Britain’s bizarre reaction to war crimes allegations: investigations needed March 8, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Britain, Criminal Justice, Torture.Tags: binyam mohamed, british government, british intelligence, british national security, cia, dahlia lithwick, dana milbank, David Miliband, department of defense, dod, dominic grieve, foreign office, geneva conventions, geneva standards, glenn greenwald, Guantanamo, house of commons, International law, jacqui smith, journalism, journalistic ethics, m15, media complicity, media ethics, micael mcconnell, michael hayden, president obama, roger hollander, state secrets privilege, tom friedman, torture, us media, War Crimes
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(updated below – Update II)
Binyam Mohamed is the British resident who, two weeks ago, was released from Guantanamo and returned to Britain after seven years of detention, often in brutal conditions. Since his return, compelling evidence has been steadily emerging that British agents were knowingly complicit in Mohamed’s torture while in U.S. custody — including the discovery of telegrams sent by British intelligence officers to the CIA asking the CIA to extract information from him. How does a country with a minimally healthy political class and a pretense to the rule of law react to such allegations of criminality? From the BBC:
MPs have demanded a judicial inquiry into a Guantanamo Bay prisoner’s claims that MI5 was complicit in his torture. . . .
[Mohamed's] allegations are being investigated by the government, but the Foreign Office said it did not condone torture.
Shadow justice secretary Dominic Grieve said the “extremely serious” claims should also be referred to the police. . . .
Daniel Sandford, BBC Home Affairs correspondent, said Mr Mohamed’s claims would be relatively simple to substantiate.
“As time progresses it will probably become quite apparent whether indeed these are true telegrams and I think it’s unlikely they’d be put into the public domain if they couldn’t eventually be checked back.”
The Conservatives have called for a police inquiry into his allegations of British collusion.
Mr Grieve called for a judicial inquiry into the allegations.
“And if the evidence is sufficient to bring a prosecution then the police ought to investigate it,” he added.
Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Ed Davey said there was a “rock solid” case for an independent judicial inquiry. . . .
Shami Chakrabati, director of campaign group Liberty said: “These are more than allegations – these are pieces of a puzzle that are being put together.
“It makes an immediate criminal investigation absolutely inescapable.”
New revelations by Guantánamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed, claiming that British intelligence played a central role in his torture and interrogation, must be answered by the government, the former shadow home secretary David Davis said last night. . . .
[Mohamed's] allegations appear to contradict assertions by foreign secretary David Miliband and home secretary Jacqui Smith that the British government would never “authorise or condone” torture.
Davis said Mohamed’s testimony demanded a response from these ministers. “His revelations show that the government’s claims about its involvement in the interrogation of Mohamed are completely untenable,” Davis said. “Either Miliband or Smith should come to the House of Commons and reveal exactly what the government knew.”
Last night other public figures said there should be wider efforts to look into the allegations that the British government had colluded in Mohamed’s torture.
Notice what is missing from these accounts. There is nobody arguing that the dreary past should simply be forgotten in order to focus on the important and challenging future. There’s no snide suggestion that demands to investigate serious allegations of criminality are driven by petty vengeance or partisan score-settling. Nobody suggests that it’s perfectly permissible for government officials to commit serious crimes — including war crimes — as long as they had nice motives or were told that it was OK to do these things by their underlings, or that the financial crisis (which Britain has, too) precludes any investigations, or that whether to torture is a mere ”policy dispute.” Also missing is any claim that these crimes are State Secrets that must be kept concealed in order to protect British national security.
Instead, the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.
If one stays immersed in American domestic political debates, it’s easy to lose sight of just how corrupted and rotted our political and media class is, because the most twisted ideas become enshrined as elite orthodoxies. Britain is hardly the paragon of transparency and adherence to international conventions; to the contrary, they’ve been with the U.S. every step of the way over the last eight years, enabling and partaking in many of the worst abuses. Yet this one single case of documented complicity in torture — mere complicity with, not actual commission of, the torture — is generating extreme political controversy and widespread demands across the political spectrum for judicial and criminal investigations. The British political class may not have wanted to see it, but when compelling evidence of criminality is rubbed in their faces, they at least pay lip service to the idea that crimes by government officials must be investigated and subjected to accountability.
By stark and depressing contrast, America’s political class and even most of its “journalists” — in the face of far, far greater, more heinous and more direct war criminality by their highest political leaders — are explicitly demanding that nothing be done and that it all be kept concealed. They’re surveying undeniable evidence of grotesque war crimes committed over many years by our government — including enabling legal theories that even Fred Hiatt described as “scary,” “lawless” and “disgraceful” — and are literally saying: ”just forget about that; it doesn’t matter.” Our country is plagued by “journalists” like The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank, giggling with smug derision over the very few efforts to investigate these massive crimes — and then even lying on NPR by claiming that support for investigations is confined to “a small but very vocal minority within the Party – these are the same folks who were pushing for the impeachment of the President and the Vice President right up [dismissive chuckling] basically to the time of the Inauguration” (to see how flagrantly false is Milbank’s statement about support within the Party for investigations, see here and here and here; the NPR host, needless to say, said nothing to correct him).
