing.”

Perhaps General Kelly's greatest flaw is to overestimate Americans' concern for Latin American countries.

"I've learned that, in many cases, people say ‘I want ground truth’ and they don’t really mean it. There are warts all over this organization, as there are in many organizations, but you just have to tell truth to power and let the chips fall where they may. I know a lot of people may read that, if you put it in your story, and say 'easy for him; he’s a four-star.' But I would say some of the most challenging periods in my life, as a Marine officer, have been fairly recently, where you get into that civilian-military thing and the truth is not always welcome. It can cause some heartburn when you get a call from certain people in Washington who say 'it’s probably not a good idea to go down that road anymore.' But I say 'hey, that’s the truth. I'm at a congressional hearing, and they asked me a question. What am I going to do, lie?'"

Ask Clapper.

So, that's three generals in the administration, so far.

 

Perhaps with Petraeus, who's still dangling in the wings.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE

The US Gulag

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Military leaders are thinking about whether they will need to put a wheelchair lift into their showcase communal prison three or four years from now, widen some some cell doors, add ramps for geriatric captives.

Not one of the 80 prisoners is now in a wheelchair and most are in their 30s or 40s. The oldest is 68. But briefings by senior military officials here made clear that they are starting to actively think about operating an offshore Pentagon detention center long after President Barack Obama leaves office.

[...]

Obama wants the prison emptied, and a Pentagon plan proposes moving 30 to 40 captives to military detention in the United States and releasing the rest to other countries. But Congress has outlawed any transfers to U.S. soil, and some members are proposing legislation to prevent transfers altogether, to anywhere, prompting speculation that the only way Obama does it is through an Executive Order that opponents of closure warn would be illegal.

  McClatchy

Of the remaining 65 captives, 28 were on a list approved for transfer, spread out across three different sites capable of confining 300 captives.

Two among them were in orange jumpsuits, signaling they were rule-breakers the military considered violent. But the other 63 were categorized as compliant, cooperative, following the rules.

As a sign of the era of cooperation, the senior medical officer, Navy Capt. Richard Quattrone says the same Navy medical unit that tube-feeds hunger strikers introduced 30-minute, health and wellness classes in some prison recreation areas. It began three weeks ago, he said, and 17 captives attended one.

Does that come before or after they're tied down and roughly force-fed through tubes down their noses?

Topics so far included “stress-reduction techniques,” to include breathing exercises.

So, before, for sress-reduction. But maybe after, to breathe again.

At Camp 6, where most captives are kept in cell blocks that allow them to eat, pray and watch TV together, the most frequent request from the prisoners is for replacement Tupperware, says the Army captain in charge, a special education teacher in civilian life. Each cell block has a food pantry equipped with a microwave and they keep melting the containers. “They’ll hit 5 minutes, no matter what,” says the captain, a woman forbidden to say her name, even if she wanted it printed here.

Maybe they should give cooking classes.  The most frequent request used to be for a fair trial, but they finally gave up on that.

Meantime, however, the overall commander defends the need to maintain a dedicated detention center staff of 1,950 to 2,200 troops and civilians. The military is on its own here, no backup at the gate, which leads to a minefield and Cuba. Clarke said he might need his full force “if we had an act of mass non-compliance, a riot, something like.”

Idiot. I thought he was going to justify that many people to guard 80 caged people in the event of an attempted attack on the base. But, two thousand people for an 80-person prisoner riot?

Meanwhile, back in the states...

As of March 2016, 75 percent of Rikers detainees had been awaiting trial for less than a year, but there were 109 whose cases had been pending for more than three years and another 209 who had been waiting for more than two years, according to a spokesperson with the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice. Jairo [Pastoressa arrested for stabbing and killing a young man during a dispute, awaiting trial for 6 years and counting] believes he is the longest-serving detainee currently on the island. “This system keeps those that have been accused of committing crimes out of sight and out of mind,” City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito said in her 2016 State of the City address, in which she announced an independent commission to review whether the population at Rikers can be reduced enough to make its closure possible.

  The Intercept

Yeah. Not very likely, is it?

Kalief Browder [...] last year committed suicide after being held without trial for three years.

Kalief Browder’s incarceration, abuse, and eventual suicide was only the most recent Rikers scandal. In the last few years, countless stories have emerged of violence on the island, between inmates, but also, regularly, by guards. In 2014, an inmate died in a 101-degree cell, and a correction officer pleaded guilty to trying to cover up the incident. That year the Department of Justice concluded a multi-year investigation with a report on the brutal treatment of adolescent boys at Rikers, condemning the jail’s systemic use of force by staff, inmate-on-inmate violence, and the use of punitive segregation.

[...]