The accountability-free, self-loving mentality that demands that nothing be done about America’s war crimes over the last eight years is hardly confined to America’s detention, surveillance and interrogation policies. This is exactly the same bloated, insular corruption that allows multi-billion-dollar insider frauds like this one not only to go unexamined but also to result in those responsible being further empowered with high government positions. It’s what lets someone like Tom Friedman think he can lecture us all with a straight face on the evils of overconsumption, the ravaging effects of our “growth model,” and the environment-destroying impact of consumerism as he lives in this house, financed by his heiress-wife’s shopping-center-developing company, his books urging unfettered globalization, and his columns urging various wars.
In sum, we have the only country, and the only results, that it’s possible to have given who has been wielding influence. And nothing expresses more vividly what they are than their explicit insistence that systematic war crimes committed by their own Government be immunized and forgotten, underscored by their bizarre feelings of “centrism”-smugness and Seriousness-superiority for expressing that definitively lawless and amoral view.
* * * * *
One other point about Mohamed: Last month, the Obama DOD claimed that it conducted an investigation and concluded that Guantanamo now fully comports with all Geneva standards. In a New York Times interview yesterday, President Obama claimed (for the first time, to my knowledge) that most of the problems with Bush’s detention policies were confined to what he called ”the steps that were taken immediately after 9/11,” and that most of those problems were fixed by CIA Director Michael Hayden and DNI Michael McConnell “by the time [Obama] took office” because Hayden and McConnell “were mindful of American values and ideals.”
Compare all of that to Binyam Mohamed’s post-release statements — supported by other corroborating evidence — that “conditions at the US detention camp in Cuba have worsened since President Barack Obama was elected. . . . “‘Since the election it’s got harsher,’ Mohamed told the newspaper.” Isn’t this something that the U.S. Government should be called upon to address?
UPDATE: Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick reviews, and dismantles, each of the justifications being offered by the Obama administration for keeping Bush crimes concealed and shielding them from investigations and prosecutions (h/t Bystander). It’s quite concise and well worth reading in its entirety (as is Digby’s discussion of that article).
UPDATE II: In comments, Cocktailhag writes:
It is something of an upside down world wherein journalists, as a class, comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, and see nothing odd about this.
At times I’ve wondered whether Watergate would have even been discovered by the mindless media we have today, but even worse, whether they all would have just explained it away.
It’s difficult to select what one thinks is the single most illustrative symbol of how our country now functions, but if I were forced to do so, I would choose the fact that it is America’s journalists — who claim to be devoted to serving as a check on Government and exposing its secrets — who are, instead, leading the way in demanding that the Government’s actions of the last eight years be concealed; in trying to quash efforts to investigate and expose those actions; and in demanding immunity for government lawbreakers. What kind of country does one expect to have where (with some noble exceptions) it is journalists, of all people, who take the lead in concealing, protecting and justifying government wrongdoing, and whose overriding purpose is to serve, rather than check, political power? ”Upside down world,” indeed.
The Joys of Airstrikes and Anonymity December 30, 2009
Posted by rogerhollander in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan, War.Tags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan War, air strikes, al-Qaeda, civilian casualties, collateral damage, corporate media, drone missiles, glenn greenwald, islam, journalism, Media, media ethics, muslim, muslim world, pakistan, predator missile, Qaaim al-Raymi, roger hollander, sudan, terrorism, terrorist, war, yemen, yemen strike
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Each time the U.S. bombs a new location in the Muslim world, the same pattern emerges. First, officials from the U.S. or allied governments run to their favorite media outlet to claim — anonymously — that some big, bad, notorious, “top” Al Qaeda leader “may have been” or “likely was” killed in the strike, and this constitutes a “stinging” or ”devastating” blow against the Terrorist group. These compliant media outlets then sensationalistically trumpet that claim as the dominant theme of their ”reporting” on the attack, drowning out every other issue.
As a result, and by design, there is never any debate or discussion over the propriety or wisdom of these strikes. After all, what sane, rational, Serious person would possibly question a bombing raid or missile strike that ”likely” killed a murderous, top Al Qaeda fighter and struck a “devastating blow” to that group’s operationg abilities? Having the story shaped this way also ensures that there is virtually no attention paid to the resulting civilian casualties (i.e., the slaughter of innocent people); most Americans, especially journalists, have been trained to ignore such deaths as nothing more than justifiable “collateral damage,” especially when a murderous, top Al Qaeda fighter was killed by the bombs (besides, as Alan Dershowitz once explained, “civilians” in close enough proximity to a Top Terrorist themselves may very well bear some degree of culpability). The adolescent We-Got-the-Bad-Guy! headline also ensures there is no attention paid to the radicalizing effect of these civilian deaths and our attacks for that country and in the region.