According to the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, nearly 40 percent of Rikers inmates have a “mental health designation.”

[...]

“If they sentence you, you know they sentenced you to however many years, you get used to the idea, and you do your time,” said [Jairo's mother] Anna, exasperated. “But when they don’t sentence you and they throw you in there — he’s losing his mind.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bold

A FORMER Guantanamo Bay guard has spoken for the first time about what he claims was a CIA murder of detainees, covered up as a triple suicide.

Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman was on guard at the Cuban prison camp on the night they died, and calls the official version of events “impossible”.

“They would have had to all three tie their hands and feet together, shove rags down their throats, put a mask over their face, made a noose, hung it from the ceiling on the side of the cellblock, jumped into the noose and hung themselves simultaneously,” the ex-Marine told Vice News in an explosive video interview.

“In a cellblock where guards are ordered to check on detainees every four minutes.”

[...]

He has now written a book, Murder at Camp Delta, which he hopes will be a step towards finding out the truth.

[...]

None of the men had been charged with a crime.

Hickman says [they were killed] because the three were regular hunger strikers, who incited others to do the same.

“They had a policy that if a detainee is hunger-striking, he cannot be interrogated,” said Hickman.

[...]

After their deaths, Rear Admiral Harry Harris took the unusual step of attacking them in his announcement of their apparent suicide.

“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own,” he told Reuters. “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

  NewsComAu

Prisoners on hunger strike = waging asymmetrical war.

Get ready for some serious backlash, Sgt. Hickman  (And some serious money on book sales, no doubt.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Tell Me Again - Why Do They Hate Us?

nytimes.com | Feb. 14, 2008

The most famous journalist you may never have heard of is Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who is on a hunger strike to protest abuse during more than six years in a Kafkaesque prison system.

Mr. Hajj’s fortitude has turned him into a household name in the Arab world, and his story is sowing anger at the authorities holding him without trial.

  NYT

Al Jazeera | 11 Jan 2016

When it was time to go to university, I left home [in Sudan] and headed for India, where I spent five years studying political science and sociology. But I always maintained my passion for the media.

[...]

It was while I was [in the United Arab Emirates] that I heard about a new channel that was being set up in Qatar – Al Jazeera. I felt compelled to join.

When I was eventually taken on, it was with the intention that I would become the channel's Chechnya correspondent. My wife is from the region and I had a deep interest in it.

But then 9/11 happened and everything changed.

  Sami al-Hajj: Al Jazeera

Al-Hajj worked as a cameraman for Al-Jazeera. In October of 2001, his media crew began covering Taliban activity, regularly crossing back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. One day, December 15, 2001, he was stopped at the border going back into Pakistan.

The Taliban had been pushed out of Kandahar and Al Jazeera wanted us to report on life in the city after their departure. I was worried about the route in, but felt relieved when we arrived at the border crossing and found it full of journalists. There must have been about 70 of us, from all over the world.

But they wouldn't let me cross.

I knew the border guard who stopped me. They had a paper, he said, directing them to arrest "Sami, the Al Jazeera cameraman".

[...]

I spent the night in the border guard's office. The next day, he telephoned [an] intelligence officer. Either come and take him, or I'll let him go, I heard him say. Thirty minutes later, the intelligence officer arrived. I was taken to their office and arrested.

[...]

A case of mistaken identity, they assured me. I was just waiting to be released.

[...]

But the hours turned into days – I would spend 23 there in total.

[...]

Then, one night, I was moved.

I was taken to the airport with a group of Arabs. There were around 25 to 30 of us. We were handed over to American soldiers. Bags were placed over our heads and we were handcuffed in a human chain. Then we were loaded into a military cargo plane. That flight felt like something from a horror film. We were beaten randomly. By the time we landed, our feet were numb from the cold, our bodies frozen stiff.

They were at Bagram, a US base.

They began to question me about Osama bin Laden. They thought I'd interviewed him for a report that had been broadcast on Al Jazeera some weeks earlier. They wanted to know what I knew of his whereabouts.

Of course, they were mistaken. I had never met nor interviewed Bin Laden. But their questioning revealed that, even if this was a case of mistaken identity, they were in no doubt as to the fact that I was a journalist.

[...]

After 17 days in Bagram, I was transferred to Kandahar.

The conditions were better there.

[...]

I was questioned about Al Jazeera. They again acknowledged that I wasn't the person they had been looking for. But still I wasn't released.

[...]

After five months, I was among the last group of prisoners from Kandahar to be sent to Guantanamo.

[...]

The process of breaking us down began immediately. And it never stopped.

[...]

[A]fter 30 days on hunger strike, the force-feeding would begin. It is hard to convey just how traumatic this is. It became a form of torture in itself.