Yet over and over and over, it turns out that these anonymous government assertions — trumpeted by our mindless media — are completely false. The Big Bad Guy allegedly killed in the strike ends up nowhere near the bombs and missiles. Sometimes, the very same Big Bad Guy can be used to justify different strikes over the course of many years (we know we said we killed him four times before, but this time we’re pretty sure we got him), or he can turn up alive when it’s time to re-trumpet the Al Qaeda threat (we said before we killed him in that devastating airstrike, but actually he’s alive and more dangerous than ever!!). Just like the “we killed 30 extremists“ claim or the “we got Al Qaeda’s Number 3″ boast, this is propaganda in its purest form, disseminated jointly by the U.S. Government and American media, and it happens over and over, compelling a rational person to conclude that it’s clearly intentional by both parties.
In the last week alone, this pattern just asserted itself — twice — with regard to the air strikes in Yemen. The first set of strikes, it was immediately leaked, was allegedly aimed at “the presumed leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Qaaim al-Raymi,” yet it turned out he was not among the dozens of people killed, though “U.S. officials believe one of his top deputies [unnamed] may have been killed.” Then, after a second set of strikes on Thursday, it was claimed that “a Yemeni air raid may have killed the top two leaders of al Qaeda’s regional branch,” and an American Muslim preacher linked to Nidal Hasan, “the man who shot dead 13 people at a U.S. army base [Anwar al-Awlaki] may also have died.”
But while ABC News had identified “the presumed leader of al Qaeda in Yemen” as “Qaaim al-Raymi” when he was the target of last week’s strikes, Reuters decided that the “top two leaders of al Qaeda’s regional branch” were completely different people — “Nasser al-Wahayshi, the Yemeni leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and his Saudi deputy, Saeed al-Shehri” — and then excitedly announced that they “may have been killed” by this week’s air strikes. Whoever we claim we kill is the “key leader of Al Qaeda’s operations”– and it can change from day to day. And now, it turns out, the “radical cleric” who reportedly spoke at length with the accused Fort Hood shooter and thus packs the most emotional punch for Americans is not dead at all, but “is alive and well following reports he may have been killed in a Yemeni airstrike against suspected al-Qaida hideouts.”
Just watch how this obvious propaganda tactic works again and again:
Last week’s Yemen strike – ABC News, December 18, 2009:
This week’s air strikes in Yemen, Reuters, December 24, 2009:
False – Associated Press, December 25, 2009:
______________
CNN – January, 2006 U.S. airstrike in Pakistan:
False – Fox News, January 31, 2006 – “Zawahiri, in New Videotape, Says He Survived Airstrike“:
_____________
CBS News, July, 2008 U.S. airstrike in Pakistan:
False – NY Daily News, April 30, 2009 – “Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri calls the shots, says State Department”:
________________
January, 2006 missile strike in Pakistan, New York Times:
January, 2006 missile strike in Pakistan, ABC News:
False – LA Times, February 3, 2008:
____________
January, 2006 airstrike in Pakistan, New York Times:
False – Fox News, April 9, 2008:
______________
Summer, 2008 Predator strikes in Pakistan, Telegraph - “Al-Qa’eda’s American-born propaganda chief may have died in predator attack”:
False — LA Times, June 14, 2009:
______________
July, 2009 airstrike in Pakistan, Fox News:
Highly questionable – Middle East News:
New York Times, December 23, 2009:
_____________
I could literally spend the rest of the day chronicling events very similar to these. A few caveats are in order. It’s not surprising that facts are sometimes difficult to obtain in the immediate aftermath of a strike, particularly in remote areas such as Western Pakistan and Yemen. Sometimes, these air strikes do actually result in the death of the specific targets alleged to lead various Islamic radical groups.
But far more often, these boasting claims regarding a controversial U.S. air attack or missile strike turn out to be completely false. It’s painfully obvious that these assertions are made to overwhelm, distort and suppress any discussions of the actual effects of the attack — who the strike really killed, whether it was justified, legal or wise, whether we should continue to drop bombs in more and more Muslim countries. Yet no matter how many times these claims prove to be false, American media outlets not only dutifully and mindlessly print them without challenge or skepticism, but also allow these claims to dictate their headlines and the overwhelming focus of their “reporting” on the attacks (U.S. Air Strike Said to Kill Top Al Qaeda Leaders). As a result, Americans are innundated with false claims about things that never actually happened — pure myths and falsehoods — while the actual consequences of our actions (the corpses of innocent Muslim men, women and children being pulled from the rubble) are widely disseminated in the Muslim world, yet are barely mentioned by our media. And then we walk around, confounded and confused, about how there could be such a grave disparity in perception among our rational, free and well-informed selves versus those irrational, mislead, paranoid, and primitive Muslims.
Because it’s all done under the corrupt cover of anonymity, there’s never any accountability (reporters will simply say that they printed this because their government sources whispered it in their ears — so what choice did they have? — and they’ll keep the government officials’ identity concealed to ensure they can never be questioned). The whole process is blatantly designed not to convey what happened, but to obscure what happened and to prevent any discussion of its consequences.
Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.