They would tie us up by our hands and our legs and then force a tube up our nose. Most of the time, the fluid would enter our lungs. We'd be coughing and choking as our lungs filled with liquid. Often, they'd over-feed us so that we vomited. But even as we threw up, they'd keep on going. The vomit would dry on our faces and bodies. We weren't allowed to clean it away so the smell became unbearable. And they'd use the same tube for multiple prisoners without cleaning it.

Although a federal judge ordered the videos of these "feedings" to be released in October 2014, they still have not been seen by the US public. The Obama administration filed an appeal, of course. Some members of Congress "demanded" to see the videos.

The administration was again ordered to release videos (redacted, of course) in 2015. At that time, the Navy dropped a case it had pending against a Navy nurse who had refused to do the "feeding." (He had been removed from his nursing duties.) But no videos, redacted or otherwise, were released.

Finally, in August last year, the government released to the court 8 redacted videos (out of more than 30 that were made and requested) that had been ordered released a year earlier. At some point, it provided the remainder "sanitized" videos to the court.

Lawyers for a since-released detainee who have asked for the public release of the videos are still at it without success. Attorneys in the case have indeed seen the tapes but are barred from discussing them.

It's not clear to me whether prisoners are still being force fed, but they were as of September 2015, so I suspect they still are.

In a 22 July [2015] filing, the then commander at the Guantánamo detention facility said that if the tapes were released, the information on them could “be provided to detainees, allowing them to manipulate the system, disrupt good order and discipline within the camps, and enable them to test, undermine and then threaten physical and personnel security”.

  Guardian

The DOJ is still dragging the judge's order through appeals with no end in sight.

If the government has retained these videos but deems them sufficiently disturbing and incriminating that it fights their release, we can only imagine what the 90-some tapes of "interrogations" officials destroyed rather than turn over must have shown.

Sami al-Hajj was released from Guantánamo May 1, 2008, after 480 days on hunger strike.

Very few detainee cases have ever gone to trial. And today, there are still innocent people – people who have been told that they pose no threat – in Guantanamo.

It is an inhumane place; an insult to humanity.

  SAmi al-Hajj: Al Jazeera, November 2016

Guantánamo: "The Most Expensive Prison on Earth"

A Miami Herald reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act claim to obtain the cost of running the US prison at Guantánamo in March 2004.  After nearly eleven years, she finally got it.  Here's her report.

Hint:  There are currently just under 2,000 troops and civilians to staff a prison that holds 107 prisoners.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A Coup

I think I get Glenn's point.

Unless he's saying that the military can't overthrow the country's president  (which I don't think he is).  How many times has that happened in other countries?  I do believe it could happen here.  Especially considering the majority of the populace with guns would back the military.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sure, Now You Do It

Isn't it interesting how they have eight years to do something but wait until the end to actually do it?  Hey, if it gets done, it goes on his resume.  No matter if he can do it now, he should have been able to do it six years ago.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

USG Ordered - Again - to Release Force-Feeding Videos

Pentagon video editors are on the clock now that a federal judge has ordered that several hours of “disturbing” force-feeding videos from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay are to be redacted and prepared for public release before the end of next month. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued the ruling on Friday, ordering the government to complete the redaction process that she initially ordered more than 10 months ago.

She set an August 31 deadline to prepare eight of the 32 tapes for release.

Kessler also ordered the government to redact an additional two compilation tapes before the end of September: one tape created by the government and one by attorneys representing Abu Wa’el Dhiab (pictured above) — a former Guantanamo detainee whose legal struggle has served as the catalyst for the pending disclosures.

That puts roughly five hours of footage on track for release, pending a final appeal by the government once the redactions are completed.

  The Intercept

So look for them some time in 2025.

 Maybe.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

How Charming

If President Barack Obama could go back to his first day in office, he told a crowd in Cleveland, he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

On his second full day in office, Obama did sign an executive order that was cast as a directive to close Guantanamo within a year. But it actually created a task force charged with creating a plan to close the detention facility. By the time the group released its plan on Jan. 22, 2010, the bipartisan consensus around closing Gitmo had dissipated and the administration had other priorities for spending its political capital.

  Politico

So, scores of innocent men have been imprisoned for lack of convenience on the President’s part?

He lost bipartisan support.  No other reason.  This is a textbook description of a political prisoner.

After opposition grew, Obama acknowledged Wednesday, “the path of least resistance was to just keep it open even though it’s not who we are as a country.”

That’s what I call a real leader. Taking the “path of least resistance.”

Obama said he also had some regrets about delaying a new approach to personal grooming.

“I was thinking maybe I should’ve told myself to start dying my hair now, before people noticed, because by a year in it was too late,” he said. “Michelle thinks I look distinguished.”

Har, har, har. Guantánamo is equal in importance to the color of his hair. Both are apparently more important than the drone-killing of thousands of innocent people and the stealing of millions from Americans’ retirements.

Interview re: Gitmo and Torture

Ex-FBI agent who went to Guantánamo, Jim Clemente, is interveiwed by RT:

 

The Picture Worth a Thousand Words

Tells an entire story, doesn't it?

h/t Intercept

And here's the latest in that ongoing story...

The U.S. military overnight transferred six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay. All of them had been imprisoned since 2002 – more than 12 years. None has ever been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of any wrongdoing. They had all been cleared for release years ago by the Pentagon itself, but nonetheless remained in cages until today.

[...]

[There are] still 136 detainees there, with 67 of them cleared for release (Democrats’ claims that Obama is largely blameless are false and misleading in the extreme, as are claims that no country will accept detainees).

[...]

Among the released detainees is Abu Wa’el Dhaib, a Lebanese-born Syrian national and father of four who was seized by the Pakistani police and turned over to the U.S. in 2002 for what was reportedly a large bounty. He was cleared for release in 2009 – five years ago – and has repeatedly gone on hunger strikes inside the camp to protest his treatment. At the age of 43, he has become physically debilitated. As the human rights group Reprieve detailed:

As a result of the conditions inside the prison and the callous treatment he has received, Mr Dhiab’s health has now deteriorated to such an extent that he is confined to a wheelchair. Recent revelations revealed that Mr. Dhiab is being denied access to his wheelchair, meaning he is brutally dragged from his cell and force-fed against his will every day.

  Glenn Greenwald: Intercept

For a man never charged of any wrongdoing.

Just as the Obama administration suppressed photos showing U.S. torture and is now attempting to delay if not outright prevent release of the U.S. Senate’s torture report, Obama officials have repeatedly sought to suppress the videos showing the horrors of force-feeding at Guantanámo. It was the family of Dhaib [...] which relentlessly pursued a legal and public campaign to obtain those videos to show the brutality of this treatment. [...] The rationale from The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ for suppressing evidence of U.S. government crimes, brutality and savagery is always the same: transparency will “adversely affect[] security conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq” by enraging people around the world. Not engaging in such behavior is never an option. The only priority is preventing its disclosure.

Only one thing wrong with that. We're not sorry. We were protecting our country.

We Tortured Killed Some Folks

Three “suicides” [of Guantanamo prisoners] on June 10, 2006  “incurred the wrath of then Guantanamo commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris, Jr., who announced that the suicides were ‘not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare against us.’ In a similar spirit, Colleen Graffy, deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, told the BBC that the suicides ‘certainly (are) a good PR move to draw attention.’”

The reactions of Harris and Graffy, [...] were indictment enough of the unconscionably coarse attitude of senior U.S. government representatives regarding human life. But now there is the possibility that they were only spouting a cover story for even a worse scenario, a triple homicide about which they may well have been kept in the dark.

[...]

“It is still not 100-percent clear exactly how the three died and who was present at the time. However, it is abundantly clear that the Government’s claims concerning their deaths are false, fabricated to cover up what actually transpired."

[...]

The records “reveal that the three died not from strangulation (as would be the case in a hanging) but from asphyxiation resulting from having cloth stuffed down their throats — precisely the same kind of cloth, it turns out, that was used by a similar interrogation team around the same time at the Charleston Brig, and which has been labeled by a University of California study as ‘dryboarding,’” Horton wrote in an email.

[...]

“Penny Lane was being used by an interrogation unit of the CIA up until approximately the time of the deaths, and it was, strictly speaking, a CIA facility. Under the terms of a Special-Access Program (SAP), neither the camp commander nor the commander of Joint Task Force, Guantanamo were to have any knowledge of this program and what went on in connection with it. The program reported to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally, as well as to an official at the White House’s National Security Council.

  Ray McGovern: Consortium News

And someone may have been getting too close to that fact when it was decided Rumsfiend needed to resign. It happened shortly before he left.

The interminable delays [in releasing the Senate report on torture] can be more readily understood, once you realize that the Senate report, if it is halfway honest, must include evidence on CIA-sponsored homicide as well as torture, which might put Obama back on the spot regarding his pious assertions that “no one is above the law.” He has shown no appetite to discharge his duty if it risks getting crosswise with his spies.

I doubt anyone in Washington wants to get crosswise with the spies.

I was having trouble wrapping my mind around the notion that [my former colleagues at] the CIA had been given official sanction to murder. And inured as I am now to such indignities, I still shudder at the prospect that President Obama will, a year or two from now, explain it all with a nonchalant riff on his earlier “We tortured some folks” — substituting “killed” for “tortured.”

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.